Camelopardalus

Une année, il célébra les temps ocres et riches…

Traduction anglaise du post précédent.

I had promised that I’ll post chunks of an essay on “the sentiment of love” (so far, I call that “Dilections”, a French word probably too “précieux” for what I intend). These two paragraphs are ripe enough for a posting. They are a fragment of the introductory chapter.

Confrontation and seduction: these are the two ways in which humans relate, at individual as well as at more general levels. Human relations are much characterized by accidents, psychological and other types of contingences, but when we ignore them to focus on the abstract, pure form of human relations, that is what we see: logics of confrontation, or logics of seduction. I do not mean to say that one is exclusive of the other, but it seldom happens that they balance each others out. It seems to me that confrontation generally results from those moments when the two parties (individuals and movements) hold their own principles as much more vitally important than the particular quality of their interlocutor. For confrontation to evolve, such absolutism must exist with both parties. Cold indifference or even clear hostility toward the particular quality of the interlocutor then takes root in the will to promote one’s own particular quality. Everything takes on a judgmental coloration. When, on the other hand, seduction prevails, then, I would think, most promising results should obtain – especially if both strive to seduce, and the undertaking is mutual, not one-sided. The logics of seduction changes one in relation to the other. That is the case because, in order to seduce, one has to come out of one’s own closet, study the other whom one wants to seduce, and strive to reproduce or acquire the traits one supposes (s)he would like best.

It certainly happens that one seduces inadvertently, simply by being and showing up so to speak. Then the thing to say is that one attracts. Seduction is a plan, and belongs to the realm of actions – while one may attract simply by showing up. Given that seduction brings us out of our closet, it also exposes our vulnerability. One is of necessity seduced by one’s object of seduction: most often, we want to seduce another person precisely because that person is attractive to us, and has thus already, inadvertently, seduced us. Seduction – which has its own perversities to be sure – is a kind of relationship more often found between individuals than between groups and communities. The latter are based on principles and collective interests which take on an air of being objective, even though their roots reach deep in the subjectivities of their members, and they thus acquire a kind of rigidity very auspicious to absolutism. For instance, Muslims would not bend on Islamic law, and Westerners cannot bring themselves to see beyond “human rights.” At a personal level however, most often, doubt, desire, fear even, and certain traits, certain predilections, and certain distastes, make us more malleable and flexible…

All of this is illustrated, afterward, by an analysis of Joseph Conrad’s story, The Secret Sharer, which I am not posting – thinking that this gives a good enough idea of the project, if superficially.

Dans l’affaire des enfants tchadiens, Déby dégoise des sottises sur les buts présumés des gens de l’Arche de Zoé, comme quoi ce serait des trafiquants d’organe et des esclavagistes modernes. L’arrogance et le cynisme de ces gens méritent quelque dureté, mais cette outrance est aussi embarrassante que curieuse. Embarrassante et curieuse est une autre interprétation venant de la très islamique cité de Kano, où les islamistes locaux nous assurent que le but des soi-disant humanitaires français serait d’enlever les enfants pour les convertir au christianisme, horreur des horreurs. Ce que les gens voient en dit toujours long. Ce qu’ils ne voient pas aussi…

On se rappellera que dans un blog sur une énervante lecture j’avais cité l’anthropologue Fox comme quoi les Anglo-saxons, en Irak, sont des missionnaires protestants et non des croisés catholiques. Eh bien, il semble avoir une sorte de confirmation matinée d’un cinglant démenti. Il se peut, en effet, que les protestants soient plus des missionnaires que des croisés (même si c’est précisément ce côté missionnaire qui irrite les gens de Kano et alentour). Mais les Anglo-saxons en Irak ne sont pas que protestants, ils sont aussi catholiques, et apparemment, littéralement des croisés. C’est ce que révèle un livre de Jeremy Scahill publié il y a deux ans déjà, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, et qui montre les liens de Prince, fondateur de Blackwater, catholique intégriste (converti d’une forme fondamentaliste de protestantisme. Cette bio date d’avant sa conversion) avec une nouvelle idéologie de croisade qui se réfère explicitement aux croisades médiévales, et notamment aux ordres militaires (Hospitaliers, Templiers, Teutoniques, etc.) qui assistaient les royaumes chrétiens dans leur assaut contre le Moyen Orient. C’est une chose qu’on ne voit pas.

