It was during the period in which we lived in that apartment that I started attending the city’s “boy’s high school.” I really have to emphasize the fact that this was no ordinary kind of event within my family; in fact it was something new, a real break with the past. I was the first person to move on from primary to secondary education, even to the earliest stages of it. I was eleven years old, and my older brother, older by two years, hadn’t gone to this school, but had remained in the primary schools. These two educational tracks existed side-by-side at the time, and this entailed a brutally direct screening process. A year later, my brother would become a butcher’s apprentice. He wasn’t interested in staying in school, finding it both boring and a waste of time. So my mother, having seen a small sign on the door of a butcher’s shop that read “Apprentice needed,” asked him if that was something that would interest him. He said yes, so she took him to the shop and the matter was arranged. Thus did our trajectories begin to diverge, although in reality the origins of this divergence were probably to be found even further back. In very short order, everything about us was different, from our hair and our clothes to our ways of speaking and thinking. At the age of 15 or 16, all he wanted to do was hang out with his friends, play soccer, chat up the girls, and listen to Johnny Hallyday; I, on the other hand, wanted to stay at home and read, and my tastes went more in the direction of the Rolling Stones or Françoise Hardy (whose song “Tous les garçons et les filles de mon âge” seemed to have been written expressly to describe the loneliness of young gays), and then in the direction of Barbara and Léo Ferré, or Bob Dylan, Donovan, and Joan Baez—“intellectual” singers. My brother went on incarnating a working class ethos, a way of being and a set of bodily habits that kept him tightly knit to our social world, whereas I was constructing an equally typical ethos, that of a high school student. My choice put a distance between me and our world. (At 16, I was wearing a duffle-coat and Clarks Desert Boots and letting my hair grow long.) Even our relationship to politics set us apart from each other: he had no interest whatsoever in it, whereas from a young age I started going on and on about the “class struggle,” a “permanent revolution,” and the “international proletariat.”
I was always terribly embarrassed when asked what my brother did and would inevitably find a way not to tell the truth. He observed my transformation into a young “intellectual” with a certain amount of disbelief and a good deal of irony. (What was also happening was my transformation into a young gay man, a fact which, of course, did not escape his notice. But coming from someone for whom incarnating the masculine values of the working class was so important, his sarcastic remarks were directed more at a general appearance and a style that struck him as “effeminate” than at a specific sexuality. The early signs and unsettling appeal of that sexuality were something I was myself only beginning to be aware of.) We were still living together, now in a large low-income housing project on the outskirts of the city. We had finally moved there in 1967. I was able to have my own room, because, high school student that I was, I needed it to study in. He shared his room with one of our younger brothers. The other, the youngest, slept in our parents’ room. Our bedrooms may only have been separated by a narrow hallway, but each day we became more and more different. We were loyal to the choices we had made, or thought we had made, with the result that neither of us could avoid being embarrassed, increasingly so, by what the other was becoming. With no problem at all, with no sense of separation at all, he fit in with the world around us, with the jobs that were available to us, with the future that was laid out for us. It would not be long before I was experiencing, and even cultivating, the feeling of an immense disjunction in my life, one both my studies and my homosexuality were working to create: I was not going to be a worker, not going to be a butcher, but rather something different from what I had been socially destined to become. He would perform his military service and get married immediately afterwards (he must have been 21 or 22), quickly having two children. As for me, I would begin university studies at the age of 18, would move out of my parents’ house at the age of 20 (shortly after he did, in fact) in order to live alone and without interference. And I desperately wanted to be declared unfit for military service. (That is, in fact, what happened in the end, a few years later. After having received the maximum deferment that was permitted for students, I pretended to suffer from impaired vision and hearing during the “three days” that led up to being inducted. The result was that the doctor in charge of the barracks at Vincennes asked me: “What is your occupation?” “I am preparing for the agrégation in Philosophy.” “I think it would be better for all concerned if you continued with that, then.” I was 25 years old at the time, and it was all I could do to control the jubilation I felt at that moment enough to keep it hidden.)
4
I went nearly thirty-five years without seeing this brother of mine with whom I spent my childhood and a good part of my adolescence. At the time I write these pages, he lives off of disability benefits in Belgium, because he is today physically incapable of performing what his work (or any form of work) requires of him: carrying animal carcasses around year after year has destroyed his shoulders. And if I no longer have any connection with him, it is, as I already pointed out, entirely my fault.
We were already like strangers to each other while we were still living together. Then, in the two or three years after we had both moved out, when we would see each other at family gatherings, the tie between us was only that we had a past in common and that we each had a relationship with our parents, his a close one, and mine distant.
