For a different Europe

When I am asked if emigration – the displacement – influenced my writing, it is impossible for me to give a precise and definitive answer. That is probably because I have become increasingly convinced that the displacement, the crossing of borders, feeds my anxieties, contributing to the creation of an imaginary territory that ultimately resembles my country of origin in one way or another. That is my own inner quest, my way of perceiving the universe. I chose a long time ago not to shut myself away, but to listen to the sound and the fury of the world, in order never to think about things in a fixed way.

I didn’t start writing because I emigrated, but since having left, I look at my fatherland in a different light. In my first texts – which I started on while still in the Congo – I had the feeling that there were pieces missing, that my characters were confined, could barely breath and were asking for more space.

In this way, my emigration has contributed to this unease that, in my eyes, is the basis for any creative process. You write because ‘something is not quite right’, because you want to move mountains or want to get a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Writing then becomes an attempt to take root, a cry in the night, an ear pointed towards the horizon...

I was born in Africa, in Congo-Brazzaville, and spent a large part of my youth in France before I went to live in the United States. The Congo is the place of my umbilical cord, France the adopted fatherland of my dreams and America a corner of the world from which I can view the footprints from my wanderings. These three geographical spaces are now fused together and I sometimes forget in which continent I am sleeping or writing.

I love all cities which I pass through, I am filled with wonder by all places that do not resemble those of my childhood. I arrive light-hearted, without any thoughts in my mind.

We are not emigrants if we export our being, our manners, our habits, our tastes with a view to imposing them on our host country. Because the place where we live is in such stark contrast to our so-called ‘natural environment’, images from our own childhood suddenly resurface, the clamour of our streets, the hardships and the joys of our people. It’s during periods of tornadoes that you recognise the properties of a blue sky, a free bird taking flight and the flowering of a species whose name you search for in vain until the day that you remember that it also grows behind the hut of your father or in a park in the Moungali district in Brazzaville.

It’s in the desert that you realise that the Atlantic Ocean and the Congo River are a divine blessing. Even so, the danger would be to regard that which an ‘emigrant’ writes as notes that stem from nostalgia. You can get homesick even if you stay at home. I am not nostalgic. I brood over the worry: that one day I will leave this world without having discovered this minuscule detail that connects us...

Sometimes, I say to myself that I am a European, whether I want that or not, whether the sun burned me or not.

What is a European to a Congolese? Difficult to say. I have searched long and hard for an answer without ever finding it. And then, Europe is an elusive notion. It slips through the fingers of strategists and it escapes salespeople who sell conformist utopias.

Wouldn’t Africans be able to formulate their own definition Look, for example, at what Le Robert dictionary says on the subject of the word European:

1. From Europe, its inhabitants.

2. In favour of the European construction.

3. Africa. Used to describe every white non-African.

‘European’ is therefore that which is from Europe, which relates to its inhabitants.

Which Europe? Which inhabitants? Who are they?

The most important thing – as far as I’m concerned – is the definition of Europe that is assigned to us as Africans. For Africans, only ‘white non-Africans’ would be Europeans! That would mean that Africa has a racist conception of Europe. All ‘non-African’ white people are Europeans in our eyes.

If you deconstruct this definition of ‘African’, we see that it recognises the existence of ‘white Africans’, to whom we ‘black Africans’ would almost deny the ‘status’ of European!

That representation is very disputable, because it confines, limits, compartmentalises, divides and reduces. There is at most one sole advantage to this. It proves that we Africans have understood the subtleties of this world for a long time! We have organised this world based on the specific characteristics of mankind. We took into account the attachment to a land, and not to a race. We would gladly say that a white person from South Africa is an African. African literature is rich in its colours: the novelists Mia Couto, Nadine Gordimer, Deon Meyer and many others are white. They are not Europeans. They are Africans; just like white people who live in Zimbabwe and have only known that country.

Perhaps the relevance of this conception ends there. If in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, a President, and monarch for life, engaged in hunting whites, that was not because game was becoming increasingly rare in the bush. This president reminded these Africans that they were white, thus Europeans, even if some of them had never known anything but this Zimbabwean land. For this dictator, lost in his maze, all white people will remain Europeans! It doesn’t matter that they have never known any other land than that of Africa.

