"Being Black in the US, means being angry every day" James Baldwin
"Being Black in the US, means being angry every day" James Baldwin
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Let all the suffering budding James Baldwins of this country reach the mature level of anger that will enable them to finish the quotation any way they want by finding the right words and formulas to say it.
The courage necessary to formulate a substance that will express their humanity, a humanity that has been denied and stigmatized in words, and that leads to crime…
They are concerned with finding and constructing material that will help them denounce their condition and re-appropriate their denied dignity. They will first use words, their own words full of their demands, demands that have been killed by the words of others….
They have the will to conquer one’s own words, confiscated words, misrepresented words, assassinated words, to then give them life again, give them authenticity, take them out of their terrible condition as primary tools of alienation, as, so to speak, sound gags….
They have the strength to refuse words that are straight jackets. Words that choke and reduce to helplessness. Words that keep us in an open-sky prison. This system that puts minds in jail….
They want to get rid of these empty and reassuring concepts that are served as lexical plates in evening discourses and news. These indecent lexical larvae that take pleasure in our outraged humanity.
These words we forever chew on, believing we are naming reality when in fact we are only accomplices in making reality a travesty.
These constipated words that have been manufactured especially for us. A failure of domestication and destruction, and yet legitimized by our own mouths.
An open-sky cemetery on which we uselessly grind away. So many cadavers of oppressive dictionaries tasting like handcuffs.
Empty abstractions
Sterile metaphors
Ghostly concepts
Nothing but wind.
The big wind of self-denial expressed through the words of others. Words that say nothing. Do not see. Do not hear.
We have to lock up what we perceive. We have to not speak of our unbearable daily suffering caused by exclusion, ostracism and racism. Words that are barb wired in order to keep away helplessness and frustration, shame and self-hatred. Words that are as dead as those neighborhoods, those projects and inner cities, as they are incessantly described in newspapers of disinformation.
Words?...
The most insidious mental colonization. Semantic oppression in its most vile cruelty. Words that kill hope and paradoxically suppress speech.
Oppression. Those words that confine us in violence and silence. Those words that are said in order to suppress all vague impulse to be familiar with what cannot be said, with emotions, with written grimaces or tears, with some of its flavor, part of its difference.
Words?...
Anesthetizing bullets used against "scumbags"
An ersatz of grain to be ground into void, in order to listen to our sterile discussions while we are waiting for our lesson.
Salt of alienation.
The painful self-taught capability to awaken one’s conscience by re-claiming one’s words, which are the sap and leaven of one’s evolving humanity…
That’s what I have been trying to do in my own way.
With my anger always questioned.
With my decolonized words,
With my liberated style,
By writing my humanity like no other
One music
One tiny music
Atypical
Hybrid.
Melted into the great clamor of those who have been trampled and demand justice.
So many words rolled out with grandiloquence and humility.
As a writer.
A website ?
To say who I am.
Why?
To explain the meaning of a process
For what purpose?
To lay out what I expect.
And you who are you?
I am a writer. First and foremost. Uncommon and universal. Solitary and supportive. Simultaneously nothing and everything. Not much. A man of letters. Just a man standing, lucid, whose conscience is awake, whose dignity is more than ever sensitive.
My territory of operation: that of words, guns that only shoot blanks.
Nothing in my origins pre-destined me to this status, which is not one. Nothing if not for anger. The brutal daughter of injustice, the whore of violence, the uprising of a wounded soul that dos not abdicate and reclaims its human part while facing its inhuman negation
Just like many other victims of History’s violence, I was lucky enough to be born angry, a rebel, a future existentialist. And facing a growing desert, I will probably die angry. Drowning in indignation until my last breath. Proud of all my fights and proud of all my scars. My books are my scars. Only books. The most peaceable protests.
I became a writer out of anger and necessity. Because of course I had to go through a fucking long period of misery, of colonial night, of war, of exile, of humiliation, of racism. Writing is an outlet for rage and the exploitation of conquered dignity. Writing in order to not succumb to the duty of violence as the answer to an absurd, cruel and unjust world. Writing in order to fight back as a man, to return to words, to their magic, to their alchemy. Writing in order to transform received violence into words and sentences, in order to give violence a meaning and answer it. By trying not to turn into a monster. By elevating myself as an artist. By taming my violent instincts and turning them into slow creative endeavors and into demanding conscientious acts. By transcribing social rage into writing and harmonious uprising. By premeditating texts that were fed by the tradition of barricades. By transforming the blood of internal guns into subversive ink, and bearing witness to the groove of the pen in motion.
It is by incessantly re-writing that I learned that one does not become a writer, but that one works at being a writer, that one makes the decision to be a writer, and suffer the pain that comes from creating while facing adversity and lack of understanding. First by escaping the inescapable power of the masters, learned the hard way, that teaches you to stay in your place, to remain silent or scream without echo. By inventing your own language, by finally giving life to your own world.
This is how from book to book, I have become a seducer and a thief of language, an indelicate reseller of war bounty, an inventor of style and tone, the creator of my own music; a writer my way. Always angry, always rebelling. In order to free myself from alienation, in order to free myself. In order to be re-born to my own pride through the conquest of my humanity expressed in literary equations; my subversive uniqueness unrolled into majesty.