Il faut suivre ou lire (le texte existe en dessous de la vidéo, mais en anglais) l’interview de Scahill par Bill Moyers ici. Scahill nous montre (entre autres choses) Blackwater et des gros bras… israéliens patrouillant New Orleans après Katrina. Ceci, et d’autres choses, sont les signes d’une effarante montée en puissance que personne, de ce côté-ci du monde en tout cas, ne semble trop vouloir voir.

Traduction anglaise du post précédent.

Ekwensi has just died at 86, in the verdant midst of Enugu’s cityscape, in the heart of his dear Ibo country. His most well known novel, or should I say, long story, is Jagua Nana, whereby he achieves, in this probably minor genre of the fast-paced story-telling, a kind of triumph. Ekwensi was a fabulist of what the Nigerians call “penkelemes”, or “higgledy-piggledy”, the messy life, in cities carnal and soulless. His writing, speedy, brisk, vibrant, shows both the urgency and the incoherence of that life (here are some telling titles: Lokotown, The Restless City and Christmas Gold, and the very last one: Cash on Delivery). There is there, however, if one gets to read much more than my amused dismay allowed me to, a splendid reflection on the problem of modernity in an Africa torn between its ingrained ecumenism and the clash of processes imported from distant centers – of which Nigeria is, at the very least, the most dramatic stage (including with regard those very real clashes between North and South that are poignantly illustrated in some of Ekwensi’s productions, like Iska). One cannot, also, help thinking, apropos Ekwensi, of the English writers of a period which does have some profound analogies with this moment of Nigerian life: Smollett and Fielding, in the height of England’s eighteenth century. They have this same humor crude but to the point, this same sprightliness, this same melodramatic moralism, and much of the same clumsiness related to the shamelessly artificial character of their plots. The comparison between the era of the “origins of contemporary England” (to reuse the phrase minted by Taine for eighteenth century France) and the hot and turbid genesis of Nigerian modernity is, for that matter, rich of lessons on that latter process. The England of then indeed offers the same spectacle of violence in actions and coarseness in sentiments, the same rough cynicism tempered by an arduous moral sense, the same barefaced political corruption (votes were bought out as in today’s Nigeria, and its premier, Walpole, quietly knew that his longevity was due to his exquisite mastering of the art of corruption), the same mores shaped by the rush and hassle of city life… England, however, had a class that did hold the land (landowners, and those folks who were transitioning from merchant capitalism to manufacture and enterprise, and who were generally labeled “the money interest”), and generated, in order to gloss out its social brutalities, a Church-and-Gentry ideology of the “sublime and beautiful” (following the words of its most comprehensive champion, Burke). One feels, in Smollett and Fielding’s productions the uneasy aura of that armature of the English world. What about in Ekwensi’s?

Well… As far as the sublime and the beautiful are concerned, I thought of such things this summer when, in the bookstore of Kaduna’s Arewa House, I chanced upon a book I now regret I didn’t buy, and which, reverting the famous title of Armah’s novel The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born, is entitled The Ugly Ones still refuse to Die. I think that’s where we are, regarding the Penkelemes. The meaning of Ekwensi’s Biafran commitment (he was the chief of the Bureau for External Publicity of the stillborn state) is to a large extent to be found in a desire to ward off said Penkelemes. Unsuccessful in this, Ekwensi was more successful in depicting it in a rich stream of stories and novellas which, most of them, deserve to be read.

