The Oklahoma Nature Theater Is
Recruiting
‘Everyone is welcome’, ‘We seek to employ everyone and allocate them their rightful place’, proclaim all the posters for the Oklahoma Nature Theater. It is the largest theatre in the world. It is so vast that some of its employee-inhabitants have never had time to visit. Hundreds of men and women instantly disguised as gigantic angels and demons are being hired amidst a racket of trumpets and patriotheatrical fanfares. The largest angels and demons in the world.
There is virtually no audience. This is because nearly everyone who arrives in Oklahoma, synecdoche of America, becomes an actor, each person preferring to be seen rather than to look themselves, in this Amerika about which Kafka was the first and ultimate reporter. The majority of these people, yesterday's exiles, are today dressed in costume, magnified and welcome. All that remains for them to do is to appear on the stage, which extends more or less from one edge to the other. They do it so good-heartedly that whenever they are asked, ‘Where are you from originally?’ not one of them answers: from Russia, from Ireland, from Hungary, from . . .
Once suitably disguised beneath scales and feathers, they in effect become purged amnesiacs and are transformed into reborn Americans. Quite extraordinarily, the repertoire has not changed since 1912, date of the first Oklahoma Nature Theater production, dreamed up by Kafka, from his small room with a view over the river and the Verdict bridge (das Urteil), but how did Kafka know everything there was to know about America, never having been there? It was telepathic and prophetic genius.
Kafka read letters and stories written by the many young delinquents whose Jewish families Kafka knew, and who rid themselves of their children after the second prank by dispatching them on the Hamburg, which set sail from Hamburg for New York, gateway to the other world, where the youths tested their luck: on this continent you will either sink or swim. Amongst the unwanted travellers from Europe – particularly from Germany – whose journey via the ‘Hamburg-Amerika’ has been recorded and is perhaps found on the Internet (because the ‘Hamburg-Amerika’, being a German company, naturally had a sound sense of order and records of people on board are archived forever), one comes across an entry for 15 July 1901 which lists the names of Karl Rossmann, aged sixteen, son of the Rossmann and Jakob families, and Benjamin Jonas, member of the Jonas and Meyer families, aged eighteen, my grandmother's younger brother, the eighth and somewhat wayward child. The Oklahoma Nature Theater welcomed and recruited these youngsters without delay, giving them roles as either angels or demons.
The most outstanding thing in this so called ‘American novel’ is that Kafka describes America, not only as the country cannot not be, an unlimited labyrinthine actualisation of the promise, the promised land – something owed, just as would be, will be and will have been every promised land that has been terribly realised, but also as it continues to be and will persist in being. One hundred years ago Angels and Demons opened. Today, in Bushite times, the play has changed: If you are not one of our Angels you are one of those Demons.
I was in a taxi going from Washington Square to the big rusty Brooklyn hangar which houses the Academy of Contemporary Music on the left and the Battered Women's refuge on the right, all of whom are black, coincidentally.
My driver, a corpulent man with a somewhat dubious pinkish complexion and with tattoos along his arms, a rather seedy ex-marine with an air of goodness about him which emanated from beneath the grimy white coloured skin, expressed his concern.
‘What is a woman like you (which I took to mean white and well dressed) doing in a neighbourhood like this?’
‘I am meeting up with my theatre company, which comes from France, that's one explanation, who perform here, far from Broadway, in this big semi-musical, semi-miserable hangar that looks like a Red Cross shelter, and they are putting on stage plays that fear neither rust nor shit nor blood.’
And so I told him the story of the famous warrior king whose wife assassinates him the very day he returns victorious, as a punishment for their daughter's assassination, whose throat the king, in spite of himself, had ordered to be slit to pay the reigning gods of the time for the right to cross the seas and go to war. My driver nodded his head, having nearly been a member of the jury in a similar affair.
‘Where was this?’
