Eight 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<\/a>[2]<\/a>\u00a0in the Amazon, led by the Peruvian Amazonian Company, which was registered in Britain. Both massive atrocities emerged out of the Western powers\u2019 demand for rubber. At that time, wild rubber could only be harvested in the great jungles of the Congo and Amazon. He was knighted for his pioneering humanitarian work by the British Crown in 1913, which did not prevent him becoming a revolutionary in 1916.<\/p>\n Casement\u2019s journey may lie ahead of us, providing a compass to rediscover our humanity in living\u00a0for\u00a0<\/em>the world rather than merely in it. That is why I consider him a Joycean hero. Firstly, James Joyce\u2019s heroism is to be a radical cosmopolitan \u2013 combining the local and global \u2013 which is, for example, to be and feel Irish and simultaneously think and feel globally, and even cosmically.<\/p>\n A 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.<\/p>\n In 1904, when Joyce and his future wife Nora Barnacle left for Trieste, he wrote a letter to her revealing his vocation: \u2018I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond.\u2019 For Joyce and Casement, to be a radical cosmopolitan is to be an exile soul \u2013 \u2018self exiled in upon his ego\u2019 as Joyce put it in\u00a0Finnegans Wake<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 \u00a0perpetually on a homeward journey. Thus, while every page of\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>\u00a0is rooted in a specific place in Dublin, it is also what Yuri Slezkine called, \u2018the Bible of universal homelessness\u2019.<\/p>\n II<\/p>\n To be a Joycean hero is, secondly, to be driven by love \u2013 love for all living creatures, defined by a courage to oppose oppressive political systems; listening to an inner voice reminding us of our core values, shutting out belittling and paralysing chatter. The one time Leopold Bloom really sticks up for himself in\u00a0Ulysses\u00a0<\/em>is in the Cyclops episode, when faced with patriotic bigotry and racism. He declares that true life is love. It is no coincidence that the only mention of Casement in\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>\u00a0is in this same episode, as one who stood up for the indigenous peoples of the Congo and Amazon:<\/p>\n \u2014Well, says J. J., if they\u2019re any worse than those Belgians in the Congo Free State they must be bad. Did you read that report by a man what\u2019s this his name is? Ulysses<\/em>\u00a0is set on a single day \u2013 the 16th<\/sup>\u00a0June 1904 \u2013 itself a symbol of love for Joyce as this was his first official romantic encounter with Nora Barnacle. As the patriarchal, colonial powers of Britain, France, Germany and Russia locked horns in a horrific world war, sending millions of young men to needless slaughter, Joyce wrote his masterpiece of ineluctable love \u2013 embodying truth, beauty and freedom.<\/p>\n Love incorporates both sundering and reconciliation, and remains a consciously unstable force in Joyce\u2019s work. It resides \u2018ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void\u2019 \u2013 a sentence from the penultimate episode of\u00a0Ulysses,<\/em>\u00a0which could serve as Joyce\u2019s definition for art, beauty and human existence.<\/p>\n Casement\u2019s affirmation of life drove his love for the marginalised populace of an unprotected wilderness. Like Joyce, who wrote in the language of the coloniser on behalf of both the colonised and coloniser, Casement recognised the tensions between coloniser and colonised. He concluded a letter to his friend William Cadbury in 1911 with these words: \u2018PS. If I wrote a history of the slavery I\u2019d be kicked out of the public service.\u2019<\/p>\n III<\/p>\n Thirdly, a Joycean hero acknowledges the \u2018epic of the human body\u2019 \u2013 Joyce\u2019s \u00a0description for\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>. With nations and empires obsessing about war, obliterating the body and any hint of joyful sensuousness, Joyce and Casement\u2019s war is an affirmation of the body, a resounding \u2018Yes\u2019 to life that is the last word of\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>.<\/p>\n Joyce\u2019s solitary writing of\u00a0Ulysses,<\/em>\u00a0with each episode representing an organ of the body during the life-negating years of World War I, and Casement\u2019s tireless campaign for the voiceless oppressed in the Congo, Amazon and Ireland \u2013 along with his anti-colonial and anti-war essays collected under the title\u00a0The Crime Against Europe<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 represent a grand defiance and affirmation of the human spirit.<\/p>\n Casement can be found buried deep in the fourth and final section of the second part of the four books that make up\u00a0Finnegans Wake<\/em>\u00a0set in the ocean off the coast of Ireland, on embarking and disembarking: \u2018\u2026 and after that then there was the official landing of Lady Jales Casemate\u2026\u2019 There is allusion here to both Casement and checkmate (\u2018Casemate\u2019), jale (to work) and jail (prison). The Lady can imply Britannia a symbol of the British Empire, and equally can allude to an idea of a crossdresser or homosexual \u2013 also echoing the description of Bloom as the \u2018new womanly man\u2019 in the hallucinatory \u2018nighttime\u2019 episode of Circe in\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>.<\/p>\n To Bloom\u2019s \u2018new womanly man\u2019 and Protestant Jew subjected to racism and betrayal, Casement is a sensitive homosexual, who was also well positioned to understand deeply the oppression and silencing of the marginalised. As the mischievous, plural voice will say to the reader in the middle of\u00a0Finnegans Wake<\/em>, \u201cdo you hear what I am seeing?\u201d<\/p>\n IV<\/p>\n Fourthly, the Joycean hero embodies the antinomies and conflicting identities of the human self, such that Casement is, what Joyce calls in\u00a0Finnegans Wake<\/em>, \u201ctwo thinks at a time\u201d and \u201ctwosome twiminds\u201d \u2013 as Protestant\/Catholic, British consul\/Irish revolutionary, Christian\/homosexual, and traitor\/humanitarian. The \u201ctwosome twimind\u201d is key to understanding Joyce\u2019s thought and vision \u2013 seen in words such as \u2018chaosmos\u2019, \u2018thisorder\u2019 and \u2018jewgreek\u2019. The conflicted, dissolving, plural hero reveals the cracks and anxieties of his age \u2013 with Ireland a site of contradictions culminating in a bitter civil war (1922-23).