I will put up a translation of this note later… 

Ekwensi vient de mourir à l’âge de 86 ans, dans les verdures urbaines d’Enugu, ce coeur du pays Ibo qui lui était si cher. Son roman, ou plutôt récit le plus connu était Jagua Nana où, dans ce genre probablement mineur de la narration express, il réussit une sorte de triomphe. Ekwensi était le fabuliste de ce que les Nigérians appellent “penkelemes” ou “higgledy-piggledy”, de la vie en pagaille, dans les villes charnues et sans âme de cette puissante anarchie. Son écriture rapide, torchée, énergique, en réflète bien l’urgence et l’inconsistance (quelques titres qui en disent long: Lokotown, The Restless City and Christmas Gold, et son tout dernier: Cash on Delivery.) Il y a là, pourtant, si on sait lire plus que ne me l’a permis ma consternation amusée, une magnifique réflexion sur le problème de la modernité en Afrique, déchirée entre son oecuménisme foncier et le clash des processus de modernité importés de centres lointains – dont le Nigeria est bien le terreau le plus spectaculaire, à tout le moins (y compris dans ces clash réels entre Nord et Sud dont Ekwensi donne quelques intenses aperçus, comme dans Iska). On ne peut d’ailleurs s’empêcher de songer, avec Ekwensi, aux écrivains anglais d’une époque qui n’est pas non plus sans quelques analogies profondes avec ce moment de la vie des Nigérians: Smollett et Fielding, dans l’Angleterre du plein XVIIIème siècle. Ils ont ce même humour gros mais précis, cette même prestesse, ce même moralisme mélodramatique, et parfois des maladresses similaires tenant au caractère benoîtement artificiel de l’intrigue. Cette comparaison entre l’époque des “origines de l’Angleterre contemporaine” (pour reprendre le titre de l’ouvrage de Taine sur la France) et la sulfureuse genèse d’une modernité nigériane, nous offre d’ailleurs bien de leçons sur ce processus. L’Angleterre du temps, au vrai, nous offre le même spectacle de violence dans les actes et dans les sentiments, le même cynisme cru compensé par un moralisme ardu, la même corruption politique sans état d’âmes (on y achetait les votes comme aujourd’hui au Nigeria, et son premier-ministre, Walpole, s’expliquait lui-même sa longévité par l’art exquis de la corruption dont il s’était rendu maître), les mêmes moeurs gérées par les stridences de la ville… L’Angleterre, cependant, avait une classe qui tenait le pays (propriétaires fonciers et ces gens qui passaient du capitalisme marchand au capitalisme d’entreprise et qu’on appelait généralement le “money interest”), et s’était faite, pour patiner sa brutalité sociale, une idéologie ecclésiastico-aristocratique du “sublime et du beau” (selon les mots de Burke, son champion le plus total). On sent, dans Smollett, dans Fielding, l’aura malaisée de cette charpente de l’univers anglais. Chez Ekwensi?

Bon… A propos de Sublime et de Beau, j’y ai pensé en tombant, cet été, dans la librairie de Arewa House, à Kaduna, sur un bouquin que je regrette de n’avoir pas acheté, et qui, renversant le titre fameux du roman de Armah The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born, s’intitule The Ugly Ones still refuse to Die. Je crois qu’on en est là, dans le Penkelemes. Le sens de l’engagement biafrais de Ekwensi (il fut le chef du Bureau for External Publicity de l’Etat mort né) se trouve sans doute dans le besoin de conjurer ledit Penkelemes. A défaut d’y réussir, Ekwensi l’a inlassablement dépeint dans un torrent de récits et nouvelles qui méritent, pour la plupart, d’être lus.

A propos de Terreur et Tremblement, Jon Basil Utley de Foreign Policy in Focus décrit l’espèce de politique terroriste (mais au sens substantiel du mot) que prône une frange influente de la chrétienté américaine, les Armaguédonites. Influente surtout dans les appels à la guerre à outrance au Moyen-Orient, censée présager la fin du monde (parce que s’y trouve le nombril du monde, la Palestine) qui serait, pour eux, la salvation éternelle.