And whatever happened to me here or there, in a book or another does not matter. And what does it matter if when a publisher approximately condemned me, when an advertising worker who called himself a literary critic used a stupid remark, I protested and executed them with a barely deadly sentence, a beautiful phrase, a reversed pun, against one of those you want to strangle. People who think of themselves as conscientious, and beautiful souls, who are the world, who make the world. Under their paternalism and disdain they hide the living part of the world, the real life of the world: a tide of angry civilization.
It does not matter!
I am still a writer.
A writer out of necessity, out of legitimate and absurd self-defense. Out of basic need to exist. Unique, barely recognized but recognizable.
Because, in spite of what I endured, in spite of accumulated indignation, in spite of the indifference and denial of the ones who are established, words have always helped me regain dignity. The taming power of words in order to resist the temptation to give a barbaric answer to barbary. The will to look for meaning and comfort through writing, even if it was often painful and tiring. Every time touched, every time wounded, knocked out but still standing. As a man. As a laughable part of humanity, pregnant with all oppressed humanities, a minority oozing with all the minorities that demand repair.
In short, a writer!
To be and remain a writer, nowadays, means that you have a strong sense of your mission without asking for permission. It means that you refuse to participate in the cultural anemia that is slowly creeping up. Refuse to be either its object or proponent. To not be shackled in a “series”, a segment of window programmed by the literary industry. You have to be suicidal, like they say. Write in the singular as if each sentence torn off your flesh were the last one. Write like a monster with the bitter realization you are nothing but a monster, the product of an anthropophagic system. Monstrous, the product of a monstrous society but persistent in your vigilant humanity.
For me, to be a writer is to write what my conscience dictates. As only I see it. A recluse in my vocation, to write again and again with a scalpel and a brush, with smiles and explosions, as close as possible to the puss coming out of a wound; where the heart of arrogant mystifications beats. In order to tear up the cotton conspiracy organized by the publishing world. In order to always write. To write for one reader, if necessary, without conforming to anybody’s demands. Rich with an infinity of shared anger. Always outside, never boxed in. Outside of the norms, outside of fashion. At odds with geographies, of belonging or exile, it does not matter. In permanent rebellion while disarming a publishers expectations, and the labels invented by “criticatures”. By avoiding determinisms towards which I know I am surreptitiously heading, already pre-established but never imprisoned. In quest for a no man’s land where I will not reside. Between I and We, in an impossible at home.
This is how, in light of what I have just said, in this context, in this programmed death sentence of the book, by those same people who live off book sales, that I claim I am a writer. The last one if necessary. Independent worker of the ink. From now on free of publishing fetters. A nomad going at my own speed. Collecting the perverse honey that turned into the sap of my books. Frequenting the punk words and the frozen alarms of writers who know how to turn them into beauty. Earning medals as an atypical, an unclassifiable, thanks to the sweat of my words covered with the nitroglycerine of the kind of anger that deserves an echo.
Algerian?...
French?...
Franco-Algerian?...
Algerian-French?...
Emigrant?....
Immigrant?...
Maghrebian writing in French?...
Francophone?...
Language refugee?...
Culturally without a country?...
Citizen of the abyss?...
Fuck that!
Nothing and Everything.
« A NATION OR NOBODY ».
A writer!
A certain kind of approach
To be faithful to what precedes. And, taking advantage of this opportunity to keep on honoring the ethical duty of what it states.
To continue writing what I like, what kills me, what I have to do while avoiding the pitchfork of those who legitimize and print anything because they are more interested in profiting than in reading the books that pass through their hands and that they hastily throw to the readers.
In order to persist as a creator and not become a contented provider who gives up and supplies contents on demand.
To not give into bloody martyrdom, exoticism, nativism. Folklore and other assigned sub-human roles where many of my fellows lost themselves: Neo Uncle Toms and revamped token Arabs. My fake brothers. My true pain.
So that whoever wants to read me, can.
So that my universe and whoever wants to, can take the time to meet.
To be a writer now more than ever. Not a scribbler. Not a person who writes. Just a writer in a world where the publishing industry and its affiliated networks (newspapers, radio, TV, etc…) has become the grave digger of what I think literature is, writing is, a book is.
Because the “intellocratic” little world that makes and un-makes books keeps on turning into a self-proclaimed autism, a soporific manufacturer of “void” made with “nothing”.
Because censorship, cynicism, disdain and arrogance have never changed consciences and mutated minds so efficiently. Except that today books are no longer banned, books are no longer burned. Why have useless censorship when it is easier to drown controversial writing in a mass of publications. It is easier to slowly smother them, silently, and in the passive ingestion of mass consumerism.
Because I want to be a mind-reader and a clairvoyant in a world in which, unless you are blind, it is impossible not to notice that literature and literary life are constructed and oriented by nothing but the laws of the market.
Because I cannot see myself as just another donkey in the stable of I do not know what head of industry turned ---certainly not out of love for literature—publisher (until when will that word still have a meaning?).
