In his short story, Facing the White Man, African-American writer James Baldwin portrays a racist policeman and shows us the world through his eyes. Deep down, Jesse refers to black people using vile words, including one in particular.
To measure its violence, Baldwin, who has often been the target of the same word, writes it out in full.
In my next book, Baldwin, Styron and I, I tell of an assault suffered in France, during which I was spat a racist and misogynistic insult. I insisted, witnessing this incident, to write it down in full.
Violent words. Those who are used to destroy us. In some autobiographical works, we use them to convey what we have been through. In some fictions, like Baldwin’s short story, we use them to say something about our time, to denounce an injustice. To show the ugliness of the world while wresting from it a vital little victory: from this ugliness, to draw beauty.
And this is perhaps what pisses me off the most: the stubborn blindness of those (rare, I know, but they worry me) who do not realize that wanting to do away, in whole or in part, these works , it is a bit like wanting to silence the authors who had fought before us in the fights that we claim to be continuing today.
To transmit
These days, certain debates push us to question, as a society, our way of approaching these works and these words in a pedagogical situation, or of transmission.
I no longer teach and I am (cowardly) relieved. Not because “we can’t say anything” (we live in Quebec in 2021 and not, for example, in Mao’s China), but because today, those who are our future are asking both compelling and destabilizing: to question the way in which we ourselves were the recipients of transmission in our time – a way which can therefore seem indisputable to us.
Recently, I was invited to present my book Twelve years in France (2018) to a college group. At a time when we were talking about the fight against anti-Arab and anti-Black racism, the expression “le mot en n” was used by the students.
I am uncomfortable with this expression because it seems to me to refer to a thing without naming it and without making it disappear. I fear rather to see disappear, by force, the history of these words which had such a weight – and corollary, the possibility of knowing the context which formerly made them acceptable in order to fight it. I am even more uncomfortable when the discussion surrounding difficult words turns into violence, tension, attack. (This was not the case with those students, who were anything but tense. Careful, open gazes. Soft words. Relevant questions. Smiles.)
So many questions, no answer
But I am perhaps also uncomfortable quite simply because I am the age that I am, and that I received such an education, in such circumstances, in such an environment …
I do not know.
So I was there to present my previous book and not the next one. I didn’t have time to talk in detail about Baldwin’s short story or about the Arabophobic and misogynistic insult that I had wanted to write in full. No time to explain that for me certain words have already referred to a reality that must be known, out of respect for those who have suffered it. The hope of putting an end to what violent words denote by replacing them with others deemed harmless always raises a hurricane of questions in me.
But this was not the time, nor the subject. In truth, I was shaken by these young people and their ways of speaking about our world.
I chose to listen to this shock. I followed them. I referred to the reality that the n-word refers to without saying the word, because I didn’t want to run into them. That seemed to me reason enough. That, and the feeling that there would have been something opportunistic in the fact of jumping on their spontaneous use of the expression to impose on them the abyss of my doubts, cold, between two interventions on something else.
It had been decided in me in a few seconds. The whirlwind of my thoughts calmed down. I focused on them. It was a good time.
This story is not meant to be an example. I am not claiming that we can derive an answer from it. Faced with such complex questions, I just don’t have one.
I only know that many of us want to think beyond the tensions and bad faith, respecting those who invite us to do so, this question of the transmission of works that address the monstrous aspects of the human experience.
These works which, I will not give up, nevertheless count, even if they are difficult to teach – these works which, let us not forget, have undoubtedly been much more difficult to write for those who lived what they did. tell.
These works that can get us out of our solitude, open our eyes, and arm us against evil … on condition that they are broadcast at a pace that is neither that of social networks nor that of controversy: the slow pace of teaching and study, rigor and humility.