JAC Volume 17 Issue 3

When news of Paulo's death reached me May 2 by email, I was shocked. I stared breathless at my screen, reading over and over the terrible message announcing his fatal heart attack in Brazil. A month earlier, I'd seen Paulo in New York, at a gracious gathering hosted by George Stoney of NYU, whose ambitious film about applying Paulo's ideas is well underway. Over lunch in Manhattan, I made plans with Paulo to bring a working-class studies group to meet him at Harvard where he would be in residence in the fall of 1997. Paulo was excited to hear about the growing interest in "class" issues, in this era of strident neo-liberalism and the religion of the marketplace. He said, "It's very important to reinvent the instruments of class analysis." I didn't know that I'd never see him again.

That final day we met, Paulo quipped, "I discovered something I never before knew existed, old age." He had been fond of saying that his head felt 25 years old, full of hope and desire, but each time he climbed stairs his body told him that he was not 25. Paulo looked frailer to me at lunch than I was used to seeing him, and the sight worried and saddened me. A foolish fantasy walked through my brain—that if I embraced him hard enough some of my remaining years would transfer to him. I watched him eat less than usual, and this was a man who loved food, wine, romance, and music. I thought back to the prodigious meals of past years, when Paulo would say, "I do not trust people who do not like food." To Paulo, eating lots of good food was "biophilic," in his usage, life-loving. To eat was to love life. Yet, his favorite food was ordinary fejoada, the national everyday dish of Brazil, a spicy bean stew. Paulo also had a passion for liver and arrugala, and often wanted to eat all three items at the same meal when he visited New York during his honeymoon with Nita, his second wife. Now, how many restaurants have liver, bean stew, and arrugala on the menu? The absence of beans especially drove Paulo to frustrated eloquence. Once, in a restaurant whose big menu offered no beans, Paulo announced, "But this is an absurdity, a restaurant without beans!"

Memories like these have filled my thoughts as I grieve for Paulo. My mourning went underground after two days of crying when news of his death first reached me on a Friday. I had the weekend to myself to cry at home for his loss, then left for Ohio on Monday for some talks. I'm not able to cry in public, so in Ohio I couldn't share my grief out loud. Instead, I found myself breaking into tears at unexpected moments when I was alone in my hotel room, or later on as I drove my car. I wish I had learned to cry in public the way Sharon Crowley weeped openly for Jim Berlin in her beautiful homage at the 1994 CCCC memorial for Jim in Nashville. Instead, I find my subterranean grief doing strange things. One night, I went to the video store planning to rent a comedy to cheer me up. Instead, I came home with a three-hour documentary on the CIA. I watched the tape nonstop and found what I was apparently looking for: A segment on Brazil in the early 1960s, when the CIA was meddling there and elsewhere in Latin America. I was able to look at motion pictures of Brazil when Paulo was a young man filled with the optimism of that time, anticipating a new democratic society. I was moved by this episode in the film, the images of militant peasants, workers, and students before the military coup in April, 1964, which overthrew the elected government of President Joao Goulart, who had just appointed Paulo to lead a national literacy program. I wanted to see what Brazil looked like when Paulo was rooted in his own culture, not yet a forced exile. After 1964, Paulo became a world traveler and author, in his words an involuntary "peregrine of revolution." When I met him later in his life, he had become legendary for his warmth, wisdom, militance, and hopefulness, with a white beard that made him into a grandfatherly guru. To those who wanted to sit at his feet and copy his words or actions, Paulo said, "the only way anyone has of applying in their situation any of the propositions I have made is precisely by redoing what I have done, that is, by not following me. In order to follow me it is essential not to follow me!" (Learning to Question 30)

Paulo became a legend often cited. But, in my grieving search for the young Paulo, I remembered his stories about the years before the coup, like when he issued a call in 1963 in Rio for 600 students to serve as adult literacy tutors, and some 6,000 showed up. The interviews had to be held in a soccer stadium. Paulo said, "It was a time of fantastic popular mobilization, and education was part of it, one of the elements, until the coup" (A Pedagogy for Liberation 32).

With the coup, many were jailed and exiled. Paulo's programs were crushed. He was arrested, held for 10 weeks, moved from prison to prison, and finally forced to leave the country without his wife Elza and their five children, who joined him later in what would be a long exile. Not until 1980 could Paulo move back home. Once there, he reported a certain disorientation in his native land. He had to relearn the way Brazilian workers and peasants used the Portuguese language. He also had to re-situate himself in the changed political conditions. In essence, the coup removed Paulo from Brazilian politics in the prime of his life, when he was at the peak of his activist energies, intimately linked to a society aroused for transformation. Back home at last in 1980, Paulo became a founding member of the new Workers Party, along with a group of union leaders like Lula and intellectuals like Francisco Weffort and Moacir Gadotti. Paulo said that he waited forty years for the Workers Party to appear in Brazil; it was consistent for him to center his hopes for transformation in a broad social movement rather than in education alone. Paulo defined critical education as part of a larger politics of democratic change. To him, education was not the "lever" through which to change society, although questioning the status quo in classrooms was important in challenging inequality.

Just imagine what Paulo and Brazil might have become if the coup of 1964 had failed. Of course, we know Paulo as a world-philosopher whose appearances and books have inspired people globally. He made historic use of expatriation. But, cut off from his native culture by the coup, Paulo in exile lacked the roots abroad to be of the concrete consequence he was in impoverished Brazil. In the Brazilian political climate of the 1980s and 1990s, later in life, Paulo re-rooted himself in his society, first through the Workers Party, next in two universities where he taught, then by travels around the immense Brazilian territory, and finally as Secretary of Education for the City of São Paulo from 1989-1991. The concreteness of Paulo's educational-political work before 1964 and after 1980 in Brazil contrast with the abstractness some saw in his talks and books overseas. Abroad, trying to function in English or French, in societies he was not born into, Paulo lacked the concreteness of home. When I visited him in São Paulo, I witnessed a different Paulo than the one I saw addressing foreign audiences around the U.S. and in Canada. When Paulo spoke in Portuguese on his home turf, he was fluently concrete, which gave me a lesson in the rhetorical value of context and identity.

Somewhere in the world today, the next Paulo Freire is developing. Wherever she is, she has the right to work and to live out her life in her native land. She has the right to speak, teach, write, and organize without being arrested, tortured, raped, disappeared, or exiled. With Paulo gone, my tears are private, but my outrage, impatience, and responsibility are public. I feel outraged that others like Paulo have had their lives, families, work, and democratic dreams suppressed by American intervention, which Noam Chomsky has voluminously chronicled. I feel impatient for a social movement here in America that can interfere with Washington's meddling in other countries, with the CIA now 50 years old. I feel responsible for Paulo's exile and the fate of others, because after all I'm an American citizen and it's my government and taxes that do the dirty work. While Paulo tried to change Brazil in the years leading up to 1964, I was at the excellent Bronx High School of Science and then at the excellent University of Michigan, where no teacher or professor in any writing, literature, or other course mentioned CIA interventions or imperialism. As Paulo said so often, "Education is politics."

Rest in peace, dear friend and mentor. Lives end, history continues.