‘This happened somewhere between Europe and Asia’, and my driver, putting himself in the jury, wondered who would be in the dock, and if there was the slightest hidden ‘reasonable doubt’ which would decide for or against capital punishment.
‘And to think that these tragedies were written 3,500 years ago’, I say as if it were yesterday.
‘How can that be?’ exclaimed my fellow juryman. ‘Did men exist before the time of Jesus Christ?’
‘Just like today,’ I replied. ‘Men hell-bent on war, whatever the price.’
We parted amidst dreamy effusion. He came from Superior, Wisconsin, on the edge of Lake Michigan. I, from Oran in Algeria, but I did not dare to tell him. Whenever I am in the USA I give it up, not that I become an angel or a demon, but out of politeness: I don't want to disconcert the people I am talking to by invoking unknown spectres around them. Algeria does not form part of their wealth of knowledge. And so I say: Paris, France, in the same way I say Paris, France when I am in India. Oran is so absolutely removed from Superior, Wisconsin. We had in common a primitive interest in throat-slitting amongst families and in the fundamental complicated crimes.
But on the other hand, Superior, Wisconsin is so beyond the powers of our European imagination. Do we have a notion of Montana, of Oklahoma, of the Kentucky border, of Mazar-i-Sharif, of Suleimania, Ithaca, New York? We still cannot comprehend to this day how someone can be Persian. It is inconceivable, both intellectually and morally. ‘To think that seven hundred thousand Iranians live in Los Angeles’, California suddenly thinks, frightened. And starts detaining hundreds of Iranians under the pretext that they are (undoubtedly) Afghanis, or else Iraqis.
I first came across fear in the USA; it was a long time ago, during the sixties. Here are the facts. I was consulting Joyce's manuscripts in the Beineke Library at Yale. The library décor was reminiscent of a necropolis, a museum, luxuriant, offering cold sensual delight. Suddenly a sharp pain, a stylet went through my left eye; it was a twin attack, in my only ‘corrected’ eye, a stab in the back, lightning. A young man was chuckling as he read Milton's Samson Agonistes in front of me. What was making him laugh? Blind Samson's lament, o dark dark dark amid the blaze of noon. O darkness three times dark in the heart of the noontime inferno. It's so bright that the light I cannot see burns at the very core of my soul. The speck of dust scores through the corneal diamond under the pressure of the contact lens. The word lens, the word contact. The single eye drowns. The other eye without a lens was scratched through in early childhood. Scratched from the world of those who see.
I did not see anything for a moment. I could hear my neighbour in the library laughing.
I was expelled, with this foreign body in my single eye. He was doubled over, admiring the doubly blind Samson, blind in both eyes, in spite of, or because of these two beautiful eyes eager for beauty, but also blind from having been sightless without realising it, and henceforth for all eternity, all the way to the story of the blind who are fighting over Palestine in Israel, Eyeless in Gaza.
Is it (because) at the very instant a speck of dust enters one's eye that fear enters the story? My one ‘corrected’ eye was bathed in tears, I could not see anything, I was lost and apart, I had fallen into separation, ostracised, deprived of the world.
When my sight returned, I was totally lost. When one is totally lost, one does not know it. One has a foreign body in the eye and one does not know it.
I had landed in America from the West and the next day I entered in a state of Astrayness. I studied alone during the summer at Occidental College, a university completely devoid of people. Not far from this empty space, beneath my stupefied gaze the people of Los Angeles divorced the same day they married, they called love treachery, and setting all memories aside, enjoyed the fabulous present of their country. The Sheriff, a Sioux, a Blue Beard from the town without a centre, was marrying his fourth Swedish wife the same day his eldest daughter was getting married. Each was more than foreign, but each and every one of them was at home in their madness. I was scared of becoming an other. This fear has never left me. It awaits me; whenever I try to go through the West or the East gate, it is there, it stamps my visa, it pushes me on to the stage of the Nature Theater, Perform! it cries. Yes, but what?
