Letter no. 1 - About a Green Star and its ethos; Introduction to Esperanto as a language-movement

 

 
Esperanto club at the Amundsen-Scott Antarctic Station, in 2022, the southernmost in the world. (Available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Esperanto-Klubo-Amundsen-Scott-2022.jpg.)


This text was composed from two threads and some replies made on Twitter over the last year, with a few changes to the content and a short post-scriptum. I'd been interested in organising them in text form for a while, but I lacked the will, the ‘spark’ to actually publish it. For some reason, this ‘spark’ just happened to appear on this Sunday of Christ the King. I dedicate it to Antonio Vargas and Ana Bezerra Felício, to whom much of this text was first presented.


A few years ago, during my late teens, I was looking for a language for a fiction writing project - the language would serve to give a sense of a foreign place, as done in the film ‘The Great Dictator’. The project never went ahead (because I had neither the time nor the patience to create stories from scratch) and my superficial interest in the language waned. As a teenager, I was looking for an extra language to study and university classes were just starting. Some time later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I began to study a bit of Italian through a textbook for self-taught students, “Italiano passo a passo” [Italian step-by-step], from the Berlitz label, published in Brazil by publishing house Martins Fontes.



I finished the book, enjoyed the serotonin that came with the learning process and remembered the old international language I had put aside. I learnt a bit more about the language and thought its ease was ideal for a short period of study (back then I thought the university would take a little longer to resume classes). After the New Year came to pass [from 2020 to 2021], I found out there was an association of Catholic Esperantists on Facebook, IKUE (Internacia Katolika Unuiĝo Esperantista). Through a comment about St. Maximilian Kolbe's birthday, the president of the organisation invited me to take part in the Saturday rosaries on Zoom (most of the organisation's already elderly members live in Europe). From then on, I took Esperanto a little more seriously, so that I could at least understand the prayers recited [during the sessions].
That same year, I started to use Twitter as a tool for immersion in other languages (such was the case with French and Italian), and towards the end of that year, I began to post in Esperanto there and met my first Esperantist webfriends. Thus I've been studying Esperanto as both a language and a movement ever since, with somewhat fluctuating interest at first (I thought about stopping those language studies because I couldn't find people to talk to [during my first months]) - today I’m officially a member of the Brazilian Esperanto League (BEL).
When I became more interested in the history of the Esperanto movement, I started looking for books about the subject on Kindle. That's when I discovered a bedside book that sealed my adherence to the movement once and for all: “Bridge of Words”, by Esther Schor, published in 2016 in the United States, that tells the story of the language and the movement from the birth of Zamenhof onwards. The author learnt some Esperanto in order to write the book, mixing historiography with immersion experiences; she went to American, European and Asian congresses of the language, taking her from her homeland to Cuba, Poland, Turkey, Vietnam and even Brazil, where she visited the Bona Espero (Good Hope) school farm in the interior of Goiás. These are conversations with all kinds of people, from anonymous Esperantists to famous ones, from the Nepalese secretary Kalindi to the former president of the UEA, Humphrey Tonkin, as well as dozens of other unique characters. (A review of the book is available on the LA Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/esperanto-language-of-hope-esther-schors-bridge-of-words/.)

