Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  A sharp turn similar to those that must be made at short intervals in a horse show leads me, therefore, to note a mistrust of knowledge likened more or less to a collection of recipes that are certainly worth something but cannot give the real answer. Now, to acquire knowledge is the object of one of my profoundest desires and the moment when something is revealed has for a long time appeared to me most disconcerting: how could I, with one stroke of the pen, cross out this passionate desire that probably fuels the most manifest part of my will? If it is of primary importance to show that one has a will of one’s own, one must “know what one wants” (as the saying goes) and if one of the things I want most obstinately is very precisely knowledge, I have twice the reason—or the reason multiplied by itself—to persist in trying to find out what, in the last analysis, are the values that I should regard as enduringly mine and dedicate myself to serving with all my will. Such knowledge, of course, will not be a kind of magic capable of giving me the iron will I used to admire in my gym teacher; but at least it will help me not to waste my efforts, probably allow me to concentrate more effectively, and respond, in some way or other, to my desire to be a man who, knowing his limits, does not stray into paths at whose ends he would discover only failure and, avid to dissimulate, would inevitably drift into inauthenticity.

  I will therefore sustain very firmly my wish to understand more about this idea of brotherhood, at once so bracing and so elusive.

  There are noble brotherhoods, but there are also ignoble ones; if one cannot concede as valid, for instance, the sort of communion that may exist between two cops as they give someone the third degree, one must conclude from this that what is important is that thing in which, through which, one communes and not the fact of communion pure and simple. Brotherhood, of course, is one of the most moving words, but before one becomes moved, it would be an advantage to know which sort of brotherhood we’re talking about: the brotherhood of cowards who join in eliminating someone weaker than they? Brotherhood in courage but for a cause that is at bottom idiotic or detestable? The brotherhood of criminals as close as the fingers of a hand? A brotherhood based on a shared inclination or vice? The good-natured brotherhood that reigns within a group of extroverts or a sports team? The brotherhood of a club which the vanity common to all its members tends to promote as a society of perfect human beings? Universal brotherhood, still only a slogan up to now? Even though to fraternize may be a better watchword (not only because it is a verb that evokes an action but because it implies an enlargement of the circle, an appeal to others, the conclusion of an alliance that did not exist before and, in a general way, the breakdown of all the different sorts of barriers that stand in the way of effusiveness) I don’t think the idea of a communal brotherhood can be enough in itself, for the recognition by everyone of the simple fact that all men are zoologically brothers and associated by the similarity of their destinies would still leave unanswered these two questions: According to what terms and conditions should this brotherhood be lived? And what should we, all together, try to do with it?

  If I were prepared to solve these two problems now, perhaps there would be nothing more for me to do but bring this book to a close after briefly setting down their solution. Does that mean that I would be able to sit back and rest? Not in the least, for then I would have to work at translating these ideas into action, and would certainly have to write, and write again, in order to formulate them in a way that was ever clearer, more communicative, more convincing ... But I am far (as I know all too well) from having accomplished the long journey at the end of which I would be able to risk attempting some conclusions. All I can do now, more or less, is simply describe some friendships, at the same time allowing myself to present a certain number of reflections one at a time and to insert here and there, in fragments, something that will resemble perhaps that “enigmatic scale” that Verdi introduced, among other vocal parts, into one of the Pezzi sacri he composed when he was nearing the end of his life.

  A serious sort of brotherhood experienced last December when I took part, as an observer, in the Congrès des Peuples pour la Paix [Peoples’ Peace Congress] held in Vienna: it was a great moment (commensurate with the international nature of the assembly) but it was only a moment and I also lack the militant spirit that would let me pursue enthusiastically what I continue rather dutifully, with the desire above all not to disappoint those who very naturally expect me to be loyal to them. There are two terms, after all: what is seductive, and what one regards as the Good. Need I emphasize how much easier everything would be if one could find a legitimate way to make these two terms coincide all the time?

  A frivolous sort of brotherhood, superficial and committing me to nothing, experienced as the chance result of a few encounters at a time when my health, the inclinations of my character, and my occupations allowed me greater latitude for some kind of night life: in an English bar in rue Pigalle, one Christmas night, a young British student was going from table to table carrying around his neck—like those necklaces of flowers with which the Polynesian islanders customarily decorate tourists—a toilet seat on which he was politely recording the signatures and addresses of everyone present, in order to preserve (I suppose) a tangible token of those hours of collective euphoria; another evening in the same bar (which for a long time I used to patronize now and then and from which, on my return from Béni-Ounif, I, soldier that I was at the time, came home once with two frightfully black eyes as a result of an impromptu boxing match in which I and one of my companions opposed four or five strangers with whom we had quarreled on the sidewalk), an Englishman with graying hair, very drunk, very lonely, and very sad, sent a bottle of champagne from his table—without the slightest scrap of conversation resulting from this gesture—to my wife and me and the friends who happened to be with us, three men and one woman.

