By JOSÉ CASTILHO MARQUES NETO*

In a world adrift, where elites bet on dehumanization, reading persists as a revolutionary act: each book opened in La Carcova or in Brazilian prisons is a brick torn from the wall of barbarism. The landscape that will save us will be made of bookshelves.

1.

After the intense journey of the LeerIberoamericalee.com seminar – available to watch online – I sat on the balcony of the house that has housed us for seven years in Madrid and which has a history that says a lot about the intellectual and artistic life of the last hundred years in the Western world.

The famous Madrid Student Residence It was, from its foundation in 1910 until its closure in 1936 by the dictator Francisco Franco, a shelter and encouragement for many creators and writers who not only left their mark on Spain, but on Western culture: Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, Miguel de Unamuno, Alfonso Reyes, José Ortega y Gasset, among many others.

Other scientists and artists who were key figures in the 20th century, such as Einstein, Marie Curie, Marinetti and Le Corbusier, also passed through this same space, giving courses and lectures. In the original block of the Residence, which now houses research centres and a library, the external windows bear the names of hundreds of illustrious people from that first period and after the fall of Franco, some of whom are still alive and active on the international scene.

Their names embody all the symbolism of resistance to barbarism and the exaltation of sublime and humanitarian values ​​of science and arts, synthesized in that set of exposed brick buildings and in the middle of a garden forest that infects all who continue to take shelter there.

Feeling imbued with this story and the almost magical atmosphere that surrounds me, I think about the lessons learned from the seminar that has just ended, the continued interaction with friends and life partners that I have met again, and the desire to continue maintaining contact with the new friends and partners that the meeting produced.

Gradually, the feelings and affections experienced give way to assessments of what was said, debated, and absorbed as essential. Not simply as a bureaucratic or exclusively academic assessment, but with the perspective of seeking connections with the contemporary world that urgently needs to unite around projects that recover the meaning of civilization in our time.

Ultimately, we know that we will not recreate the world that is almost in ruins without knowledge, without storytelling and without sharing, as is done in all the seminars. Read Iberoamerica Lee who knows that sharing is the most sublime essence of acquired knowledge.

2.

As I reflect on this intense week, I connect with debates that I will find in upcoming forums in Brazil and that will revisit ongoing themes from our difficult history of reading and writing. Among these themes, one prevails: the unequal distribution of public policies and civil society programs, which impacts on the subordination and lesser importance that the country gives to the formation of readers and the promotion of the country's literature.

Suddenly, all my idyllic thoughts of the story of Residence hits the wall of Brazilian and Latin American reality that does not understand the urgent need to train readers.

I emphasize that this is not a case of ignorance of this need, but of a political decision, both by the public authorities and by the economic and social elite that has the resources to resolve issues such as illiteracy or the preservation of bibliodiversity.

There is no shortage of objective examples of literary training programs, such as the one I share below.

Among the interventions Read Iberoamerica Lee, I recall the words of the Brazilian Alexandre Amaro, a researcher of reading and writing in environments of deprivation of liberty, and the Argentine Waldemar Cubillas, who lived in prison for ten years and, after this experience, created and directs the La Carcova Cultural Center and Library, a neighborhood in the province of Buenos Aires partially built on an open-air landfill. Both moved us with their reflections on the perspective of reading from the perspective of prisoners, and how these human beings deprived of freedom perceive and build their relationship with literature and books.

Waldemar Cubillas shared an image based on the idea that “love depends on the landscape.” And how can this landscape that builds the love for books be possible in a neighborhood where next to the landfill there is only a penitentiary and chronic poverty?

He told us that the book first appears as paper, to be sold by weight; then it appears as a protective shield when placed on the abdomen and protected the prisoner from an enemy knife in prison; then it appears as a facilitator of small pleasures, like the very thin paper taken from the Bible and with which cigarettes are made; and, little by little, the book on the shelves of the modest prison or community library builds another landscape and this landscape builds many others that arise from the readings of the books, as if each story read or told opened a door to the world. It is reading being constructed.

Fabulation, this essential construction alongside other narratives, which the master Antonio Candido defended in his seminal text The right to literature, showed itself in its entirety in the harsh real world of Waldemar Cubillas, a resistant from La Carcova. I understand as evidence, based on thousands of similar experiences and territories throughout Latin America, that the web of fable is not a mere whim, but an innate right that pulses in the center of the human being.

It is in the interweaving of narratives, whether in the vastness of literature or in the thousand faces of storytelling, that the world reveals itself in its intricate dance, and human experience finds its echo and its meaning. Candido, with his peculiar lucidity, teaches us that literature, in its deepest essence, is the breath that humanizes, expanding consciousness and carving the wings of empathy and reflection in the spirit.

3.

Reaching this level of civilization is a legitimate ambition and a goal to be achieved. Perhaps it is useful to think that in order to advance we need to invest not only in buying books, but in educators and mediators, who have qualified know-how, practical expertise based on intelligible rules and principles, whose ability allows them to transform the rough into something orderly, with purpose and, often, beauty.

In my research, I have noticed the existence of many people in the world of books, reading, literature and libraries who navigate these waters, such as Waldemar Cubillas. They build and teach how to build in extreme situations, in hostile environments, in territories where Freirean hope is something that the citizen who eats three meals a day cannot imagine could exist.

In this intense and difficult period for humanity, when authoritarian elites are reemerging with a project to prevent the formation of critical citizens, it is time to abandon Pollyanna ideas of a non-existent world and embrace once and for all the purpose of strategically constructing plans to educate readers, supported by a great deal of social mobilization and based on the unity of all links in the book and reading sector. Without this consistency, the current perverse situation that prevents a large portion of society from exercising its right to read and write will not be reversed.

It is necessary to build and, when thinking like this, I mentally review the exhibition “You have to see it”, from the March Foundation, which explores the autonomy of colors in abstract art. The clever montage reminds us that “colors do not exist, but the world is unimaginable without them.” It also shows that physics teaches that colors come from white light and that, since 1864, with James Maxwell, we have known that they are the result of a perceptive experience in which light is captured by the photoreceptor cells of the retina, transforming into electrical impulses that the brain recognizes as colors.

If even the colors that inspire so many writers are not the result of careless chance, but require a complex journey and are only accessible through a combination of perceptions, it is high time that we responsibly address the formation of a society guided by the values, memory and fables that we find in good books in all their formats.

*José Castilho Marques Neto He is a retired professor of philosophy at FCL-Unesp. He was president of Editora Unesp and the Mário de Andrade Library and Executive Secretary of the PNLL (MinC and MEC). Author, among other books, of Revolutionary loneliness: Mário Pedrosa and the origins of Trotskyism in Brazil (WMF). [https://amzn.to/3XNwXEi]

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