Letter to Jimmy (12 page)

Your conversations remain unchanging. She offers you advice as she did long ago, when you were a child in Harlem: take care of yourself, don't stay up too late, above all don't smoke too much, drink even less, don't give in to the taunts of those who attack you now that you are a public figure, or because your sexual orientation differs from theirs. For her, despite your international influence, you remain little Jimmy, who followed her around the house . . .

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At present your world is reduced to the four walls of your bedroom. The biographer James Campbell paints a striking picture of this room that holds the secret of your final hours: a room submerged in soothing darkness, but whose wall paintings create an atmosphere of hallucination.
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In this confinement, as Campbell points out, there is the feeling that Simone Signoret and your other friends dead long ago have come to bring you news of the other world.

You still have the strength to give an interview in November 1987 to the writer and professor Quincy Troupe who will publish, two years after your death, a collection of essays dedicated to your memory.
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In the mix are the voices of Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, William Styron, Chinua Achebe and Mary McCarthy, among others.

An abundance of project ideas fill your mind. You plan, for example, to write a long introduction for a publisher in London who will publish two paperback editions of Richard Wright's novels. A large number of critics and biographers would doubtless consider such a presentation as reconciliation between the mentor and the pupil. But you will not have time . . .
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In November 1987, you had planned to host a large dinner at your home for Thanksgiving. You imagine that there will be a lot of people there. You and your friends will dine outdoors, you will smoke, crack a few jokes.

Alas, you will not know this farewell filled with laughter and song.

You leave this world on December 1, 1987. After the inhabitants of Saint-Paul-de-Vence have said their goodbyes, your body is brought back to the Harlem of your childhood. There is a viewing at the Episcopal cathedral Saint John the Divine. From your casket you can hear the sobs of cultural icons as well as those of strangers you managed to win over.

You are buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, on December 8, 1987.

10.

on the need to read or reread you today

I
f you return to this world, Jimmy, you will judge your homeland even more severely than you did when you were alive. Inequalities are now more subtle, and more hidden, in a society which has not yet resolved the issue that had been so important to you: redefining American identity, or, in your words, addressing integration through the “power of love.” Happily, Judgment Day is not yet upon us.

On the other hand, if you cast a fleeting glance toward France, our mutually adopted homeland, you will be shocked to discover that your words and writing are as relevant today as they ever were. France is still burdened with the skeleton in the closet—the country's “colonial activity”—a chapter of its history so controversial that
a line has been drawn in the sand between those who would systematically lay claim to memory and the “competition for victimhood,” and those who call for an end to the “tyranny of guilt,” in keeping with the notions of Pascal Bruckner who, in 1983 evokes the “tears of the white man” and his “suspicious tears.”
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By way of introducing
The Tyranny of Guilt,
the French author and essayist asserts, “Strangely, we are experiencing today a one-way street of guilt: the latter feeling is demanded of only one group, ours, and never of other cultures, of other regimes who cloak themselves in their alleged purity to blame us more easily. But Europe accepts too willingly the blackmail of blame, if we are so taken with self-flagellation, and covering our head with ashes, is it not our secret wish to exit history, to shelter ourselves snugly in the cocoon of contrition, to discontinue action, to escape from our responsibilities? Repentance is perhaps nothing more than a triumph of the spirit of abdication . . .”

Later, in the preface to the paperback edition of the same book, Bruckner would reveal the difficulties he encountered upon publication of his article, proving, as if it were necessary, that this subject remains a very sensitive one in a French society that has little by little constructed itself on a vision that is, to say the least, simplistic: executioners on one side, victims on the other. Between the difficulty of interpreting the meaning of its history and the need to curb the volume of grievances against it—grievances that
could certainly last for centuries—France is on the brink of an ideological split.

Setting aside any doubts one might express about some of Bruckner's theories—how for example, if asking these questions, can one not expect generalizations from the fiercest opponents, not only from the side of the “victims,” but also from his own side that “cries,” and now repents—one is obliged to respond to his outstretched arm and to his sense of dialogue: “There are no innocent or chosen people; there are only more or less democratic regimes capable of correcting their failures and of assuming responsibility for their past transgressions . . .”
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He argues against the “triumph of the abdication-minded,” which is in conflict with the triumph of the accusation-minded from the other world that he considers to have been at all times and in all places the punching bag for the white man's monstrosities and appetite for conquest. Between these two antagonistic positions, the side that cries and the side that accuses, the cease-fire is a long way off. Self-criticism is a rare commodity we no longer find in the marketplace. Add to that the absence of thoughtful and objective reflection, and the coming together of people is further undermined, and the path down the famous “competition for victimhood” further widened.

In 1961, Jimmy, your friend Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Frantz Fanon's
The Wretched of the Earth,
legitimized this theory of victimization: “Our victims see us in their injuries and in their chains: this is what renders their testimony indisputable. They need only show us what we have done to them to make us understand what we have done to ourselves. Is this useful? Yes, because Europe is in danger of dying.”
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To the Europeans who insist that they cannot be held responsible for the consequences of colonization—because they were never in the colonies, you see!—Sartre underscores the duty of solidarity burned into their collective conscience, which is probably the cause of the tears currently being shed by the West: “These are your pioneers—you sent them overseas, they made you rich. You warned them; if they spilled too much blood, you would politely disavow them, in the same way a State—no matter which—maintains a network abroad of agitators, rabble-rousers and spies that it disowns when they are taken . . .”
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Meanwhile, Jimmy, the strict regulation of migration and the political restructuring of European states as one bloc have created “individuals without fixed nationality.” The entire definition of the immigrant's status has to be revised. The presence of these people from former French territories becomes as a result the subject of great debate,
and the subject of agitation and political posturing during election campaigns.