And if these white Africans are returned to Europe, they wander there like stateless people. In Africa, we point the finger at them. In Europe, they are looked at with wide eyes. There are disconnected from that continent, which has nothing to do with their tropical universe, their childhood space.

The definition that Le Robert dictionary attributes to Africans contains enough spicy ingredients to feed animosity, withdrawal. And this ideology justified race wars, the rise in hatred, the chain of expropriations outside court decisions.

Le Robert believes that for an African, the European is ‘any non-African white person’.

Should we conclude that: Europe is the continent of every white person... and non-African? This erases the meeting of individuals, the adherence to ideas, the transplants of history. Would we say that for Asians the European is any white non-Asian person? And what would it be among the Oceanians?

I can already imagine the sweeping definition that North Americans would give: any white non-American person! America being predominantly white, and what’s more a territory of settlement, it would cause a lot of commotion, and tons and tons of History pages would have to be burned! It is undoubtedly with the aim of tempering the sensitivity of communities that America has come up with names that connect everyone to the nation without concealing their place of origin. We therefor have African-Americans, Asian-Americans, American Indians, etcetera. The consequences are far-reaching and show a society overwhelmed by the management of its minorities. Each community living in its own corner...

With the proliferation of means of communication, we have created regions, ramifications around the world. ‘Rome is no longer in Rome’, and therefore the writer becomes this migratory bird who remembers its distant land, but also tries to sing from the branch of the tree on which it is perched. Do these songs of migratory birds still fall under national literature? I’m not sure about that, in the same way I’m not convinced that literature should settle for a defined space. I will live anywhere in the world as long as it accommodates my dreams and allows me to reinvent my universe. I am both a writer and a migratory bird...

My conception of identity goes far beyond the notions of territory and blood. Each encounter nourishes me. It would be futile to confine ourselves to a territory, to ignore the proliferation of interferences and, beyond that, the complexity of this new era, which binds us together, far removed from geographical considerations.

Without returning to the times of Methuselah, I would say that history, especially that of colonisation, has shown us that territory could be imaginary, go beyond borders, defy climatic variations, mix languages and races. In this sense, didn’t France, for example, not extend its territory beyond the seas, forming an empire whose power and radiance shone in the eyes of the world? General de Gaulle during a visit to Martinique in 1966 would also exclaim in front of the natives: “My God, how French you are!”

At that time, the term ‘nation’ was perceived in the broadest – even ideological – sense. It was based on the idea of strengthening one’s place in the world. If we look closely, we will see that France still extends to the overseas departments and territories, which should be enough to reframe our notion of territory, unless we consider these distant islands as mere tanning spots for pale-complexioned metropolitans.

‘Rome is no longer in Rome, it is here where I am’, wrote Corneille, challenging the idea of a fixed territory. The French capital was ‘moved’ during the occupation. Paris was no longer in Paris, but in Brazzaville, that suddenly become the capital of Free France, while Radio-Brazzaville became the ‘Voice of France’.

The historian Olivier Luciani summarises the difficulties of that period: ‘... on the one hand, Free France has imposed a particularly heavy war effort on all the rallied colonies since the summer of 1940. On the other hand, President Roosevelt is not hiding his desire to replace colonial empires with a system of international guardianship.’ France had to fight to keep its ‘possessions’, as De Gaulle worded it in his Memoires. We Congolese therefore entered the war as ‘a piece of France’. It was also in this capital that the famous ‘Conference of Brazzaville’ took place in 1944, bringing together ‘senior colonial officials in the presence of De Gaulle in order to develop reform projects to be implemented after the liberation France. The aim was to preserve the colonial empire by renewing it somewhat.’

A question then arises: should we always wait for a tragedy, a global conflict, to demystify the territory? In any case, we will have taken a big step when we admit that each of us ‘drags along’ a piece of the territory of origin, the influence of which we are accountable for, even its depreciation abroad.

