| WALLS - Approach of the chances and the need for the idea of identity. |
|
By Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant/
for the Institute of the All-world (www.tout-monde.com)
One of the most fragile richnesses of the identity, personal or collective, and most invaluable as, is as obvious it develops and is reinforced in a continuous way, nowhere one does not meet identity fixity, but also which it could not be established nor to be reassured starting from rules, of edicts, laws which would found authority of it nature. The identity principle is carried out or déréalise sometimes in phases of regression (loss of the feeling of oneself) or of pathology (aggravation of a collective feeling of superiority) which the various “cures” do not concern, they either, of prepared and taken decisions, then mechanically applied.
Let us try to approach this complex multiplicity, ever given like a whole, nor of only one blow, which we call identity. People or an individual can be attentive with the movement of their identity, but cannot decide some by advance, by means of precepts and of postulates. One could not manage a ministry for the identity. If not the life of the community would become a mechanics, its asepticized future, made unfertile by fixed controls, as in an experiment of laboratory. It is that the identity is initially a being-in-the-world, as say the philosophers, a risk above all, than it is necessary to run, and than it provides thus to the relationship with the Other and this world, at the same time as it results from the report/ratio. Such an ambivalence nourishes at the same time freedom to undertake and, front, the audacity to change.
for the Institute of the All-world (www.tout-monde.com)
One of the most fragile richnesses of the identity, personal or collective, and most invaluable as, is as obvious it develops and is reinforced in a continuous way, nowhere one does not meet identity fixity, but also which it could not be established nor to be reassured starting from rules, of edicts, laws which would found authority of it nature. The identity principle is carried out or déréalise sometimes in phases of regression (loss of the feeling of oneself) or of pathology (aggravation of a collective feeling of superiority) which the various “cures” do not concern, they either, of prepared and taken decisions, then mechanically applied.
Let us try to approach this complex multiplicity, ever given like a whole, nor of only one blow, which we call identity. People or an individual can be attentive with the movement of their identity, but cannot decide some by advance, by means of precepts and of postulates. One could not manage a ministry for the identity. If not the life of the community would become a mechanics, its asepticized future, made unfertile by fixed controls, as in an experiment of laboratory. It is that the identity is initially a being-in-the-world, as say the philosophers, a risk above all, than it is necessary to run, and than it provides thus to the relationship with the Other and this world, at the same time as it results from the report/ratio. Such an ambivalence nourishes at the same time freedom to undertake and, front, the audacity to change.
National identity.
In Occident and initially in Europe, the communities are constituted in nations, whose double function was of exalter what one called the values of the community, to defend them against any external aggression and, if possible, to export them in the world. The nation then becomes a State-nation, whose model little by little is essential and defines the fundamental nature of the relationship between people in the modern world. The community which lives in State-nation knows why it does it, without never being able to appear it by postulates and theorems, this is why it expresses that by symbols (famous values), to which it claims to allot a dimension “of universal”. Such an organization is with the principle of the colonial conquests, the colonizing nation imposes its values, and is claimed of an identity preserved of very reached external and that we will call a single identity root. Even if any colonization is initially of economic exploitation, none can do without this identity survalorisation which justifies the exploitation. The single identity root thus needs always to be justified while being defined, or at least while trying to do it. But this model as was at the origin of the fights anticolonialists, it is in the claim of an national identity, inherited the example of the colonizer, as the dominated communities found the force to resist. The model of the State-nation multiplied in the world. It is resulted from it many disasters.
Of such a succession of obviousnesses, or commonplaces, we can conclude from two ways. Initially that nations lately appeared, or who changed mode, progress only with difficulty towards a design of the nation which is not related to a rigid and exclusive identity requirement. It seems to us that only South Africa expressed the need for a voluntarily mongrel organization, where the Blacks, the Zulus, the White, the Mongrels, the Indians, could live together, without dominations nor conflicts: the vocation of an identity relation. In addition, that it is only if the State-nation is threatened in its existence that the need for the national identity is forged fully as tool of defense (it is seen then who is treacherous or not with the nation) or as close gathering, without it being however need to legislate on this identity. But in which will make one believe today that the French nation is thus threatened, in danger, and that flows of two or three hundred and thousand illegal immigrants would constitute the hard core of this threat?
