by Alexis Jenni
I wandered through the night like a crazed shadow, a talking phantasm, a walking logorrhoea. Eventually, I arrived home to find a gang of youths skulking beneath a lamp post in my street. They were huddled around a moped parked on the pavement; its owner stripped to the waist but for a motorcycle helmet, the chin-straps dangle over his shoulders.
In the desolate street every window was dark. I could hear their raised voices, although I could not make out the words, but their clipped phrasing told me all I needed to know: where they were from. From a distance, from the rhythms of their speech, I could tell from which hereditary strata of society they came. Apart from the boy with the helmet sitting astride the moped, not one of them was sitting. They were leaning against the wall, prowling the pavement, their arms sweeping the air like basketball players; they were scouring the street in search of adventure, however slight. They were passing around a huge bottle of something fizzy, throwing their heads back and drinking in long draughts.
I made my way through the gang. They stepped aside. They flashed mocking smiles and danced around me, but I kept walking. I was not afraid. I did not give off the slightest whiff of fear. I was too preoccupied by my pain, too busy not drowning in my own saliva. I passed through, muttering as I had been all night, mumbling to myself, vaporous words that no one could understand; this made them laugh. ‘Hey, mate, you’ll use up all your fixed tariff minutes talking to yourself all night.’
I was in pain. I was suffering from a national sore throat, from a French flu that squeezes the windpipe, leaves the throat red-raw and swollen, infects the precious organ of speech and triggers this torrent of words, these words that are the true lifeblood of the French nation. Language is our blood and it was flowing from me.
I walked away from the gang without bothering to reply. I was too preoccupied, and besides I had not understood the reference to technology. The rhythms of their language were not quite the same as mine. They fidgeted without moving, these boys, like saucepans left on the stove, the surface bubbling and seething within. I walked away, heading for my front door. I did not care about the outside world. (I knew only that I was in pain, and I clutched the little paper bag of medicines that became more and more crumpled as I walked. Inside the bag, in the little cardboard boxes, was something that would heal me.)
A police car decked out with blue-and-red stripes glided along the street through the sheet of rain. It drew level with the gang. Four uniformed young men leapt from the car as one, flexing their muscles; one hitched up his belt in a clatter of weaponry. They were young, they were fit, there were four of them with limbs like coiled springs; there was no older, experienced officer to keep them in line. No one older or slower; no one with that detachment born of experience; no one who would not react recklessly; no one to defer this firepower. They were all of an age, these four warriors with sharpened steel jaws; they were very young and there was no one to keep a tight rein on them. Older officers are reluctant to pound the beat on muggy June nights; and so unpinned grenades are let loose, jittery young men searching in the darkness, playing hide-and-seek with other jittery young men.
The young men in sober blue approached the young men in baggy, garish gear, one of whom was bare-chested. With only a perfunctory greeting, they demanded to see the boys’ papers and the papers for the moped. They studied the laminated cards, scanning the surrounding area, their movements gradually slowing. Without bending down, they gestured at a cigarette butt on the ground and had it picked up to be examined. Their movements became slower and more meticulous. Each of the boys was forced to empty his pockets and was frisked by one of the boys in blue, while another officer stood, his hand on his weapons belt, watching their every movement. It dragged on. They were searching; and if you search for long enough, eventually you will find something. The sluggish movements had slowed almost to immobility. It could not last. Stasis does not last long. The body is a coiled spring; it abhors stillness. There was a sudden jolt, shouts, the moped fell. The boys dissolved into the darkness, leaving only one, the shirtless lad, lying on the ground, his helmet having rolled away, pinned by two of the athletic men in blue. He was dragged to the squad car in handcuffs. In the silence of the dark street I could clearly hear them talking into their radios. Lights flickered on in some of the windows, faces appeared at the crack in the curtains. I heard the charges being read: ‘Refusal to submit to an identity check. Resisting an officer. Fleeing the scene.’ I heard the words clearly. I was still standing in the street, but no one asked me anything. Preoccupied with my own physiology, I had nothing to fear; shut away inside myself I had no interest in anything but obliterating my pain. One by one the lights in the windows flickered out; the squad car drove away with one additional passenger; the moped was left lying on the pavement, the helmet in the gutter.