To summarise: I have been going to the USA for the last forty years; the moment I land on US soil I become unknown, bizarre and unimaginable and not only to the taxi driver, to the hotelier, to the forty-five year old woman seated next to me in the plane who is flying for the first time and whose friend is the head of the Syracuse Police, but also to myself, I become foreign and distant, as if I were born 3,500 years ago. It's that the USA has the greatest altering power in the world. From one moment to the next, one ceases and one becomes. One can either become American, or one can become an ‘alien’. One can be welcomed with open arms like the long lost traveller or in a blink of an eye one can be stopped and thrown across the line, behind the invisible and mobile fence which distinguishes, disassociates, separates, unadmits and integrates one to the other. Having barely landed and approaching passport control I could be someone else. No, I don't look Mexican; I am not a Chicano, nor am I a Sino-Khmer. But seen by Americans with innocence I look as if I could have many possible origins and professions: in the USA I have already been Greek, Iranian, Egyptian, doctor, model, actress, painter, explorer, Parisian, Italian; I myself start to doubt and am ready to acknowledge a string of nebulous guilts.
‘Everyone is welcome’
At O'Hare, Chicago's international airport, with its endless illuminated musical architecture where obeying the security orders I arrive two hours early on 12 October 2002, I am not frisked, no one looks at me, furthermore, no one is frisked or looked at because the two ticket stamping machines have broken down and the only boarding attendant, ostensibly American, is busy trying to dismantle them in vain (I forgot to mention that the USA often becomes India, particularly the airports). Everyone passes through, is passed through, suddenly the United Airlines employee emerges red faced and irritated from the small broken machine and pounces on a suspect, a little Japanese girl about ten years old who comes up to the waist of Her Obesity. She feels her with her finger tips, touches her, she weighs her up from head to toe. The little girl quivers and quakes in her socks.
Why, out of the two hundred passengers, did they pick on her? It's as if a Greek tragedy had gone awry. It's fate. It's as if we were witnessing a Japanese Iphigenia in Chicago. Why this crazy and pointless selection? Precisely because it provides the attendant with the opportunity: see what I am capable of, says the police effigy, and tremble. I am capable of the ultimate absurdity, of the most senseless hostility. You may consider yourselves innocent but be warned; I will frisk your innocence until I find its weakness. And above all it is not because you look Chinese – or Japanese – that you can prove to me that you are not an Arab at heart. Isn't anything possible?
There is always some meaning to be found in these logics of persecution. How to say who persecutes whom, who cheats, who lures, who stabs their finger into whose eye? I even feel vaguely guilty and a little pale myself. Why was I so sure I would be the one to be frisked, hey? What do I reproach myself for? For being or failing to be neither this nor that. In spite of myself I am an unconfessed purjured liar. Was I not born in Algeria? Who, in these traps, can say what ‘Algeria’ means; there are so many and contrary Algerias at that, and what's more I am of intermittant French nationality.
‘French’. What does that mean, who, how much? I read The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, I leaf through a hundred pages, I look for Paris, no, France, no, aha, at last I come across this dwarf, this mite, this tiny little seed!
If our governors read the American papers, what a cure by dwarfism! Ministers: seen from Up High, you are moths. But they don't read. Neither do the others. Hypocritical readers. If they read, if they looked, if they listened, they would get the measure of just how minuscule they are and they would have good reason to be worried and do some work. They are but mere mites, these chic States who, in the belief they speak powerfully, barely whimper. Sure, they can do some good, or slightly less not-so-good. But when it comes to resisting evil they don't even dream about dreaming about it.
