I could spend hours like this, reading articles and looking through programs, all that powerful life of the circus, with its artists like birds dyed in red and forever being reborn.
But I have to move on.
Li-An is right to tease me by comparing me to a great invalid surrounded by scraps of paper in a bedroom with a cork floor: if I want to understand something about the life of these people, I have to also follow their route, find again their trails and eat up some miles. The various places where Maxime worked, for example, or the last house that he lived in. I have to face up to places physically, their materiality, including the state of the walls, the faint smell of saltpeter and its little white crystals, the steepness of the staircase . . . I have to go to Mahajanga.
Georges does not appear to be in any rush to see me leave his house. But he says the same thing to me as Li-An.
—The documents, the papers, it’s all very good. But you absolutely must meet Jean Pivoine, the old jeweler. No one knows anymore exactly how old he is, but he’s probably close to one hundred. He knew all about that period, he is one of the few able to speak of it. If anyone can tell you who is in the third tomb, it is him.
Need to hit the road, then. Tomorrow morning we leave for Mahajanga.
In Madagascar every journey is like a battle. The roads are full of holes, smashed up, powdery, and often impassable. You come out of each journey exhausted and strangely reinvigorated, the body full of bumps and holes, as if the road itself gets under your skin. However, it is the best way to discover the country.
Georges has let me use his car. Well, if you can still call it a car, that is: it is an old white Peugeot with the floor full of holes and the rearview mirrors attached by string. The engine is almost new, he tells me; that is, it is not older than fifteen years or so. The gas tank light is constantly lit up, which does not exactly help in knowing when to fill up, but who could be put off by these details? From time to time the accelerator gets stuck, and that is very dangerous: I have to dive beneath the steering wheel myself to lift the pedal up by hand. As I do that, the car speeds away like mad, and as might be expected, with my head under the steering wheel looking for the accelerator pedal, my vision of what is happening on the road is rather reduced. The rest of the time, as Georges says, the car runs very well.
Li-An is sitting on my right, on the passenger seat, or as they say in French “à la place du mort,” in the dead man’s place, and when I say it to Li-An, she laughs, finding it quite appropriate, given the state of the car! We drive for a long time through a lively and colorful crowd, between the beat-up vans, cattle carts, kids running around, and women carrying heavy loads on their backs. Poverty catches your eye everywhere you look, as does life: a laugh, a friendly altercation, young people holding hands. I make mental notes of several signs that sketch out along the journey little portraits, colorful glimpses, of the country:
or this school with its tender and sweet name:
We’ll need some of that! Indeed, we have two days ahead in the car, first in the coolness of the high plateaus, then in the heat of the plains and the dusty tracks. Making the journey from the high plateaus to the coast feels like going from a refrigerator to a bread oven. Leaving the territory of the Merinas, the body trembles, the fingers are numb with cold. Arriving in the land of the Boina, the sun’s rays transform the car’s shaky interior into a sauna: the body gets cooked, you are like a roasted chicken turning on its spit. From time to time, we have to climb some steep hills and throw out a few cans of water to lighten the load.
On the approach to Mahajanga, there is a rumble of thunder: a storm crashes down upon us and leaves again as quickly as it arrived. Villagers run out: everyone lends a hand to push the car through the floods of mud studded with stone blocks loosened by the storm and the ravines denuded by the torrents of water. Li-An has been counting: we have passed fifty-two rivers in all, as many as there are weeks in a year.
Finally, stores start to appear by the side of the road; we are approaching the town. Everything is for sale here, nothing is wasted, everything is transformed into a joyous tumult: live chickens; cuts of meat; mismatched shoes; yellow bananas, looking soft and smooth; green pineapples with their tops fanned out . . . On the right a notice asks: “Are you selling a 403 half-engine?” Where did the other half go, then?
It is the joy of the marketplace and the great buzz of the world.
*
On arriving in Mahajanga, we have a mind-blowing tête-à-tête with the clouds. In its scale, its sweeping breadth, the palette of its colors, the variety of its clouds, the multiplicity of its light, the Madagascar sky is an astonishing spectacle. At the end of the afternoon, soaring over the Mozambique Canal, its tenderness knocks you over.
In the car, with its beat-up seats, we go to circle the baobab. It is the ritual, Georges tells us: going round the baobab that stands right at the end of the boulevard brings well-being to new arrivals.
