The Nestlé Boycott

One simple man from Sialkot had the guts to take on a murderous multinational like Nestle. Here in Lahore, MBA-holders from “prestigious” institutions, such as my alma mater LUMS, feel proud to work for the same company.

A respected company

Syed Aamar Raza joined Nestlé Milkpak as a Medical Delegate in December 1994 at the age of 24. It was a dream come true to work for a multinational company and he was quickly indoctrinated with Nestlé's "Be the Best" slogan.

Aamar was responsible for promoting breastmilk substitutes and infant cereals. One of his first tasks was to run a baby show, already organised by the Area Detailing Executive. Baby shows were popular with health workers and mothers and provided an opportunity for marketing staff to make direct contact with both and to display the company's range of breastmilk substitutes and discuss them. Such activities are banned by Article 5.5 of the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes and Nestlé's own "Charter".

Nestlé's "Charter"

Aamar says he received no training from Nestlé on the International Code. But in December 1996 he received a copy of Nestlé's weak version of it - known as the "Charter".

Aamar says:

"I was confused when I read the 'Charter'. It said Nestlé does not give gifts to doctors, but we did this. My bosses signed the cheques. It said we did not make direct contact with mothers, but we held baby shows and in clinics we used Cerelac samples as a way of striking up conversations to push the milks. The "Charter" says Nestlé does not pay staff by incentives, but my salary revisions signed by Mr. Roland, Marketing Manager, includes incentives. Infant formula received the most points in the scheme. "By bosses told me to do all these things which the 'Charter' says we do not do."

Some of the Nestlé Medical Delegates at an annual sales meeting. Minutes reveal that breastmilk substitutes receive most points in the company "sales incentive scheme"

Crisis of conscience

Several months after first seeing the "Charter" Aamar was visiting one of the 200 doctors on his circuit. This doctor was one of the very few who refused the gifts offered by Nestlé. The doctor was called from his office to attend a sick child, a child he could not save. "This is the result of marketing by people like you," he told Aamar when he returned to his office. He explained that the child had been breastfed for just one month and then a doctor had prescribed infant formula. Two months later the child was sick with diarrhoea. A month after that he was dead.

Aamar says that during training he had been told to quickly say "breast is best" before launching into his sales pitch, but the risks associated with bottle feeding had not been explained. Leaving the doctors clinic, Aamar understood that unsafe bottle feeding could kill - had killed the child of the distraught parents he saw grieving outside the office.

Aamar returned home to his 2 year old son and pregnant wife and began to think about what he must do.

---

"I resign with immediate effect"

Aamar's first action was to resign his well paid and prestigious job with Nestlé. He returned his motorbike, but he kept copies of the documents relating to his job. These had been gathered following instructions from his superiors. He had been instructed to maintain records of incentives to doctors so that he could later use them to pressure the doctor into prescribing more Nestlé products. He also had to keep copies of the instructions he had been issued. Aamar realised that he held irrefutable proof that Nestlé was systematically breaking the International Code and its own "Charter." It was not enough to resign his job, he had to do more to stop the unnecessary death and suffering to which Nestlé contributed by such activities.

Continued: http://www.babymilkaction.org/update/update27feature.html

Please share with friends and family, protect your loved ones.

Remember, Remember, the fifth of November

“Remember, Remember, the fifth of November*”

Hassan Rehman

"It's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or when the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

By all means he seems an ordinary mortal. Talk to him and the level of his reasoning reveals that he has not been fortunate enough to attend some prestigious school or college. His clothing reveals that he belongs to a middle class family. His ‘khatara’ byke confirms his middle class back ground. If he is not wearing black coat and pant, no one will believe that he is a lawyer. So what made TIME print his photograph at its title back in November 2007?

His courage and his defiance. On 5^th November, 2007, when the premises of the Lahore High Court were stormed by the Police, where hundreds of lawyers and dozens of students and faculty members from LUMS & FAST were peacefully protesting against the unconstitutional steps of the then-President Pervez Musharraf, Afaq did something no sane person could have imagined. When the Police started firing tear gas shells on the protestors (extensive baton charging not being an effective lesson), he started throwing those shells back at the Police. A TIME reporter captured the image which was to appear at the title of TIME (complete story at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1682292,00.html). Seeing the image, Ralph Nader noted that US lawyers to learn a lesson in resistance from Pakistani lawyers (http://www.counterpunch.org/nader11132007.html).

