Notes

In ending these notes, I come back to you Paulo, as past compan˜ero de lucha (comrade of struggle), and present ancestor, grandfather and guide. In both the Pedagogy of Hope and the Pedagogy of the Heart, you criticized the intellectuals of postmodernity (those of the Right and the Left) who describe the obstacles the present times pose to liberation and proclaim them insurmountable. ‘Accepting the inexorability of what takes place is an excellent contribution to the dominant forces in their unequal fight against the ‘condemned of the earth’, you said in this latter text, referring here to the expression of Fanon (Freire, 2007, p. 43). In Pedagogy of the Hope, among your numerous references of Fanon, there is one about the need for the colonized and oppressed to take distance from the colonizer-oppressor, ‘to locate themselves “outside” as Fanon would say’ (1993, p. 47). Both dialogic admonitions hold relevance here. The complacency among many, including of the so-called Left, remains, as does the inability to comprehend the condemnation of which Fanon speaks: a factor of capitalism and class struggle but more broadly of colonization and the ongoing matrix of colonial power. The political location ‘outside’, in the margins and decolonial cracks, as I have argued here, has a history of 500+ years in AbyaYala and a presence that is increasingly visible, in struggle and in multiplication.