Then we climb to the right, toward the Corniche. We go past the hotels and restaurants that overlook the sea, the provincial governor’s house with its lanterns, the Jardin d’Amour, where Maxime and Pauline shared their first kiss, and we arrive at the cemetery gates. But night has already fallen, and the cemetery is closed. The three tombs are there, close by, hidden in the shadows.
We check in to the hotel. We are exhausted by the journey. Li-An falls asleep very quickly, her belt barely unbuckled, her long legs like two beautiful foils with flexible blades unfolded across the bed.
I listen: I can hear the rain arriving, passing, and leaving again . . . The rain always comes at night, with its overcoat of clouds, its blue storm. The feet of thousands of migratory birds land on the town’s rooftops, scratching the zinc and the corrugated iron—all of a sudden, all the town’s odors escape and wind their way through the alleys, between the tree trunks and the house foundations. It is the midnight meeting, the coven, between the wet leaves and the roofing, rust extending its power over the world. Clouds, alluvium, electrons, and iron particles, suddenly as free as the air: a magnetic force breaks free from each branch and spreads over the walls, women’s dresses, and the hoods of cars.
The sky is unleashed: wind, gusts, and whirling rain. I take a look out the window. Outside, the backs of people’s necks bend down, their heads disappear into their shoulders, they want to retreat into themselves to escape the rain and its thousand flashing blades.
And above it all, there is the wonderful smell of cherry and lemon from those little flowers that, a minute ago, seemed nondescript by the side of the road.
I will go tomorrow to see the Indian jeweler.
*
The jewelry store is clean and orderly. The main space is divided into four parts by two wooden display cabinets on which sit the precious stones and the silver bracelets and around which plays out the ballet of visitors, the commotion of the suppliers, and the comings and goings of the buyers. A bracelet costs between 260,000 and 300,000 Malagasy francs—that is a bit more than 10 euros. The gold is in another window and is dearer: around 4 million Malagasy francs, “but that is only 20 euros,” as Jean Pivoine points out. No one knows exactly what age he is, but at around a hundred years old, he still juggles exchange rates, prices, and currencies. With a youthful spirit, he makes light work of continents, time zones, and currencies, he follows from day to day the price of primary materials, evaluates the geostrategic data, weighs up the political context, juggles from one currency to another, and converts everything into something else or its opposite. He is a kind of Ariel circulating and calculating—between the ages too: he speaks to you about the rates in the 1960s and the state of the market following independence, then returns in an instant to the current situation, working conditions, the difficulty of finding qualified workers . . . He is an elf, the personification of an age-old spirit, a commercial genie. Seeing him, you realize how several dozen Indians have been able in the space of a few years to build financial empires built on gold and silver, selected precious stones, and metalwork.
Jean Pivoine, the old Indian jeweler, at least ninety-nine years old if he is a day and with a face like a Noh mask, marked by the sands of time. His skin descends in waves to his chin, then spreads out in successive lateral slides toward his cheeks, his neck, and shoulders; it is just like standing before a melting caramel sponge cake. For some old people time stretches their features in a crumbling succession. His liquid skin is held together at the neck by a snug tie, which makes him look like a jabot: above the folds of the collar there are pockets, blisters that bubble to the surface in lumps. His face is like milk, butter, and flour—a doughy mass that slides downward. But in this face, right in the heart of it, there are two little lively, shining yellow eyes. They shine all the more as soon as we speak about Maxime Ferrier.
“Maxime Ferrier, Maxime Ferrier . . .” Right away, as soon as he knows I am Maxime’s grandson, he moves around on his chair and stands up. His voice quavers, hesitates a bit in the lower tones, he gives a little cough, and begins again on a sharper note: “Come over here, we will have some peace and quiet. At this time there is not much business. It is the time for filling in tax returns, administrative forms: I have sent my workers home; they are on vacation for a month. All that paperwork has nothing to do with them.”
We leave the main room, and he leads me to the back of the store, a dark windowless room that contains a set of scales and some precision instruments: glasses, iron fixtures, weights and measures. It is here that he weighs the metals, makes the alloys, checks the combinations . . . On the wall are two calendars, one with Indian scenes and the other with Catholic illustrations.
A lovely sweet smell floats through the air, of sandalwood mixed with musk and rose. Some incense emits a few rings of blue smoke. The light only barely penetrates this den, where sounds are made in the form of low hisses. As soon as I pronounced Maxime’s name, he took on a mysterious air and led me to this back room. It is the farthest back room, the one that no one ever enters.
