NG

UD GI

Freedom, Freedom!
Camaragibe, PE, Brasil

II

Ivone gebara

.J
The word freedom sounds good and can arouse many positive emotions, despite its inherent difficulties. Talking about freedom seems like talking about fundamental things without which one cannot live with dignity. For this reason we may say that almost all persons know what freedom means although the meanings vary according to the subjective contexts, also because of vagueness, and a great variety of experiences and nuances. Where to start our consideration of freedom? There are many roads and intuitions. I propose to start with the words etymology, since it indicates something close to the experience where it was born and gives us a key to open the word and say something about its historical appearance. The word freedom comes from Latin, libertas. And the word libertas? It comes from liber, soft tissue that allows circulation of sap in plants. If liber is blocked, for any reason, the plant may die. By analogy, liber is also attributed to human life and the need we have for our human sap, our blood, our breathing, to circulate, making life possible. Our liber, that is, the tissues through which our energy and sap run, need to be in good conditions and with no blocking, for our body to be well. If that sap is blocked we say we lack freedom, circulation of our vital sap is lacking. A prisoner within bars, or chained, or a person who cannot talk, or a hungry crowd, have their liber blocked. And the action to re-establish circulation may be called search for freedom. Therefore, we may say the history of freedom accompanies human history. Every time our vital sap, for some reason, is blocked by external or internal forces, we feel a discomfort which we call lack of freedom, that is, a lack of adequate circulation of our vital sap. The lack of circulation of our sap is a menace to life in its different dimensions. It is in this sense that the expression freedom or death! was coined, that is, death appears as an alternative or more accurately as a lack of an alternative in the
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search for freedom. Once dead we no longer need to keep our vital sap going. We find that the search for freedom is a continuous process, impossible to comprehend in all its aspects, and never finished. In that process we are continually blocking each others vital sap, to establish ourselves as masters. This is why freedom is a complex continuous struggle; it comes and goes, it is searched, lost and found, as part of our own life. This is the stage of human history and of all beings and things connected to it. To acknowledge this temporal truth, changing and limited, of freedom as a permanently renewable value, is in a certain way to free ourselves of many absolutisms constructed and imposed by ourselves. Throughout history, in a subtle or authoritative way, we impose on each other models of freedom, we fight until death for situations we believed were the signal of a permanent freedom. Along the same lines, we declare certain people free and others slaves, we identify freedom with states of economic, political or social well-being or with a religious practice. We also want to manage and rule freedom from the standpoint of ideologies or social and religious utopias, believing in them as solutions for human cruelty or for unjust relations. Nevertheless, most of the times we fail, because what was the object of freedom became a form of prison and even suffering, for others and many times for ourselves. In the long and renewed process of becoming human, of responding to that which we call vocation for freedom, we get lost, we become inhuman and we even resign to the freedom of others and of ourselves to maintain an idea, sometimes anachronistic, of freedom or to defend a pseudo-freedom. On behalf of freedom we can eliminate people, deprive them of rights, block their path considering it opposed to the realisation of our own individual freedom. How many times political regimes, universities, religions, eliminated people of great worth, because they we op-

Translation by Alice Mndez

posed to scientific theories or religious beliefs of the time! They used the word freedom as an alibi to maintain their tyranny and dominance over bodies and consciences. How many assassinations in the name of freedom, how many stakes lighted to burn alive bodies of women and men whose crime was thinking and living autonomously and allowing their vital sap to circulate! Today, we are invited to free our pre-established schemas of freedom and assume critical postures before our own concepts. Although we need pedagogy and methodology to live freely, the search for freedom is greater than the schemas we create. Freedom starts with some fundamental steps towards the maintenance of our lifes dignity, and follows its transformation process to the rhythm of the new challenges history throws at us. Freedom seems to identify with fixed models of behaviour, but moves with the flow of life. Hence the difficulty inherent in the search for freedom. As Paulo Freire said, we need to wish to be more than what we are now. It is necessary not to stay with what we learn from a reading: we need to write books from everyday life. Not search for food only for our children, but for everybody. It is not enough if some have their rights guaranteed; rights must be extended to all and be renewed in accordance with the needs of the moment. The dynamics of freedom are the dynamics of keeping the individual life and the common collective life. It is the vital force flowing in me and you, flowing in our town, and in other towns. The processes of assertion of freedom or unblocking of vital energy that keeps us alive, are marked by the contradiction inherent to the human condition and stressed by the manifold gain that characterises us. The vital sap flows mixed with the forces of death, ambition, authoritarianism, selfishness, truth and lies, change of positions and interests that characterise us. This is why we need to be vigilant so as not to fall tempted by the imposition of our idealised models on people or situations that are often quite special and particular. And more so, we need to keep from the temptation of using the word freedom in vain, especially when we attribute it to economic systems or institutions we create. For example, it is common to hear about freedom of the capitalist market, understanding by it the

imposition of laws established by elites that govern the national and international commerce. Freedom would be here the circulation of the vital sap of some in an uncontrolled and excessive way, and always to the benefit of those few, damaging the vital sap of the majority. Or we could think of the freedom of the white as opposed to the slavery of the black, or masculine dominance over the right to dignity of the feminine. Freedom covers many possibilities, ambiguities and contradictions. With all this we are signalling the need to pay attention to the use of the word freedom, stating hence the need not to be satisfied with the appearance of the word in the political text or in a public speech or even in poetry thinking we are already in the search for that precious value. Just the word, without the corresponding actions, may be a dangerous trap. That is why we always need to ask in what sense the world is being used, and in whose benefit. We need to continuously find the motivations for that which we call search for freedom. This implies a renewed educational process inviting to better understand the multiplicity of uses and customs around the same word. The educationalist Paulo Freire talked of the pedagogy of freedom to indicate the complexity of this process and the need to be permanently ready to modify it and understand it again, according to the new situations. Freedom is not something we can achieve peacefully, but just something close to a fundamental value we experience once and many times in a continuous and renewed way. And in this sense freedom is close to love, to truth, to generosity, to all those human values we always look for. No freedom or love or truth experience exhausts freedom, love or truth. Each experience is a figure, an expression of that which we are looking for and will search until the last breath of life. This multiplicity of expressions invites us to respect and at the same time enter into a dialogue with those people who have different experiences and views. Freedom needs a dialogue with us and with others to appear and continue its journey on the road of human history. Freedom is a permanent personal and collective need and because of this it is a constant call addressed from Life to all lives to try to keep the vital sap within each of us, but always beyond myself. The vital sap is the Mystery of Life. Hence it cries within us: Freedom, Freedom! q

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