- Global actions
- Contact us
Rabindranath Tagore, Aimé Césaire and Pablo Neruda – poet activists and historic figures from different geo-cultural spheres (Asia, Africa/Caribbean, Europe and Latin America) who wore their affiliations on their sleeves, were able to respond to the burdens of history in their time, from the second half of the nineteenth century (Tagore was born in 1861) to the early twenty-first century (with the death of Césaire in 2008).
Their activism and literary work challenged the contradictions of an unequal and unfair world system and developed a new understanding of their society and the world in order to establish a concrete and universal humanism. The work and paths of these three major writers are a reflection at the highest level of the interrelationship between the universal and the particular in understanding the complex processes of modernity.
Tagore, Neruda and Césaire defined themselves first and foremost as poets. Yet, Art and Poetry remain the irreplaceable bearers of mediation between human beings and the world. Reinventing humanism might be signify reading poetry in a more profound manner, hearing it more carefully in all its forms, encountering the new varieties of orality that express the dreams and revolts of young people.
Moreover, through their humanistic literary commitment Tagore, Neruda and Césaire realized, long before the ecological and environmental question took on the gravity it presents today, the crucial need to bring the material and collective development of humanity into line with nature. Their pioneering visions remind us that human beings’ respect and love for nature have long united the wisdoms of western and non-western civilizations.
Despite their historical and geo-cultural contexts as different as those of Asia and the Indian sub-continent, Latin America or the West Indies at the crossroads between Europe and Africa, Tagore, Neruda and Césaire committed themselves as active visionaries and proposed a dialogue based on the integrity of the human person. Their project was not to summon a court of history but to contribute to the emancipation of peoples by freeing them from political oppression and also eradicating the moral or intellectual slavery that threatens us all.
Furthermore, Tagore, Neruda and Césaire hailed the formidable explosion of knowledge brought by the development of scientific thought and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. The three poets thought that was an essential but non-exclusive part of the adventure of human knowledge that must also be- nourished by the imaginary, inseparable as it is from life.
By questioning the relationship between dominant and dominated, the legacies of Tagore, Neruda and Césaire help to define the mission that concerns education: ‘building in the mind of human beings’ an order of the world that could make compatible the urgent demands of the universal and those of the particular. They teach us that all knowledge and all cultures are victories of equal significance and organic symbols of the diversity of peoples and civilizations.