<\/p>\n The phrase \u201ctwosome twiminds\u201d comes from the chapter on Shem Skrivenitch \u2013 Joyce\u2019s thinly disguised self-portrait – in\u00a0Finnegans Wake<\/em>:<\/p>\n [\u2026]\u00a0a nogger among the blankards of this dastard century, you have become of twosome twiminds forenenst gods, hidden and discovered, nay, condemned fool, anarch, egoarch, hiersiarch, you have reared your disunited kingdom on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul.<\/em><\/p>\n I attempt a translation of this passage, alluding to our unconscious designs:<\/p>\n a nigger among the white bastards of this dastard century, someone who has developed a dual or conflicting mind, going against the gods, condemned and foolish, containing elements of the archetype of the anarchist, egoist and heretic, and raising up your disunited kingdom upon the void of your own most doubtful or despairing soul.<\/em><\/p>\n This could be an illuminating description for Casement as well as Joyce, who both performed the role of outsider. Each employed the term \u2018the language of the outlaw\u2019, and Joyce\u2019s use of the word \u2018nogger\u2019, alluding to the offensive word \u2018nigger\u2019, is used in an opposition he shares with Casement to the colonial master. These controversial and conflicted figures \u2013 each one simultaneously magnanimous and egotistical \u2013 intertwined as servants and traitors of the \u2018disunited kingdom\u2019 (Ireland and\/or the United Kingdom).<\/p>\n In dueling opposites, Casement is a powerful example of combining the realist and the romantic: as one who casts a suspicious eye over human systems in his clear, jargon-free, reports on Congo and Putumayo. He was among those dangerous dreamers, living a mythic life of complexities and great challenges, a mediocre poet whose life became an epic poem.<\/p>\n V<\/p>\n Finally, the Joycean hero\u2019s journey is one of transformation. Casement became an orphan at the age of thirteen and then spent twenty years in Africa and seven years in Brazil. He embarked on a transformative journey from advocate of British colonial rule to humanitarian crusader and anti-imperialist.<\/p>\n If we observe the stylistic differences between Casement\u2019s diaries from the Congo and those from the Amazon it is as if each has been written by a different man. The cryptic statements, short-hand daily reminders and mini weather reports in the Congo diaries give way to the sprawling, dense, meandering Amazon journals, opening out like the great river itself.<\/p>\n It is no accident that Casement loved and collected butterflies \u2013 the epitome of transformation. Transformation is deeply ecological. Casement was acutely sensitive to his environment. As he moved up river he was surrounded by the vegetation of the two largest jungles of the world. In his journals we find the eye of an ethnographer and environmentalist, who understands the intimate connection between any land and the people living there.<\/p>\n This frontier environment at the limits of human endurance raises his awareness of the truly global struggle he was involved in. In a letter from Brazil after publishing the Congo Report, he wrote that it was deep \u2018in the \u2018lonely Congo forests\u2019 where he found King Leopold II, who directed the enslavement of the country, along with himself \u2013 \u2018the incorrigible Irishman\u2019. The rivers and trees of the two mightiest jungles on Earth lead Casement to places few are willing to travel.<\/p>\n Finnegans Wake\u00a0<\/em>may be viewed one day as the great novel of ecological thought, a theme hinted at in\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>. This is apparent on every page of his last work as words mutate in each sentence to become living, breathing entities, and as all things, animate and inanimate, metamorphise. Ultimately in this extravaganza of ecological vision, the river is crucial to emptying out, recycling and renewing. Hundred of rivers from all over the world are woven through the famous chapter involving the two washerwomen gossiping about Anna Livia Plurabelle on the bank of Dublin\u2019s River Liffey (whom she is); the first word used in the book is \u2018riverrun\u2019; and Joyce\u2019s final soliloquy is delivered by Anna Livia Plurabelle \u2013 meaning the plural, beautiful, river of life. The rivers and the trees are the site for transformation, creativity and redemption for Casement, Joyce and humanity.<\/p>\n Bartholomew Ryan co-wrote (with Christabelle Peters) and performed a two-act monologue play on Roger Casement in Lisbon, Strasbourg and Bergen in 2016. He is a philosophy research coordinator at the New University of Lisbon<\/em>\u00a0(http:\/\/www.ifilnova.pt\/pages\/bartholomew-ryan<\/span>)<\/a>\u00a0and leader of the international band The Loafing Heroes<\/em> (https:\/\/theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com\/<\/span>)<\/p>\n Featured Image: Daniele Idini<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a>[1]<\/a>\u00a0See Hochschild, Adam;\u00a0King Leopold\u2019s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa<\/em>, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.<\/p>\n <\/a>[2]<\/a>\u00a0See\u00a0Goodman, Jordan;\u00a0The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man\u2019s Battle for Human Rights in South America\u2019s Heart of Darkness<\/em>. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2018the appeal of a broken archangel\u2019; Joseph Conrad said: \u2018He could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget, things I never did know\u201d; Edmund Morel described him as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":482,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[189,501,1333,2815,4107,5056,9603,9610,9689],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-2","category-uncategorized","tag-2018february","tag-and","tag-casement","tag-economics","tag-history","tag-joyce","tag-twiminds","tag-twosome","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Putumayo.jpg\")
\n\u2014Casement, says the citizen. He\u2019s an Irishman.
\n\u2014Yes, that\u2019s the man, says J. J. Raping the women and girls and flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can out of them.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Joyce.jpg\")
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