The African immigrant is no longer the same, to be sure, but one must from now on consider his descendants who, not being from “over there,” must nevertheless find their place “here.” They are torn between two, sometimes three continents—their place of birth does not guarantee them any sense of belonging—while at the same time the “values of the Republic” to which they must adhere do not take into consideration the history of their ancestors. The little “black grandsons of Vercingetorix
”
can do nothing but try to see themselves in Rimbaud's
Bad Blood:
“I have the whitish blue eye of my Gallic ancestors, the narrow skull, and the clumsiness in conflict. I find my clothing as barbaric as theirs. But I don't butter my hair. The Gauls were the most inept skinners of cattle and scorchers of earth of their time. From them I take: idolatry and love of sacrilege;—Oh! all the vices, anger, lust,—magnificent lust—above all lying and sloth.”

The son of an immigrant could perhaps from one day to the next be picked up from school and deported with his parents. It is the politics of diversity that is being discussed now; you would be surprised to discover that a debate has begun to rage in France over affirmative action, and that your native country is sometimes used as a model to follow.

We are still a long way from understanding that
other
is not necessarily a synonym for loss and subtraction, and even less so of division, but rather of addition and even multiplication, two operations that we can no longer engage in sparingly in a world that challenges more than ever the rigid definition of national identity.

It is in this sense that the philosopher Achille Mbembe reproaches France for its lack of the kind of hospitality practiced mostly by the United States that has allowed it to “captivate and recycle the world's elite. Throughout the last quarter of the 20th century, [the United States'] universities and research institutions managed to attract nearly all of the top black intellectuals on the planet.”

But can we applaud the American model of hospitality blindly, Jimmy? The Cameroonian philosopher argues, “Whether we like it or not, things now and moving toward the future are such that the specter of the third world in our culture and collective lifetime will not rise in a quiet way. The presence of this specter forces us to learn to live exposed to one another. And although we have means of limiting this increase in visibility, in the end, it is inevitable. Therefore we must, as quickly as possible, make the specter into a symbol that facilitates understanding.”
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At the same time, relations between the “dark continent” and France bring to mind a children's story with, as yet, no moral. Europe and Africa avoid the issue of history—or at least stifle their differing views of it—while quietly muttering their respective reproaches behind each other's backs. They are like a couple who hides their incompatibility in public, promising to a family court judge, saddled with the same case for centuries, to keep their dirty laundry behind closed doors.

Is there any hope for these spouses? I am not sure, because when they run into each other on the street corner, they hastily gloss over their differences, telling each other they will discuss everything later. But one of them never comes home on time, returning whenever he feels like it, adding to the ever-growing list of infidelities while swearing, on all that is holy, his undying love.

To stick with fairy tales, Jimmy, I would say that once upon a time, a rooster crossed the ocean, ran aground on African shores, did without parental consent to force himself on the dove as her husband, accumulated acts of domestic violence, and all with such an arrogance that he practically declared war on any other animal eyeing his barnyard. This is how, in my country, Congo-Brazzaville, the Gallic rooster and the Belgian lion would have killed each other over a patch of land had it not been for the intervention of the German mediator who made them sit down at a table in Berlin to work out a way to share.

The marriage between the rooster and the dove lasted for decades. The 1960s were the divorce years, sometimes through mutual consent, but more often than not through the wife's bitter fight for liberation; the losses were incalculable and would deplete the inheritance of the children born of this union. The rooster decided the settlement. He would leave, but his spouse would be nothing more than a dependent at the mercy of his charity. The rooster could return to the marital home whenever he pleased, and behave like the master of the house. Moreover, he reserved the right to choose a new husband for his ex-wife. At best, this new husband would have attended French schools and universities; at worst, he would be nothing more than an old house servant, a Senegalese Tirailleur, or a frustrated military man, but who got along well with the rooster, to whom he vowed to keep careful watch over his former home.

With time, the new husband would become temperamental, would build castles for himself, proclaim himself “General in his Labyrinth,” president for life—or even in death—with a cane and traditional uniform. And we are the children of this divorce who must be understood.

You would have spoken today in particular to the former colonies of black, French-speaking Africa, Jimmy. These are undoubtedly the only ones since the “The Suns of Independence,” since the refrain from Grand Kallé's song, “Indépendence Cha Cha,” who remain
on the platforms, deceived, and cheated, watching the phantom trains passing, bemoaning the cursed Ham. How will they not yield to the lure of the “competition for victimhood?”

I am sure that it would be to them that you would address your words, though not to scold them, but to look them in the eyes.

You would tell them that the attitude of the eternal victim could not for much longer absolve them of their inaction, their equivocation.

You would tell them that their current condition stems, directly or indirectly, from their own illusions, confusion, and their one-sided reading of history.