Voici l’article de Utley (en anglais) :

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4630

Traduction anglaise du post “anté-précédent”.

Yet, I hear from a penpal, both fervently homosexual and Muslim: yet, surely, there is Muslim homophobia.

No doubt about it. More accurately perhaps: there is, in the legal and conceptual arsenal of Islam a number of incontrovertible elements which validate homophobia. And there are probably less of such incontrovertible elements to validate homosexuality. The real question, however, behind the “there is” question is a, so to say, positivistic question: it is this: doesn’t Islam make you a homophobe? Isn’t there a cause/effect link between Islam and homophobia? Like so many positivistic questions, this one is rather not very interesting. To be sure, if one is, like I am, a pagan – an abstract and ecumenical pagan – one would have a kind of subjectivity which cannot even understand homosexuality. For paganism, sexuality isn’t generic (premised on gender), it is individualistic (premised on the specific type of relationships that obtain between two persons, independently of gender). It must have some kind of limit or boundaries, and that would be relative to basic social organization (family, certain basic social groups, such as children or the elderly, according to certain stages of natural and spiritual growth) rather than gender. Foucault contended that homosexuality is something that could really be traced back to only the nineteenth century, in Europe: not that there wasn’t, before then, practices and attitudes that we would read, today, in 2007, as pertaining to homosexuality – but those practices and attitudes were experienced in very different ways, in the relationships that they established between the individual and society, and between the individual and him or her self. It has become routine, in the United States at least, to castigate Foucault and his “post-modernism” (but I do not believe that Foucault is actually that much of a “po-mo” thinker) for such overwrought elaborations, and I feel that there is some misunderstanding here. For what all his words are about, I’d suggest, is, yet again, how that double relationship of oneself to oneself and oneself to others discipline our conducts. If I delve in some details in the memory of my personality, I know that my sexuality is not necessarily “homo”. I’ve had an early and unproblematic awareness of that dimension of my sexuality, but there was a time when it did not prohibit other possibilities. It seems to me, however, that in order to preserve my homosexual instincts, which I found pleasurable for profoundly subjective reasons (oneself to oneself), I had to strengthen it so as to not have it crushed by an inhospitable social environment (oneself to others), so much so that it is that instinct which has ended up “crushing” the heterosexual possibility, in a kind of swing effect. Why did I find my homosexual instinct pleasurable: that is the fundamental question – but before coming back to it, let me note this: in a way, society forced me to choose, it forced me to define myself, first and foremost, as a homosexual, because that is a valid category for it – a category that is criminalized, but that is valid. The kind of individualistic sexuality which, I think, is typical of pagan subjectivity is, on the other hand, invalid, it is not an option of our hic et nunc, despite the fact that such is the form of sexuality which would have best suited my subjectivity. Contemporary society therefore offers that form, “homosexuality”, and then condemns it through attitudes that sociology calls “homophobia”. There is no way out. This means that the question of homosexuality and homophobia is not a simple question of justice or democracy, but more fundamentally, it is a question of civilization: homophobia can be abolished only as homosexuality itself is abolished – in a scheme similar to what was argued by Wollestonecraft relative to women (liberty is an expression of moral progress which transcends gender difference and thus suppresses the necessity of their hierarchization) or by Marx relative to the Jews (anti-Semitism will disappear with the last Jew, that is, with Jewness). Is it necessary to specify that Wollestonecraft and Marx’s radical democracy treads a path that is the exact opposite of the one followed by the preferred method for tackling collective quandaries nowadays, liberal democracy: liberal democracy, or government through “rights” framed so as to invoke categories such as “homosexual”, “women”, “Jews”, “Blacks”, solidly opposed to homophobia, male chauvinism, Anti-Semitism, racism – which of course it cannot be blamed for having created. And I do understand that, from the point of view of humanist morality, this is a real advantage, even if rather too clutch-like for my taste.