Afaq, like hundreds of his colleagues in Lahore and thousands in other cities of the country, was detained that day and sent to a prison outside Lahore. He was released after a few days but he didn’t learn the lesson the establishment wanted him to learn. He took part in all lawyers’ protests afterwards and was one of the ‘vigil keepers’ who were arrested from the official residence of the honorable Justice Shahid Siddiqi on 6^th December, when the then Chief (In)Justice of LHC ordered the eviction of the honorable Justice Shahid Siddiqi on the grounds that since he had refused to take oath under the PCO, he was no more a judge. Afaq was at the Aiwan-e-Adal on 10^th January, 2008, when the GPO was rocked with a suicide attack. Afaq, like thousands of his colleagues from around Pakistan, participated in the boycott of the PCO judges, which meant loss of income (he is not a salaried person). I come to the point lest it seems that I am writing an obituary.

Afaq is an ordinary person, a mediocre being. What differentiates him from the rest of us is his belief in struggle. A struggle which is not necessarily waged in the air-conditioned court rooms, or in the ivory towers of academia (or, for that matter, on the online discussion boards and email lists). He, and his fellows (students, doctors, faculty members, civil society activists) believe that protesting on the roads is a question of philosophy – of asserting one’s being – and not necessarily of strategy. They refuse to live like the modern counterparts of Roman spectators, who read blogs, send links of atrocities recorded at YouTube to each other, indulge in discussions, all from the safe havens of their homes and offices. (Their Roman counterparts used to go to stadiums to watch the atrocities – pity they didn’t have access to YouTube, discussion boards and online articles to have fun). The most important dividend of Afaq’s struggle (ignoring the tear gas shells and detention at prisons) is the satisfaction – that he tried his best when something blatantly wrong was being done to his country. And he, alongwith thousands of brave and determined lawyers of Pakistan, has done us a favor that can never be forgotten. I disagree with the utilitarian angle of looking at things (lawyers helped bring CJ back and the CJ is helping the poor by reducing the price of sugar and the cases are being disposed of quickly these days!!) or, to be precise, attribute more importance to the less-utilitarian (more philosophical??) angle of looking at things. Lawyers helped this nation in witnessing a moment which I label as the ‘indigenous audacity of hope’. We, the ‘sofa Bolsheviks’ and others, owe a lot to them for this favor. Hope that we had lost; hope that we were desperately seeking. A lesson to be learned from the struggle that spanned two years: issues don’t survive on their intrinsic academic or ethical importance alone, their survival, and the possibility of some solution down the road, is dependent on the extent of the determination of their supporters.

One is reminded of a quote attributed to Plato, “One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that we end up being governed by our inferiors” – no reference intended!!

* - The title is a comment made by V, the masked anarchist and the protagonist of the movie ‘V for Vendetta’. Interestingly, the tactics used by the lawyers’ movement, peaceful from day one till the end, have no similarity with the tactics used by the anarchist in this movie!

The writer is an IT professional and a political worker associated with FASTRising.org. An edited version of this article appeared at http://pakistaniat.com/2009/11/05/lawyers-movement/

Some relevant links:

http://reddiarypk.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/today-at-the-lahore-high-court/

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1680691_1480052,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1680691_1480042,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1680691_1480041,00.html

A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war ... ssssshhhhh....
Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all...Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing...For our dead.

EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002.