People can be arrested for resisting arrest: it is magnificently circular logic. The legal reasoning is impeccable, but circular. The reasoning seems rational once it has appeared; but how does it appear?
Obviously, nothing had happened on my street that night. But the situation is so tense that the slightest judder triggers a spasm, a brutal convulsion of the whole body politic, as though fighting off a genuine disease; except that there are no enemies, excepting a part of ourselves.
Society is racked by a raging fever. The bilious body politic cannot sleep; it fears for its sanity and its integrity; the fever makes it restless; the bed is too hot for it to get comfortable. Every sudden sound is interpreted as an act of aggression. The sick cannot bear loud voices; they find them as painful as physical blows. In the sweltering heat of their rooms, the sick confuse signifier and signified, fear and effect, words and blows. I closed the door behind me. I did not flick the switch, the light streaming in from outside was enough. I went to the sink and poured a glass of water. I swallowed the medicine I had been prescribed, then I fell asleep.
The mind hangs on by a thread. The mind teeming with thoughts is a helium-filled balloon in the hands of a child. The child loves his balloon, he clutches the string, terrified of letting go. The psychosomatotropics dispensed in pharmacies alleviate anxiety; the medications open the hand. The balloon drifts away. The psychosomatotropins dispensed in pharmacies promote a sleep that is disconnected from the physical world, where insubstantial ideas seem real.
How can anyone tell them apart in the darkness?
Real-life grammar is not a theoretical grammar. According to the rules of grammar I have read in books, when I use a pronoun it is an empty box; nothing, absolutely nothing, indicates who is meant. The pronoun is a box; its contents are unknown; the content is provided by the context. Everyone knows this. The pronoun is a closed box, and without opening it, everyone knows what is inside. People understand me.
How do they manage to distinguish? Tension heightens the senses. And the situation in France is very tense. One discarded ticket and a whole train station can be ransacked, committed to the flames. You think this is an exaggeration? Actually, it’s an understatement. I could reel off many worse horrors, all of them true. The situation in France is tense. A metro ticket tossed on the floor of a station prompted a militarized public order operation.
A single spark and everything burns. When a forest burns, it is because it is arid and overgrown. Forces are despatched to track down the spark, to arrest the guilty party. Everyone wants whoever created the spark to be caught, to be named and shamed and hanged. But sparks are constantly being struck. And the forest is as dry as tinder.
One day an inspector asked to see a young man’s ticket. He had just tossed it away. He said he would go back and find it. The inspector was determined to take him aside and record the offence. The young man protested. The inspector ruthlessly insisted; he could not bend the rules. There followed a commotion that cannot be fully explained by all the witness statements. Witnesses are always inconsistent about how violence erupts. Actions appear as quantum leaps; events are entirely unknowable in nature, their outcome depends solely on probabilit
y. The event might not have taken place, but it did take place; it is therefore inexplicable. It can simply be recounted.
Events unfold with the logic of an avalanche: everything gave way because everything was unstable, everything was ready. The ticket inspector tried to take the offender aside; the young man protested. Other young men gathered round. The police arrived. The young men shouted wildly. Riot police showed up to clear the metro station. The young men ran and began to throw small things, then larger objects that it took several of them to dislodge. The police adopted the regulation configuration. Officers in riot gear lined up behind their shields. They lobbed tear-gas grenades, they charged, they barked orders. The station began to fill with gas. More young men spilled from the metro. They did not need the situation to be clarified: they chose sides without the need for explanations. Everything is so volatile: confrontation is always possible.
The metro station was littered with broken glass, filled with gas, devastated. People emerged, sobbing, bent double, clinging to each other for support. Blue vans with bars on the windows were parked everywhere. Traffic came to a standstill; metal barriers cordoned off the streets; access was vetted by uniformed officers and by lines of muscular young men in plain clothes clutching crackling radios.