But to better approach the issue, let’s get back to the fundamental interrogation: why do I find my homosexual instincts pleasurable? This is not a question different from: why do I like Racine (and not Corneille or Shakespeare)? Why was Newton a physicist? Why was Charlemagne infatuated with a certain lake? And why are they people who hate other people categorized as “homosexuals” without even knowing them? In a sense, that last question is even more mysterious than the others. We could strive to elucidate it through a sociology or a psychology based on collective references – such as Islam, for instance: it will still remain true that beyond all those who are homophobic just out of educational reflexes, there are those who are homophobic in the same way as I like the taste of dark chocolate. With passion, zeal, obsession and rigorous instinct: I don’t think they are necessarily – as is often said – self-repressed homosexuals. If I have some kind of heated irritation against imperialism, why wouldn’t someone else have a heated irritation against homosexuality? I bring myself to reading homophobic diatribes, and I find there not so much religiously orthodox reasoned condemnations as intemperate and overpowering anger, with which any kind of human connection seems out of question. Anger is a beautiful passion, but only when reined in, and when its fire is subdued into hot embers that make judgment more ductile, and refined. It is to be supposed that a bilious obsession with imperialism leads one to studying the phenomenon, in order to understand what, in this specific object, outrages one so much. And it may happen then that such a study, favored by anger, enables us to discover secret truths, and the complexity of a reality whose nasty aspects could be disassembled from the more innocent adjacent movements that were confused with it. Homophobic anger doesn’t even look like it could lead to that sort of examination and thus seems to me to be thoroughly immoral, like any passion – even a “positive” one – which would claim to free itself entirely from the potentials of reason. But this kind of pathological homophobia is in the minority, and may feed equally well on religious doctrine and on a lay Weltanschauung.

This then put aside, what specific tinge would Islam impart on homophobia? There is firstly, with some folks, the Fear and Tribulation dimension of religion – of Abrahamic religions in particular – which fascinates and pleases them. I recall the shudder that I had when, reading Tertullian, I heard him cry that when, on Doomsday he would contemplate the fall of sinners into Hellfire, “there I’ll laugh! There I’ll rejoice! Ubi rideam, ubi gaudeam!” That jubilant glee while looking at the fiery show of the burning punishment of “vice” is a common expectation of the Abrahamic, and I often heard it from our Muslim preachers, in Niger, with this exact tone of Tertullian (as I could imagine it). The same fancy could however lend itself to terrific refutations. The second Duchess of Orleans, Palatine Princess, wife of the famously homosexual (we would say today) brother of King Louis XIV, had acquired, as is noted by Proust, a rather deep knowledge of the special universe to which her spouse belonged. She was in awe of another famous homosexual of the time, King William III of England, sworn enemy of Louis XIV, and marveled at his military virtues. And she gossiped on him: “The things that are reported on King William are true, alas! But all the heroes were like that: Hercules, Theseus, Alexander, Caesar, were all like that and had their favorites. Those who, while believing in the Holy Scriptures, are yet tainted by that sin, fancy that it was a sin only when the earth was insufficiently populated. They do their best to conceal what they are so as to spare the feelings of the vulgar, but among persons of quality, they openly speak of it. They think it is quite the genteel thing, and readily repeat that since Sodom and Gomorrah, our Lord God has ceased punishing people for that reason.”(Letter of 13 December 1701 to the Raugrave Amelia-Elizabeth). A note of that time’s vocabulary: vulgar=credulous masses, persons of quality= the elite, genteel thing=innocent pleasures. Based on this translation, I guess we may transpose this outlook into our Abrahamic society, and prove my point that in Sub-Saharan Africa, we are living in a “classical age”, with all the ponderous social superstitions there-attached. (The Africans, I am told, now export Tertullianean pastors to the West, at the request of Western Christians who think that “liberalism” has undermined too much the foundations of Christian civilization in the West, notably given the kind of unwelcome legal tolerance for homosexuality). Tertullianism is much fashionable among us, that is, the panting desire to see vice punished and sinners flattened by pain and sorrow.