The Pedagogy of Hope

Extracts from Chapter 3 of Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of Hope:
   I have never labored under the misapprehension that social classes and the struggle between them could explain everything, right down to the color of the Sky on a Tuesday evening. And so I have never said that the class struggle, in the modern world has been or is "the mover of history". On the other hand, still today. and possibly for a long time to come, it is impossible to understand history without social classes, without their interests in collision.
   The class struggle is not the mover of history, but it is certainly one of them.
[...]
   In our making and remaking of ourselves in the process of making history - as subjects and objects, persons, becoming beings of insertion in the world and not of pure adaptation to the world - we should end by having the dream, too, a mover of history. There is no change without dream, as there is no dream without hope.
   Thus, I keep on insisting, ever since Pedagogy of the Oppressed: there is no authentic utopia apart from the denunciation of a present becoming more and more intolerable, and the "annunciation", announcement, of a future to be created, built - politically, esthetically, and ethically - by us women and men. Utopia implies this denunciation and proclamation, but it does not permit the tension between the two to die away with the production of the future previously announced. Now the erstwhile future is a new present, and a new dream experience is forged. History does not become immobilized, does not die. On the contrary, it goes on.
   The understanding of history as opportunity and not determinism, the conception of history operative in this book, would be unintelligible without the dream, just as the deterministic conception feels uncomfortable, in its incompatibility with this understanding and therefore denies it.
   Thus it comes about that, in the former conception the historical role of subjectivity is relevant, while in the latter it is minimized or denied. Hence, in the first, education, while not regarded as able to accomplish all things, is acknowledged as important, since it can do something; while in the second it is belittled.
   Indeed, whenever the future is considered as a pregiven - whether this be as the pure, mechanical repetition of the present, or simply because it "is what it has to be" - there is no room for utopia, nor therefore for the dream, the option, the decision, or expectancy in the struggle, which is the only way hope exists. There is no room for education. Only for training.
   As project, as design for a different, less-ugly "world", the dream is as necessary to political subjects, transformers of the world and not adapters to it, as - may I be permitted the repetition - it is fundamental for an artisan, who projects in her or his brain what she or he is going to execute even before the execution thereof.
   That is why, from the viewpoint of the dominant class interests, the less the dominated dream the dream of which I speak, in the confident way of which I speak, and the less they practice the political apprenticeship of committing themselves to a utopia, the more open they will become to "pragmatic" discourses, and the sounder the dominant classes will sleep.
[...]
   The assertion that an "ideological discourse" is a kind of natural clumsiness on the part of the Left, which insists on holding one when there are no ideologies anymore, and when, it is said, no one any longer wishes to hear an ideological discourse, is itself a cunning ideological discourse on the part of the dominant classes. What we have gotten over is not the ideological discourse, but the "fanatical", or inconsistent, discourse, which merely repeats clichés that never should have been pronounced in the first place. What is becoming less and less viable, fortunately, is verbal incontinence - discourse that loses itself in a tiresome rhetoric bereft of so much as sonority and rhythm.
   Any progressive, who, all afire, insists on this practice - at times in a tremulous voice - will be contributing little or nothing to the political advance of which we have need. But, then, to up and proclaim the era of "neutral discourse"? Hardly.
   I feel utterly at peace with the interpretation that the wane of "realistic socialism" does not mean, on one side, that socialism has shown itself to be intrinsically inviable; on the other, that capitalism has now stepped forward in its excellence one and for all.
   What excellence is this, that manages to "coexist with more than a billion inhabitants of the developing world who live in poverty,"*, not to say misery? Not to mention the all but indifference with which it coexists with "pockets of poverty" and misery in its own, developed body. What excellence is that sleeps in peace while numberless men and women make their home in the street, and says it is their own fault that they are on the street?
[...]
   To me, on the contrary, the element of failure in the experience of "realistic socialism", by and large, was not its socialist dream, but its authoritarian mold - which contradicted it, and of which Marx and Lenin are also guilty, and not just Stalin - just as what is positive in the capitalist experience has never been the capitalist system, but its democratic mold.
   In this sense, as well, the crumbling away of the authoritarian socialist world - which, in many aspects - if a kind of ode to freedom, and which leaves so many minds, previously calm and contained, stupefied, thunderstruck, disconcerted, lost - offers us the extraordinary, if challenging opportunity to continue dreaming and fighting for the socialist dream. Purified of its authoritarian distortions, its totalitarian repulsiveness, its sectarian blindness. This is why I personally look forward to a time when it will become even easier to wage the democratic struggle against the wickedness of capitalism. What is becoming needful, among other things, is that Marxists get over their smug certainty that they are modern, adopt an attitude of humility in dealing with the popular classes, and become postmodernly less smug and less certain - progressively postmodern.
   Let us briefly return to other points already mentioned:

Inasmuch as the violence of the oppressors makes of the oppressed persons forbidden to be, the response of the latter to the violence of the former is found infused with a yearning to seek the right to be.
Oppressors, wreaking violence upon others, and forbidding them to be, are likewise unable to be. In withdrawing from them the power to oppress and crush, the oppressed, struggling to be, restore to them the humanity lost in the use of oppression.
This is why only the oppressed, by achieving their liberation, can liberate the oppressors. The latter, as oppressing class [emphasis in the original], can neither liberate nor be liberated.**

* See Relatório sobre o Desenvolvimento Mundial [World Development Report], 1990, published for World Bank by Fundação Getulio Vargas
** Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 43.

