Entretien entre Patrick Chamoiseau, lauréat du Prix Marguerite Yourcenar 2023 et Bertrand Leclair

La Scam

Beaucoup se souviennent de "l’oiseau de Cham", alias le "rapporteur de paroles" qui orchestrait la spirale polyphonique constituant "Texaco". Ce grand roman de la créolité en marche a valu à Patrick Chamoiseau un prix Goncourt retentissant en 1992, six ans à peine après la parution de son premier livre, Chronique des sept misères.  En inventant son chemin sur les traces magiques des conteurs créoles surgis de la catastrophe esclavagiste, son dernier roman, "Le vent du nord dans les fougères glacées" (Le Seuil, 2022), forme un lumineux diptyque avec l’essai publié, "La nuit, le conteur et le panier" pour explorer les sources de la création artistique d’une manière inédite, et témoigner ainsi d’une forme d’accomplissement.  C’est donc pour mieux approcher un écrivain, appréhender son univers, (re)découvrir son talent que le Prix Marguerite Yourcenar de la Scam met en lumière un auteur ou une autrice pour l’ensemble de son œuvre.

Transcript

00:00 Thank you very much Patrick Chamoiseau and Isabelle for this splendid beginning

00:06 which will not necessarily make it easy to bounce back into a new conversation.

00:12 It is also, as a member of the Commission, extremely happy and proud to participate in this award ceremony

00:22 to the great artist of the language, Patrick Chamoiseau, alias "Speaker of the Word", alias "Bird of Cham"

00:29 and this flamboyant literature of an intelligence of the world that is essential to us,

00:36 precious and essential to us, which has been going on for almost 40 years now.

00:42 And recently, the last book published by Patrick Chamoiseau,

00:50 "The North Wind in the Frozen Flowers", which is an extraordinary novel,

00:54 is a form of accomplishment for me, a new dimension to this work.

01:00 We will talk about this later.

01:02 I had planned to start by mentioning, with Patrick's agreement,

01:08 the tragedies that were repeated in the Mediterranean last week,

01:12 perhaps 700 dead and a tragic reminder of the tragedy on the island of Lampedusa,

01:20 but I will not go into detail because it is also a matter of commitment that is underlying.

01:25 I was obviously relying on "Friars Migrant" to launch the debate,

01:29 which was published in 2016 in the Seuil editions,

01:32 which shows the fervor of indignation and the need that Patrick Chamoiseau shared with Édouard Glissant.

01:39 The book is in the memory of Édouard Glissant.

01:43 I will get to the first question through the word "lethargy",

01:48 which is quite the opposite of Margaret Thurston's or yours.

01:54 There is a collective lethargy, to varying degrees,

01:59 which is collectively extraordinarily powerful today.

02:02 I use the word "lethargy" in the knowledge of the cause,

02:07 knowing that the word comes from the word "summer",

02:10 but not so much from the "River of Hell",

02:12 but rather from the goddess Summer, who personifies oblivion.

02:15 This is what allowed Martin Heidegger, for example,

02:20 to evolve on the question of truth by finding the Greek word "alletheia".

02:26 "Alletheia" is built on the word "summer",

02:33 as if truth was ultimately a revelation out of oblivion

02:37 of something that everyday life and economic machinery,

02:41 capitalists, etc., constantly lead us to forget, to deny.

02:46 I think this is not very present in extremely different proportions.

02:50 It is not at all the current situation.

02:53 Ossanty is not comparable to the tragedy of the Mediterranean,

02:57 which is also played out in the Manche.

02:59 But it is something that is extremely present since Texaco and even before.

03:03 This collective lethargy that we must react against,

03:11 which we still find in the North Wind, in the frozen ferns,

03:15 since the main characters, in search of the last master of the word,

03:20 will have to break free from this everyday life that invites lethargy.

03:25 So, excuse me for being a bit long,

03:28 my first question is to what extent,

03:32 the hypothesis I made when I was reading some of your books,

03:35 can we say that writing is getting out,

03:39 writing and reading, by the way, is getting out of lethargy?

03:42 Yes, I think that one of the functions of art

03:50 is to move back what we can call the limits of reality.

04:01 In general, the Homo sapiens lives in his imagination.

04:06 The Homo sapiens is confronted with the unthinkable of the real,

04:11 and he will develop a whole series of symbolic systems, etc.

