Chapter 8: Dante’s Decolonialism

In the White and Gold Rose all are present, Virgil’s bees, a’building Dido’s Carthage, inseminate the Incarnation, women and men are equally present as in a Quaker Meeting, likewise pagan past and Christian centuries coexist in a palimpsest, as polyphony, as Florence’s Gospel, as the Oriflamme of Peace. Dante has circled the square, has prismed light into rainbows, has gathered up all the scattered Sibylline leaves, of Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, Horace, Sallust, Aristotle, Avicenna, Avverroës, the Kitab al-Mirag, even of his schoolmaster’s Tesoretto/Tesoro, even of the Libro del Chiodo decreeing his tragic, unjust exile, into one volume, the Comedy. In whose God we see our Humanity. But we need to read his text “true”, to find this Decolonialism of Freedom, Peace, and Love. To do so we must tackle the false divisions, the injustices, of Nation, Language, Race, Gender, Class, Religion, as we find Dante to do. Dennis Looney so titled his book, Freedom Readers. We can become “Freedom Readers”, Dante explaining that the Freedom of the Soul is the intent and goal of his allegory, indeed the anagogy, of his Commedia’s use of Psalm 113, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto”.