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In January, I read CLR James' The Black Jacobins - Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the definitive account of the uprising of the slaves of San Domingo (now Haiti) that led to the eventual abolition of slavery all over the world. I couldn't put it down - stayed glued to to it for two days straight. Intense experience. Obviously, I need to re-read it, this time in a calmer frame of mind.

In February, I read the first three chapters of Paulo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I couldn't read the last chapter because it's not available online, so I'm at the mercy of a friend who has his own copy and has promised to photocopy the last chapter for me (the most resourceful book people in Lahore haven't been able to find a single copy for sale anywhere, though we did find out that an Urdu translation had been published but is now out of print). As I was telling a friend afterwards, this book answers all my questions about teaching methodology and quite a few also about communicating across boundaries of class and culture.

As I read through it, I had those ecstatic moments of recognition, of connection coming upon a line that linked me to a conversation with one or the other friend. I thought it'd be an interesting idea to record here some of the forwards I made out of the bits I cited:

1. To the doctor with the most eclectic taste in music ever: "reading this, listening to Explosions in the the Sky... it becomes possible to hope."

2. To the human rights worker who despises communism and generally favours property rights, who's gradually going cynical in the face of the horrors she sees:

But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or "sub-oppressors." The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of "adhesion" to the oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot "consider" him sufficiently clearly to objectivize him — to discover him "outside" themselves. This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction;[2] the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole.

In this situation the oppressed do not see the "new man as the person to be born from the resolution of this contradiction, as oppression gives way to liberation. For them, the new man or woman themselves become oppressors. Their vision of the new man or woman is individualistic; because of their identification with the oppressor they have no consciousness of themselves as persons or as members of an oppressed class. It is not to become free that they want agrarian reform, but in order to acquire land and thus become landowners — or; more precisely, bosses over other workers. It is a rare peasant who, once "promoted" to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself. This is because the context of the peasant's situation, that is, oppression, remains unchanged. In this example, the overseer, in order to make sure of his job, must be as tough as the owner — and more so. Thus is illustrated our previous assertion that during the initial stage of their struggle the oppressed find in the oppressor their model of "manhood."

Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront thus phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend — conditioned by the myths of the old order — to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them.

3. To some of my activist friends:

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

[...]

However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor, but also their own oppressed comrades who are fearful of still greater repression. When they discover within themselves the yearning to be free, they perceive that this yearning can be transformed into reality only when the same yearning is aroused in their comrades. But while dominated by the fear of freedom they refuse to appeal to others, or to listen to the appeals of others, or even to the appeals of their own conscience. They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom.

azadi, azadi, azadi... nov 07 to may 08*... over and over again, we returned to the theme of freedom... instinctively, passionately, devotedly, in guilt even, in despair, back again with hope, over and over and over again.

* just the period of my active participation in protests

4. To a young telecommunications professor at a recently privatised university, who'd recently been telling me about his travails dealing with the after-effects of three years of incompetence in his department:

Reading the opening paragraph of Chapter 2 reminded me of your upcoming workshop:

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level inside or outside the school, reveals its fundamentally narrative character This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness.

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration — contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.

The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. "Four times four is sixteen; the capital of Para is Belem." The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means, or realizing the true significance of "capital" in the affirmation "the capital of Para is Belem," that is, what Belem means for Para and what Para means for Brazil.

5. To an ex-colleague, enraged at our complicity in the "War on Terror", at our pusillanimous acquiescence to all American demands, at our oh-so-fashionable buying into Sufism with its pacific message:

and these lines reminded me of you: "The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is a better "fit" for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it."

6. To the great Pink Floyd fan:

It's as if "The Wall" were just a transcription in another medium of Friere's ideas:

This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking* concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

(a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
(b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
(c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
(d) the teacher talks and the students listen — meekly;
(e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
(f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
(g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher;
(h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it;
(i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;
(j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

* He takes "banking education" to mean the kind in which the teacher merely deposits ideas and concepts in the minds of the students.

7. To an old friend who used to teach English and direct the school plays:
Also reminded me of your play Translations [an Anglo-Irish play about the cultural genocide practised by the English colonists in Ireland]

Aimé Césaire

...my Negritude is not a stone, its
deafness a sounding board for
the noises of the day
my Negritude is not a mere spot of
dead water on the dead eye of
the earth
my Negritude is no tower, no cathedral

it cleaves into the red flesh of the
teeming earth
it cleaves into the glowing flesh of
the heavens
it penetrates the seamless bondage of
my unbending patience

Hoorah for those who have never invented
anything
for those who never explored anything
for those who never mastered anything

but who, possessed, give themselves up
to the essence of each thing
ignorant of the coverings but possessed
by the pulse of things
indifferent to mastering but taking the
chances of the world...

