When the sea burns

When the sea burns...

Flambeurs, passeurs, métisseurs d'imaginaires transméditerranéens







Dahmane El Harrachi, Yâ Rayâh [2]



And from then on, I bathed in the Poem

Of the Sea, infused with stars, and lactescent,

Devouring the green azures; where, pale float

And rapt, a pensive drow sometimes descends;

Rimbaud, Le Bateau ivre







"When the sea burns"[1]. This baroque metaphor at the beginning of my speech may come as a surprise. In reality, it's not mine. The men and women who invented it have no names, or even faces. And yet there are millions of them. Millions of lives in transit. Millions of memories full of tears, suffering, violence and hope.


I'm talking here about the multitudes of destinies that sail with the currents and winds of history. It's countless human journeys that I want to talk about here tonight. Countless and unique. Because it's always the same crossing. Hazardous and fabulous at the same time. That of all emigrants, exiles, defectors, deserters, resistance fighters, refugees, outcasts, deportees, transhippers, expatriates, beggars for bread or love, seekers of knowledge or the absolute, transmitters of dreams or utopias. It's important for me to evoke here their strange, magnificent and terrible ballet. For it is now for me, for us, the hour of the "pyres before the sea" - to take up Albert Camus' beautiful metaphor at the end of his Petit guide des villes sans passé.[3]



The bonfires I'm talking about light up every night like a huge garland all along the Maghreb coasts. These are the thousands of bivouacs of the ḥarrâga maghrebins. In the media lexicon, the ḥarrâg (حرّاڨ) - singular of ḥarrâga - designates a "candidate for clandestine emigration" (as if it were a contest!). But in the vernacular Maghrebian language - from which this appellation derives - it's much more than that. In the literal sense, the ḥarrâg is an incendiary. But I prefer the term flambeur. In French, this word implies not only the idea of burning by emitting light - we'll see in a moment what kind of clarity this might be - but also that of a risk taken with panache, a form of extreme, mad daring to say the least. As in a game of Russian roulette, where one's own life is at stake.





Back to our ḥarrâg. What exactly does it burn? Quite a lot. And first of all, his civil status documents. So as not to be recognized or identified. This is, to tell the truth, an elementary precaution known to all ḥarrâga. Yet, without him necessarily realizing it, this gesture is fraught with significance and consequences. Indeed, the moment he sets fire to his identity card or passport, the ḥarrâg becomes a "sans papier", a stateless person, a citizen of the world. Through this liberating yet illegal act, he also frees himself from the weight of affiliations, belongings, obediences and allegiances. He resembles the "third-state" swimmer so aptly described by philosopher Michel Serres, when he evokes the figure of the "métis" swimmer:



"The real passage takes place in the middle. Whatever direction the swim decides, the ground lies tens or hundreds of meters below the belly or kilometers behind and ahead. This is the lonely traveler. You have to cross to learn solitude. It can be recognized by the disappearance of references. (...) The body that crosses certainly learns a second world, the one towards which it is heading, where another language is spoken, but above all it initiates itself into a third, through which it transits.[4]"





But it would be far too simplistic to think that this founding event in the trajectory of the ḥarrâg is prepared in joy and gladness. Before the departure, there is this terrible moment. As the cold December twilight slowly invades this North African beach - it could be Tangier, Oran, Bejaia or Tunis - a man prepares to leave his land and his past. Perhaps for life. The flames that consume his paper identity also devour an essential part of his memory. But this is the price he has to pay to invent new dreams, and the light of this mini-burner illuminates the darkness of the journey ahead.





For the identity burner is necessarily a road burner. By which he means those sidings where one wisely awaits death. But also the autostrades and other signposted itineraries where placid, disciplined crowds rush in during the great summer transhumances. Under the watchful eye of speed cameras and other smart Bisons[5], they cross landscapes and cultures at regulated speeds, like so many ready-to-wear decors. From the smile of a cat at the window of a small village in the Algarve, the mystical colors of Granada at sunrise, the poetic mystery of a summer twilight in Fez, the solar gravity of the ruins of Tipaza or the grandiose shadows of Carthage, these hurried multitudes will have retained only the price of the postcard before the next tollbooth.
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As for our ḥarrâg, with the first wave that carries it out to sea, in the swirls of the engine or the oar that are already pulling it out of itself, it erases one by one all known landmarks. He sets fire to the "old parapets" of an "outdated" reality - as he humorously calls it. He leaves it behind. In so doing, he erases and corrects the old portulan on which he had been taught a certain order of the world. At his peril, he inaugurates new trajectories and, with them, a new awareness of travel. But what kind of journey is this? A journey to the Other, to Elsewhere, of course, but one that cannot be imagined without a journey from self to self - the two terms being clearly not equivalent in either time or space. When the paths of childhood burn in the night of departure, we know that we have lost, probably forever, the Ariadne's thread that linked us to the center of ourselves. From now on, our compasses no longer point to a single North: we have to accept that we are off-center. This is the most obvious consequence of de-part.
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But first, we were about to forget the essential. The ḥarrâg, however, has not forgotten it. For we must return to another crucial moment. To the eve. To the wake of the great embarkation. It's in a dingy café, in a seedy gargote where the last hot meal is swallowed, it's in the small square sheltered from the wind where the last cigarette is shared. Then the old man, whom the sea has already washed up so many times that his soul has evaporated with the sea spray, whom the police have already escorted handcuffed to the gangplank of the plane or boat home, starts to talk.































