9 - Schizophonic Solutions

Summary

Philoctète

In my opinion, any expression of culture—a myth, a song, a dance, a painting, a poem—is a kind of impersonal message, at once vague and truncated; an obscure and previous desire that was already moving around here and there and can never be interpreted entirely by the performer or read completely by a reader; every effort by the one or the other to fill this essential gap will fail to lead him toward a goal, but will issue into lateral movements, spiralings, steps that go forward but also backward …

—Benítez-Rojo

With absolute specificity, fearlessness, and humor, Philoctète ventures to write the unspeakable (that is, disgusting and unbelievable) hours of the Dominican Vespers. The events of these two days—so known and so denied, so unfathomable and yet so emblematic of a contemporary, worldwide ethical failure with respect to blackness and difference—are mired in trauma and shame. Stunned silence might well seem an appropriate response. How, though, to write the fiction of such real horror? Whose story to tell? In what language? Philoctète seems to find some answers in the schizophonic offerings of the spiral. In Le Peuple des terres mêlées, he looks at terror's impact on self-expression, and at the ways in which language is implicated in and articulates that terror. His narrative reads as a personal chronicling of this at once intimate and collective experience of state violence.