Eyeless in USA
It is a known fact, or it is said, that the Americans don't know anything about the non-American world, they are without a mirror or mentor, the other countries feature in small paragraphs on page twenty-five of their newspapers, their ignorance and their indifference to the ‘world’ as ‘the rest’ of their world incites irritation or hatred in the other countries. But: ignorance on one side and ignorance on the other side of the oceans. I arrive in France. I was in the USA; France, like the other countries, has no knowledge of the American world, indeed the USA in the form of their President and their politics takes up a lot of column space in the newspapers, but this does not mean that there is any reading, clairvoyance, knowledge, justice, analysis. The USA has been seeped in the war for months; in France, like in other neighbouring countries, we are in an ‘as if’ situation, as if it were going on above our heads or as if we considered [commesidérait] the state of war declared, prepared, proffered, the fire already lit months ago by the Very Powerful Patron of the Planet to be a joke that does not concern us: the USA go off to war, the heads of the Rest clean their nails in their State-Provinces, the USA are on the road to war, in a state of pre-war and arch-war, so all the Rest, who are in tow while pretending not to be the baggage carriers, all the Rest are already caught up, engaged, committed, affiliated and in consent with all this martial activity which swells every day but 1) it must not be said, 2) it must not be known, 3) it must not be seen, 4) one must be blindly blind.
One can be proud in France: don't we have enough supplies of smallpox vaccines? In France we are superior.
Fable: Polyphemus USA
The USA (les États-Unis d'Amérique) is always in the singular in American. The USA has only one person. USA has only one eye, the same one. Any other is all = one for him.
In order to start to comprehend what is seen from the USA's eye – or what it thinks it sees, one has to stand erect before the port of New York and look at the world, right arm raised, brandishing an object which, according to some, like Kafka, is a sword, and, according to others, a torch, to face what is approaching.
It is quite extraordinary to think that it was Bartholdi, a French sculptor paid by the French, who was responsible for symbolising the idea that the USA illuminates the universe in the form of Liberty.
But holding a torch does not exclude being blind. Interestingly, the Statue of Liberty has its back to New York City.
From time to time, USA bludgeons down the torch on a ship load of foreigners arriving from Asia Minor after a long journey in the hope of being offered hospitality and some of those gifts hosts often exchange. And there stands this deceptive raiser of sheep and goats picking out two travellers full of hope, smashing them against the soil for his dinner: entrails, meat, marrow, bones. One would have thought he would stand in solidarity with old compatriots, having once come from a foreign land himself.
In the primitive Homeric version, USA was a rich shepherd who lived isolated on an island; he lived off the animals’ produce and from his fat cheeses he doused with milk at meal times. In those prehistoric times Polyphemus had only one round eye and never travelled. What he had heard said about the Grecians was enough for him. Once he was taken around the whole of the city of Paris in an hour, it had been enough for him. He had seen the Rest of the World on Fox TV. He knew by prediction from history that someone by the name of Ulysses would blind him with his own hands. But according to the fable he was still waiting for a tall and handsome mortal who would spring up cloaked in great force. That is why, already blind before having lost his eye, he had not seen, he had been unable to see that the blinder in person was standing right under his nose. To have one's eye gouged out, the only eye, by Nobody, a begger, a whippersnapper, a dwarf, is what multiplies the Cyclops’ pain.
Later the story will start up again. One would so much like to have an enemy who was both magnificent and seductive, and we allow ourselves to be Saddamised. There is no point in being tall or rich or the son of God or of the president, if one cannot discern the real real from the fake. It is possible in the USA to take oneself for and to be taken for the actor president of the USA and to end up actually becoming the president, and following on from this possibility, it is logical therefore to think that others can equally be successful impostors and conmen.
Before the war, the war
First sign. War is already upon us. For the last few months some of the prestigious and classical university presses have no longer been publishing fiction, philosophy or essays. The budgets are allocated to publishing books on army history and strategic studies.
Idiomatically we say ‘before the war’, ‘after the war’. ‘Before the war’, during the Second World War, World War II; it was like an imaginary golden age. Before the war, would that be peace? Why is it no one ever says ‘during peace’? Because ‘peace’ only ever existed in a dream. Before the war it was already the war. ‘Peace’ refers to a time during which ‘war’ prepares its eruption.
