Breyten Breytenbach - Intimate Stranger

I repeated (obviously there was just no way anybody could get me to speak to the subject of the session!): Tolerance, or even just reciprocal acceptance, must be rooted in the concrete field of transformation to make sense. Differences, even when these are confrontational, can be mutually enriching when explored creatively, in a practical environment — or rather, an environment of practice — always tending toward producing some thing you can lay your hands on — the book, the painting, the movie — where they (the differences) are examined critically and, if possible, self-critically, where they are not permitted to become institutionalized as some form of support for power.

Unfortunately, as we know, large sectors of humanity (let’s call these sectors ‘cultures’ for the sake of convenience) are led to believe that in the beginning there was Truth, and maybe innocence, and all of history since then is a sorry story of decadence and decay. When any culture, however rich or ancient, is but a confirmation of prejudices or the conservation and parroting of so-called truths, it is doomed to be exclusive, voracious, totalitarian, ultimately fundamentalist. I am not referring here only to known expressions of fundamentalist monotheism, although I’d venture to say that monotheism inevitably predisposes to fundamentalism and thus to intolerance.

Let me jump (I said): when the president of the United States and the prime minister of Britain suggest that September 11 was an attack on civilization , they are in effect equating civilization with globalization (which is but the married name of whorish expansionist capitalism), and therefore by implication making a case for Western global fundamentalism.

For my part, I don’t believe that ‘revealed’ Truth is ever innocent or benevolent. It can be dangerously evil. For me, the story of mankind is the nomadic search for many, many truths along harsh roads bordered with the flesh and bones and the apparitions of truths long since eaten by birds; it is looking for truths to fill a grumbling stomach, and spitting them out like pebbles when they have lost their flavor.

Reader, I don’t imagine my contribution went down well. But then, I was the only statutory terrorist present and had to live up to the image. Osama Bin Laden’s beard is longer than mine, that’s all.

That was Saturday. We were all tired of talking important sounding nonsense. I went for lunch with an old accomplice, Joachim Sartorius, now in charge of Berlin’s annual cultural festival. Towards the end his wife and a blonde-haired friend joined us. I told them how I saw Naipaul levitate recently in New York as a reincarnated Lord Vishnu, an affliction that had come over him ever since he’d been given the Nobel Prize. But how admirable and profoundly compassionate it was, too, that he expressed his appreciation of prostitutes who initiated him to the pleasurable apprenticeship of self-disgust and reassured his shrinking manhood. The blonde friend was a novelist who just recently had one of her books turned down in the US, ostensibly because of the very graphic descriptions of bestiality and zoophilia involving dogs and refugees.

The wine carried me through a long afternoon of quite useless arguments.

That evening we went to dine in a Thai restaurant. I found myself seated between a journalist with liver spots on her hands, who seriously tried to elucidate for me the deontology of relations between the media and politics, her hair was artificially red and her bare shoulders had the appearance and the substance of slack sea bamboo, and on the other side a delicious old Frenchman who spoke several Asian languages and could converse in slow admiration with the pretty waitresses. One of them particularly, lowered her eyelids in a demure figure of seduction, and made suggestive use of her hips as she walked back and forth from the kitchen to our table. The old gentleman, it turned out, had been born in Vietnam in 1921. Smoking and beautiful women kept him alive, trim and vigorous, he claimed. He was a cultural anthropologist specializing in oral literatures. His grandfather, whose name he inherited, had been a wandering journeyman of Greek or Provençal or maybe Catalan origin, his grandmother was impregnated when the hay was still freshly cut, and then abandoned, he himself grew up a bastard, some of his grandchildren are black and some yellow. Life was such a wonderful and unforeseeable adventure. He was in no hurry to die. Peasants are the wisest people on earth. Suddenly he started telling me how hard it was in the Japanese concentration camp where he’d been interned during the war. The guards wouldn’t allow the prisoners to beg for cigarettes or food. It was demeaning, only dogs beg, and they’d be beaten if caught. Like dogs. The only way he could get a cigarette was to kill fifty flies. So he’d spend his days on the rubbish heap of the camp, killing flies in exchange for smokes. Until he learned how to read the facial expressions of the guys playing poker or bridge. As an astute observer of foreign customs he developed a special talent. Once he started playing and winning at cards he didn’t have to kill flies anymore.