“The walls have not only ears, they also have eyes and a tongue. For those who know they are listening, in any case . . . Here we will be better.” He pushes forward a chair. “Do not think that these inanimate objects”—he brushes an old bronze set of scales with his hand garnished with yellow rings—“are always mute. These chairs, these walls, these drawers, speak to me as clearly as if they were sending a message.”
He begins to tell his story. His gestures are at once precise and ample, the ringed hands rise and fall softly on his chest—like a prayer—while he speaks about his youth, the card games at the Grand Hôtel with Nénesse, the Perrier-Martel, his favorite cocktail, brandy and soda water, which leaves in the mouth a lightly effervescent taste of peach. Later, in the 1960s, he will switch to whisky. Today it is rum . . . He pours one for himself and serves me a glass.
His eyes seem always to be fixed on some scene taking place a few kilometers away. He speaks softly and in slow syllables, as if the words were coming out of a pit, as if the phrases were climbing back up along a funnel. “These days I drink only on weekends. When you get old, you have to slow everything down to be able to go on,” he says, moving his left hand, which is suddenly weighed down, solemn: you would think that it was crossing the ages to come and sit on his chest.
His gaze slides over my head, as if he was contemplating an exciting spectacle taking place on the other side of the planisphere. He searches a bit for his words and his voice, but his diction and ideas are perfectly clear. Now the little evening rum is lighting up his memory. I take out my notebook and pen and take notes . . .
*
It is precisely from the time he met Pauline that Maxime’s fortune starts to grow exponentially. In a few years he establishes himself as one of the best businessmen of the west coast: by working in turns for the local colonists and for himself, he makes his way up the ladder of polite society in Mahajanga, “in less time than it takes to grill a grasshopper,” as the Malagasy proverb says.
Maxime sets up first a plantation in Karankely, in the bush, for fourteen months, on behalf of the colonist Cavadini, the husband of a Delastelle girl, a well-known Franco-Malagasy family from the Big Island. In the previous century one of her ancestors, going by the resonant name of Napoléon Delastelle, had managed various establishments on the coast, working even with Queen Ranavalona. Maxime is at that point in charge of around thirty workers, who produce mainly coffee, vanilla, and pepper. In a year the coffee production has increased sixfold: the colonists begin to take an interest in this man, who is respected by his workers, who does not think twice about spending entire weeks in the bush sleeping with the Malagasy workers, and who, on weekends, accompanies the Nuñes girl on her promenades.
Then he works for someone called Berger, an Alsatian, proprietor of the “Transvaal Farm,” who hires him from the Cavadinis by offering to double his salary. He goes from three thousand francs per month (and a fifty-kilo sack of rice) to six thousand francs per month (and a bicycle). He is now in charge not of thirty people but around fifty. Maxime stays there for a year or so, then he is once again poached, this time by Hassan Ali himself. The former friend of Madame Bartolini owns a dozen or so plantations on the northwest coast: he has never forgotten the young acrobat who arrived ten years earlier among the flowers and beasts. He puts Maxime in charge of the métayage, a form of sharecropping, on one of his estates and, in particular, his zebu farming. Maxime moves from six thousand to eleven thousand francs and then, after producing good results, from eleven to fourteen thousand francs. He also has at his disposal, by contract, several stacks of wood and an electric generator. He now has between a hundred and a hundred and fifty Malagasy peasants under his authority: he gives them plots of land that they cultivate for their own benefit, but at the harvest season they must give a daba of rice or corn (the daba is a tall and square gas can made from tinplate, the equivalent of around twenty liters). When they kill a cow, they keep the ribs but give the filet, the heart, and the brain to Hassan Ali. The mangoes, corn, cassava, and vegetables are for the proprietor, while the rice, brèdes, potatoes, and grains (broad beans, lentils, green beans) are for the Malagasy.
The estate’s accounts are impeccably kept. He has come a long way from the time of the little store on the beach at Amborovy and its chaotic accounts ledger! From now on the legal and administrative papers are organized in bundles of thirty and categorized according to the nature of the certificates (leases, contracts, transactions, indictments, reports), by Pauline’s expert hand. By bringing together the words of the old jeweler with the pile of documents I found in Pauline’s chest, and which remain today like the dead skin of these successive moltings, one can get a quite clear idea of the colonial world in which Maxime lived, the difficulties he confronted, and the ways in which he tried to get around them. One discovers in particular an incredibly hierarchical republic, where it is very difficult for those who are neither French nor white to find a place.