The USA is currently experiencing a gestation of War, a war which to all intents and purposes seems to have been publicly declared between two castrating forces, following the malevolent and sexually charged assault of 11 September, but whose origins can be traced back to Bush the First and before the time of Bush the First etc. In any event, 11 September, with its terribly cruel signals, cruelly phallic, was the wake-up call to the American population, which struck at the very heart of popular America, the sublime body of the Americans; the totemic posts, the archaic representations, the primitive vulnerabilities, these must not be ignored. All the other countries belonging to the ‘Rest’, those who experienced hundreds of wars and millions of dead are annoyed by the proclaimed bereavement for four thousand people, three thousand five hundred, and finally two thousand eight hundred dead. But death is not counted solely by numbers; horror competitions alone do not stir the imagination or passions. Trauma has its own roots, its own absolute singularity; there is neither justice nor fairness with regard to massacres, to bereavement, to the identification with a crucified body, with a martyred Hussein, with six million Jews in smoke.
Let us not discuss the weight of the pound of flesh or the length of the wound.
The pain that has penetrated the American heart has its own singular colour and depth, not least because to some extent it is ‘the first pain’ they have experienced. ‘It was time,’ will some people say? But there are as yet no winners. What do we know? What do I know about your pain? My Afghan and Kurd refugee friends had never even heard of the Jews’ pain. Each and every one believes him or herself to be the first, the one and only, the worst, the most. Each people cherishes its own atrocious treasure. And so there it is, the planet's unscathed giant received its first arrow in its body proper. It is the beginning of experience. The grief is as great as the country. It even marks the beginning of wisdom, but of this the Rest of the world is uninformed: so many Americans, powerless citizens in an extremely delegated and relegated democracy, demonstrate endlessly and stubbornly against the war. ‘No to war’ is the new Song of Experience which can be heard throughout the USA. But the great misinformation machine – the press and the media are both accomplices of, and completely subservient to governmental powers – they do not circulate the new sound. Whoever is in the USA in person sees it; can see it with their own eyes. Those in power who do not even have a majority still persist and cultivate the super-powerful warrior mythology. The first victim is its twin half, barely in the minority in Congress but with a majority of votes.
One has to differentiate who amongst the Americans forms part of the terrorised and terrorising tradition, currently the Bushians, from those more numerous than the world will admit to, the entire world including the USA of ceremony and appearances, the world that wants to hate, growl, bite and slit throats in imitation of the Bushians. No, those who make up the US population are like us: Europeans exposed to or prey to a confiscated democracy, or as Jacques Derrida says, fettered, recalcitrant, rebellious citizens of a democracy-to-come, still dreamed of, still perhaps to be hoped for and defended in a dream. But the dream is the strongest, though the least armed, part of reality. ‘No to the war’ they say, ‘Not in our name’ even if the war is already going on at this point, they are not behind it. Annulled from our shores with limited responsibility, they are conjured away and made invisible and inaudible behind a curtain of newspaper and a wall of television screens which few potential witnesses make the effort to circumvent. The Rest of the world has no desire to be able to like the Americans. One clings to one's own devil: one is happy. Moral and intellectual laziness is the best shared worldwide vice. The Bushians make me scared. No more or less than any of the other Dog-States, be they Iran, Iraq, my beloved delirious Algeria, the enraged in Israel and the same in Palestine. All those who wish to bite, devour right down to the bone scare me. But the other-Americans, and there are increasingly more of them, I like them more and more.
It is not a matter of indifference where we as peoples locate the danger. The Europeans – let us consider for this purpose that we are more or less a people with a historical, mnesic community, and even if the European body does not know how many people it is made up of, and even if it is fearful of grafts etc. – the Europeans (and I speak here as a mixed European, ‘cut’, or ‘added to’ by an African element), share a long painful history of war. They are former wounded ones, stitched with the past, who rember at present.
