The Other Heading: Memories, Responses, and Responsibilities

Extract

To begin, I will confide in you a feeling. Already on the subject of headings [caps]—and of the shores on which I intend to remain. It is the somewhat weary feeling of an old European. More precisely, of someone who, not quite European by birth, since I come from the southern coast of the Mediterranean, considers himself, and more and more so with age, to be a sort of overacculturated, overcolonized European hybrid. (The Latinate words culture and colonization have a common root, there where it is precisely a question of what happens to roots.) In short, it is perhaps the feeling of someone who, as early as grade school in French Algeria, must have tried to capitalize, and capitalize upon, the old age of Europe, while at the same time keeping a little of the indifferent and impassive youth of the other shore. Keeping, in truth, all the marks of an ingenuity still incapable of this other old age from which French culture had, from very early on, separated him.