Because I cannot bring myself to accepting the fate of seeing my work, the puss of my conscience and the sweat of my ink, being reduced to a vulgar merchandise with the very limited shelf time of three months, quickly exhibited, quickly buried, in the swirl of an anthropophagic commerce, in a mass of interchangeable platitudes where book contents have been replaced by the screenplays of their authors.
Because a book needs the slow pace of gourmandise, a book needs time to find its readers (and certainly not consumers). Because a book is the fruit of creative pain. Because a book contains the promise of shared pleasure. Because a book calls for meeting, enlightenment, identification and communion. Because it is unique. Both crazy and moral, punk and distinguished, subversive, irreverent. Audacious, slutty, blasphemous, avant-guard and outdated. In short: immortal.
Because a book does belong neither to logic, nor to the criminal and mercantile rationale of the exploiters of the ephemeral fame of recorded and re-written books, of the ‘salesmen’, the ‘heirs’, as well as all products of indecent social reproductions; those who shemlessly call themselves “publishers”, those merchants of paper who work on command and who format fashion and seasonal awards.
Because it has become intolerable, unacceptable, unthinkable for me to find myself again playing the role of the unimportant employee of a plant that manufactures best sellers.
Because the WEB is the only medium that I have left so that I can escape the tyranny of creeping "group think", so that I can call myself an author, an artist. A fighting-writer.
So that I can longer feel the shame of my books in the unwanted company of catalogues.
So that I no longer empathize with their distress in finding them in their “alibi-niches” of bad conscience, exposed as casting mistakes, as industrial accidents.
Because literature cannot be reduced to what marketing demands. Because literature cannot be reduced to a shelf in a supermarket. Because literature cannot be reduced to a mass-produced object.
Because...
Because...
Enough is enough!
What are your own expectations?
In the flourishing book industry, a book is published every 30 seconds.
Inflation of the “new”….yeah, right!
One million titles are published a year. Most of them will never be commented upon, will never be translated, will never be reprinted. Short, very short launching sales. Infernal rotation of well wrapped books, flavorless, with no real content, programmed, conceived for and destined to the mass. One wonders if, actually, more books are published than read?
In this chaotic, universal graphomania, even “the Classics” --thanks to marketing strategies—are “recycled”, and “revamped”, which ends up derailing their transmission from one generation to the next.
In that context, there are few, very few reprints.
There is no plot of silence. No conspiracy of "the system" in order to keep books in oblivion. Only a mercantile logic is at work, against which I rise up in my own way. By resurrecting, through, this medium, my books, books that have been silenced by the laws of short-term profit.
Instead of waiting for the impossible good will of a publisher or begging for illusory reprints—probably quickly suffocated by mass-uniformization--, I choose to exhume my books from the publishing tombs where they were rotting amidst silence and indifference, after being “out of print”, “exhausted”. In order to tell their future readers that there is a literary life after economical death, by posting them on the WEB, little by little, making them available to whomever is interested.
However regaining the rights to my creations—a simple act of dignity—was not easy. But I did it. I spent years fighting against the universal ogre, years “grilling myself”, according to the term used in the circles that regulate words, years trying to emancipate myself, in fact. And in doing so, I emancipated my books from the guardianship of the various publishers that had participated in their death sentence. I have resurrected them into autonomous creations, alive and, as always arrogant. Then, I put them on a canvass. I gave them time. All the time needed for them to find their readers again; to rescue them from organized amnesia. To make them available to whoever wants to make the effort to meet them. Because I know there is a deep desire to read, to read differently, an expectation of “something different” from what is published thanks to marketing troops and media over-exposure.
Strangely, in the world of literature, the writer is the weak link, whereas all the other actors of the commercial chain such as publishers, distributors, bookstores, make money by selling books. The writer is the only one who does not., and yet everything depends on him or her. (Bernard Lahire, in « La condition littéraire »)
Since I do not have a calling for being the weak link of any system or any so-called literary world, I do not know if I will be able to survive but I am certain I will not be dying.
I want this website to be a black-market window where any individual can take the time to chose, savor, comment, exchange at will…
An echo chamber for a certain form of writing and its themes, proclaimed (everywhere and in all its meanings by “criticaturists” and pseudo-specialists) as being marginal, ethnic, peripheral, and who knows what else?...
A window open onto real life, thanks to the WEB, this technical thumb in the noses of the so-called experts, and thanks to all the possibilities and hope it affords.
A sanctuary open to the most peaceable army, an army of dreamers and creators whose writing is life itself, its meaning and its future, even if they are slowly dying, for lack of living…..
One link in a network of initiatives by authors, publishers (in the noble meaning of the word), readers, translators, the curious…all infused with the same passion for books and writing, and who refuse to accept the fatal drifting away of books, in order to make sense of a literature that is worth it, and get its luster back……
A place for plural expression in a world where it endlessly shrinks….
A pathway in a world of single-thought highways…
A workshop for artisans of words as if it were a tongue stuck at the printing industry….
A free parlor, a space for exchange and communication….
The last breakaway…
Ahmed Zitouni