Most of the Americans, those who call themselves such, are frightened. Everyday American culture is a ‘culture of fear’. It is a primitive fear, near to the caves, originary, foundational, inculcated at dawn with a supposedly antidotal dose of patriotism. They are fearful. I said culture: they cultivate, they maintain, they appreciate, they produce and consume Fear. It would be incorrect to presume they are ashamed or frightened of being frightened. Quite the contrary: they are not frightened of being frightened, they encourage and praise fear. They are mad with fear and they congratulate themselves. The sage is frightened of being frightened, is frightened of the consequences of fear.
Thoreau was a useless sage: he advised his compatriots not to be frightened, because fear provokes unnecessary cowardice.
After all, the Bushians elected this man who, adjusting his aim of his little eyes, repeats to them every day that they have good reason to be frightened and that he personally has come to bring an end to this fear, with fire and sword. Every Bushian is in possession of one or numerous arms with which to fight fear. He issues warnings. This has now become a political project. He was once known as ‘the fastest gun’. Now he has become ‘the first’. He pre-fires before anything moves. There are some of the older generation, who do not renounce resistance, I have Senator Byrd from Vermont in mind here, and they defend courage in the face of the dictatorship of fear, and stand up in the Senate against this infringement of the Constitution. But they are taken for old men, out of date, museum exhibits. The Bushian Presidents are young; they have the worst before of them. When the worst finally arrives, wished for or forcefully, they will retaliate in centuples.
The Sniper
Each year the ‘Oklahoma Nature Theater’ stages a horrific new play in which a man is hunted down. This is because the Bushian spirit is that of a man hunter. The play unfolds to reveal a structure which is reciprocal: a hunter is pursued by other hunters. Throughout the hunt the audience quivers and quakes in fear, because they identify with the prey (who is also a hunter) and with the hunter. One year the Nature Theater staged the O. J. Simpson Affair. One year the Clinton-Lewinsky-Kenneth Starr Affair. In 2002 we had The Sniper. The Sniper is a play based on Bushian current affairs. It was so successful and caused such sound and fury that even in France extracts were sold, even though we (unfortunately) have hundreds of our own similar scenarios, but if it is made in USA it sells, it has become merchandise, whereas exactly the same story – were it to take place in France at Nanterre Council, for example, is treated as a local mishap.
One has to say that The Sniper was so well done that one might have thought if not sworn to it that it had all been commissioned and executed from the White House by Rumsfeld's men, or some other Bushian advisor predisposed to clandestine propaganda. Let me remind you: the Sniper is an anonymous werewolf who behaved ruthlessly in October 2002 in the State of Maryland, and around Virginia and Washington. Let me remind you: all the American Bushites are marksmen. Some are virtuosos. The man who in France would have been referred to as an assassin or murderer was called The Sniper, like a character in a video game. The Sniper shot someone every second or fourth day. He knew what he was doing. The USA quaked and quivered, the whole country talked about it ten hours a day. The victims were anyone, you or I, chosen indiscriminately regardless of race, class or age. The person in charge of hunting him down (it was very well done) was a good character: Chief Moose, a chief of police a bit Afro-American, who looks like Colin Powell, the perfect man for white and black identifications, virtuous, moral, serious, angry, firm, overwhelmed, reassuring, who could do nothing. All the country's criminologists talked about it, as did the politologues, the experts on terrorism, on Al Qaida, the retired Generals, the strategists etc., and everyone was sick with fear, including my friends. It was appropriate to be frightened, whether one was nearby or far away. The sniper killed one, two, up to nine people, who could well have been one or nine of the 250 million Americans. A journalist interviews a young school boy on television, after another boy from another school had gone on the rampage firing shots at people in school.
‘Hey son, you were really scared weren't you?’
‘Yes sir, I was very frightened.’
‘That's good.’