Then, relative especially to Islam, there is the enormous legalism which, by claiming total comprehensiveness, condemns itself to forcefully cut out that which it cannot bring itself to take in. Christianity’s position is even more uneasy, but doesn’t preoccupy me here. I explained to a Christian female friend, who is saddened by my apparent lack of religiosity, that I would accept being called a Muslim – for beyond faith and rites, Islam is a kind of extensive search for oneself within the parameters of a certain education, and that education, I received it not in a school, but in the air I breathed while growing up. I cannot view Islam from the outside: I am inside. But in that “inside” of Islam, there are other folds in which I do not belong – notably the legalistic fold, which seeks to right-track, so to speak, life, according to precepts assigned to an ultimate Truth, which one has, in reality, catalogued for oneself. Those who are attracted to that posture are all those who want to have a somewhat manic hold on their life, and who indeed cannot advance in life without some sort of militant code. In that view, the key difficulty is – given the messy character of life, its infinite entanglement of desires, dreams, needs, feelings and ideals – to draw a neat boundary between purity and impurity, and the most practical way to do it is to fabricate impure beings, and to then find out that, by opposition, one is pure, one is proudly not this, not that, etc.

I have to say, in passing, that we all are sort of like that: but usually vaguely and uninsistently. The Muslim, or Abrahamic homophobe uses the law to locate impurity, and feels pure for not being a homosexual for instance (and if we look closely, his concept of homosexuality is different from the one that the liberal homosexual has, and is reduced to a kind of sexual intercourse that gives him the creeps).

Although Islam is a moral universe sufficiently vast to not be confined within that puritan legalism, it brought with it that possibility. It is hard to conceive of the moral posture I just described in pre-Islamic societies. The latter did not have that concept of the Luwadu (from the Arabic way of saying Loth – sodomite as it were), which is a legal concept, pertaining to penal law above all, exactly like “thief” or “parricide”. For most Muslims – even those who aren’t homophobic, and that’s why I am a Muslim, myself, nolens volens – the first take on this form of sexuality is therefore a criminalizing one. Other moral influences enabled me to not really take seriously this detail, but I had to have a settled interest for so doing. Imagine someone who has no clear consciousness of homosexual sentiments and whose entire moral education is, on this score, shaped by the legalistic Islamic approach: there is no obstacle to force him to stop and think or feel otherwise, and if, on another level, he is earnestly swayed by the righteous, codifying tendencies described above, he will proudly pose as a pure servant of God, innocent, or courageously opposed to everything that divine law (such as catalogued by or for him) rejects.

I find that terribly immoral.

I strove to locate some parameters of Islamic homophobia, in a rather clumsy blabbering. Some sticking points are: there is no doubt that Islam stimulates homophobia, if only through its “penal law” approach to the matter; that it is, on that account, a moral retrogression relative to that which was there before is a strong opinion of mine, and one that is more or less empirically grounded (but for my fervently Muslim friend, who is the initial pretext to this soliloquy, we cannot “revert” to Paganism, given that Islam is an essential and comprehensive moral progress – while I’d think that it is a progress here and there, but a retrogression here and there…) ; that it should be seen as causing homophobia is however a proposition I find doubtful.

I will come back to this and related questions, when giving, soon, a summary of the essay on the “sentiment of love” that I have started, or rather, restarted, a few days ago, and which has more to do with my “paganism” than with Islam.

Un lecteur de Harper’s Magazine:

Reading resonates with individual first and still, and always with a minority. For to hear a story – decanted by a rhapsode; related around a campfire – requires only ears, whereas to read a book, whether by Proust or by Dr. Seuss, demands work: most everyone has the former, and most anyone despairs of (or hasn’t a taste for) the latter. As a delivery device for stories, the book is a recent innovation, one that allowed a Roman form of storytelling – the novel – to proliferate, very richly. All that has happened to our “literary culture,” it seems to me, is that, lately, we have seen the rise of a better technological approximation of the campfire – the passive, story-absorbing state we have long preferred.