The Sunday morning session on Cultural Policies in Times of Crisis, the last one I attended before beating a hasty retreat to Tegel Airport, turned out to be heated. The subject was introduced by a countryman of mine of Indian descent, Sarat Maharaj, currently a co-curator of the Kassel Documenta. I was made proud by his incisive intelligence, even though he was clearly an unconditional and quite uncritical modernist. He made the point that crisis is not just good, but essential for any artistic breakthrough, insofar as it illustrates that old forms are ill adapted for dealing with complex new realities. Señora Arizpe objected that ‘crisis’ meant death where she came from, it’s no salon game now (we all had flame-flowering towers besmirching the islands of our minds), that a Duchamp ‘ready-made,’ such as his famous toilet bowl, would have been senseless in Mexico when it was first sprung on mankind in a full flush of avant-gardism, whereas the murals of Diego Riviera bound the people, interpreted them to themselves, gave shape to the dream of a nation respecting diversity. I intervened to suggest that this ‘crisis’ (of clashing civilizations) we all twalk around without naming, is nothing new, for a long ongoing time there has been a crisis of hunger and exploitation in the poor world, translating into death, yesterday today tomorrow, and since Duchamp may indeed be an inappropriate protagonist given the more than likely absence of such sanitary pedestals there, it may be more apposite to suggest as vector for modernity in Mexico at that time Frida Kahlo, the fat Riviera’s wife, who with her dark blood disguised as paint certainly struck deeper chords than the muralist. Maharaj went on to laud culture (we had a similar problem with the concept, he also preferred ‘creativiteness’) as vehicle for heterogenesis, the production of difference — as opposed to the logic and the celebration of sameness. Culture, as practiced and exported by the rich countries and by an international bureaucracy like UNESCO, could not honor the ethics of difference; it led to representationalism where all one had to do was to make the other visible (and mighty self-satisfied you’d be for doing so), to managerialism as ‘pis-aller’ for true and vigorous exploration, and ultimately to cultural consumerism or tourism confirming the mere retinalization of differences.

Thereafter things fell apart. People in the hall became restless and wanted part of the act. It was suggested, appropriately to my mind, that UNESCO was certainly a diligent (though indigent) and equitable custodian of the world’s cultures, but it had no mandate from any popular constituency, and there was a noticeable lack of input from creators and independent-minded intellectuals. No stimulation, no juice. Finally, it was doomed to be only collecting and preserving dead things. UNESCO is the custodian of the dead and their winds. The director of French Institutes worldwide advanced the conviction that one just had to operate within the boundaries of the realistic, umm, politically realistic, even if it meant imposing some contortions on the rebel (rabble) conscience, that the international cultural traffic was a means toward federating skills and knowledge, that it is in the nature of all politicians to attempt avoiding death. Whereupon it had to be pointed out to him that most politicians not only do not shirk from terminating human life, but indeed verily relish the enterprise. As long as those terminated are ‘foreign,’ obviously. (Later on, during coffee break, we would lift our upper lips at one another and show teeth in what would just have to pass for smiles.) It was brought to our notice that, as for the bright cultural export idea of promoting convivéncia , the world living together harmoniously, it needed to be said that the poor world may well experience the diffusion of culture from the rich part as an encroachment. When last did a delegation of African anthropologists travel to Europe to go and measure the circumference of a typical Auvergnat peasant’s head? And when you open your cultural institute in some underdeveloped, coughing, foot-shuffling country — should you not simultaneously open a similar institution in your own country to disseminate their culture? Surely reciprocity should be an absolute guideline? How else might you prove useful, messieurs les riches de ce monde ?