Had the boy said no it would have been scandalous! But he was a good student. A good patriotic chap. He had his parents and the institution behind him. The schools were immediately closed. Of all the fathers in the town, only one, filmed in the empty public garden with his son, said: ‘Life has to go on, I am going to send my son to school.’ But the school was closed. On television everyone else was playing the sniper's game. If a nurse was shot, the hospitals were closed. Maryland closed down, no one moved. Alone, the Company of Angels were out and about running errands for all those who were terrorised. Right at the top of the ladder, Bush said: We are frightened. We will get him. Rely on me. God, as always is on our side. However, for the first time in history, civil society called on the FBI and the army. Helicopters flew over Maryland and the surrounding area, carefully searching for the needle in the haystack. Everyone forgot or reminded themselves to think about the bombings in Afghanistan. Because ultimately the Sniper proved not to be Bin Laden after all. But as the scenario had intended, it was an inopportune black man who was playing into Bush's hands and for nothing.
Saddamisation
We will get him. We, dreamers, idealists, consider Saddam Hussein a monstrous dictator, guilty of genocide, who needs to be neutralised without incurring the cost of chaos which comes with the destruction of human lives, and we who stupidly do our geopolitical calculations think of him as a deviant and disgusting character. In the USA the Bushites’ current favourite werewolf is a character who is both necessary and familiar in the spectacle that makes everyone shudder; everyone calls him Saddam, this is how he is introduced into homes in the guise of a dreadful buddy. All the talk is about him, every day, there's only Saddam and Go More. Under the pretext of diminishing him, by depriving him of a surname, by giving him a name fit for a dog, we become saddamised, featuring in a perverse scene of a dreadful fairy tale. The Bushian USA conceals an inadmissible desire for its Bugbear in the folds of its puritanical soul. He is cherished, and each and every one is welcome to take his place at the Oklahoma Nature Theater. Everything takes place in Baghdad-Texas. Is there a country in the world where one sees so many obscene masses spread out their tongues and their splendour so frequently and so magnified around this Phallus (elected) promoted amongst all, who makes such great promises of sacrifices. The worst of it is that one can never escape from the Oklahoma Nature Theater, unlike an ordinary theatre, or a nightmare, because it is both the largest in the world and the world itself. At least in these times of terror.
When my friend, the great Iranian writer in exile Reza Baraheni, tells me that the Saddam Hussein he loathes, the mad killer, the Sniper of a million Iraqis, is not worried about the imminent war, so confident is he of winning, it will be another Vietnam, a long war, which will again infest the body of the USA, I am gripped by fear. I realise that unbeknownst to me (I think) I am betting on an American victory after all.
The self-satisfied and narcissistic air of a film star, the big-spectacle plumpness, the calm self-importance of a boxer sporting a moustache who looks at himself in the mirror and believes himself more handsome than the clean-shaven boxer with his fine, square jaw; that's what it is, his conviction, his comfort. It would appear to be his silent way of provoking Polyphemus, while all Ulysses’ companions beg him not to provoke Cyclops’ anger, given that we have finally managed to place a huge stretch of sea between the giant and ourselves. Perhaps this Ulysses, in a sanguine tyrannical guise, wants to be attacked; what does it matter if he loses a few more of his companions and brothers, he wants the impotent giant to throw some mountains at his hull, perhaps he really wants to be included, alone if need be, in the legend books; the monster wants to be crowned a hero in the eyes of the very people who spit him out and whom he has tortured. Has this Hussein, then, found his own way to be transformed into one of those martyrs that these countries haunted by the religious glory called ‘Shaheed’ like to celebrate? Of course he will win, and if he loses it will be a supplementary gain. That is why he is always smiling on every poster in which he features around the world, imitating himself in the charming role of the cinema dictator, whereas on the posters distributed by the other camp, Polyphemus Bush poses ever more angry, the eye of his eye not much bigger than a pin head, surrounded by his advisory ministers with increasingly protruding square chins. Nor should we overlook the fact that he disembarks from his airplane carrying his dog, instead of the much loved ram, who of course appears more human than any Bushian.
