The Notebook by Jose Saramago

Author:Jose Saramago
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844678013
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

March 26: A Question of Color

The text of a dialogue in a TV car ad. A six- or possibly seven-year-old girl sitting in the front passenger seat of a car asks her father, who is driving, “Daddy, did you know that Irene, my school classmate, is black?” Her father answers, “Yes, of course. . .” and the girl replies to him, “I didn’t. . .” If these few words are not exactly a blow to the solar plexus, they could certainly be called something else: a fillip to the mind. The rumor goes that this little piece of dialogue was no more than the creative outpouring of a marketing man of genius, but here at my side is my niece Julia, no more than five years old, who when asked whether black people live in Tías—the region where I reside—replied that she didn’t know. And Julia is Chinese.

It is a commonplace to say that truth comes from the mouths of babes and sucklings. However, according to the above examples, this appears not to be the case, since Irene really is black and there are plenty of black women in Tías. The problem is that, contrary to what is generally supposed, and however hard they try to convince us of the opposite, absolute truths do not exist: truths are plural, and only a lie is global. The two children did not see black women: they saw human beings, other people just the same as themselves, so the truth that emerged from their mouths was simply another.

But Mr. Sarkozy happens not to think just like them. Now he’s come up with the idea of demanding that an ethnic census be conducted, designed to provide an “X-ray” (his expression) of French society to show where each and every immigrant is living, supposedly in order to bring them out of their invisibility and prove how well the anti-discrimination policies are working. According to a widely held opinion, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is where I believe France will go if this initiative wins out. It is not hard to imagine (the past provides a wealth of examples) how the census could be used to demonstrate a perverse need for new and more refined forms of discrimination. I am seriously thinking of asking Julia’s parents to take her to Paris as an adviser to Mr. Sarkozy . . .

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