I watched his satisfaction with everything I wanted to leave behind, his enjoyment of all those things I detested. To depict my feelings for him, I could cite nearly word for word what John Edgar Wideman wrote about his brother in Brothers and Keepers: “One measure of my success was the distance I’d put between us.” It couldn’t be better said. In a certain way, this means that my brother implicitly served as a reference point for me. What I wanted could be summed up like this: not to be like him. Talking to his brother in his mind, Wideman poses the question: “Was I as much a stranger to you as you seemed to me?” Did I ask myself this question all those years ago? I knew the answer, and it in fact made me happy, since I was trying in every way I could think of to become different from him. I recognized myself again in something else Wideman wrote: “Because we were brothers, holidays, family celebrations, and troubles drew us to the same rooms at the same time, but I felt uncomfortable around you.”11 In fact, in my case, everything about these occasions made me uncomfortable, since my brother fitted well into the world that was already no longer mine, except that it really still was. To the extent that for Wideman, “running away from Pittsburgh, from poverty, from blackness” and attending university represented a path of voluntary exile, it seems obvious how difficult it would have been for him to retrace his steps at regular intervals. Each time he returned home, he couldn’t help but find there, unchanged, the same reality that had made him want to leave—a discovery that allowed him to notice with the passage of time his increasing success at distancing himself. This would not stop him from feeling guilty faced with those he left behind. But it was a guilt accompanied by fear: “Fear marched along beside guilt. Fear of acknowledging in myself any traces of the poverty, ignorance, and danger I’d find surrounding me when I returned to Pittsburgh.” Yes, a fear that “I was contaminated and would carry the poison wherever I ran. Fear that the evil would be discovered in me and I’d be shunned like a leper.” The observation he arrives at in thinking about his brother is in the end quite simple: “Your world. The blackness that incriminated me.”12 I could use the same words, the same phrases, as regards my way of perceiving my brother at the time: your world, working class culture, the “culture of the poor” that was like an accusation directed at me, one that I was afraid would stick to my skin even in my headlong flight from it. I needed to exorcise the devil in me, to get it out—or else t
o make it invisible, so that no one could detect its presence. For many years this was something I worked on during every moment of my life.
Citing these few lines from Wideman allows me to give a description of the burden I carried with me everywhere during my adolescence, and for many years after. It was as if his words spoke of me (even if I am perfectly aware, should it need saying, that this transposition has its limits. If I can recognize myself in the description Wideman gives of the disintegration of his connections to his family, and especially to his brother, or, more precisely, the transformation of these connections into relations of distance and rejection, obviously the situation he describes is quite different from mine. For he came from a poor, black neighborhood in Pittsburgh, and went on to become a professor and a famous writer while his brother was sentenced to life in prison for murder. This is the tragic history that he is trying to understand in his magnificent book.)
Wideman is right to insist on the fact that he had to make a choice, and he made one. I, too, had to choose. Like him, I chose myself. But the sense of guilt that he describes is one I felt only intermittently. The sense of my own freedom was intoxicating, as was the joy of escaping from what had been my destiny. All this left little room for remorse. I really have no idea what my brother must think about all of this these days, what he might say when he talks about the subject—when, for instance, someone asks him if we are related after one of my appearances (which I try to keep infrequent) on television.
Imagine my surprise upon learning from my mother that my two younger brothers (eight and fourteen years younger than me) felt that I had “abandoned” them, and had been very hurt by this abandonment! At least one of them still feels hurt by it. I had never really asked myself how they must have perceived my increasing and then total estrangement. What were their feelings? How did they think of me? What was I to them? It was as if I became a ghost in their lives, one about whom they might later speak to their wives and children. But those wives and children would never meet me. When one of my younger brothers went through a divorce, his wife, who had never met me, hurled the following reproach at him amidst a series of other complaints (my mother told me this): “And your brother Didier is nothing but a faggot who abandoned his family.” I can’t really deny it. Didn’t she give concise expression to a simple truth? To my truth?
I was selfish. I was out to save myself and didn’t have the inclination—I was twenty years old!—to pay heed to any of the damage my flight might have caused. My two younger brothers followed more or less the same path through school as did my older brother. They enrolled in middle school (there was now only one track open for all students) at the age of eleven because they had to, and they left school as soon as it was allowed (at the age of 16), one of them having spent a few years vegetating in “vocational” classes in a technical high school and the other in a literary track. (“I wasn’t cut out for school,” one of them told me recently, replying to some questions I had sent him in an email as I was writing this book.) Neither of them continued on to the Baccalaureate exam. The older of the two wanted to become a mechanic. Today he sells cars on the island of Réunion. My mother tells me he makes a good living. The second joined the army at the age of 17, and he has stayed in the military. Or, more precisely, he joined the police force and has risen a bit in the ranks. Both of them vote for the right, of course, having been until quite recently loyal supporters of the National Front. This means that when I joined demonstrations protesting the electoral successes of the extreme right, or when I showed my support for immigrants and undocumented workers, I was demonstrating against my own family! But I could also put things the other way round and say that it was my family that rose up against everything that I supported and thus against everything that I was, everything I represented in their eyes (a Parisian intellectual totally out of touch with reality, understanding nothing of the problems of the working class). Still, the fact that my brothers voted for a political party that horrifies me, and then for a presidential candidate who belonged to a more classic version of the right wing party but understood how to appeal to this part of the electorate, seems to be so much the result of a kind of sociological necessity, seems so clearly to follow certain social laws (as, indeed, do my political choices), that I am left feeling a bit baffled. It is no longer as clear to me as it used to be how I should react to all of this. It seems easy to convince yourself in the abstract that you will never speak to anyone who votes for the National Front, never shake their hand. But how do you react when you discover that these people are part of your own family? What do you say? What do you do? What do you think?
