Encounter by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera [Milan Kundera]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571367726
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Home and the World

“I SAY WE ARE SMOTHERING. THE PRINCIPLE OF A HEALTHY Antillean politics: Open the windows. Air. Air,” Césaire wrote in 1944, in the journal Tropiques.

Open the windows toward which direction?

First of all toward France, says Césaire; for France is the Revolution, it’s the great abolitionist Schoelcher, and it’s also Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Breton; it is a literature and a culture worthy of the greatest love. Next, open them toward the African past, a past amputated, confiscated, that holds the buried essence of the Martinican personality.

Later generations would often dispute Césaire’s Franco-African orientation, insisting on the Americanness of Mar tinique; on its “créolité” (connoting the whole array of skin colors and a language of its own); on its bonds with the Antilles and with all of Latin America.

Because every people in search of itself thinks about where to locate the margin between its own home and the rest of the world, the location of what I call the median context, the realm between national and global contexts. For a Chilean that median context would be Latin America; for a Swede, it is Scandinavia. Obviously. But what about Austria? Where was that margin located? In the Germanic world? Or in the world of multinational Central Europe? The whole meaning of Austria’s existence depended on the response to that question. When, after 1918 and then still more radically after 1945, it had left the context of Central Europe, it turned back into itself or into its Germanness, it ceased to be that shining Austria of Freud or Mahler, it was a different Austria, and with far more limited cultural influence. The same dilemma faced Greece, which inhabits both the world of Eastern Europe (Byzantine tradition, Orthodox Church, Russophile orientation) and the world of Western Europe (Greek-Latin tradition, strong bond to the Renaissance, and modernity). In impassioned polemics the Austrians or the Greeks can argue for one orientation over another, but with a little detachment we would say: there are some nations whose identity is characterized by duality, by the complexity of their median context, and that’s precisely what gives them their particularity.

As to Martinique, I would say the same thing: the coexistence of various different median contexts there is what makes for the particularity of its culture. Martinique: a multiple intersection; a crossroads among the continents; a tiny slip of land where France, Africa, the Americas meet.

Yes, that’s beautiful. Very beautiful, except that France, Africa, America don’t much care. In today’s world the voice of small entities is barely heard.

Martinique: the encounter of a great cultural complexity with a great solitude.

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