The invisible Sniper fired from far away and disappeared as if by magic. The moment the alert was given, all the roads in the area were closed; the army could always be sent in, to bomb where and whom? Up until the day the Sniper left his visiting card not far from his last ambush. It was a tarot card, the effigy of Death. Death had written the following message: Dear Policeman I am God. Chief Moose was furious: some said that God Death could only speak to the Supreme Policeman, to the White House resident. It was one interpretation.
Ground Zero
This is the address we give to the taxi driver. He hesitates slightly; because you can reach zero from all sides. I want to reach zero. Not long ago it was Hiroshima's new address. I have wanted to see the depths and the foundations for a year. There was a time when I too went with you to the Windows on the World and, like us all, Americans or non-Americans (I thought), we believed we could see the World from our window. Those towers and that horizon had the power to provide everyone with a new naïvety, indiscriminately, regardless of race, class, sex or nationality.
Because all humans aspire to a tower of Babel; for children it manifests itself in a desire to be a Grown Up, independent of one's parents. Ground Zero has a great simplicity. It is the tomb of an immense child, the tomb of Childhood. To the left, in front of the now clean depths (because I arrived once the rubble, the thick dust and the thousands of rats had been removed), there is a childlike fresco of the Statue of Liberty which covers the full height of a remaining wall. The people at the fence have their photographs taken. They have come from everywhere. One does not know what the affective value and the interpretation of the photographic document will be. They all babble feebly. The majority of my American friends would not have gone to Ground Zero under any circumstances. According to them it is a remake of the traders in the Temple. According to me it is naked. It is abandoned, yet nonetheless living and miserable. It is the people looking down on its wound. The workmen are calm characters. Their reasons for being there are purely professional. Their costume, in true Oklahoma style, consists of fluorescent yellow and orange jackets, on which the word Contractor is written. The workman works the soil behind the fencing which surrounds Zero. We are separated by twenty centimetres. I ask him what he is doing. He has blue eyes. He answers kindly: ‘I am removing the metal from the cement groove.’ This is precisely what he is doing.
‘Are you building a walkway?’ I say pushing my questioning beyond the allocated square metre.
‘Yes, it will be temporary’, he says, ‘but what do we know.’ And he does not venture further. A little further on, in search of the church of disaster. There is no lack of churches, the unemployed Afro-American tells us. Pray here, it's right next door. But we are searching for the tiny little church which has seen everything. We finally find what we are looking for, Saint Paul out of the dust, after the deluge of dust, surrounded by ambulant-photos-souvenirs, T-shirts, African bracelets, bagel traders’ stalls. The four sides of the little building, which dates from another era, are adorned with innumerable rent and heart-rending monuments, soiled, it's a temple to be found in Bombay or Calcutta; a vast number of small teddy bears, hundreds of trophies, caps, football helmets, hand-written streamers, we will never forget you, passport photos showing permanent smiles, mouldy garlands, fresh and decomposed flowers. People walk up and down, pensive, sucking on their giant cups of Coka-Cola; at the corner of these archives of bereavement without any help of sublimation or art, the Summary: a large teddy bear with a green felt crown of thorns placed askew across his forehead, his resigned posture somewhat collapsed in the style of Falconetti in the role of Joan of Arc that Dreyer passed down to us, icon of the infinitely sad resignation to one's fate. Saint Paul is also a little bit crooked and wears a green felt crown of thorns. The great of this earth laugh at our pain, says the teddy-bear-soul of a certain universe. We have already witnessed this scene, it occurs wherever angels and demons of gargantuan proportions stamp things down, reducing everything to nothing, it will take place tomorrow on another continent, indiscriminately, regardless of race, sex, class or nationality. A great wind violently pulls tears from those who did not intend to spill them.
There will be war once again, everyone will cry, wherever it may be every cheek will be moistened by a human tear divided into you and me. Except for Saddam and Go More, who will pose for the television channels, fake eyes face to face with fake eyes. Eyes Zero. The Zero marks the empty place. It marks the place where there isn't any.
25 December 2002
Translated by Jane Metter (revised by Eric Prenowitz)