He speaks in a low voice, and the others listen. He reminisces as he unravels the plot of his story. His fable. And the others follow him in his adventures, in every detail of his heroic deed: what the sea was like that day, what the boat was like, how much petrol they had, why they drifted, when the youngest ones started vomiting and getting sick, where the corpses had to be disposed of, how he drank his own urine, how the skin swells and dries under the effect of the salt and the wind, how one morning the coast appeared. And how... And where... And why...





All night long, to the point of exhaustion, the narrator's voice unwinds the thread of the founding tale. And in the painful, flamboyant ardor of nomadic metaphors, in their star-filled heads and bandaged muscles, the ḥarrâga gathered will have already begun their poaching race. Listening to the exploits of the Ancient One, they too will have been confronted with the cruel and eternal whims of that same "winey sea" described, all those centuries ago, by another ḥarrâg in perdition:



"We had just left the island, and no other land appeared, but only sky and sea, when the son of Cronos placed a blackish cloud over the hollow nave; and the sea was darkened by it. The ship didn't run for long; soon Zephyr came whistling in, whirling in a storm; the violence of the wind broke the stays of the mast, one and the other; the mast fell backwards, and all the tackle was hurled into the bilge. As the mast fell onto the stern, it cracked the pilot's skull, shattering every bone in his head, and he, like a diver, fell from the forecastle, his valiant soul leaving his bones. At the same time, Zeus thundered and hurled his thunderbolt at the nave. Struck by Zeus' thunderbolt, she spun around, filled with brimstone smoke, and my people fell from the ship. Like crows, they were carried away by the waves around the black nave, and the god deprived them of their return.[6] "







The return. It's out of the question for the man who burns his ships. Why bother? Why expose himself, like Ulysses, to the terrible ordeal of mirrors and dogs? In any case, the one who returns is merely the ghost of the one who left. And besides, Ithaca is no longer in Ithaca... This is what Algerian poet Habib Tengour reminds us at the end of his fine novel, L'Épreuve de l'Arc:
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"Ulysses completed his exile by making a great bonfire on the agora and bengal fires on the Nerite and on all the highest points of Cephallenia and Zacynthos. He gathered the people together, but it would have taken more than a blaze of brushwood, and something else, for Ithaca to be electrified from top to bottom, and himself sparkling as at the moment of departure for Ilion.[7]"





In reality, it all happened offshore. In a few days of hell, at the bottom of this makeshift pateraor boti[8], a fragile asylum adrift for a small troop of Sindbad(s) in disarray. In this respect, we should probably dare to draw a parallel. The one suggested by a central passage in Édouard Glissant's Poétique de la Relation. In a chapter entitled "La barque ouverte ", he resurrects the figure of one of the millions of anonymous deportees of the Slave Trade. The West Indian poet then relives the crucial experience:



"(...) when you fall into the belly of the boat. A boat, according to your poetics, doesn't have a belly, a boat doesn't swallow, doesn't devour, a boat heads for the sky. The belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a non-world where you scream. This boat is a matrix, the matrix abyss. Generator of your clamor. Producer of all future unanimity. For if you are alone in this suffering, you share the unknown with a few you don't yet know. This boat is your womb, a mold that nevertheless expels you. Pregnant with as many dead as living on borrowed time.[9] "





Can this magnificent allegory of the "barque-matrice" be transposed to the case of the ḥarrâg ? No doubt this would be a case of going too far. For the exile is certainly not a transhipped person, forced by the violence of the slave trader to embark on the slave ship. And yet... Can we not consider the "sea-burner" as a kind of modern-day slave, forced for a multitude of reasons (starting with economic) to leave his homeland to work in the new territories - not to mention domains - of the globalized slave trade? But if we follow Glissant's metaphor, we will in turn be led to conclude that what took place here, in this piece of wood floating in the heart of the Mediterranean, in this melting pot of humanity tossed by the swells, between men who were destined to share this extraordinary destiny, is also something unheard of. As in a Greek tragedy, it's also a little of the fate of the planet that unfolds on the ḥarrâga's boat, lost amid mists and gusts. As a result, we can now say that this experience of the abyss is the best exchanged thing in the world.