A plume of smoke as thick as tar shattered a window and rose into the sky. The station was ablaze. A column of firemen was despatched, flanked by men protecting them with shields. A hail of small objects rained down on the plastic shields and the station forecourt; the firefighters sprayed the building with dry ice.
This might seem absurd: the two things are incommensurable, a metro ticket and a train station. But this is not anarchy: the rival forces to the clash knew their roles in advance. Nothing was premeditated, but everything was ready; the ticket started the riot the same way that a key starts a truck. It is enough for the truck to be there, it will start when you turn the key. No one takes issue at the disparity between the key and the truck, because it is the design of the truck that allows it to start. The key does nothing; or very little.
We like to think that a magnificent train station in the centre of a city represents order, and a riot represents disorder; this is reassuring, but false. We do not take the time to look at stations, we are merely passing through. But take the time to study them, sit for a while as others bustle about, and it becomes clear that nowhere is more chaotic than this intermodal passenger complex where trains, metros, buses, taxis and pedestrians all converge, each obeying their own private logic, attempting to go on their way without obstructing the others, each following a broken line, like ants on a huge anthill made of pine needles. It takes only a minor jolt, a slight stumble, an impurity in this fluid system, and the order masked by stillness immediately reappears. The spate of impatient people filling the station solidifies, arranges itself into lines, takes shape. People pair up, groups form; eyes which cast all around now focus on a few particular spots; empty spaces appear which were previously crowded; perfectly straight, blue lines form where previously there was a motley mass; objects fly along particular trajectories.
The forces of law and order do not maintain order, they create it; they create it, because there is nothing more orderly than war. During a battle everyone knows their place; there is no need for explanations: all that is required is an organizing principle. Everyone knows, and acts; in war everyone knows his role, everyone is in his place. Those who do not know leave the battlefield in tears. Those who do not know their place pretend they understand nothing; they think the world has gone mad and they complain; they watch the train station behind them burn. They cannot comprehend this absurdity; they believe that order has broken down. They live or die at random.
The moment the ticket was discarded, the station was ablaze. There were bodies clashing and others fleeing. People got organized. The organizing principle was race.
The young man who was stopped for discarding his ticket was black. The station burned.
Race does not exist. It exists just enough for a station to burn, for hundreds of people with nothing in common to group themselves according to colour. Black, brown, white, blue. After the incident in the station, the groups of colours were uniform.
After the troubles the police passed through the carriages of the terrorized trains. Thumbs hooked into their weapons belts, they moved slowly down the aisles, studying the faces of the passengers. They were equipped like shock troops; they were lithe and determined in their militarized uniforms. They no longer wore the old gendarme uniform with straight-fit trousers, flat shoes, cloak and kepi; instead they wore trousers cinched at the ankles for jumping, high-top shoes for running, baggy jackets and helmets jammed tight on their heads. From their belts hung the implements of beating and restraint. Their redesigned uniform was based on the paratroopers.
They stroll through multi-coloured, multi-cultural trains at a leisurely pace, checking identity papers. They do not check at random, that would be inept. They use a colour-coded system everyone understands. This is common knowledge. It is part of our human capacity to perceive similarities. When the trains stop at stations, there is a nasal crackling of loudspeakers, the primal sound that marks the divisions of urban areas. ‘People loyal to France, the police are safeguarding your security. The police are hunting outlaws. Comply with inspections, be on the alert, follow instructions. Populations loyal to France, the police are watching over you. Help them to help you. This is about your security.’
Security. That is something we know a thing or two about.
Having surrendered my body to psychosomatotropins, I was not sleeping.
From the outside, there was nothing to distinguish this sleep from death; my body is immobile; it is wrapped in a sheet that could serve as a winding sheet or a shroud, which could help carry me through the darkness or across the River Styx. Freed from the body, the mind becomes a gas lighter than air. It becomes helium, a balloon; it is important not to let it go. In neurochemical sleep, the mind is a helium balloon no longer tethered by a thread.