Wyatt Mason, Cambridge, Mass. (Harper’s Magazine, August 2007, p. 4).

(D’où mon idée d’un texte technologique.)

—————————————————————————————–

Vers cette époque, ou peu auparavant, la Toscane annonaire fut témoin d’un prodige qui mit en défaut les plus habiles dans la science divinatoire. Un jour, à Pistoia, devant un grand concours d’assistants, un âne monta au tribunal vers la troisième heure du jour, et se mit à braire avec une continuité des plus remarquables, à la grande stupéfaction de tous ceux qui le virent, ou à qui le fait fut rapporté.

Ammien Marcellin, Histoire de Rome, Livre XXVII

(L’ouvrage abonde en détails de ce genre, qui saisissent par le contraste entre l’absurdité du fait rapporté et la tranquillité de ton objectif avec lequel cela est rapporté. Par exemple encore : « Cette contrée nourrissait jadis des peuples barbares différents de mœurs et de langage, dont les plus redoutés étaient les Odryses, si altérés de sang humain que, lorsqu’ils n’avaient pas d’ennemis à combattre, ils tournaient au milieu de leurs repas, ivres de vin et gorgés de nourriture, le fer contre leurs propres membres. »

Je m’imagine bien imaginer un livre d’histoire entièrement à cette mode.)

—————————————————————————————–

Coste d’Arnobat, à propos du parlementaire Hérault de Séchelles, conventionnaire sous la révolution, et un temps mis en péril pour ses mœurs hétérodoxes : « Dans le temps des premières chaleurs antiphysiques de ce magistrat, il fut question de le chasser du Parlement : mais un de ces messieurs observa que la dernière exécution d’un pauvre conducteur de brouette, brûlé en place de Grève pour crime de sodomie, avait exercé les plus violents murmures ; que plusieurs personnages considérables ou très connus tels que les d’Elbeuf, les Bauffremont, les Villars, les Bouillon, les Chambonas, les Thibouville, les Villette, faisaient impunément profession publique de sodomie, au lieu d’être mis aux Incurables, ce qui avait fait reprocher à MM. nos Seigneurs du Parlement de ne servir que contre la canaille, et que, d’ailleurs, Hérault était un magistrat. On se contenta d’une vespérie à huis clos dont il ne tint aucun compte, et Messieurs passèrent à l’ordre du jour. »

(Hérault de Séchelles – on écrivait aussi, « de Seychelles » – était le petit fils de Jean Moreau de Séchelles, contrôleur général des finances de Louis XV, d’après qui fut baptisé l’archipel des Seychelles).

————————————————————————————–

Les diversités religieuses de l’Afrique mettent à la disposition des savants tous les éléments humains et spirituels qui ont prolongé chez nous le passé de l’homme, n’épousant forcement pas son unité, ni celle de nos races, ni leurs couleurs perdues et parfois reprises à la suite d’invasions qui l’ont, quelque fois, rejeté dans des milieux culturels différents du sien, au moment de ces invasions, ou après celles-ci.

Boubou Hama, Enquête sur les fondements et la genèse de l’unité africaine.

(Je suis certain que l’épigraphe authentique de ma thèse, de mes thèses, se trouve dans l’œuvre hétérogène et intarissable de ce géant ignoré. Quand je le lis, je me surprends à penser que toutes mes recherches ne sont que des notes en bas de page de ses écrits.)

Ceci est la traduction anglaise du post précédent.