We intend to say of a young wonder of the direction of orchestra which it would have been born in a garage: his/her parents would have been almost SDF and immigrants, hinged perhaps of these decrees of expulsion. It is ensured us that the young boy fallen from a window while trying to flee the police force of immigration was one of best of his class. Would France give up coldly, in the name of an obsession of identity, or would try it to carry an illusory regulation, so that diversity, the unforeseen one, fruitfulness of the world would be likely to bring to him?
Make-world.
Thus in full 21st century, a great democracy, an old Republic, ground known as of the “Human rights”, gathers in L `entitled of a ministry called initially with repression, the terms: immigration, integration, national identity, Co-development. In this precipitate, the terms S `entrechoquent, are cancelled, are condemned, and finally leave only the hoquet of a regression. France betrays by there a share not codifiable of its identity, one of the fundamental aspects, the other is colonialism, of his report/ratio in the world: the exaltation of freedom for all.
It is true that democratic space is a field of antagonistic forces extremely virulent. That this the least bad of all the systems, asks for an attention of any moment, and like a vigilance of Warrior. It is true also that we gave up the idea of a rectilinear progression of the conscience human, and learned that regression and advanced is like indissociable: there or intensifies the light, the shade continues as much. It is true finally, that the 21st century is this moment when the world completes to make world under the auspices dismaying of the economic liberalism - - this capitalist virulence which invests the spirit of freedom to denature it in a system which precipitates forts and weak, those which have and those which have nothing, those which can and those which cannot, in the open large géhenne of the “Market”. The setting in system of the spirit of freedom is not any more freedom. It is a crumbling of all, which exposes each one, only and stripped, with the appetite of the monster.
It is true finally that in this opened market, this “world-market”, this “market-world”, the depressions between shortage and abundance cause intense migratory floods, as cyclones which no border could dam up. Sapiens is by definition a migrant, emigrating, immigrating. It essaimé like that, taken the world like that and, like that, it crossed the deserts and snows, the mounts and the abysses, left the famines to follow drinking and to eat it. It is not border which one does not exceed. That is checked on million years. This will be it until the end (even more in the climatic upheavals which are announced) and any of these walls which draw up all everywhere, under various pretexts, yesterday in Berlin and today in Palestine or in the South of the United States, or in the legislation of the rich countries, could not dam up this simple truth: that the All-World is the house of all - Kay all moune -, that it belongs to all and that its balance passes by the balance of all.
WALL AND RELATION.
The temptation of the wall is not new. Each time a culture or qu `a civilization did not succeed in thinking the Other, to think itself with the Other, to think the Other in oneself, these stiff safeguardings of stones, iron, barbed wires, or closed ideologies, rose, broken down, and still return to us in new stridencies. These refusal frightened of the Other, these attempts to neutralize its existence, even to deny it, can take the shape of a corset of legislative texts, the form of an indefinable ministry, or the fog of a belief transmitted by media which, forsaking in their turn the spirit of freedom, subscribe only to their own expansion in the shade of the capacities and the dominant forces.
The concept even of identity was used a long time as wall: to make the account of what is with oneself, to distinguish it from what holds of the Other, which one then sets up in illegible threat, impressed cruelty. The identity wall gave eternal confrontations of people, the empires, the colonial expansions, the Draft of the negros, the atrocities of American slavery and all the genocides. The side wall of the identity still existed, exists, in all the cultures, all the people, but it is in Occident that it proved to be more the devastator under amplification of sciences and technologies. The world nevertheless made All-World. The cultures, civilizations and the people nevertheless met, crashed to pieces, mutually embellished and fertilized, often without the knowledge.
The least invention, the least lucky find, was always spread in all the people at an astonishing speed. Wheel with the sedentary culture. Human progress cannot be included/understood without admitting that there exists a dynamic side of the identity, and who is that of the Relation. Where the side wall of the identity contains, the Relation side opens as much, and if, right from the start, this side opened with the differences as with opacities, that forever be on humanistic bases nor according to the device of a laicized religious morals. It was simply a business of survival: those which lasted best, which reproduced best, had known to practise this contact with the Other: to compensate for the side wall by the meeting of give-receiving, feeding unceasingly as follows: with this exchange where one without changes to lose oneself nor to denature itself.
The need for any identity falls under this contact and this exchange. It is the inaptitude to live the contact and the exchange which creates the identity wall and denatures the identity. The ultimate refusal of the contact and the exchange would come from the mirror which one breaks to see more oneself. To start to refuse to see the Other thus starts a lawsuit of closing to oneself. The idea that one can build self can be worked out only in the report/ratio with the Other, the presence in the world, in the effervescence of the contacts and the exchanges.