If in the previous thread I talked a lot about how I became an Esperantist, in this one I'll talk about a factor that was decisive in making me continue to study the language - its community. I'm going to use this thread to mention a few things about the movement and its members.
To begin with: since many censuses don't have precise data on the linguistic landscape of their countries, it's impossible to have an exact number of Esperantists around the world. One relies on estimates, many of which differ wildly from one another. The most recent of them, made by Svend Nielsen in 2017 [https://svendvnielsen.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/percountry-rates-of-esperanto-speakers/], states that there are circa 63,000 Esperanto speakers around the world. (The then-student of Statistics also gave some explanations about his work to Libera Folio [Free Sheet] in February 2017 [https://www.liberafolio.org/2017/02/13/nova-takso-60-000-parolas-esperanton/].) It's not much compared to other natural languages, but it's enough to make it the most spoken constructed language in the world. (By the way: the study also says that there is no significant correlation between the number of Esperanto speakers and a given native language. What does exist is a tendency for richer countries, with more internet access and cultural and scientific contributions, to have a higher number of Esperantists).
The fact that the language was declared “neutral” [by its adherents] doesn't mean that Esperantists are politically neutral. This has been the subject of much discussion in the past, when the movement was the target of repression by Nazifascist (Germany, Italy, Spain) and Stalinist (Soviet Union and surrounding areas) governments during the second quarter of the 20th century. (We'll see more about these persecutions later.)
Generally, Esperantists identify themselves as being closer to the left on the political spectrum - socialists, anarchists, social democrats and social liberals make up the majority of members. However, it's not uncommon to find quite a few conservatives, liberals or libertarians in the mix. (I've come across a few Esperantists on Twitter [don't ask me to call it ‘X’] who are supporters of European national-conservatism, never mind the apparent contradiction in terms. Reality defies any pre-moulded theories and ready-made explanations...) As Zamenhof's language was created partly as a reaction to the ethnic nationalisms of his time, most Esperantists are rather suspicious of current nationalist movements. There is even an association specifically dedicated to anationalists, the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (SAT) [World Anational Association]. This is also due to the state persecution that the movement suffered during part of the last century, as already mentioned here. (Ulrich Lins‘s “Dangerous Language” deals with these persecutions in further detail.)
Esperantists at a Polish Socialist Party rally during the interwar period. (Source: @_SATeH_ on Twitter)

Esperanto has a reasonable body of literature, with more than 25,000 books published, including both translations and original publications. There's something for (almost) everyone: poetry, prose, short stories, horror stories, drama, comedy, politics, sport, geography, among other topics. A good introduction to literature in Esperanto is the “Nova Esperanta Krestomatio” [New Esperanto Chrestomathy], compiled by William Auld in 1991, which introduces the reader to various texts by Esperanto authors, in prose and poetry. (Auld also made a basic reading list for Esperantists in 1988, updated in 1997 by the poet himself [https://www.esperanto.be/fel/but/baza.php]; authors Sten Johansson, Nicola Ruggiero and Suso Moinhos made a list of their own in 2023 [https://www.liberafolio.org/2023/09/12/baza-legolisto-aktualigita-proze-kaj-poezie/], updated with additional works later chosen by them). It also has its traditions, such as Zamenhof Day (or Esperanto Book Day), celebrated every 15 December. It's a day for Esperantists all over the world to get together; buying a book in Esperanto on that day is a suggested practice.

But what made me stay in the movement was certainly the people who make it up. Meeting Esperantist webfriends and web-acquaintances was a key factor for me to keep up interested in studying Zamenhof's language. Esperanto is a language that I really have fun with; I love looking at the dictionaries! And I want to improve my grammar so that I can write better and more complex texts. When I’m toying around with Esperanto grammar, I feel at home.
Esperanto books at the Universal Esperanto Congress in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in July 2008 (Photo: Ziko van Dijk/Wikimedia Commons).

Beyond the sense of amusement, there's also a sense of ‘carrying the torch of tradition’. To talk in Esperanto is to remember the existence of people who fought for a fairer and more solidary world, who gave their blood (sometimes literally) for an ideal often misunderstood or mocked. When Zamenhof created Esperanto, he was thinking of circumventing the obstacles of the Tower of Babel. Through his creation, misunderstanding and hatred would cease, and the world would become one great family circle. As Esther Schor wrote in her "Bridge of Words":

“The Tower of Babel story is not only a myth of misunderstanding; it is also a myth of the diaspora as an existential condition. From the Babel myth, Zamenhof intuited that the perpetual impulse of humans to stake “a name for themselves” on a piece of territory only compounded the problem of misunderstanding. And while Zamenhof accepted misunderstanding as part of the human condition, he refused to accept its human costs: lives lost to tribalism, anti-Semitism, and racism; pogroms just yesterday and perhaps a war of empires tomorrow. Instead, he set about to convince misunderstood and scattered human beings that they had the capacity, without divine intervention, to understand one another better by joining together not over land, not over a tower, but over language.” (SCHOR, 2016)

Many things have changed. The idea of “Babel as a problem” ceded its place to the idea of “Babel as a solution”. Today, the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA) is an outspoken advocate of language rights, a banner that has been close to my heart since I first became interested in language and linguistics. But the idea of a fairer and more peaceful world still persists, even if it seems more implausible than Flamengo winning something this year [and in fact we didn't win anything that year (2023)]. It's part (and parcel) of the internal idea of a movement that has survived powerful blows and (at times) relentless persecution from various sides, whose mere existence, firm and strong though large it may not be that much, is a small miracle of nature.

