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Charles de Gaulle, the greatest of great Frenchmen in recent memory. The hero who had liberated France from the Nazis while continuing to enslave us Vietnamese. Ah, contradiction!
Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.
Your father was a colonizer and a pedophile, which go hand in hand. Colonization is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission!
Americans loathed symbols, except for patriotic, sentimental ones like guns, flags, Mom, and apple pie, all of which the average American proclaimed he would defend to the death. One had to love such a practical, pragmatic people, impatient with interpretation, eager just to get the facts, ma’am.
regarded me with a curiosity that soon devolved into disdain, which the French have difficulty concealing, since they consider disdain a virtue.
Loving a master who kicks you is not a problem if that is all one feels, but loving and hating must be kept a dirty little secret, for loving the master one hates inevitably induces confusion and self-hatred. That was why I never threw myself as wholeheartedly into the study of French as I did with English and why, ever since leaving the lycée, I had hardly ever spoken a word of French. French was the language of our enslaver and rapist, whereas English was a novelty, heralding an American arrival that spelled the end of our French debasement.
it suddenly struck me that I was not just seen as an other by white people. They also heard me as other, for when I opened my mouth and broke the beautiful china of their French language, they heard what the poet, boy wonder, gun runner, and slave trader Rimbaud must have heard and then plagiarized from some nameless African or Oriental traveler: I is an other.
That night, my aunt and I smoked the finest hashish and drank the finest Haut-Médoc and listened to the finest American jazz, that black-and-blue music so beloved by the French partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism.
My neighbors will think, I can’t believe someone yellow has moved in. Funny thing about white people. They think we Asians stick together too much, but when white people come to our country, all they do is stick together.
Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet. We learn from those mistakes. You yourself are making a mistake of judging the revolution too soon.
You can’t dodge a bullet with your name on it,
Being tortured was, in that sense, like going to church. After a while, neither taught anything new. The ritual and the repetition simply reinforced knowledge already known but in danger of being forgotten, which was why torturers plied their trade not just with pliers but with the conviction of priests like my father, who tortured me in his own subtle way.
If revolutionaries can educate themselves in prisons, why not brothels? Can’t prostitutes be as radical as prisoners?
American exceptionalism, which is how Americans delicately refer to “American imperialism,” a phrase that one must never say to Americans, who sincerely believe, as all imperialists do, that they have taken over the world for its own good, as if imperialism were a kind of penicillin (for the natives), with power, profit, and pleasure merely being surprising side effects (for the doctors).
If the word of a bastard is not persuasive, then perhaps the word of Sartre, writing on Fanon, is: “With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation.” Or to put it in my own words: Whitewashing the blood-soaked profits of colonization was the only kind of laundering white men did with their own hands.
Slogans were my turn-on and my political convictions were my most erogenous zone.
Mayakovsky, Chernyshevsky, Lenin . . . what was wrong with these Russians? Was it Siberia? The steppe? The cheap and plentiful vodka, visually synonymous with water? Or was it that the Russians were essentially Oriental, as Sir Richard Hedd claimed? Did the sum of these things make the Russians prone to brutal behavior, unrealistic expectations, and very thick novels? And, at least by reputation, deadly roulette?
And even after slapping yourself on both sides of your face, and with your cheeks stinging, you could hear yourself continuing to laugh hysterically, although it might also be possible that you were just laughing historically. The joke, after all, was timeless.
but revolution is always an act of insanity, because revolution is not a revolution unless it is committed to the impossible, although if this is too depressing and daunting one needs to remember that only a few thousand years ago it was beyond the human imagination that one could travel around the world in a day, an amazing feat that has brought the world together, so that today nowhere in the world is beyond the reach of tourists, investors, missionaries, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, meaning that the infinite dialectic still swings back and forth between the impossible and the
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