Found in an Internet group Pasolini’s movie Il Fiore delle mille e une notte, normally downloadable with English subtitles: but I have failed to plug into the stuff the English subtitle, and have to watch it play in a language – Italian – which I do not understand a priori. If truth be said, it is rather easy to watch the movie in Italian for the facts that many words are recognized by the Francophone ear, and the movie is a tale, with a narrative logic that is somewhat independent from words… Is that why I watched it almost integrally thrice in one week? That is a bit odd for a movie whose language one does not understand…

I get this: Pasolini is my kin – from that sort of kinship, moral and sensitive, which is much more important than biological or genetic kinship, when it comes to the true happiness of life. There is, of course, the fascination for the pagan beauty of boys, which makes of him a much ancient Mediterranean, a contemporary of both Pindar and Abu Nawas, or of Cavafy. His Italian ragazzo shows up here in the form of the Arab ghuzlân – or “male gazelle”, as the ephebe-loving Arab poets used to call the boys they liked… And must I say in passing, ah! Everlasting Mediterranean: I bought in Maradi a book printed in Lebanon and entitled Al-Kabair, or the Great Sins. It discusses something that is rather improperly translated “homosexuality”, and gives on that score those most wise counsels: “Al-Hassan said, citing Zakwan: ‘desist from hanging out with the sons of the rich, for they look like virgin maids, and do even induce to more temptations than women.’ One of the disciples said: ‘I have a greater fear for the hermit, when he is with a boy than when he is with a wild beast.’… Some theologians have gone so far as to indicate that one should not be alone with a boy in a shop, a house or a bathroom, and comparing that with the fact of being alone with a woman, they stated: ‘Among boys, there are many who are more beautiful than women and are the spring of graver temptations. A boy can thus be the cause of a greatest evil, and both his behavior and his company may more easily lead to doubts and failings. The ancients have warned men against boys, and called boys not the un-bearded ones, but the filthy ones.’” One could see in these words – almost poetic by dint of frankness and ingenuity – Islamic homophobia. Some other parts of the chapter would better deserve the indictment however: what is at play here rather seems to be the common intense seduction that adolescent boys exert on Mediterranean men, and those pious Islamic expostulations look quite exactly like the laws of Solon forbidding men, under penalty of death, to go to the gymnasium when boys are training there, or like Plutarch sarcastic comments on how boy-love and sports-ground company were nurtured together. Pasolini, in any case, is at home here – and so am I.

The movie has this refreshing side of being European, without being either arrogant or colonialist. Practically all of the actors are Yemenite or Nepalese amateurs, who act with remarkable zeal and skill under Pasolini’s direction. No orientalism here. Pasolini’s gaze has neither coldness, nor even that kind of guilty or feverish desire of certain Western artists (It is true that Pasolini’s Italy was barely Western, and that the Westernization of Italy, its gentrification, was for him a harrowing loss). Slaves are not necessarily black and women are never submissive in this movie. Pasolini does not judge or stare at the Orient – he lives in it, so much so that we no longer see it, and we become captive of his story, a story which could as well be told by Petronius, or by Cervantes’ Benengeli, or by Oriental story-tellers, adept practitioners of the genre of the picaresque fantasy, which is the specific genre of the movie – a non European genre, because in Europe, a separation was made between the fantasy of chivalric romance and the picaresque, which, in these lands, could only meet in the absurdity and the madness of Don Quixote, while in the Arab Orient, the two necessarily went together… Pasolini was able to perceive that…

It is all of that that makes of this movie a wonder to me, and makes me thirsty of more like it – a newer, fuller life imparted on this art, so luminous, magical and droll.

There is quite a bit of nakedness in the movie, following Pasolini’s approach which is neither to conceal it nor to stage it. Feminine nakedness, but also – since this is no heterosexual opus – simple and straightforward masculine nakedness. To freak out at this would be freaky.

On se transmet des pensées, des regards, une longue inquiétude, le goût d’une fragile pesanteur entre les doigts, et une âme enfin…

Thoughts, a gaze, weary wariness, the quest for some sort of frail weight between two fingers, and even a soul – get passed on…