🐵 “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” ―Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1854)
🙉 Barcelona Gipsy Klezmer Orchestra, “Djelem, Djelem” (Imbarca, 2005) [Rom anthem which title means “I left, I left”]
🙈 Henrique Oliveira, “Baitogogo” (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013)
A long time ago, I asked someone I knew why she went on a trip around the world. My question was mostly about the running-away-dimension of it all when I too had desires of escaping. I wondered if it was needed to identify what it is that we are running away from, whether traveling really allowed escaping from it, and above it all, what coming back implied: is there a way to avoid eternally what we flee? Is it possible to be transformed by otherness and come back anyway?
In The art of not being governed : an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia (2009), James C. Scott considers that the people he studies can be understood from their remoteness or their incorporation with regards to the State. This deliberate political choice gives birth to specific social organizations which put in question the linear evolutive sequence of humanity. This theoretical sequence implies that we would have gone from small groups practicing nomadic hunting-gathering, to then get into pastoral nomadism, and later move into seasonal semi-nomadic agriculture to finally attain sedentary agriculture and further progressively settle into hamlets, villages, cities and metropolis. Against this one-way model, the flexibility and cultural inventiveness which define those people who run away from a central authority and take refuge in the hills of Southeasts Asia show the ability of going back and forth between multiple human social organizations, and to resort to autonomous alternatives providing the behavior of neighboring conquering populations. A generalized aversion for authority leads those hill peoples to “marronnage”. Scott talks about state-evading peoples, or fugitive peoples.
I’m obviously still fleeing, or looking for something. I haven’t made a trip around the globe but I haven’t come back from my last western getaway. Well, I did try. A few failed return trips showed me a few things that those who have left one day (and I’m not talking about going on a vacation) know very well. No one is waiting for you and you get back to what you left when going away. I believe that the difficulty for those who come back is that the transformation which took place from distancing is not really being accounted for, it is not made real, and the person who comes back is not reintegrated in the group as a new being. Or maybe it’s because there was no group initially –I’m not sure.
Arnold Van Gennep published in 1909 Rites of passage, a “systematic study of rites of door and doorstep, hospitality, adoption, pregnancy and birth, childhood, puberty, initiation, ordination, crowning, engagement and wedding, funerals, seasons, etc.” He described the three physical and mental states allowing transformations to succeed: separation from the group in time and/or space; margin or liminal step matching with distancing and ordeals coming from the breaking that separation created from oneself and from the rest of the world; reintegration or incorporation as a new being recognized as such.
The secret of constructing oneself might be to learn how to belong, or to create forms of not-belonging together. This is what did do marroon slaves communities all over the American continent and in the Caribbean; this is what did do multiple groups of mystics. Anyhow, this process needs to go through separation and thus, going away. To flee is also to escape mentally, that is to dream. Get lost a little.
Some of the peoples described by Scott are not literate –they do not use the technology of writing. Writing here designates the graphic signs which represent words used in oral language. However, other forms of representations used to communicate meaning exist, like the ones inscribed in textiles, painting, sculpture, etc. “Writing [as a representation of language] is for the Wa, associated with the trickster figure; the word for writing is the same as the word for trading and implies deception and cheating.” Writing can thus be understood as an essential technology of administration and conduct of the State since it favors the stabilizing of a social hierarchy through the affirmation of its permanence beyond a few hereditary objects such as a crown or a scepter. Those who incarnate coercive power establish themselves as the exclusive administrators of humans, things and their relationships through writing rolls, registers, cadastre, lists, receipts, decrees, permits, codes, agreements, contracts, etc. It is the concept of the text that creates authority. In this context, the rejection or losing of writing gives way to the possibility of oscillating between various forms of association, while not letting emerge centralization of a power which would hold a monopoly. Absence of writing allows inventing its own history and making it alive.
“People are carrying wounds of separation and dislocation experiences not handled as ritual experiences, not framed, nor made real, that are like initiatory experiences that will keep happening because the psyche wants to transform, the soul wants to transform and so we keep going to separation experiences until it starts to be a separation that unifies.” (Michael Meade, “The Truth of A Myth”, Aubrey Marcus podcast, 361)
If we consider that administration, or bureaucracy, is a dehumanizing enterprise because it neutralize us by deleting our personal stories and what really matters, we could say that what makes us human is borne out from our ability to build up our own identity by telling ourselves stories. It is also one of the elements that makes us different from other animals. And it is too what the hegemony of science cancels out: the possibility of not knowing and the multiplicity of explanations about reality. It abolishes myth and mystery. By desperately trying to know and explain everything, it corrupts the inevitable unknowable, it impedes perceiving the void that we need to face in order to know. There is saying that goes like this “Those who tell stories rule society”. In the modern world, things do not mean anything, they just work. Nonetheless, humans learn and live through stories because they talk to the unconscious part of our minds, jut like metaphors or inquiries.
I think that we possess an identity more fluid that what seems like. What feels so good, sometimes, with family and close friends is sensing an identity cocoon, without a need to introduce or justify yourself, although it can also transform into a jail. What feels so good while traveling, sometimes, is the possibility of redefining yourself all the time. What would allow finding a balance between the two, maybe, is knowing that a base exists from which one can transform, and that base is made by witnesses who can see the occurred transformation. This is because identity, as changing as it might be, needs to be tied to the look of others. We can claim to the world who we are, in the end what will stay and what will be passed over, is what others keep of ourselves.
And this is why the State makes sense, in a way. It neutralizes in the mesh of its administrative system identities. It subjugates them though instead of making them flourish. But this security allowed by a strategy of separation between beings, thoughts and things, makes up a world where movement is captured. Things have an identity. Contracts, a legitimacy. Activities, a permit. Individuals, a number. Roads, a name. But these identities are subjected to rules that have no other right to existence than being written and controlled. They are superficial, senseless, rootless identities. And also imposed and compelled. To the contrary, fugitive societies described by Scott have ambiguous and porous identities. Their integration rules are flexible and they use imaginative geneaologies if needs be. Scott describes them as incoherent genealogically, linguistically, politically, genetically. Incoherence here is not pejorative. Be undetermined to not be dominated.
Me, I never really felt I was where I should and I don’t feel either at home everywhere. I’m not a “citizen of the world”, an expression I see as a globalized opportunistic substitute. Pierre, the other day, asked me if I felt I had friends here and I immediately translated it as “people whom I would still be in touch with if I leave one day”. But rather, I think now that it needs to be seen as “who holds me in their mind and heart whether I’m here or elsewhere.” Rooting oneself might just match the process of sowing tiny seeds in others. Those who have picked up a piece of our soul. Soulmates who have made ourselves pass through their own veins. There is a need to recognize inside oneself those invisible rhizomes, those subterranean networks of furtive meaning who enrich the fertile compost that build us. Becoming rooted fugitives.
Some of this post’s sources:
the interview of Bayo Akomolafe (For The Wild, 155) where the poet who undertook “a decolonial journey” imagines the possibility of non-integration as a mode of being
Les Furtifs (in French), the extraordinary disto-utopian novel from Alain Damasio (La Volte, 2019)
the book Quilombos (L’échappée, 2018) (in French) which tells the story of unsubjected slaves communities in Brazil