04:18 and he will build a small reality,

04:21 what we generally call a culture or a civilization.

04:24 It is an interpretation of the real, which is full of unbeatable mysteries,

04:30 but reality gives some answers and we find its balance in reality.

04:35 This means that most of the archaic communities

04:39 were made up of individuals who were at their service,

04:44 and the community submitted the individual to the community,

04:49 and this gave them a kind of existential readiness.

04:54 But this readiness, as it is cut off from the real,

04:59 because reality is conformed to what we like,

05:03 it is reassuring, we have certainties, we have truths,

05:07 the real remains absolutely unthinkable, unpredictable,

05:12 and the real often defeats reality.

05:15 This means that a community that is over-adapted to its reality,

05:19 to its symbolic system,

05:21 is very quickly swept away by the emergence of the real.

05:26 This is why in most human cultures,

05:29 there are two beings who have always preserved the communities

05:35 of the dilution of the structures of the imaginary,

05:41 which are absolutely deadly.

05:44 The first was the wizard,

05:46 because the wizard remained on the side of Edgar Morin,

05:52 who explains that in a community of men,

05:55 there is the prosaic, eating, drinking, safety, etc.

05:59 And then there is the poetic, love, mystery, the invisible, singing, dancing, etc.

06:06 And on the side of the state, the state of the community,

06:10 the government of the community, is on the side of the prosaic.

06:13 But there is another power that remains in the face of the real and the poetic,

06:18 it is first of all the wizard.

06:20 The wizard is in contact with, I would say, the unthinkable of the whole universe,

06:26 the whole symbolic system, etc.

06:29 And the son of the wizard is going to be the poet.

06:33 From the line of poets, we will get the artists.

06:36 An artist is generally someone who is positioned in front of the unthinkable of the real.

06:44 The real is like a name outside of the spirit that exists in a community.

06:51 And the work of art is something that brings back,

06:54 that grasps something in the unthinkable of the real

06:58 and brings it back to the reality of the moment.

07:01 And so it's like an oxygen ball, a kind of comet that makes reality explode.

07:07 Which means that generally a work of art provokes what is called an aesthetic stimulation.

07:14 An aesthetic stimulation is nothing more than an elevation of consciousness and an elevation of knowledge,

07:21 which considerably modifies the hardening of reality.

07:28 And that's why when all these deaths took place in the Mediterranean,

07:32 and when the Mediterranean began to become a cemetery,

07:36 we heard a lot of economists, sociologists, and a lot of experts.

07:42 The capitalist system has put us back in the hands of the experts.

07:48 And we no longer hear poets and artists.

07:51 Yet there is a thought of the poem, there is a thought of art.

07:57 An aesthetic stimulation is a vision of the world.

08:01 It's not a truth, but it's a problematization that opens up the imagination

08:07 and allows us to produce from the world and, indeed, to renew the foundations of the real.

08:12 So dealing with the question of migrants from a poetic point of view

08:18 was, in a way, reoxygenating a dried-up imagination.

08:25 And that's absolutely fundamental.

08:27 And that's where we see that today capitalism dominates us so much

08:33 that we have the impression that it's really...

08:37 I've developed this a lot in a book called "Written in a Dominated Country"

08:41 that I call "The Silent Domination".

08:44 Capitalism has captured our great poetic desire

08:49 and put it directly into consumerism.

08:54 Our purchasing power, our consumption, our individualistic repression of our family.

08:59 That's the object of...

09:01 And even culture has become an object of...

09:06 And what's more terrible when we have a form of totalitarian domination

09:10 is that we have a direct collapse of creativity.

09:13 We have a collapse of poetry.

09:15 Poetry being captured, in any case, the great desire that opens up poetry

09:19 being captured and put into the impulses of purchasing power.

09:23 We have a collapse of collective creativity

09:27 and we have a drying up of the imagination.

09:32 And why do we have this drying up?

09:35 Because if there wasn't a collective drying up of the planetary imagination,

09:40 no one would accept that the Mediterranean, every day, and even recently,

09:44 hundreds of people are drowning in conditions...

09:47 It seems completely absurd in a few years.

09:50 We have to change all the world legislation,

09:55 but it reveals the inhumanity of the capitalist system

09:59 which leaves us...

