Migrant Brothers by Patrick Chamoiseau

Author:Patrick Chamoiseau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fear and Trust

The relational imaginary makes globality the domain of conscience. The latter can then without a shield take up the adventures of living in the fire of life. This allows it to favor its subtle flavors without fear. To be initiated into polyrhythms born of differences when they call to each other and find one another, often complement one another, sometimes repel one another, but each one conserves the memory of the other. Life functions in this way. With neither fixity nor truth. Nor naive idealism. Simply a relational fact, imperial and changing. The planet itself was created in this way, from a relational effusion in which hominization let its epic unfold until it yielded the improbable Sapiens: the fertility of a spiritual clarity that sees the world, that sees itself in the world, that perceives its inexhaustible mystery, its innumerable possibilities, that lives the unprecedented and unthinkable, and then acts, forced to create, against death, against mysteries, to create, much like life, not necessarily against but with the unthinkable. All creation arises from a mystery and presents to us above all a mystery. This mystery is to be lived. The beauty of a creation is linked to the degree of conscience and mystery that it imparts to our existence. Self-consciousness is primarily creation, it eludes fixities, it sees the depths that overwhelm Reason, it knows expanses that only become deeper, it senses, discerns without defining, knows without retaining, recognizes without naming, it goes, endlessly. At first immobile in the mind of the dreamer, of the sorcerer, of the poet, then in the leaping desire of the hunter, the energy of the circular wanderer, finally in the enterprise of the traveler, the ferocity of the conqueror, the appetite of the merchant . . . the, alas, protean force of domineering hordes.

This is the lineage from which their globalization came.

Globality began in an identical way, albeit in the nuances of sensitivity to the self. It is benevolent in the mind of the dreamer, ardent in the symbolic extension of the sorcerer, limitless in the wonder-terror of the mind of the poet, O essential wound! It kept itself going, diffuse like a glow, beneath the reptilian advancement of nations and peoples, luminescent like a fog in the clarity of knowledge, and still expands in the intensities of relational winds. Now that a climax has been reached, it can fill our imaginaries with “another region of the world,” a different sensibility, that permeates us (without giving it) with a henceforth wide-open totality.

Open to what?

To the poetics of a living without conquest and without domination.

Of an inhabiting given back to great common spaces.

There is no fixity that does not die.

There is no border that is not crossed.

There is no living reality that does not move and is not constructed in this way.

Sapiens Africanus was born not in a lattice of sharp borders but rather in open ecosystems, punctuated by climates, shortages, abundances, droughts, and floods, ruptures and junctions, alliances, parasitisms, antagonisms, sharing, and exploitation .

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