Christophe Massé: Les autres (traduit par Bruno Gruyer)

"So long is the way to Vahalla". Tony Cabrefigue

The others, the wicked, the wicked and the wicked.

To my friends of all colours, all religions, all cultures, all sizes and all weights, to those who have bulky brains and big pricks, to those who laugh in suffering to those who still weep every week.

For a very long time I had no idea of what war could mean. I was born 1961 in France, in Perpignan, Eastern Pyrenees. I had a marvellous childhood, never being cold nor hungry. The street was my kingdom. A whole universe demarcated by the railway, the river and waste grounds. Playing was the only goal in my life.

Later, in high-school, there were two young Lebanese in my form. Brother and sister. I had heard from a teacher that they had fleed their country because of the war, and this very word took its full meaning.

Maybe the fact that I lived completely free eventually made my life more difficult, but the feeling of independence that had grown inside me forced me to learn respect, tolerance and sharing, which still soothe my intransigence, my touchiness and my irritability impulses today. Fearing others leads to war. The others, the French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, North-African, African, Rumanian, Italian, Greek, Turk, English, Yugoslav, Gipsy, Jew, Arab filled my neighbourhood scholl and streets, and the memory of our mingled bodies on the stadium's pole vaulting mattress, on which we would have great times, naturally contributed to my keeping away from discrimination. No accepting to do my military service was a continuity in my refusal to leam anything about fighting. I naturally rejected the army, weapons, soldiers and all those crummy explanations about the need for a country to have its own deterrent power. As time goes by, war worms its way into people's flesh. Man starts to be nasty from the very moment he thinks that he is threatened. The threat is himself. The outcomes that don't lead to frustration are too rare to avoid the awakening of the monster that lies inside most beings. An unconscious eager for ambition, recognition and power that just waits for the slightest pretext to arise. A beast that would need an unimaginable compensation to be satisfied with loving only. If one day borders, should they be purely mental or in the form of garden fences, could stop existing, then each man would understand that his difference can be shared instead of being a motive for systematic extermination. Bordeaux, January 3, 2001. (Texte traduit par Bruno Gruyer)

Comments

[ellesurlalune]

j'ai pas tout compris, je l'avoue