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And it struck us all then, the answer to humanity’s eternal question of Why? It was, and is, simply this: Why not?
Even among the unwanted there were unwanted, and at that some of us could only laugh.
Over the next few weeks, I would never exhaust myself of that word: “charming”! Neither my homeland nor America could ever be described as charming. It was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine. We repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed. As for America, just think of Coca-Cola.
Besides, the French and the Vietnamese shared a love for melancholy and philosophy that the manically optimistic Americans could never understand. The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.
Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.
The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one’s own people was always comforting.
Facts, my aunt said, are just the beginning, not the end.
Some of us loved the French, our patrons, and some hated the French, our colonizers, but all of us had been seduced by them. It is difficult to be loved by someone, as the French imagined their relationship with us, or to be abused by someone, though the French pretended otherwise, without being shaped by their hand and touched by their tongue.
drug dealer was just a petty criminal who targeted individuals, and while he may or may not be ashamed of it, he usually recognized the illegality of his trade. But a capitalist was a legalized criminal who targeted thousands, if not millions, and felt no shame for his plunder.
I’m an editor. I read fast and I don’t sleep much.
Even here in France we are in danger of being Americanized. The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity.
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.
Colonies were a pearl choker adorning the alabaster-white neck of the colonizer.
The state wants to monopolize violence, the monopoly of violence is named the law, and the law legitimates itself. The police are not there to protect us, the citizens, but to protect the state and its rule of law.
Che Guevara and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it up close, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier to say for the living!
cangues
where Le Cao Boi said, What the fuck happened to you? which I would have said to me as well, knowing that this was one of the more affectionate things that could be said between one man and another, an expression of care and concern that promised action,
eschatological
Madeleine said nothing, lighting a hashish cigarette and keeping her eyes closed, behind which she was undoubtedly watching a movie only she could see, the rickety reel of memories in which everyone she knew was still alive.
“The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”
Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.
Twilight was the time of hashish, the dusky native, the swarthy subaltern, and the mellow yellow. Twilight was the best time to contemplate the truth, which was usually found in the shadows rather than in stark light. Twilight was also the best time to savor whiskey, make love, foment revolution, and go in circles.
tête-à-tête
and he finally took the bottle and we drank ourselves into a brotherly stupor in the back seat, communicating wordlessly in the manner of men, or animals, or trees.
The revolver weighed about as much as a soul would, or five souls, or perhaps even three or four or six million souls. Why not? Dead souls, after all, could weigh almost nothing.
bonhomie,
While the best situation for an anti-imperialist was to live in an imperial country where one could benefit from imperialism while righteously opposed to it, as happened quite often in the United States, the French had the second-best situation: being anti-imperialist in a formerly imperialist country.
My father had taught me that alphabet, and now I spelled it on Madeleine, rehearsing every letter over and over again as she cried out in her mother tongue and as I added punctuation and accent marks for good measure, until I—at long, long last—was literate.
“Art is not a mirror held up to the world but a hammer with which to shape it.”
The hammer was heavy, even heavier than the bloated foie gras of your guilty conscience, force-fed with all the crimes you had committed. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
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.
The General had the same nostalgic clock in his Los Angeles restaurant, its open secret revealing how, for refugees, time only moved in circles. But the Boss’s clock revealed another open secret, how, for refugees, time sometimes stopped completely.
You’re right, you said, swallowing that familiar mix of guilt and shame for which you had long ago developed a taste. They went so well together, like gin and tonic, like civilization and colonization, like resistance and collaboration, like Hitler and Goebbels, like Nixon and Kissinger, like Vietnam and Algeria, like France and the United States, that there should be a cocktail, or at least a minor Russian novel, or maybe just a teenage dance craze, called the Guilt and the Shame.
You’re all the same. You take us for granted. You assume we’ll cook your food, wash your dishes, launder your clothes, giggle at your dumb jokes, swoon at your poetry or love songs that you love to write until the day you marry us, when you’ll never write us another poem or love song again, since you’ll be writing them to your girlfriends. You think we’ll always be there to make love to you, have your kids, raise them on our own, do the shopping, listen to your complaints, massage your egos, keep the accounts, work for extra money, tolerate your parents, serve your mothers, ignore your
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in those days when revolution was romantic, death was unreal, and contradiction was only the gap between the departing train of liberty, equality, and fraternity and the platform of the colony on which you stood, stranded.
And when Bon pulls the trigger, you can’t quite believe he actually did it, the flash of lightning that blinds you being the crack in the door as Heaven opens and closes for a split second, the bullet piercing your brain before the bang reaches your ears, and somehow you can hear the voice of God one more time, breaking His silence to say, There’s nothing to be afraid of.
How did Kristeva index you the way that she has, and is she correct when she says that “it is only after his death, eventually, that the writer of abjection will escape his condition”? Because you certainly are abject, but perhaps you are a writer, at least of your own confession, and here she gives you a nail of hope on which to cling, or to be pinned: “writing, which allows one to recover, is equal to a resurrection.”