The side wall of the identity could raise few splendours these tribes, ethnos groups, tribes or nations which were confronted with hostile nature, with the violence of any life which is baited in egoists perennialities. It could be affirmed for human groups isolated by myths founders, National histories, vertical lines, but, as the world opened with the presence of all, that even the most darkened conscience opened with the inevitable existence of all (which it was for example clear that abundance from here is at the origin of a shortage from there, that misery from here could not let live the plenitude from there), it is the relational side of the identity which appeared the best viable one. By him one understands that no one does not escape the glares from the All-World, and that it is neither confusion there nor abandonment. That the walls and the borders hold even less when the world makes All-World and that it amplifies until unforeseeable the movement of wing of the butterfly. The side wall of the identity can reassure. It can then be used for a racist, xenophobe or populist policy until consternation. But, independently of very virtuous principle, the identity wall nothing any more the world knows. It does not protect any more, does not open with nothing if not the involution regressions, the insidious asphyxiation of the spirit, and the loss of oneself.
The IMAGINARY FREE one.
The walls which are built today (with the pretext of terrorism, wild immigration or preferable god) do not draw up between civilizations, cultures or identities, but between poverties and superabundances, opulent intoxications but worry and about dry asphyxiations. Thus: between realities that a world politics, equipped with the adequate institutions could attenuate, even solve. What threatens the national identities, they is not immigrations, it is for example hegemony étasunienne without division, it is the insidious standardization taken in consumption, it is the divinized goods, precipitated on all innocences, it is the idea of a “Western gasoline”, exempts others, or D `a civilization free from any contribution of the others, and which by là-même would have become not-human. It is the idea of the purity, the divine election, preeminence, the right of interference, in short it is the identity wall in the middle of human unit-diversity.
The rengaine of the shock of civilizations is lamentable. Civilizations know each other, rub, change and exchange manners conscious or unconscious since thousands of years. Cultural archaeologies, and even identity, reveal only layers which are gotten mixed up without end, are nourished, are looked at, fertilized, “emulsify”. The “occident” is in us, and we are in him. It is in us by the ways of the suggestion, subjection, the direct or quiet domination. But it is also in us by these values which it carried to highest and perhaps until aggravation (Reason, individuation, right of human, equality man-women, secularity…) and which was already present in all the cultures at variable degrees and with infinite nuances. All the cultures had their magico-mythical projection dependent on a rational and technical step. All the cultures are of madness and wisdom, prose and poetry. All the cultures are of Community impulse and individual participation. The Western domination was done on an abrupt extension and an aggravation of these data: the worm was in the fruit, - in Creole: Kod yanm which pond yanm: it is the liana which the yam produces which makes it possible to attach it as well as possible.
The great force of overcome market-world is to have received in ajoutement the wonders and the shades of the winners. Most difficult being, not to reject them, but to demolish their sterilizing fascinations by imaginary released, poetic clear-sighted of the All-World. An optimal plenitude, far from the conquests, of revenges or the dominations, and which is called Mondialité. By there we are in “the Occident”, but also us Orientons.
MONDIALITE.
Mondialité (which is not the market-world) us exalte today and throbs us, suggests us a diversity more complex than these antiquated markers can only mean it are the color of the skin, the language which one speaks, the god whom one honours or that which one fears, the ground where one was born. The relational identity opens with a diversity which is a fireworks, an ovation of the imaginary ones. The multiplicity, even effervescence, of imaginary rest on the presence vivifying and conscious of that all the cultures, all the people, all the languages, worked out in shades and wonders, and who constitutes the infinite matter of humanities. True diversity is today only in the imaginary ones: the way of thinking, of thinking the world, of thinking themselves in the world, of organizing its principles of existence and of choosing its native ground. The same skin can equip with imaginary different. The imaginary similar ones can put up with different skins, languages and gods. Mrs. Condoleeza Rice notes of same imaginary that Mr. George W. Bush, and does not have anything has to see with Mr. Mandela or Martin Luther King. In the same way, no one could not make reproach, under pretext of political or racial solidarity, with the people with skin basanée or dark who accompany Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy: they are more identical to him than with anything of other. “The Same” cheek with the chameleon. The various ones confuses identity rigidities, upsets with all-goes, and rejects the selective certainty with the row of fragile ideologies.
