Pedagogy of the Heart by Paulo Freire;

Author:Paulo Freire; [Freire;, Paulo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030398088
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lessons from Exile

One day, forbidden from being, I found myself away from my homeland.

Until 1960, besides Recife, I only knew a few cities in Pernambuco, and I had been for a couple of days in Rio, São Paulo, Florianópolis, and Porto Alegre. The year before the coup, I had been to all Brazilian capitals. I remember how, from North to South, the cities were awake, restless, dreaming of basic reforms, from which this country remains exempt. I remember the verbal incontinence of the Brazilian left, who used to claim a power that they did not have. As a result, they scared the right, leading it to grow stronger and prepare to stage the Coup of 1964.

At times, in one’s fight for justice, one neglects seeking a more rigorous knowledge of human beings. One may underestimate the power of the dominant, ignore the deep-seated presence of the oppressor in the oppressed, and end up in exile. Exile is a space–time dimension that one has not chosen, and where one arrives marked by rage, fears, suffering, early longing, love, broken hope, and also by a certain shy hope, one that signals return. There is also the wish and the need to remake oneself, remake one’s broken dream.

Exile could not be solely a nostalgic experience, a parenthesis without any reference to tomorrow’s return. It imposed itself as a time for revision and development, even to those who intended to return as if they had never left.

Even for those who can quickly resolve their matters of survival, exile is not simply a time to be lived, but one to be suffered. It is not possible to suffer such a time without living it; only when one lives this time as an existential experience, can one suffer it. That is why only men and women can be exiled.

I will never forget a comment by the president of Guinea Bissau at the time, Luiz Cabral, during a helicopter ride from the countryside to the capital. While looking at the forest, and seeing some bird move across the sky, he said, “I hope, comrade Paulo, that our animals may soon return from exile.”

He was speaking metaphorically. Threatened by war, the animals in his country had sought other support systems. None of them had a planned return, and from the human point of view, none had suffered their distance from that support system.

Suffering exile is more than knowing the reality of it. It requires embracing it with all the pain this embrace represents; this is the only way the exiled can prepare for the return. Suffering exile is accepting the tragedy of rupture, which characterizes the experience of existing in a borrowed context. One suffers exile as one deals better with the difficulties associated with being unable to return to one’s origin. One suffers exile as one reconciles the contradictions between the present where one lives, in a space where one has experienced no past, and the future, which has to be built in uncertain space.

Suffering exile implies

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