*
On high, at the very top, sits the governor-general, invisible like God and, like God, omnipotent. In Mahajanga he is represented by the provincial governor, whose residence is found, symbolically, a few steps away from the great baobab. Then there is his court with, in order of importance: the senior officials, the officials, the military, and the colonists . . . The Malagasy, the most numerous, are found right at the bottom. Everyone is subject to a strict hierarchical order and a stringent official etiquette worthy of the Duke Saint-Simon. Covering almost twenty years, dealing with the most diverse range of subjects (legal forms, administrative missives, private letters), the documents reveal something of the life of the colony in its most ordinary spheres (requests for authorization, demands, tax inquiries) as well as in its most distinguished: jealousies, hatreds, unending rivalries in the shadows, viciousness behind the drawn curtains, looks thrown between the shutters, handpicked favors.
Indiscretions? Theft? Espionage? You have to wonder how Pauline managed to get her hands on some of these letters, which sometimes have only a passing relevance to Maxime’s affairs but which must have been of use to him as a means of applying pressure during difficult negotiations or delicate talks. A certain district official asks for a bigger house, one more suited to his position. A fawning magistrate asks the provincial governor for a secretary’s job for his wife, as if it were a post as well connected as that of a royal master of the hounds working for a king with a passion for hunting. A Malagasy councillor, “at the height of his favor and personal consideration, with a reputation second to none,” complains about being refused for a promotion: the reply says that he is guilty of not greeting the administrator during his last visit . . . A magistrate argues with an agency head over his wife’s right to sit in the front row during a projection of the film La Bigorne, caporal de France on the school terrace . . . (Ah, wives: a constant source of discord!) In the mundane legal imbroglio that ensues, the seats on the terrace become the stakes of a bitter symbolic struggle, which would make the ladies of Soubise, the princess of Guémené, and the demoiselles of Montbazon turn pale with jealousy: they were to be all removed, successively, then put back, and finally painted in different colors according to the age and standing of the spectators . . .
It is the great colonial theater: sometimes comedy, sometimes tragedy, and most often a seaside boulevard. Desires and prerogatives, intrigues, resentments, calumnies, ill-timed malice: all of those high-flying officials and commissioners, assistant directors, and specially appointed private secretaries twist themselves like toque-wearing duchesses around an armchair or a chaise longue, adding to the brilliant education they have received an indisputable cunning and know-how in the art and degrees of procuring themselves little seats on the school terrace.
This vertical structure, governed by the culture of emblems and insignias and hierarchical protocol, doubles up as a horizontal structure, a sort of spiral thinking that functions according to the principle of concentric circles. Even among the French one distinguishes slyly—but carefully—between the French-born and those born in the colonies. Those who live in France are worth more and are better than the guy from Réunion, the type from Mauritius, and the old hand from Madagascar. It is from the metropole that come the best products, the most fashionable clothes, and the best French language. It is a Pharaonic society—and nothing indicates it has completely disappeared today—that only measures itself to the center and could be described as the unrolling of several cloudy lines around a fixed point of reference and rotation: the metropole. The society believes in the boundaries between social classes; the rounded, disconnected nature of the races; the incommunicability between different social spheres; and the truth of the pigmentocracy.
While preaching the virtues of “Eternal France” and hammering home the republican values, they create—in people’s heads and on paper—all sorts of different and contradictory statuses, a gradated palette of differing degrees of citizenship. The colonial official himself, who lives in town, refers to the planter as “marécageux,” or “swampy,” and all the more so as he is not a French national, a status they are careful not to afford him. There are two schools: the “European school,” for the Europeans and the assimilated (children of colonists and French officials, the odd offspring of rich Malagasy families); and the “official school,” for the Malagasy. For the first school the principal comes from France, and the teachers are recruited locally. In the second the principal and the teachers are Malagasy, and the children go there barefoot and come out destined for modest careers and lowly jobs. In their speeches they talk of eliminating racial and social differences; in fact, they promote them. Finally, right at the bottom of the ladder is found the “most primitive stage of civilization,” “the wretched life of the unclothed races,” the “civilized primitives,” as they say in the newspapers (or in their speeches at the chamber).