Arts, the literatures, the musics and the songs fraternize by ways the imaginary ones which do not know anything any more with the only national geographies or the proud languages in their with-share. In Mondialité (which is there very as far as we have to found it), we do not belong of exclusiveness to “fatherlands”, “nations”, and at all to “territories”, but from now on with linguistic “Places”, bad weather, free gods who do not claim to be adored, of the native soils which we will have decided, of the languages that we will have wished, these woven geographies of grounds and visions that we will have forged. And these “Places”, become impossible to circumvent, enter in relation to all the Places of the world. It is the shimmer of all these Places which opens with the infinite insurrection of imaginary free: in Mondialité.
REPENTANCE.
Vis-a-vis such upheavals, there are economic equilibrium, social risks, requirements of interior policy, to invent, maintain or repair. Excessive flows of immigration, from the poor countries towards the rich countries, can be balanced by a great number of measurements which would not be in immediate and irrevocable matter: for example the company deliberated and proclaimed of a stabilization right of the worldwide economy, the re-establishment of the incomes of the raw materials of the countries of the south, the systematic transfer of technologies, everywhere where that would be possible, patient establishment, been obstinated of a North-South network of durable and equitable trade. There are the principles of a great policy for a nation, which to proclaim them and to study them and start to put them into practice, would be grown. It is with each one to measure its degree of prudence, the glare of its audacity, the height of its sight.
But the madness would be to believe to reverse by diktats the movement of immigrations. In the word “immigration” there is like a vivifying breath. The idea of “integration” is a proud vertical which claims preliminary disintegration from what comes towards us, and thus the impoverishment of oneself. Just like the idea to tolerate the differences which is drawn up on its pins to evaluate the entour and which does not demolish a its proud claim. The Co-development could not be a pretext intended to alleviate possible comparses economic in order to be able to expel with pre-quantified objectives, to humiliate at home of any quietude. The Co-development is worth only by this simple truth: we are on the same skiff. Nobody could only run away himself. No company, no economy. No language is, without the concert of the others. No culture, no civilization reaches with plenitude without relation with the Others.
It is not the immigration which threatens or impoverishes, it is the stiffness of the wall and the fence of oneself. This is why we rose so that the National histories open with realities of the world. So that the vertical national memories can enivrer of the division of the memories. So that the national pride can feed with the recognition from the shades like lights. This is why we also say that the repentance cannot wonder but that it can be received and to get along. The high design of the things of the world is never happy, proud, idiotic. It is made tremors, and it is of tremor in tremor that it rises on the degrees of a clear return of conscience. The idea of repentance tends to decrease that which claims it, but it grows that which can implement it. It is necessary to fear a poverty of conscience when one is unable to dare the repentance.
The CALL.
The walls threaten everyone, on the one and the other side of their darkness. It is the relation with the Other (with all the Other, in its presences animal, vegetable, environmental, cultural and human) which indicates the highest part to us, most honourable, more enriching by ourselves.
We ask that all the man power, of Africa of Asia, of Americas, of Europe, that all the people without States, all the “Republicans”, all holding them of the “Human rights”, that all the artists, any authority citizen or of good will, raise by all the possible forms, a protest against this wall-ministry which tries to adapt to us in the worst case, to accustom us to unbearable, to make us attend, in silence, until the risk of complicity, the inadmissible one.
All opposite of the beauty.
Patrick CHAMOISEAU
Edouard Glissant
All initiatives
in connection with this call will be indexed
on the site of the Institute of the All-World.
www.tout-monde.com
In Occident and initially in Europe, the communities are constituted in nations, whose double function was of exalter what one called the values of the community, to defend them against any external aggression and, if possible, to export them in the world. The nation then becomes a State-nation, whose model little by little is essential and defines the fundamental nature of the relationship between people in the modern world. The community which lives in State-nation knows why it does it, without never being able to appear it by postulates and theorems, this is why it expresses that by symbols (famous values), to which it claims to allot a dimension “of universal”. Such an organization is with the principle of the colonial conquests, the colonizing nation imposes its values, and is claimed of an identity preserved of very reached external and that we will call a single identity root. Even if any colonization is initially of economic exploitation, none can do without this identity survalorisation which justifies the exploitation. The single identity root thus needs always to be justified while being defined, or at least while trying to do it. But this model as was at the origin of the fights anticolonialists, it is in the claim of an national identity, inherited the example of the colonizer, as the dominated communities found the force to resist. The model of the State-nation multiplied in the world. It is resulted from it many disasters.