  It is fair to say that the more time goes by, the more I tend to regard with amusement these superficial and fortuitous encounters which at one time filled me with delight but which, I see all too clearly now, imply no solidarity and are worth something only to the extent that they express, in the most naive way, that it is intolerable to remain all alone and that to form even fleeting relationships with strangers, as long as one presumes them to be at all like-minded, is indispensable (at least from time to time) to anyone who does not want to suffocate altogether. With its daily torments and its police terror such that everyone had to ask himself what he would do in the case where someone was using torture to impel him to turn in someone he knew, the Occupation does its part to make me more exacting where brotherhood is concerned and has shown me the great value of certain acts that belong to an elementary code of living that has nothing (to start out with at least) heroic or brilliant about it: to share what one has with a person in need, to reject an advantage derived from the persecution of innocent people, to know when to hold one’s tongue and when to speak, to protect those who are being hunted down, and all sorts of other actions tied to imperatives as simple as the dictum of childish morals that “you must not be a tattletale.” But I nevertheless remain convinced that no true fraternization can be conceived that would be rigidly serious and judicious: what is, in its essence, an impulse of the heart must, by definition, jostle, even if only a little, the limits imposed by morality and reason.

  To break out of one’s matrix, to get out of oneself, to merge with people outside oneself—this is the simple, vague impulse that, without any passion for drunkenness as such, may lead one to enjoy drinking in bars just as one may also take pleasure in mingling with the crowd waiting for the arrival of the Tour de France without being a fanatical fan of bicycle races. Ordinarily lost in a mass that is hardly more (except when a certain exoticism heightens its colors) than something that moves as one moves oneself and against which one must avoid colliding, one will be delighted when even a meaningless bond is created that allows one to live in harmony with that mass or the handful of anonymous people who represent it. All the more reason, in histor
ical circumstances such that almost an entire population displays its heartfelt happiness in the streets (or at least ceases to be morally holed up behind its walls), that this great formal stir and confusion will cause someone who feels in sympathy with what is behind it to experience an intoxicating multiplication of himself through his contact with others.

  The end of a war will always be cause for rejoicing on the part of the people on that side, of the two sides, that can now say “fraternity” without falling silent when it comes to saying “liberty.” After such trials, it seems to the winners that peace has solved all their problems; it is not simply an end to the fighting—a negative event, since it is no more than a return to normal—but the beginning of a better age, for which one departs from other bases: the wound has been excised, all one will have to do now is join together a little and, at the worst, give another little effort. The Second World War was followed, like the First (though more briefly) by a period marked by this optimism: the forces of evil had been conquered at last, and now a livable world could be built.

  I was in Paris when the liberation of the capital signified, for many egocentric French people, that the war was over; in fact, it lasted almost one year longer, many men had ample time to get themselves killed, and I found myself in Dakar, about to return from a mission to Africa, when I learned of the fall of Berlin and the cessation of hostilities in Europe.

  At that time it seemed, for the colonized peoples, that things were going to change: the proponents of racism had been crushed, democracy was on everyone’s lips, and one no longer spoke of “Our Empire” but of the “French Union.” Under the leadership of an inspector of colonies I had gone with two other specialists (one in human geography, the other in tropical agronomy) to study the means—of a liberalist order—by which to palliate, on the Ivory Coast, the manpower crisis that followed the elimination of forced labor. A trip that had obliged me to view Africa in a way completely different from the way I had before: what was in question was no longer the beliefs and secular institutions whose study had been the principal object of the mission in which I had participated a good fifteen years earlier, but problems that touched the very flesh of the people (living conditions in their villages and on the plantations, standards of living in general, methods of payment of contractual laborers, possible uses of their salaries and all sorts of other questions of the most forbidding sort for someone who had been led by, among other inclinations, a liking for the so-called primitive mentality to make a career as an Africanist; what I had to do—and I only succeeded with the greatest difficulty—was to rid myself of my romanticism, react as best I could against a turn of mind that (not to yield once again to the moralizing tendency that I must tirelessly make my mea culpa) I will call contemplative, and, above all, take a correct view of those miseries that one all too easily forgot because of the beauty of their surroundings, and, often, of the very individuals who suffered them.