A certain idea of colonization thus comes to light across the pages, mixed with solicitude and profitability, alternating between the public powers and the private interests, including all political tendencies, from the Cartel of the Left and its epigones to the National Bloc and it successors: a permanent toing and froing between civilizing values and commercial strategies. It is impossible for the colonial not to be ambiguous: the great fiction of humanism and progress accompanies this enterprise of guardianship, which presents itself as a benevolent, civilizing force. It is the coming together of the rights of man and the law of the jungle.
*
Above all, language is the object of a maniacal attention, a deranged surveillance, as if they suspect everything comes from it, that everything passes through it and that one day it could call everything into question: so, it is examined closely and taken apart, selected and separated, delimited and distributed—like it is the most precious commodity.
There is on the one hand the florid French of France, festooned and of higher social value, and on the other the always-suspect locutions of the bad speakers of the outre-mer. People praise the flowery French of the metropole, delicate, ornamented, with its interlaced intricacies: its skies are of vair, and its land is covered in embroidery. Boxwood trimmings line the contours of its flower beds. Every path of grass trod upon by the white frost of its language is like a gold lamé train, every bush a radiant piece of silverware . . . Behind, rumble words emerging from the desolate swamps, from shunned lexicons, unworkable grammars, and from the dark, poison-filled pages of the Tropics. There are the cathedrals of high French, its lintels and tympanums, its arches, its columns (sublime, necessarily sublime), and the language of down below, a masonry of terrible words, crowned with a black halo, that smells of farts, red beans, and piss. The time is certainly not far away when the Patricks and the Raphaëls, kids with names of angels or saints, or the Simones and the Maryses, children with the names of nuns and aviators, will make the old edifice shake and topple over. Already there are rising up all over the place words from French Guiana, words from Guadeloupe, Africa, and Martinique, preceded by some splendid words from Uruguay, beautiful like the talons of birds of prey. Mulatto words, chabin words, mixed-race words, a whole set of phrases that for the moment are seen only as mortal emanations from the mangrove of languages.
But for now what you have is the waltz of euphemisms: the conquest is “pacification,” revolts are “incidents” (or “troubles” when there are too many casualties), and the great wars of independence are grudgingly afforded the status of “events.” The development of the conquered land becomes the “economic utilization” of the colonies. Naming is the most effective means of control: they remove vowels (the fabulous rainbow of vowels in the Malagasy language), they truncate, they amputate, they mutilate. Antananarivo is converted into Tananarive, they cut Toamasina to Tamatave, they reproduce Mahajanga as Majunga . . .
And they could have gone further! . . . In a 1902 issue of the Quinzaine coloniale, a reader wonders gravely: “Is it acceptable to let survive indefinitely these names that rebel against French minds: Manjakandriana, Ambohidrahino, Maevatanana, Andranogokoaka, etc., etc.? . . . Why not replace them with French names that mean something, such as Belle-Fontaine, Haut-Mont . . .”
If the relationship with the foreign language itself indicates the degree of welcome and resistance to the speech of the other, one can say that colonization was in most cases exceptionally deaf, unwilling to listen.
We should not, of course, make things seem worse than they are. We could also mention the enrichment of a certain local middle class, backed up by the medicalization, real, and the education, proven (although very insufficient), of the society. Yes, certain people are irreproachable: midwives, leprosy doctors, nurses mourning the deaths of children in shacks, administrators who learn the language and conserve the cultural treasures, teachers dedicated to their mission and trying to educate, train, and transmit knowledge. Certain ones perhaps succeed miraculously in combining the just with the imperial . . .
But as for the rest? Yes, there were sanitary improvements and mass vaccinations, but what about the spread of new illnesses and sometimes of full-scale endemics by the colonial conquest? People forget. Yes, there are many more roads and infrastructural developments, but what about the hellish exploitation of the workforce by the imposition of forced labor? People forget. The multiplication of rules and constraints, arbitrary sanctions, convocations, bullying, discrimination? The bans on free movement, collecting wood, requisitions, imprisonments? People forget. The censuses, the shattering effects of war, “the unlimited right to conscript black troops,” permanent surveillance and generalized control? People forget.
Of course, we could always put all of that on one side of a set of scales and, according to one’s history, sensibility, and ideals—or most often, the ideological interests of the present time—decide whether the scales lean to one side or the other . . . But the so-called moustiquaire, the “mosquito net,” that young girl offered to the representative of the state, the administrator visiting the country? Quick, let’s just forget about that.