Of such a succession of obviousnesses, or commonplaces, we can conclude from two ways. Initially that nations lately appeared, or who changed mode, progress only with difficulty towards a design of the nation which is not related to a rigid and exclusive identity requirement. It seems to us that only South Africa expressed the need for a voluntarily mongrel organization, where the Blacks, the Zulus, the White, the Mongrels, the Indians, could live together, without dominations nor conflicts: the vocation of an identity relation. In addition, that it is only if the State-nation is threatened in its existence that the need for the national identity is forged fully as tool of defense (it is seen then who is treacherous or not with the nation) or as close gathering, without it being however need to legislate on this identity. But in which will make one believe today that the French nation is thus threatened, in danger, and that flows of two or three hundred and thousand illegal immigrants would constitute the hard core of this threat?
We intend to say of a young wonder of the direction of orchestra which it would have been born in a garage: his/her parents would have been almost SDF and immigrants, hinged perhaps of these decrees of expulsion. It is ensured us that the young boy fallen from a window while trying to flee the police force of immigration was one of best of his class. Would France give up coldly, in the name of an obsession of identity, or would try it to carry an illusory regulation, so that diversity, the unforeseen one, fruitfulness of the world would be likely to bring to him?
Make-world.
Thus in full 21st century, a great democracy, an old Republic, ground known as of the “Human rights”, gathers in L `entitled of a ministry called initially with repression, the terms: immigration, integration, national identity, Co-development. In this precipitate, the terms S `entrechoquent, are cancelled, are condemned, and finally leave only the hoquet of a regression. France betrays by there a share not codifiable of its identity, one of the fundamental aspects, the other is colonialism, of his report/ratio in the world: the exaltation of freedom for all.
It is true that democratic space is a field of antagonistic forces extremely virulent. That this the least bad of all the systems, asks for an attention of any moment, and like a vigilance of Warrior. It is true also that we gave up the idea of a rectilinear progression of the conscience human, and learned that regression and advanced is like indissociable: there or intensifies the light, the shade continues as much. It is true finally, that the 21st century is this moment when the world completes to make world under the auspices dismaying of the economic liberalism - - this capitalist virulence which invests the spirit of freedom to denature it in a system which precipitates forts and weak, those which have and those which have nothing, those which can and those which cannot, in the open large géhenne of the “Market”. The setting in system of the spirit of freedom is not any more freedom. It is a crumbling of all, which exposes each one, only and stripped, with the appetite of the monster.
It is true finally that in this opened market, this “world-market”, this “market-world”, the depressions between shortage and abundance cause intense migratory floods, as cyclones which no border could dam up. Sapiens is by definition a migrant, emigrating, immigrating. It essaimé like that, taken the world like that and, like that, it crossed the deserts and snows, the mounts and the abysses, left the famines to follow drinking and to eat it. It is not border which one does not exceed. That is checked on million years. This will be it until the end (even more in the climatic upheavals which are announced) and any of these walls which draw up all everywhere, under various pretexts, yesterday in Berlin and today in Palestine or in the South of the United States, or in the legislation of the rich countries, could not dam up this simple truth: that the All-World is the house of all - Kay all moune -, that it belongs to all and that its balance passes by the balance of all.
WALL AND RELATION.
The temptation of the wall is not new. Each time a culture or qu `a civilization did not succeed in thinking the Other, to think itself with the Other, to think the Other in oneself, these stiff safeguardings of stones, iron, barbed wires, or closed ideologies, rose, broken down, and still return to us in new stridencies. These refusal frightened of the Other, these attempts to neutralize its existence, even to deny it, can take the shape of a corset of legislative texts, the form of an indefinable ministry, or the fog of a belief transmitted by media which, forsaking in their turn the spirit of freedom, subscribe only to their own expansion in the shade of the capacities and the dominant forces.
The concept even of identity was used a long time as wall: to make the account of what is with oneself, to distinguish it from what holds of the Other, which one then sets up in illegible threat, impressed cruelty. The identity wall gave eternal confrontations of people, the empires, the colonial expansions, the Draft of the negros, the atrocities of American slavery and all the genocides. The side wall of the identity still existed, exists, in all the cultures, all the people, but it is in Occident that it proved to be more the devastator under amplification of sciences and technologies. The world nevertheless made All-World. The cultures, civilizations and the people nevertheless met, crashed to pieces, mutually embellished and fertilized, often without the knowledge.
