“Existir, humanamente, es ‘pronunciar’ el mundo, es transformarlo” (70) says Freire. There are certain texts that demand to be met halfway. They expect movement, shifting, breaking, and recognizing – your voice. In words of Boal, “se destruye la barrera entre protagonista y coros” (12). These texts are often declared obscure, not academic. They demand an understanding closer to the body’s organs and fluids – one that brings them forth to consciousness. To read is to speak: to pronounce: to embody a voice: to become by being. To read Freire, Cesaire and Boal means just this; the embodiment (praxis) of words (theory), action and reflection at the same time.
There is great fear surrounding this way of reading, particularly in higher education, because it requires us as People. Unfortunately, an education system built on looking for loopholes is an education system that looks for loopholes in its own professors and students. These practices, while seemingly necessary and appropriate for a critical approach, maintain people “safely” untouched, unaffected, and, on the other hand, paranoid, in a constant witch hunt. There is, I believe, an inability to read with Faith, to break the illusion of self, to surrender the individual barriers. To distrust the “other”, the writer, is a clear remnant of a practice of coloniality that served to disempower by dividing (as clearly explained in Thiong’o’s text).
Freire was committed to the constant shifting and movement, as action, that ran all through his writing. When confronted by Bell Hooks at a conference in Santa Cruz regarding his sexist language and views, he openly welcomed the comments and agreed that he had to look into that. Maybe it is because of this that I feel safe making Freire’s words my own – because I too have been sexist, racist, homophobic, etc., and have the willingness to see it and work, in a committed – wholehearted – way, towards freeing myself from this.
There are texts that I refuse to reap apart. Not because they are unproblematic (for example, a phallocentric view in Freire’s theories and almost no mention of America in Cesaire’s essay), but because as Bell Hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress, “I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst …. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water” (50).
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(I did not have the same physical response while reading Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s text. Because this is still unclear for me, I am taking my time to explore why and therefore think inadequate/unnatural to write about it on this post.)
Works Cited
Boal, Augusto. Teatro del oprimido. México, D.F. : Editorial Nueva Imagen. 1980.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group. 2000.
Hooks, Bell. Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge. 1994.