Why write? What’s the use right now? The question lives in me, and you also threw it at me, not directly, but implicitly, between the lines of your hesitations, your humility, echoing my posture, so shaky that I no longer even know if it can be call it “posture”.
One day I think of resistance through symbolism and celebrate any cultural act as a counter-posture to the horrors of the world. I ignite with you on the songs, the violins played in the shelters, the bookcases placed in front of the windows to make an image of the culture which stands upright in front of and in the ruins.
I then tell myself that culture remains this anchor point that we must never let go, for the necessary tension it exerts in the face of a devolution that would bring us back to acts rather than symbols.
I think back to this psychoanalytical grid of child development in which the infant, initially inhabited solely by his pre-linguistic corporality, gradually evolves towards this mature being, capable of language, collaboration, culture and concern for others. If I undeniably distance myself from the developmental standardization which still inscribes this grid within a paradigm opposing the normal to the pathological, I never manage to think of human maturity other than by the progressive enlargement of this capacity to enter into dialogue with the other, the resolutely other, “the irreducible”—to speak like Levinas—other. It also seems to me that a large part of my work consists in accompanying this development towards a greater capacity to see the other, a development which also begins with the fact of having been seen, heard, understood too.
And, in this sense, the empathy felt and expressed, the time devoted to “putting oneself in the place of” through any cultural act or through the practice, in the intimate, of dialogue always appear to me as acts resistance to war, even if we are not at the front, even if we are on the still protected side of the world.
Then, the next day, I am assailed by a completely different feeling, which the sociologist and philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie would certainly describe as “shame as an ethical feeling” in his essay impossible art, which opens up a field of reflection on the place that art holds in the power systems of our societies, when it replaces militancy in particular.
I also have this friend, Pascale, who, from her village in Finistère, took part in a convoy organized by citizens to the Polish border. She participates in a humanitarian effort that allows the reception of families of Ukrainian refugees. She writes to me:
“We have just left with three families for 30 hours of travel, I am overwhelmed by the pain seen on all these Ukrainian women. »
My feeling of uselessness is then reinforced, the act of writing becomes so tiny again. But crumbling under shame, isn’t that also, somewhere, the summit of my privileged posture? The shame that paralyzes, the one that allows a distancing from the other under the guise of powerlessness, a form of apathetic cynicism, would therefore also be an emotion reserved for those who still have the luxury of thinking about this shame and defend against it. And then I think of my mother’s class.
My mother, a former literacy teacher, welcomed refugees from the wars covering the 1990s and 2000s into her class. Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, the Congo, Colombia and even Afghanistan, in my class mother, formed over the years this improbable quilt of beings of flesh and heart, all united under the aegis of the learning of past participles. War, in my mother’s class, has always had this density of experience, this reality, this face.
As a teenager, accompanying my mother to the mall meant invariably running into at least one of these families, receiving news from the children or parents back home and being introduced to me: “It’s my big girl, Nathalie. »
A solemn “your mother taught me” was then launched, eye to eye, pronounced with all the variations of accent and tonalities, but always, with, inside, this pride brought back from the underworld, that of the columns straightened out by the dignity that self-narrative allows.
In my mother’s class, learning the basics of a new common language made it possible to grasp, in an excruciatingly repetitive way, precisely what happens to the world when horror replaces dialogue. Because my mother’s students often used the words of the new language to tell where they came from, they rediscovered at the same time a humanity that we had tried to take away from them, daring something of this trust in the other which they believed to be forever broken. The construction of new narratives constituted the first milestones of their afterlife, in a class where they were relearned the basis of culture: reading and writing.
When I think back to my mother’s class, I rediscover the conviction that to write, to make the world literate, is still to resist.
We will see for tomorrow.