Do we have a place in the decolonial sphere? We are neither “racialized”, nor “non-white”, nor “black”, nor “black”, nor “indigenous”, but I want to express to you why I need to get closer to decolonial struggles. I want to express to you the centuries of contempt vis-à-vis our language which is not French, our accent which is not that of the economic and media dominant, our absence from theater sets, the media, the cinema. I want to express to you the fatigue of having to justify the universality of our subject over and over again.
I want to tell you that at the same time that France was colonizing the world and implementing slavery, it was operating a vast operation within France to colonize consciousness, to destroy linguistic diversity, to prevent children to speak the language of their parents, to make us admit that there was only one language of progress and that it was French, and thereby to make us believe that there was only one possible path, that of progress. All means were good to glorify the idea of the universal greatness of France and of French, including those of historical revisionism. Including those of bodily harm to children, those of humiliation and contempt.
The question of the contempt for the popular cultures of France, and of the colonialist thought of the French State in the direction of the particular cultures of the interior – I could have dared to express the expression autochthonous cultures – cannot be excluded from a back of the sleeve, on the pretext that we would not have been colonized in the sense in which it is most commonly understood, that is to say by weapons, genocide and slavery in support. I could specify here that, as regards the armed conquest and the genocide, Languedoc, from where I am, has already paid a heavy price to France during the crusade known as “against the Albigenses”, followed by a century of daily terror, with its thousands of pyres, orchestrated by the Inquisition. But here I am not going to start counting the deaths that would justify that we are more or less worthy of claiming to be victims of colonialism.
All the more so since I could even paint a happy picture of our situation: I could be happy that the language was taught, that it was sung. I could be happy that carnivals are reinventing themselves, that villages are recreating their totem pole. I could point out that there are public policies in favor of artistic creation in Occitan. I could have the honesty to say that it is a joy to have found an artistic path in our language. And that it is perhaps even an ease, given that we are financially helped, and also more easily spotted because carrying a particular history, a particular artistic “color” in the immense choice of the proposals of creations which flood the culture market in France every year. For some artists who struggle to make a living from their creation, we are even considered privileged. We can, and even we must put forward this joy, which is real for many actors of our Occitan world, without masking the reality of theater, publishing, teaching, which are held at arm’s length by the strength of the militants who snatch some alms from the State, while it is no more and no less a question of the survival of a language.
Our realities are diverse and today the feeling of dispossession remains. Our language is in danger and all that we could qualify, as a very subjective but nevertheless very real whole, of the art of living, that is to say our particular relation to the world – neither more valid nor less valid than ‘no other – is slowly becoming diluted in the mainstream media culture.
The feeling of dispossession remains. Our ability to put things into perspective obviously depends on each person’s construction, their ability to detach themselves from a situation or not, their humor or lack of humor, their ability to confront or their predisposition to silence. We are not equal in the face of the feeling of dispossession and in the face of the feelings that result from it: from the feeling of loss of link to that of loneliness, of the feeling of not belonging to any community to that of exclusion, of that of to be dominated to that of discrimination, from that of cultural poverty to that of idleness. We are not equal and all these feelings belong to everyone and are always respectable. Prioritizing aches and pains is nonsense to anyone capable of empathy.
The feeling of dispossession remains and it is not only respectable, but it must be understood. We have been dispossessed in the past centuries of our popular culture, then self-dispossessed of what was left of it in the twentieth century by dint of telling us our unworthiness and the uselessness of our language. Today the place is free, brains are available for the mental colonization of the dominant: the State and the big industrialists insinuating themselves at all levels, social and intimate, of our lives. Our culture has become so diluted in the dominant capitalist and media culture, which for so long has been selling us its illusions of happiness, that we are molding ourselves into a collective dream, in the image of the owners, by their talk, by their accent, their clothes, their way of life – without even having the means of our dreams! It is so long ago that we abandoned the popular uses that characterized us to industry, that the essence of our culture, our universe, our art of living, our relationship to the world, our internal geography and the art of tell it, have dissolved into it. Our culture and our language are so erased that we are even dispossessed of the legitimacy of our actions, our creations or our struggles, which are considered unnecessary. And here we are forced to justify ourselves again and again for their common sense, even though, writing poetry and singing in Occitan is not always a choice, but an obvious fact that is simply necessary.
To each his own, of course. Each has its own story, none is comparable, certainly not hierarchical on an illusory scale of victimization. We are all building discourses, composing music, creating aesthetics on ruins left by capitalist and colonialist industry. If it is a hydra, as we sometimes like to call the system by granting it the existence of a living being, it is still in full possession of its means of destruction. The situation is as dramatic as it is unexpected for all those who wish to find a fraternal creative path. Everything that was destroyed has to be reinvented. What imaginaries can arise from the cataclysm? When the elders fell silent, because what they had to tell us had been killed by contempt, or because what they had to tell us was a source of too much suffering, what language can we still invent ?
BORREIA!
And pataram pataram cap al center dal monde.
Zinga-zanga! We are dancers of a bouncing earth.
We heat the oil again, which we have not scattered at the foot of the wall.
We will heat the oil again, virgin to gild the sun of the tongue again.
We will reheat the oil, virgin to focus on flight, to raise the sky and slow down by the feet of the order that walks.
And we will chirp like birds lost on the black earth.
And we will roar like burning wolves, overwhelmed but wanting nothing more than to live.And we’ll stamp our feet, knock to the center of the world.
One foot! The other ! We are dancers from a buried earth.
We will heat the oil, the one we did not throw at the foot of the wall.
We will heat the oil, virgin to brown the suns of the tongue.
We will heat the oil, virgin to ignite in flight, to streak the sky with it and set ablaze at the feet of the order which advances.
And we’ll squeal like lost birds on Mother Earth.
And we will howl like wolves in a horde, overwhelmed but only wanting to live.Laurent Cavalié
laurentcavalie(at)free.fr
28, rue Lamourguier
11100 Narbonne
sirventes.com
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