10:01 As these are no longer the forms of archaic domination,

10:03 we don't hit our heads, and again, it can happen,

10:07 but the system being a domination of the imaginary,

10:11 we feel free,

10:13 while we are as dominated as the TEL and the SERF.

10:16 So there is a need for cultural policy.

10:20 That's why we absolutely need to weigh the importance

10:25 of the policies that are proposed to cultural policies.

10:30 I think that without cultural policy, we have a lot of difficulties.

10:44 There is a lot to be said about this differentiation

10:50 between reality and the real.

10:52 The eruption of the tragic is the return of the real,

10:57 and what happens in the Mediterranean, for example,

11:00 some days, and unfortunately lethargy takes it away.

11:03 I am very happy to hear you,

11:06 because it's not the first time I hear you,

11:09 but I am very happy to hear you,

11:11 because you are not only a language artist or a writer

11:15 who develops a literature that thinks,

11:18 which is not so obvious today,

11:21 even though I think that the question of emotion

11:27 is the first one.

11:29 How, and this is in line with what has just been said,

11:32 how does this emotion, which has no words,

11:35 in your case, it has had twice the language barrier

11:39 to be able to express itself, as you explained earlier,

11:42 with the second barrier that was the learning of French at school.

11:47 But this literature that thinks is something very precious

11:53 that we can only be very happy to give you,

11:57 because I think it's the first time you have learned

11:59 for the whole work.

12:01 And we hear, I think, in what you have said

12:05 since the beginning of this meeting,

12:08 we hear very well the maturation,

12:11 that is to say something that is in the order of the path.

12:14 And so I would like to read just the first lines of a book,

12:20 you may react by contesting the point of view,

12:23 which preceded "Le Vent du Nord dans les Fougères glacées"

12:26 for two years, which is therefore a fiction.

12:28 There is an essay published two years ago,

12:31 "Le Compteur à la nuit et le panier",

12:33 which questions the emergence,

12:36 I will go a little fast, of course,

12:38 the emergence of the counter in the plantation,

12:40 this absolutely incredible phenomenon,

12:42 which is a way of inviting a reflection

12:45 on the sources of art,

12:47 what we heard earlier, a few echoes,

12:50 sources of art that are lost in the night of prehistoric times,

12:53 of which we ignore everything,

12:55 but which in a way,

12:56 and obviously all proportions kept,

12:58 have reemerged in this space of the plantation

13:05 where people had been mixed with each other

13:08 and in fact cut off from their language,

13:10 from their culture, from all their beliefs,

13:12 and had to reinvent something precisely in the face of death.

13:15 This is the theme of the book.

13:18 But I just wanted to quote the first lines of the book.

13:21 It starts by releasing a round bar,

13:24 "The writer is an artist who walks in a very singular way

13:29 towards this unbeatable enigma that is literature.

13:33 His work is therefore a journey towards understanding the art that is his.

13:37 Scattered with the experiences of his contemporaries,

13:40 those who preceded him,

13:42 those who he invokes the emergence,

13:44 this journey remains essentially devoid of a path.

13:48 Like any artist, the writer invents a path that never ends,

13:52 a way, V-O-I-X, that always seeks its field.

13:57 This is how it remains desiring.

13:59 And yet, if this path continues,

14:04 in a way, in the unknown,

14:07 the unknown that is to be unravelled,

14:10 today there are a number of stones

14:13 that are placed on the path that has been traversed.

14:16 And this path that has been traversed is also,

14:19 today, it is probably the coming of age,

14:23 the complexification of the work that is in it,

14:26 is a path that has gradually elucidated

14:30 the initial puzzlement that operated in a theoretical fog,

14:35 for example, certainly very thick.

14:38 And so, this idea of the journey that you have taken,

14:42 which allows you today to have a speech that thinks of literature.

14:46 Yes, I think that there is a thought of art,

14:52 there is a thought of poetry,

14:54 there is a thought of writing,

14:56 there is a thought of the novel.

14:59 Literature is a mode of knowledge,

15:04 in any case, a mode of confrontation with the real,

15:08 that is, the unthinkable of the real.

15:10 A great novel informs our realities,

15:15 new dimensions that the great novelist manages to grasp

15:20 in the unknown of the real.

15:22 And that's how there is a surging.