  As I was to take the plane the next morning for Paris, which I had left a little more than three months before, I had agreed that day to have lunch with two young men, one of whom I had met at the home of a mutual friend before he settled in Africa; it was a very simple good-bye lunch, with the amount of drink appropriate in the colony the day before one returned home. It was over dessert or when we were having coffee—as far as I can remember—that the radio announced the news, shortly afterward signalled to the inhabitants of Dakar and its environs with all desirable pomp by the noise of sirens and gunshots. Very quickly we found ourselves on our feet, listening with our brandies in hand as a record player broadcast the anthems of the allied nations, including that of the Soviet Union, which we accompanied in chorus with our three voices, even though we did not have the necessary linguistic knowledge to articulate its words. I was doubly happy, first because the great news had reached me in Dakar and second because the population with which I was fraternizing in the joy aroused by such an event was the black population of an African town.

  My first concern was to go back, flanked by my two hosts, to the house called the Hôtel des Gouverneurs where I was staying with the leader of my mission and two of our companions, one of whom was the geographer and the other a planter from the Ivory Coast who had worked with us as local representative of that corporation in which a few rare estimable people, of whom he was one, rub elbows with a depressing number of brutes and swindlers. I expected that with my colleagues we would wander through the streets carrying with us a jubilation shared with the crowds of Dakar, and it was with this impulse, already completely fraternal, that I went to join them.

  That the leader of our mission would come with us—something he probably would have been led to do whatever we decided, given our companionable relations—was out of the question, for, since we were leaving the next day, he had to devote himself entirely to the duties of his position. As for my two other colleagues, strolling around town was perhaps not the most direct desire inspired in them by the announcement of victory; yet it was in their company that I embarked upon that day which one could expect to be a great day. As for the first—a real workhorse with whom I had sometimes become irritated, given my nonchalance—what I appreciated, despite the tiresomeness of his rigorous rationalism, was his fundamental honesty and his resolute desire to improve in a perceptible way the fate of the peasants among whom we were making our investigations; I certainly learned a good deal from him in the course of our rounds, developing a more realistic view of things. As for the second—for reasons that are still rather romantic, certainly different from those that compelled me to respect the first—I enjoyed listening to him talk and may say that I spontaneously liked him very much because of his love of life in the bush and the men of the bush, also because of the passion he had for hunting elephants, an activity that appeared to him quite natural (since he had to protect both his own plantation and the crops of his people from the incursions of the great destructive animals) but to which he had an air of devoting himself with a tranquil ardor, much less in a spirit of obvious self-interest than of Crusoe-like adventure. The two men were as different physically as they were intellectually, the first being tall, lean, and angular, like a big blue-eyed Scandinavian (he actually came from the East), whereas the second, a little shorter than I, looked like a lively, dark Mediterranean (though I cannot say if he really came from that region). I wonder—not knowing really what I am about and being something of a flying fish or amphibian, a beaver, seal, frog or toad—in which foggy or sunny clime an uninformed narrator might situate me, for I have (unfortunately) very little in common either with the head of the large family who loved the rigors of mountaineering because “only when one is tied to the same rope as another man can one judge him at his true value,” or with the bachelor leading his Negroes in the tracks of an elephant and sharing with them the game he killed.

  There were quite a few people in the streets, but they were calmer than I had imagined: no delirium comparable to what followed the armistice of November 1918 or the liberation of Paris—a sort of July 14 with nonsimulated firing; nothing, above all, that allowed one to feel such a swelling exuberance that blacks and whites would in the end form, at least for several hours, one single, identical swarm in which social differences and divisions by color would be forgotten. Everyone walked, crossed paths with others, mingled, but it seemed that each kept his own thoughts to himself. Things being what they are (it only occurred to me later) under the sign of what peace, offered to everyone as a joint possession, could the Africans and colonials of Dakar have come together? Thrust suddenly into the euphoria of the dissolution of war, I though quite stupidly that the success of the allied troops could only be the source of one and the same euphoria for everyone and—without stopping to size up the tenacious belief in my privileged position implicitly evinced by my decision thus to play the great good-natured lord—I asserted my desire not to let this beautiful day pass without fraternizing with the colored portion of the population, an apparently normal consequence of the jo
stling and chance encounters of the street, for anyone who wanted to take part in it.