Listen to the white world
its horrible exhaustion from its
immense labours
its rebellious joints cracking under
the pitiless stars
its blue steel rigidities, cutting
through the mysteries of the
flesh
listen to their vainglorious conquests
trumpeting their defeats
listen to the grandiose alibis of their
pitiful floundering
[...]
But in so doing, my heart, preserve
me from all hate
do not turn me into a man of hate of
whom I think only with hate
for in order to project myself into
this unique race
you know the extent of my boundless
love
you know that it is not from hatred
of other races
that I seek to be cultivator of this
unique race...
[...]
for it is not true that work of man
is finished
that man has nothing more to do in the
world but be a parasite in the world
that all we now need is to keep in step
with the world
but the work of man is only just beginning
and it remains to man to conquer all
the violence entrenched in the recesses
of his passion
and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty,
of intelligence, of force, and there
is a place for all at the rendezvous
of victory

-- Caheirs d'un retour au pays natal (Statement of a Return to the Country Where I was Born)

For more on Césaire: http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Cesaire.html

Transformation

"If we are only judged by our worst moment, there would be no need for the song Amazing Grace."

-- A Bend in the River

"It is what they do that makes them good or bad. A moment of love, even in a bad man, can give meaning to a life. None of us knows whose path will lead us to God."

-- Blood Diamond

The quality without a name

This wild freedom, this passion, comes into our lives in the instant we let go.

It is when all our forces can move freely in us. In nature, this quality is almost automatic, because there are no images to interfere with natural processes of making things. But in all of our creations, the possibility occurs that images can interfere with the natural, necessary order of a thing. And, most of all, this way that images distort the things we make, is familiar in ourselves. For we ourselves are, like our works, the products of our own creation. And we are only free, and have the quality without a name in us, when we give up the images which guide our lives.

Yet each of us faces the fear of letting go. The fear of being just exactly what one is, of letting the forces flow freely; of letting the configuration of one's person adjust truly to these forces. Our letting go is stifled, all the time, so long as we have ideas and opinions about ourselves, which make us hug too tightly to our images of how we live, and bottle up these forces.

So long as we are still bottled up, like this, there is a tightness about the mouth, a nervous tension in the eyes, a stiffness and a brittleness in the way we walk, the way we move. And yet, until one does let go, it is impossible to be alive. The stereotypes are restricted; there are very different configurations. The infinite variety of actual people, with their vastly and utterly different forces, require a huge creation, to find the resolution of the person: and in finding this resolution truly, one must above all be free of the stereotypes.

The great film, Ikiru - to live - describes it in the life of an old man

He has sat for thirty years behind a counter, preventing things from happening. And then he finds out that he is to die of cancer of the stomach, in six months. He tries to live; he seeks enjoyment; it doesn't amount to much. And finally, against all obstacles, he helps to make a park in a dirty slum in Tokyo. He has lost his fear, because he knows that he is going to die; he works and works and works, there is no stopping him, because he is no longer afraid of anyone, or anything. He has no longer anything to lose, and so in this short time gains everything; and then dies, in the snow, swinging on a child's swing in the park which he has made, and singing.

(…)

It has above all to do with the elements

The wind, the soft rain; sitting on the back of an old truck moving clothes and baskets of possessions while the gentle rain is falling, laughing, crouching under a shawl to keep from getting wet, but getting wet. Eating a loaf of bread, torn in pieces, hunks of cheese cut crudely with a hatchet which is lying in the corner; red flowers glistening in the rain along the roadside; banging on the window of the truck to shout some joke.

Nothing to keep, nothing to lose. No possessions, no security, no concern about possessions, and no concern about security; in this mood it is possible to do exactly what makes sense, and nothing else: there are no hidden fears, no morals, no rules, no undercurrent of constraint, no subtle sense of concern for the form of what the people round about you are doing, and above all no concern for what you are yourself, no subtle fear of other people's ridicule, no subtle train of fears which can connect the smallest triviality with bankruptcy and loss of love and loss of friends and death, no ties, no suits, no outward elements of majesty at all. Only the laughter and the rain.

-- Ch. 3, "Being Alive", "The Timeless Way of Building" by Christopher Alexander, OUP New York, 1979