In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [43]
In 1959 he went to Poland. “Nobody went to Poland in ′59 except crazy Esperanto people,” he said, “and I traveled all over the place. I was in Iran right before the revolution with Esperantists, and what I heard the Esperantists saying about Iran was nowhere to be found in the newspapers. Here I was in direct contact with a collection of people who were not beholden to the United States or Britain or whatever, and were not going to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear. So I was able in a sense to get a particular notion of the truth that other people didn't have.”
I mentioned a man I had met at the Havana congress, an Icelandic fisherman who couldn't be more gaunt, or more silent, or farther from home. He first learned about Esperanto from a radio broadcast, studied it from a book, and had been to every universal congress since—Berlin, Tel Aviv, Zagreb, Fortaleza, Gothenburg. That July, he was headed for Beijing. “You know,” Tonkin said, “there are a lot of Esperantists out there who just haven't yet found their way to Esperanto.”
Back where it all started for me, at that MIT conference, I never did gain an understanding of the role of rock music in Esperanto culture. But I did get to hear Kimo play. On a stage set up on the lawn in front of the student center on the main quad, he brought out his accordion while his friend Jean-Marc LeClerq, formerly of the group La Rozmariaj Beboj (the Rosemary's Babies), tuned his guitar. They began with the mellow strains of “Besame mucho”: “Kisu min / Kisu min multe.”
Two gray-haired women in matching green dresses twirled to the music, their feet bare in the grass. A large-bellied man with a big green star on both his cap and his belt buckle stood with his hands in his pockets, swaying awkwardly. Others joined the ladies, or perched on benches and sang along. Outsiders wandered by. The curious ones stopped to listen or to take a leaflet from a friendly college student in an Esperanto T-shirt. Others sniggered or rolled their eyes as they refused the leaflet and continued on. I sat at a careful distance from the stage, hoping it wasn't too obvious that I was part of this group but feeling guilty for thinking so. While Esperantoland has its share of people you don't want to meet—insufferable bores, sanctimonious radicals, proselytizers for Christ, communism, or a new kind of vegetarian healing—for the most part, the Esperantists I encountered were genuine, friendly, interested in the world, and respectful of others. Though I may not have fully crossed over myself, I did develop a protective defensiveness about them.
Is it crazy to believe that Esperanto has a chance in the age of English? It's insane. Ask any businessman in Asia, any hotel operator in Europe. Is it ridiculous to believe that a universal common language will bring peace to the world? Of course it is. We have all the brutal evidence we need: the fact that Serbians and Croatians speak the same language did not prevent the bloodshed in Yugoslavia; the shared language of the Hutus and Tutsis did nothing to stop the massacres in Rwanda. Do Esperantists really believe either of these propositions? Whether they do or they don't, as far as they are concerned, they're doing their part. It can't hurt.
The world may not need Esperanto, but it does need people who, like Zamenhof, are moved to act against the “enmity of nations.” Knowing Zamenhof's fate makes it difficult to dismiss his life's work with a chuckle. During the bloody peak of World War I, Zamenhof's brother Aleksander killed himself upon being ordered into the Russian army because he couldn't bear to face once again the horrors he had witnessed while serving as an army doctor during the Russo-Japanese War. Not long after that, in the midst