The least invention, the least lucky find, was always spread in all the people at an astonishing speed. Wheel with the sedentary culture. Human progress cannot be included/understood without admitting that there exists a dynamic side of the identity, and who is that of the Relation. Where the side wall of the identity contains, the Relation side opens as much, and if, right from the start, this side opened with the differences as with opacities, that forever be on humanistic bases nor according to the device of a laicized religious morals. It was simply a business of survival: those which lasted best, which reproduced best, had known to practise this contact with the Other: to compensate for the side wall by the meeting of give-receiving, feeding unceasingly as follows: with this exchange where one without changes to lose oneself nor to denature itself.
The need for any identity falls under this contact and this exchange. It is the inaptitude to live the contact and the exchange which creates the identity wall and denatures the identity. The ultimate refusal of the contact and the exchange would come from the mirror which one breaks to see more oneself. To start to refuse to see the Other thus starts a lawsuit of closing to oneself. The idea that one can build self can be worked out only in the report/ratio with the Other, the presence in the world, in the effervescence of the contacts and the exchanges.
The side wall of the identity could raise few splendours these tribes, ethnos groups, tribes or nations which were confronted with hostile nature, with the violence of any life which is baited in egoists perennialities. It could be affirmed for human groups isolated by myths founders, National histories, vertical lines, but, as the world opened with the presence of all, that even the most darkened conscience opened with the inevitable existence of all (which it was for example clear that abundance from here is at the origin of a shortage from there, that misery from here could not let live the plenitude from there), it is the relational side of the identity which appeared the best viable one. By him one understands that no one does not escape the glares from the All-World, and that it is neither confusion there nor abandonment. That the walls and the borders hold even less when the world makes All-World and that it amplifies until unforeseeable the movement of wing of the butterfly. The side wall of the identity can reassure. It can then be used for a racist, xenophobe or populist policy until consternation. But, independently of very virtuous principle, the identity wall nothing any more the world knows. It does not protect any more, does not open with nothing if not the involution regressions, the insidious asphyxiation of the spirit, and the loss of oneself.
The IMAGINARY FREE one.
The walls which are built today (with the pretext of terrorism, wild immigration or preferable god) do not draw up between civilizations, cultures or identities, but between poverties and superabundances, opulent intoxications but worry and about dry asphyxiations. Thus: between realities that a world politics, equipped with the adequate institutions could attenuate, even solve. What threatens the national identities, they is not immigrations, it is for example hegemony étasunienne without division, it is the insidious standardization taken in consumption, it is the divinized goods, precipitated on all innocences, it is the idea of a “Western gasoline”, exempts others, or D `a civilization free from any contribution of the others, and which by là-même would have become not-human. It is the idea of the purity, the divine election, preeminence, the right of interference, in short it is the identity wall in the middle of human unit-diversity.
The rengaine of the shock of civilizations is lamentable. Civilizations know each other, rub, change and exchange manners conscious or unconscious since thousands of years. Cultural archaeologies, and even identity, reveal only layers which are gotten mixed up without end, are nourished, are looked at, fertilized, “emulsify”. The “occident” is in us, and we are in him. It is in us by the ways of the suggestion, subjection, the direct or quiet domination. But it is also in us by these values which it carried to highest and perhaps until aggravation (Reason, individuation, right of human, equality man-women, secularity…) and which was already present in all the cultures at variable degrees and with infinite nuances. All the cultures had their magico-mythical projection dependent on a rational and technical step. All the cultures are of madness and wisdom, prose and poetry. All the cultures are of Community impulse and individual participation. The Western domination was done on an abrupt extension and an aggravation of these data: the worm was in the fruit, - in Creole: Kod yanm which pond yanm: it is the liana which the yam produces which makes it possible to attach it as well as possible.
The great force of overcome market-world is to have received in ajoutement the wonders and the shades of the winners. Most difficult being, not to reject them, but to demolish their sterilizing fascinations by imaginary released, poetic clear-sighted of the All-World. An optimal plenitude, far from the conquests, of revenges or the dominations, and which is called Mondialité. By there we are in “the Occident”, but also us Orientons.
MONDIALITE.