15:24 So an aesthetic stimulation is absolutely precious.

15:30 And what is happening today is that the archaic communities

15:37 that used to dominate the individuations

15:42 have been carried away by the relational phenomenon.

15:45 Civilizations, cultures are mixing,

15:47 very large individual mobility,

15:49 so an exacerbated process of individuation.

15:52 Capitalism has overturned this individuation

15:56 and has perverted us into individualism,

15:59 whereas an accomplished individuation gives birth to a person

16:03 who develops solidarity,

16:06 which makes her sensitive to the full fight in the world.

16:10 So we can say that today the artist is alone.

16:14 We had national artists,

16:16 we could have national literature.

16:19 Today, all of this makes no sense.

16:21 Today, more than ever, and it has always been the case,

16:24 it was always individuations.

16:26 We have never had an artist who was communal.

16:29 It makes no sense to an artist, by definition.

16:31 It's a singularity.

16:32 But today, the contemporary artist is deprived

16:36 of old partitions, borders, languages, phenotypes, nations.

16:42 It makes no sense.

16:43 They are individuations.

16:45 The fundamental question of contemporary aesthetics

16:51 is to know how,

16:53 now that we are deprived of the existential pre-temporal of communities,

16:58 how to live in relation,

17:00 that is, to live, to build,

17:02 not with an existential pre-temporal,

17:05 but to build personally,

17:07 in stimulations that come from the totality of the world.

17:11 And in stimulations that come, of course,

17:14 from the dominant superstructure that is capitalism.

17:16 So we are very, very largely formatted.

17:18 But the artist escapes from a certain…

17:22 the conscious artist,

17:23 the artist escapes from the dominant forces.

17:27 I don't remember if it was Agamben who said

17:30 that being contemporary of an era

17:32 is precisely not being able to adapt to the era,

17:36 that is, to see the shadows, the oppressions, etc.

17:39 And artists are always bad in their era.

17:42 Why? Because they see the negative forces.

17:44 So they escape from that,

17:46 which means they have an individual construction,

17:50 which means that aesthetic production,

17:52 a great novel, a great work of art,

17:54 great songs, etc.,

17:57 is a testimony to this construction of an individual

18:00 confronted with the chaos of the world

18:02 and confronted with the forces of dominant oppression.

18:04 And it is in this way that the aesthetic stimulation of a great artist

18:07 allows us to build our own individuation.

18:10 This in devices that are no longer devices,

18:17 the nation, the language, the skin color, etc.,

18:20 but devices related to the relationship

18:23 that we maintain with the world.

18:24 What are the families of writers?

18:26 An anthology of writers can only be made

18:29 from the structures of the imaginary.

18:31 Whatever the mode, if you take the nation,

18:34 if you take the language, if you take the skin color,

18:37 all of that doesn't work.

18:38 What works is the relationship to the language,

18:40 the relationship to diversity,

18:41 the relationship to the dominant forces,

18:44 the relationship to language.

18:46 There are many elements that make up new families.

18:51 Hence the importance of a notion like that of mondiality,

18:54 which you can oppose to the globalization.

18:57 Yes, what happened is that Western colonization

19:01 breaks most cultures and civilizations.

19:06 It creates a phenomenon of planetary knowledge.

19:09 Because Christophe Roland is a colonialist.

19:12 He arrives and then he takes possession of land.

19:15 What happens is that we have a phenomenon

19:20 of the world becoming world with colonization

19:25 in terrible conditions, under the auspices of colonialism,

19:29 that is, racism, domination, exploitation,

19:31 dehumanization, chaos of nature, etc.

19:36 What happens?

19:38 The world has become world, so it starts to move backwards.

19:41 Capitalism, which was imbued with colonization,

19:45 will explode and we will have planetary capitalism

19:48 which will take the old liberal philosophy

19:50 and create this economic system that claims freedom

19:54 but which is a catastrophe.

19:56 This means that all the peoples of the world,

20:00 artists, etc., a little more conscious,

20:03 feel that in mondialization there is a phenomenon

20:06 of standardization, standardization of the way of life,

20:09 but also a kind of submission to Western standards.

20:13 The trend has been for some time to reject mondialization,

20:17 that is, to close the doors and windows and try to ...

20:20 While Glissant says, "No, on the contrary,

20:22 we must keep the doors and windows open.