We can see that my two younger brothers both managed to rise above the situation that my parents had lived in, so we could speak here of upward social mobility, even if it still remains basically within the space of the class of origin, limited in its extent by that class and the determinisms associated with it, notably the voluntary choice to leave school which immediately restricts the kinds of jobs or professional careers open to anyone who has been excluded from the educational system and led to believe that they chose that very exclusion.
Now I have to face a certain set of questions: What if I had taken an interest in them? What if I had helped them with their studies? What if I had tried to teach them a love of reading? After all, that one should study, that reading is enjoyable, that books are something you can love—these are not universally distributed attitudes, but are in fact closely correlated with social conditions and with the background you come from. These very social conditions led my younger brothers, like almost everyone else around them, to refuse and to reject that towards which some miracle had managed to move me. Should I have realized that such a miracle could in fact happen over again? That it might even be less improbable a recurrence once it had already happened to one of us (to me!), since that first lucky person would then be able to transmit not only what he had learned, but also the desire to learn, to those coming after him. But this would have required time and patience; it would have required that I remain in close contact with my family. Would that have been enough to overcome the implacable logic of academic tracking? Would it have enabled us to push back against the mechanisms of social reproduction whose efficacy is produced in large part by the inertia of a class habitus? There was no way in which I served as the “guardian” of my brothers, with the result that it is now difficult for me—knowing that it is rather late for this feeling—not to feel guilty.
Well before I ever experienced these feelings of “guilt,” I saw myself and thought of myself as a “miracle case” within the educational system. That is to say, it became clear to me quite early on that the destinies of my three brothers were not or would not be identical to or analogous with mine, by which I mean that the effect of the social verdict that had been delivered in each of our cases even before we were born would strike each of them with much greater violence than would happen to me. In another of his novels, titled Fanon, Wideman gives a compelling description of the power of verdicts like these, and the awareness he has always had of this phenomenon—along with the feeling that he has always had of being another miraculous exception—escaping, as he did, from the different destinies that might have been his. His brother is in prison. He goes to visit him with his mother. He knows it could have been him behind bars, and asks himself why it isn’t him and how he managed to escape from what seems like an inevitability for young black men from underprivileged neighborhoods: “How many black men in prison for how long, you could get confused by numbers, staggeringly large numbers, outraged by dire probabilities and obvious disproportions. Ugly masses of brute statistics impossible to make sense of, but some days a single possibility’s enough to overwhelm me—how likely, how easy, after all, it would be to be my brother. Our fortunes exchanged, his portion mine, mine his. I recall all those meals at the same table, sleeping for years under the same roof, sharing the same parents and siblings (almost), same grandparents uncles aunts nieces cousins
nephews, the point being, the point the numbers reveal: it would be a less than startling outcome to find myself incarcerated.”13 Wideman forces us to admit the following: the irrefutable fact that certain people—doubtless a good number of people—deviate from “statistics” or elude the implacable logic of “numbers” in no way nullifies the sociological truth of those statistics and those numbers. This is true no matter what the advocates of the ideology of “personal merit” would have us believe. Had I followed the same path as my brothers, would I be like them? That is, would I have voted for the National Front? Would I wax indignant about the “foreigners” who are invading our land and acting “as if they belong here”? Would I share with them the same kinds of reactions to and the same defensive discourse about what they consider to be the aggressive actions they suffer from at the hands of society, the State, the “elite,” the “powerful,” or “others” more generally? To which “us” would I belong? To which “them” would I be opposed? In short, what would be my politics? What would be my way either of resisting the order of things or else adhering to it?
Wideman has no hesitation in speaking about a war against black people. (And he is obviously not the first person to look at American society in this way. There is a long tradition of thought—and of experience—behind such a point of view.) He says as much to his mother: “There’s a war going on, a war being waged against people like us all over the world and this prison visiting room one of the battlefields.” His mother replies that he is exaggerating, that she sees things differently and prefers to emphasize individual responsibility in the way all these dramas unfold. Still he defends his position: “a war waged by an enemy most of us don’t think of as an enemy, a total war waged by an implacable foe.”14 This is the idea that is played out in the novel, in which he weaves together political reflection on a racially divided America and a meditation on Frantz Fanon and on the importance of Fanon’s life and work for black consciousness, self-affirmation, pride, for a politics of the self, or, quite simply, for “black anger,” and thus for resistance in the face of the enemy in all its omnipotence and omnipresence. Then there is the fact that his brother, long before he was arrested, during his adolescence, kept a copy of Black Skins, White Masks in his pocket, promising himself he would read it one day. How important a book can be for someone before they’ve even read it! It can be enough just to know that it was important for other people you feel close to.
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