[The first two blocks of text appeared primarily as an answer to Antonio. The next two came to existence as a reply to Ana Bezerra.]

Zamenhof fundamentally wanted people to put aside their ethnic differences and start seeing the other person as they are, in all their humanity, within the limits of his time. However, he gradually realised that it wasn't just a linguistic problem. It was also a religious and political problem. From his studies on the beliefs of Rabbi Hilel the Elder, he began to mould the life philosophy he would later call “Homaranism”. His religious writings never gained the traction he had hoped for. He died in the midst of World War I, ill and disillusioned by the fact that his dream was to him what Israel was to Moses: they were both given the gift of a glimpse of the Promised Land, but not the possibility of actually entering it.
Time and men were cruel to those who willed to follow Zamenhof's dream. His three children, Adam, Klara and Lidia, were killed at the hands of the Nazis in the 1940s; a similar fate befell many other Esperantists during Stalin's purges and the Second World War. The members of the Soviet Esperantist Union (SEU) had already begun to suffer their martyrdom a few years earlier, during Stalin's Great Purges, between 1936 and 1938, which arose from the split between Stalinists and Trotskyists and the feud between nationalists and internationalists in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Almost all of the SEU's most famous Esperantists and several SAT members were persecuted and killed during this period, under various allegations - cosmopolitanism, spying for foreigners, terrorism, alliance with fascism, etc. Most likely, their “crime” was showing discomfort with Stalin's linguistic policy, shared by many members of the CPSU, under which Russian should be the main language of inter-ethnic communication in the Union and abroad.
And despite all this, the Esperanto movement survived. And many of those who today claim to uphold Esperantist values do so in order to give a redemptive meaning to the persecution suffered by Esperantists of the past, to say that their deaths were not in vain. And they also do it with issues similar to yours. Many of them are also black, just like you. They also feel the racism that they suffer, that others suffer and that they may suffer. They may look at the wounds of persecuted Esperantists and see something darkly familiar in it.

If I'm an Esperantist today, it's in part due to Zamenhof's dream, a man whose fight against anti-Jewish discrimination is veiled in his work; and that’s perhaps partly due to an old Christian sense of a world where there is neither Jew nor Greek. And also something else, a vision of the World as it is and as it can be: a caravanserai of peoples, beliefs and religions, in relative order and harmony. As the sixth stanza (unfortunately cut from the recital at the First Universal Congress) of good ol’ Zamenhof’s “Prayer under the Green Standard” preconizes:

Kunigu la fratoj, plektiĝu la manoj
antaŭen kun pacaj armiloj!
Kristanoj, hebreoj aŭ mahometanoj
ni ĉiuj de Di' estas filoj.
Ni ĉiam memoru pri bon' de l' homaro,
kaj malgraŭ malhelpoj, sen halto kaj staro
al frata la celo ni iru obstine
antaŭen, senfine. (ZAMENHOF, 1905)

Let brothers unite, let us grasp our hands,
[and] spring forward with weapons of peace!
Christians, Hebrews or Mohammedans,
All of us are God’s children.
Let us all keep Mankind’s sake in mind,
and despite all obstacles, ceaselessly and restlessly,
let us all obstinately head towards our goal,
onwards, endlessly.

Long live Zamenhof! Long live the Esperanto movement! And long live all those people whose love of language and compassion for their neighbours drives them to fight for a better future, in which all languages live and have life in abundance!

P.S.: In the original thread in response to Antonio, I wrote the following passage a little over a year ago: ‘By the way, beyond the inquiry about the Esperanto movement, I would also like to look after more research on Zamenhof's life. Some books analyse the Jewish influences on the development of both the Esperanto language and its ethos. I’m very much interested about them.”
Very well: this interest has been partially fulfilled in my current capstone course, which has Esperanto as its subject - or rather, the creation of a website for teaching Esperanto. Web programming works should start soon. Let us wait for what’s next...