For us, for us without exception, and even as we maintain the gap, the abyss is also projection, and a prospect of the unknown. Beyond its abyss, we play on the unknown. We take sides in this game of the world, for the renewed Indies towards which we hail, for this Relation of storms and deep calms where to honor our boats.[10]







This reality of metamorphosis, by which the "flambeur " is radically and violently transformed into a "passeur", therefore implies the loss of original landmarks (topological, identity-based), but above all openness to the great tides of the mestizo fable and to the "logiques traversières" evoked by Michel De Certeau[11], which mobilize a new intellectual posture, a new language, a new imaginary.
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While it's true that the consequences of the colonization undertaken by the West from the Renaissance onwards paved the way for the processes of cultural globalization we're witnessing today, we can't ignore the fact that the Mediterranean has always experienced these currents of exchange and syncretism. In fact, from Hellenistic cosmopolitanism and Roman imperialism to French, English, Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, Christian crusades and Muslim futuhât (conquests), the economic and political rivalries of the Race, (etc.), the Mediterranean common heritage has been formed as much by the sword as by the pen, by war as by trade (in the broadest sense of the term), by love as by rape. Whether we're talking about painting, literature, architecture, mystical practices, music or even cuisine, it's a fact that we owe our region's finest cultural achievements to creators such as Empedocles, Mani, Plotinus, Augustine, Apuleius, Terence, Avicenna, Ziryâb[12], Maimonides, Ibn Arabî, Cervantes, Ibn Khaldoun and Dante, the geniuses of the Baroque, Rimbaud, Picasso, Albert Camus, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Jacques Berque, Henri Corbin, Mohammed Dib, Le Clézio and so many others who, at one time or another in their lives and/or in their works, have all been confronted with situations of exchange, mixing and violence (political, ideological, aesthetic, etc.).).





This is still the case today for these new flambeurs-métisseurs transméditerranéens that are the ḥarrâga and their wandering brothers, transfuges of a globalization that leads them every day and by the thousands to brave death by burning the sea. If some sociologists do not hesitate to see them as veritable "civilizing ants"[13], it is undoubtedly because these young people do not hesitate, like their illustrious predecessors of antiquity or the Middle Ages, to burn down borders. On their frail skiff at the mercy of the waves, they are thus taking part - in pain and urgency - in inventing the new identity fictions of this third millennium, and deciding to take their part (all their part) in the great ballet of globalization and planetary crossbreeding.
































Mourad Yelles, Professor Emeritus of Maghreb and Comparative Literature at Inalco
Member of Lacnad

















Member of Lacnad.
Member of Lacnad.





Notes



[1] This text is a reworked version of an intervention at the round table "Périples, langages de l'exil" as part of the cycle "Non lieux de l'exil / Migrations" (Inalco) in partnership with the Centre Pompidou (BPI - June 6, 2016).

[2] "Ô toi qui t'en vas, sais-tu pour quelle destination? / Tu pars, mais tu finiras bien par revenir / Combien d'inconscients s'en ont repentis avant toi et moi". (From a famous song by the great Algerian singer and lyricist Dahmane El-Harrachi (1926-1980). It has been covered and adapted by numerous North African and European artists).
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[3]. "Don't go there if you feel your heart is lukewarm, and if your soul is a poor beast! But, for those who know the heartbreaks of yes and no, of noon and midnight, of revolt and love, for those at last who love bonfires before the sea, there is there, a flame waiting." (Noces, suivi de L'été. Paris, Gallimard, 1959, p. 13)

[4]. Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit. Paris, Gallimard "Folio/Essais", 1992, pp. 24, 25.

[5] Name of a scheme introduced from 1976 in France to help improve road traffic, especially during vacation periods.
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[6]. Homer, The Odyssey. Translated by M. Dufour and J. Raison. Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1965, p. 185
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[7]. Habib Tengour, L'Épreuve de l'arc. Paris, Sindbad, 1900, pp. 241-242.

[8]. Algerian (Oranese?) version of the famous patera. The etymological origin would be the English boat. Note that by a homophony conducive to generous and fertile ramblings, in ancient Rome, the patera was the dish that hosted offerings made to the gods, notably the Lares. Relation" (Glissant) also involves mystical offerings...
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[9]. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Poetics III. op. cit. p. 18.

[10]. Ibid, pp. 20-21.

[11]. Cf. Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien. 1. Arts de faire (1980). Paris, Gallimard "Folio/Essais", 1990.

[12]. Emblematic figures in the poetic and musical art of Al-Andalus during the medieval period.

[13]. Cf. Lamia Missaoui and Alain Tarrius, "Des fourmis "civilisatrices" entre les deux rives", in Panoramiques, N° 41, 3rd quarter 1999, pp. 64-72. To ponder this fine conclusion:"...and if European nations wished to associate the future of the two shores of the Mediterranean, they would only have to open their eyes to the reality of the links, circulations, exchanges of products, ideas and people that the "Maghrebian ants", finally recognized as civilizers, have already established." (p. 72).
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