People forget, too, about the native people and their culture, the multiplicity of regimes and specific codes, the incessant revisions and adaptations, the endlessly disappointed, improbable hope for citizenship, the legal dispensations written into the law itself. It is true that one gets a little lost in all the decrees, orders, mandates and conventions, observances and ordinances, rules and prescriptions, supposed to bring to the colonized their future status as enlightened citizens: assimilation, integration, association, accommodation . . . All of which passes into the tortuous dictionary of colonial language.
When it comes down to it, the native peoples are no longer Malagasy, French, or anything. They are left there, in sufferance, on the overseas shore. Because nationality is never a right; it is a favor that they are awarded. The native people slide from the rank of inhabitants to that of onlookers; they disappear bit by bit from their own country. Absent, phantoms, they are a décor, an ambiance, a picturesque but also exploited and taxpaying ornament in the grand spectacle of progress and colonization, a background canvas. They are there but not there: specters in their own country.
*
Ah, colonization . . . That’s where we are. It is on this theme that readers scratch away at each other, prod each other, tear each other apart, and end up at each other’s throats . . . The tone rises, the definitive truths fall; it all kicks off in the salons. Was colonization an opportunity or an error? Were its advantages real or supposed? Were its ideals false, or were they just led astray, betrayed? From these questions are born conferences, roundtables, sermons, lingering racism, and navel-gazing macerations . . . Chattering and drivel: on all the aspects of the phenomenon—positive, negative, laxative, dubious—minds go into overdrive.
Maxime’s case could well add even more confusion to this complicated picture. Maxime is not an anticolonial, far from it. To a certain degree he participates in the system, he has some Malagasy people under his command, and he will do all that he can so that his children can go to the French school, in which he succeeds. However, he is also an escapee, an émigré, and as such, he will be subjected many times to the policies of the colonial power with regard to foreigners, the administration fluctuating permanently between the search for workers and immigration control, between the concern with favoring French activities and the necessity of finding a place for certain foreign activities that are indispensable to the economy of the Big Island. His acquaintances with the Malagasy are common knowledge: on that score there are many testimonies, and this solidarity will bring to him, as we will see, a good number of setbacks . . . Not only does he pass the greater part of his life in the bush—he sleeps, eats, and drinks with the people there—but even though he has the right to go into the bazary be, the covered market reserved for “Europeans and those of similar stature,” he is most often seen at the bazary kely, the market for the indigenous people. He is, as is said of other colonists at the same time, bougnolisé, a vulgar term for “gone native.” He has a real skill for entering into others’ ways of thinking and taking on their mores. I think this is the only thing that really interests him at heart.
The color of his skin, above all, remains a subject of much conjecture—in those times, no more so than today, it is a not insignificant detail. Is Maxime “white,” “tanned,” or “light brown”? As soon as you go into the issue of his pigmentation, the question of nuances becomes infinite: his skin color seems to vary in time as well as according to his place in the social hierarchy. The descriptions of his skin color differ in effect according to the stage in his life and the state of his fortune. According to various testimonies (newspaper articles, police reports, oral accounts), his skin is variously mahogany and like molasses, plum or peach, cinnamon or caramel, sapodilla, pistachio . . . pinky yellow, ripe banana . . .
One detail recurs often: he has a white torso and tanned legs. They also say that his lips are thick—does he have African blood? Likewise, one doesn’t know exactly what nationality he claims: British? French? Malagasy? Perhaps he claims the three at once. For some he came from Bordeaux, for others from Saint-Malo (curiously, always seafaring towns). Some say he is American, others say he is Catalan. Maxime is like that. He mixes up all the signs of “civilization.” He is colored and colorful: with him you never know with which ghost you are dancing. He is endlessly various, a spectrum of color. He is a color chart. One day this will be held against him, as might be expected.
Administratively, he has a “foreign visitor” visa that he has to pay for and renew every year. When independence comes, the stamp changes—a pretty, ruffled palm tree will replace the august republican statue, and that is that. Ironically, this card carries the statement “Definitive identity card,” even though he has to take it back every year. No state, neither the colonizing nor the decolonized, will afford him any form of existence other than this paradoxical, transitory and renewable, eternally minority, definitively temporary definition.