20:25 We cannot leave the world to colonialists and capitalists.

20:28 On the contrary, we must fight with the world. "

20:31 That's why he says, "In mondialization,

20:34 under economic mondialization,

20:36 let's try to guess the other world, which is mondiality,

20:40 where the imaginary, the individuations,

20:43 the creations meet, the mixtures are made,

20:49 the stories are broken down.

20:51 Anyway, a whole world that we need to learn to decode

20:54 and which he calls the relationship.

20:56 So the idea of mondiality is fundamental.

20:58 - And it echoes something that I would have liked to hear you

21:02 say for a long time, but time goes by.

21:06 It echoes the very important diptych in your itinerary

21:10 that the slave, the old man and the monk form,

21:13 and then write in a dominated country,

21:15 which you mentioned earlier.

21:17 Just to remind you how the trigger

21:22 of the slave, the old man and the monk

21:24 is the idea that it is not about finding a essence

21:28 but about rehumanization, a struggle for rehumanization.

21:32 - Yes, in American-type slavery,

21:37 we have millions of Africans captured,

21:40 we put them in a system of plantation,

21:42 but this slavery that takes place in America

21:44 has nothing to do with ancient slavery.

21:47 That is, there is an ontological damning

21:50 of the Neg phenotype, which continues until today.

21:53 It is the most depreciated phenotype in the world, etc.

21:56 This creation meant that when we had to oppose

22:02 the dehumanization of American-type slavery,

22:05 we had to be reborn in a different way,

22:07 not just resist like Spartacus,

22:09 we had to operate a renaissance.

22:11 We had two forms of rebellion.

22:14 We had the rebellion of the brown neighbor,

22:16 the classic rebellion, Spartacus,

22:19 who leaves the plantation, who takes out his whip,

22:21 who kills the master, who burns the plantation

22:24 and who starts, but he starts to find lost Africa.

22:28 Besides, in the American black movements,

22:31 the first big black movements,

22:33 they will all try to take sticks to find Africa.

22:36 And those who took the boat to find Africa

22:39 were very surprised to see that they were no longer African,

22:43 so there was a problem that occurred.

22:45 So they had denied the phenomenon,

22:48 I would say the kind of washing machine that was the plantation,

22:51 and that had mixed American, European, African culture

22:54 and that had produced anthropologically something else.

22:57 In "Slavery, Man and Homology",

22:59 I try to follow the situation of the new brown neighbor.

23:05 He leaves, but he does not go back to the lost essence,

23:10 he does not go back to Africa, he goes to the world.

23:13 He speaks to the new complexity of the world.

23:16 - And he lets the whole American memory come,

23:18 as well as the memory.

23:19 - He lets the new complexity come.

23:21 The problem is that to resist American slavery,

23:25 you had to find ways to be reborn in a new world.

23:29 And that's the thing.

23:30 And that's a lesson from our scenario,

23:33 a historical situation, a historical framework,

23:37 in which we deepen a human condition

23:41 and we try to see how this human condition finds,

23:44 I would say, the tracks that lead it to us.

23:47 Adrien, etc., Xenon,

23:49 these are characters who seem very far from our reality,

23:54 but who tell us about great issues that are contemporary.

23:57 So American-style slavery,

23:59 all the novels we make,

24:01 those of my generation, those of Gleeson, etc.,

24:04 are novels that inform us about the active forces

24:08 in the contemporary world.

24:10 And that's the subject of literature.

24:12 Contemporary aesthetics in the field of art is the relationship,

24:16 that is, this dynamic of inter-retroaction

24:20 between cultures and civilizations,

24:22 their mixture and the individuations.

24:25 And the need for individuals to build on modalities

24:29 that are no longer communal modalities,

24:32 but that are, I would say,

24:34 common space construction modalities.

24:36 It's a bit complex, but that's how I see it.

24:39 - It's amazing.

24:40 And again, all of this leads to the quest

24:43 for the last master of speech,

24:45 which is an extraordinary experience.

24:47 We will listen to you again very soon,

24:50 but as we must hear the art that is yours,

24:53 I think we must leave room for that.

24:55 Thank you very much, Patrick.

24:57 - Thank you.

24:59 [applause]

25:02 [applause continues]

25:05 [applause fades]

25:07 [ Applause ]

25:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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