The constant roar of thoughts carries on, language continues to spill out. The flow is Man. Man is a talking puppet, a marionette worked by strings. Gorged with medications to quell the pain, unmoored from my thin-skinned body, I allow the helium balloon to drift. Language flows of itself, it rationalizes what it thinks, and it thinks only of its flowing. Only a thin thread keeps the balloon bloated with fears anchored to the ground.
To whom can I talk? From whom do I descend? To whom can I say that I belong?
I need race.
Race has the simplicity of the great follies, those that are easily shared since they are the noise made by our cogs when there is nothing to direct them. Left to its own devices, thought fabricates race; because thought automatically classifies. Race knows how to speak to me of who I am. Resemblance is the simplest notion I possess. I search for it in others’ faces. I feel for it in my own. Race is a method of classifying people.
Who will I talk to? Who will talk to me? Who will love me? Who will take the time to listen to what I say?
Who will welcome me without asking anything of me?
Race answers me.
Race speaks of human beings in an irrational, disordered fashion, but it speaks.
Race responds to the serious questions that weigh on my heart. Race is capable of simplifying complex questions with outrageous answers. I wish to live among my own. But how can I recognize them if not by their appearance? If not by faces that resemble my own? Resemblance tells me where the people around me are from, what they think of me, what they want. Resemblance does not need to be measured, it is apparent.
When the mind is idling, it classifies; when the brain is thinking, even about nothing, it classifies. Race is classification based on resemblance. Everyone understands resemblance. We understand it; it understands us. We look a lot like some people, less like others. We read similarities in every face, the eye seeks it out, the brain finds it, even before we think to look, even before we th
ink we have found it. Resemblance helps us to live.
Race survives all refutation, because it is the product of a habit of thinking that precedes reason. Race does not exist, yet reality never disproves it. Our minds constantly evoke it; it is an idea that recurs time and again. Ideas are the most enduring characteristic of human beings, much more so than the flesh that shrivels and decays. Ideas can be passed on, unchanged, encoded in the structure of language.
The brain goes its own way. It seeks out differences and finds them. It creates forms. The brain devises classifications useful to its survival. It classifies instinctively, trying to predict events, it wants to know in advance how those around it will act. Race is idiotic and eternal. No need to know what is being classified, it is enough to classify. The concept of race does not necessitate contempt or hatred, it functions with the feverish meticulousness of the psychotic who carefully places a fly’s wings, its legs, its body in different, carefully labelled boxes.
Where am I from? I wonder.
The helium balloon floated away on the wind, no longer anchored by the thread of language. What race, I wonder, do people see in me?
I have an ancestry, of course, though it does not amount to much. If I trace back the source of the blood that courses through me, I can go no further than my grandfather. He is the mountain from which all springs flow, the ridge that blocks my view. I cannot see beyond; close as he is, he is the horizon. He, too, wondered about his ancestry, but he found no answer. He talked tirelessly about procreation. He talked about many things, he talked endlessly, and he had fixed ideas on every subject, but he was at his most voluble and his most clear-cut on the subject of procreation. The merest mention of the subject would set him off. ‘Watch,’ he would say, raise his hand and, with his right forefinger, point to the joints on his left hand, the middle finger extended. He would count off the phalanges, the wrist, the elbow. Each joint represented a degree of kinship. ‘Among the Celts,’ he would explain, ‘the prohibition on marriage alliances extended all the way to here.’ He would indicate his elbow. ‘The Germanic peoples permitted marriage as far as the wrist. These days, we are here,’ he said, indicating the joints of his extended middle finger. ‘It is a gradual decline,’ he would say, running his index finger from elbow to finger with disgust, showing the inexorable progress of promiscuity. On his own body, he would locate the precise point of the taboo according to the epoch and the people. He spoke with such certainty he left me speechless. On the subject of bloodlines, he had an extensive knowledge. He knew all there was to know about the passing on of material goods, of bodies, of names. He would speak in a tone that frightened me a little, that slightly nasal, histrionic drawl formerly used for speaking French, and now heard only in old movies or on crackly recordings of radio programmes where everyone tried to speak properly. His voice had the metallic ring of the past. I would be crouching in front of him, squatting on my stool, and I found the whole thing a little frightening.