Mondialité (which is not the market-world) us exalte today and throbs us, suggests us a diversity more complex than these antiquated markers can only mean it are the color of the skin, the language which one speaks, the god whom one honours or that which one fears, the ground where one was born. The relational identity opens with a diversity which is a fireworks, an ovation of the imaginary ones. The multiplicity, even effervescence, of imaginary rest on the presence vivifying and conscious of that all the cultures, all the people, all the languages, worked out in shades and wonders, and who constitutes the infinite matter of humanities. True diversity is today only in the imaginary ones: the way of thinking, of thinking the world, of thinking themselves in the world, of organizing its principles of existence and of choosing its native ground. The same skin can equip with imaginary different. The imaginary similar ones can put up with different skins, languages and gods. Mrs. Condoleeza Rice notes of same imaginary that Mr. George W. Bush, and does not have anything has to see with Mr. Mandela or Martin Luther King. In the same way, no one could not make reproach, under pretext of political or racial solidarity, with the people with skin basanée or dark who accompany Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy: they are more identical to him than with anything of other. “The Same” cheek with the chameleon. The various ones confuses identity rigidities, upsets with all-goes, and rejects the selective certainty with the row of fragile ideologies.
Arts, the literatures, the musics and the songs fraternize by ways the imaginary ones which do not know anything any more with the only national geographies or the proud languages in their with-share. In Mondialité (which is there very as far as we have to found it), we do not belong of exclusiveness to “fatherlands”, “nations”, and at all to “territories”, but from now on with linguistic “Places”, bad weather, free gods who do not claim to be adored, of the native soils which we will have decided, of the languages that we will have wished, these woven geographies of grounds and visions that we will have forged. And these “Places”, become impossible to circumvent, enter in relation to all the Places of the world. It is the shimmer of all these Places which opens with the infinite insurrection of imaginary free: in Mondialité.
REPENTANCE.
Vis-a-vis such upheavals, there are economic equilibrium, social risks, requirements of interior policy, to invent, maintain or repair. Excessive flows of immigration, from the poor countries towards the rich countries, can be balanced by a great number of measurements which would not be in immediate and irrevocable matter: for example the company deliberated and proclaimed of a stabilization right of the worldwide economy, the re-establishment of the incomes of the raw materials of the countries of the south, the systematic transfer of technologies, everywhere where that would be possible, patient establishment, been obstinated of a North-South network of durable and equitable trade. There are the principles of a great policy for a nation, which to proclaim them and to study them and start to put them into practice, would be grown. It is with each one to measure its degree of prudence, the glare of its audacity, the height of its sight.
But the madness would be to believe to reverse by diktats the movement of immigrations. In the word “immigration” there is like a vivifying breath. The idea of “integration” is a proud vertical which claims preliminary disintegration from what comes towards us, and thus the impoverishment of oneself. Just like the idea to tolerate the differences which is drawn up on its pins to evaluate the entour and which does not demolish a its proud claim. The Co-development could not be a pretext intended to alleviate possible comparses economic in order to be able to expel with pre-quantified objectives, to humiliate at home of any quietude. The Co-development is worth only by this simple truth: we are on the same skiff. Nobody could only run away himself. No company, no economy. No language is, without the concert of the others. No culture, no civilization reaches with plenitude without relation with the Others.
It is not the immigration which threatens or impoverishes, it is the stiffness of the wall and the fence of oneself. This is why we rose so that the National histories open with realities of the world. So that the vertical national memories can enivrer of the division of the memories. So that the national pride can feed with the recognition from the shades like lights. This is why we also say that the repentance cannot wonder but that it can be received and to get along. The high design of the things of the world is never happy, proud, idiotic. It is made tremors, and it is of tremor in tremor that it rises on the degrees of a clear return of conscience. The idea of repentance tends to decrease that which claims it, but it grows that which can implement it. It is necessary to fear a poverty of conscience when one is unable to dare the repentance.
The CALL.
The walls threaten everyone, on the one and the other side of their darkness. It is the relation with the Other (with all the Other, in its presences animal, vegetable, environmental, cultural and human) which indicates the highest part to us, most honourable, more enriching by ourselves.
We ask that all the man power, of Africa of Asia, of Americas, of Europe, that all the people without States, all the “Republicans”, all holding them of the “Human rights”, that all the artists, any authority citizen or of good will, raise by all the possible forms, a protest against this wall-ministry which tries to adapt to us in the worst case, to accustom us to unbearable, to make us attend, in silence, until the risk of complicity, the inadmissible one.
All opposite of the beauty.
Patrick CHAMOISEAU
Edouard Glissant
All initiatives
in connection with this call will be indexed
on the site of the Institute of the All-World.
www.tout-monde.com