In America, I often came across French people who truly considered me to be their compatriot, giving me the impression that the French abroad, regardless of their racial background, were finally broadening their perception of citizenship. As if to better define what a nation is, we should leave our territory and find ourselves in a place where our culture finally becomes the decisive link.

If the territory must now be reconsidered, the same applies to ‘identity’. We should probably go back to the origin of this word and observe how merchants of fear succeed in turning a fluid notion into a static and suicidal ideology for the nation. Can dictionaries contribute something to this debate? ‘Identity’ comes from the Late Latin identitas, which means: ‘quality of that which is the same’. That word is itself derived from the Latin idem. Identity therefore means the ‘character of two identical objects of thought, and later ‘that which is one’. And Le Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (The Historical Dictionary of the French Language), states that the law and common usage define the word as ‘the fact, for a person, of being an individual and of being able to be recognised as such’. In short, identity is first attached to oneself, to the I, to the existence of the individual within the context of society. It is the singularity of the individual or the group. Just as an individual has an identity card, the group also has its own. But which elements would we put on the identity card of the group? Who would define those elements? Failing to measure the extent of the metamorphosis of contemporary society, they would have us believe that social behaviour can be governed by decree. Taking advantage of this opening, those fishing for votes during elections have resorted to archaisms and abstract values. Who today could give a definition of national identity? If you listen to those who promote it, we are in the midst of an ‘identity crisis’.

In that regard, it is necessary to carry out an ‘invention of the self’, to parody the title of a work by the sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann. Indeed, Kaufmann proposes ‘providing the individual with the recognition, consent and love of others that he needs in order to feel that he exists as a fully-fledged individual’, because the ‘I is nobody without the others’. The individual only truly exists when he is recognised by the group, especially since it is the law of said group that defines the framework of individual mobility. In the absence of this recognition by the Republic, pockets of resistance have arisen here and there. Groups are enacting their own laws, targeting those who have never set foot in these ‘zones’, but who point the finger at them from their technocratic fortresses. ‘Zone identities’ have emerged, pushing back the collective norms that give the appearance of being ever more implacable with those who consider themselves to be the pariahs of our time.

The debates surrounding national identity initiated in France will not have been enough to calm the multiple crises of the ‘I’. What is this national identity ultimately? At the summit of the State, even President Sarkozy was unable to find the right words during the election campaign stating: ‘Does this say what we are?’ Identity is not saying what we are, but rather saying what we will be in the intertwining of these exchanges, these frictions, these migrations and this era that will come to be known as the era of the complexity of the human race.

That observation remains to be made, because I am often shocked when some people perceive of Africa, for example, as a unit when it is as complex as the North American territory. Yes, just as America is a space of overlapping origins and ethnic groups, Africa is not as uniform as people think and the cultural differences are just as striking as those we find here. Like America, Africa has known civil wars, slavery, racial segregation, genocide and who knows what else. To this must be added the confusion created by ethnic groups and Western ideology, which instilled in us the dream of the superior Negro, like Germany thought of the Aryan race at the time.

Perhaps we will have to get used to the idea that we should redefine the very notion of Africa and no longer be limited to a geographical and fixed conception of the black continent. And if, instead of talking about Africa, we would talk about Africas. a formula that Henri Lopes dared to use in the title of one of his novels published by Seuil, Le Chercheur D’afriques (The Researcher of the Africas).

Africa is no longer just in Africa. By dispersing throughout the world, Africans create other ‘Africas’, undertake other adventures that may be beneficial for the enhancement of the cultures of the black continent. Claiming ‘Africanness’ is a fundamentalist and intolerant attitude. Will the bird that never flew from the tree in which it was born understand the songs of its migrating friend? We need a confrontation, a clash of cultures. No matter where...

The challenge consists of bringing back from the different groups where we ‘belong’ that which could help us build a common and assumed destiny in a positive manner. In short, as Amin Maalouf underlines: ‘everyone should be able to include in what he regards as his own identity a new ingredient, one that will assume more and more importance in the course of the new century and the new millennium: the sense of belonging to the human adventure as well as his own.