![]() ![]() Firstly, James Joyce’s heroism is to be a radical cosmopolitan – combining the local and global – which is, for example, to be and feel Irish and simultaneously think and feel globally, and even cosmically.Ī paradox central to radical cosmopolitanism is that we serve the present age by betraying it: Casement is hanged as a traitor for trying to liberate a people Joyce is censored for endeavouring to revive a defeated people and celebrate their landscape and speech. That is why I consider him a Joycean hero. The Putumayo atrocities in Peru, 1908 (photograph by Walter Hardenburg)Ĭasement’s journey may lie ahead of us, providing a compass to rediscover our humanity in living for the world rather than merely in it. ![]() He was knighted for his pioneering humanitarian work by the British Crown in 1913, which did not prevent him becoming a revolutionary in 1916. At that time, wild rubber could only be harvested in the great jungles of the Congo and Amazon. Both massive atrocities emerged out of the Western powers’ demand for rubber. His groundbreaking Congo Report in 1904 caused an international sensation.Įight years on, Casement was again in the international spotlight after the release of another even more horrifying report on the brutal mistreatment, enslavement and murder of thousands along the Putumayo River in the Amazon, led by the Peruvian Amazonian Company, which was registered in Britain. He was one of the central figures in exposing the genocide of millions in the Congo region, then privately owned by King Leopold II of Belgium. Livingston, I presume?’), and then to British consul. ![]() He remains an enigma not only to others but also to himself a complex and infinitely curious human being in troubled and confused times.īorn in Sandycove (close to where Joyce’s Ulysses begins) in Dublin in 1864, he spent much of his childhood on the coast of his beloved Antrim, Casement left for Mozambique while still in his teens, rising from a ship purser to an explorer under Henry Morten Stanley (the man who supposedly said ‘Dr. He is open to endless interpretation, and also – crucially – by reading and judging him we may better understand ourselves. Where to begin the story of Roger Casement, humanitarian crusader, knight of the British realm, and 1916 revolutionary? Lawrence of Arabia wrote that he had ‘the appeal of a broken archangel’ Joseph Conrad said: ‘He could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget, things I never did know” Edmund Morel described him as ‘suggestive of one who had lived in the vast open spaces’.Ĭasement’s life involved crisis, fissure, disintegration, newness and transformation, enduring intersections at the heart of our modernity. ![]()
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