These men and women standing before life. With heads held high. With full dignity in their hearts. But yearning for childbirth. Despite moments of greatness snatched at the high cost of hard work, struggles, sleepless nights or exile, these men and women are summoned to fall in line. The excellence that bears the multicolored robe of all ‘races’, lacking white, is a bastard child. A plebeian, constantly in disgrace. A gnome that those who bear the invisible, too pure color of ‘white’ always look down upon.
When excellence is mottled. When it carries the history of all peoples. When it speaks of resistance or resilience. When it talks of struggles. When it claims to revolutionize life for an equitable redistribution. When it seeks to carve out a place, too long associated with the other. When it chants the genius that is not white. It is audacity. It must therefore remain silent. Otherwise, it becomes suspicion. Even before being appreciated, by happy fortune, at the height of condescension. I name all those who, like Dessalines, entered history through the grand door of their military, literary or scientific prowess, but are buried under the rubble of long time.
I focus my gaze on all those who, like the famous character of Thélyson Orélien in 'C’était ça ou mourir', dance with death at life’s funeral. This fleeting life, that reeks of death down to the bowels of hell. I speak of those men and women that fate has birthed in all those repulsive lands. I speak of those men and women, nameless, rankless, titless. Those who have never seen a syllabary. Those who are forced to negotiate their dignity to nibble at this fine share of life, generously offered in the daily feasts of the wealthy. I speak of those wretched souls to whom Orélien's literary genius cannot pay tribute, even with fiction, without becoming a political and ideological problem.
Excellence, when it bears too much color, must bow before the throne of silence. Otherwise, it pays the price of its audacity in the form of media blows, conferences or colloquiums in respectable circles. It becomes the laughingstock of ordinary mortals, howling alongside those scouting wolves of the world.
When excellence is ‘black’, ‘red’ or ‘yellow’, it must undergo the trial of perfection before the courts of ‘white’. Of the oligarchy. Of the aristocracy, whether on the right, left or center. These courts, molded by a dual logic of guilt. Yes, it must be acknowledged: where those perched at the top of the mountain of their whiteness enjoy the presumption of innocence, others, similar to Orélien, are deemed guilty a priori, condemned to the crushing task of proving their innocence. If Jonas Dorléon is too fictional to undergo the trial of perfection, it is Orélien who is summoned to present himself before the courts of all universal laws of truth. Of authenticity. Of whiteness.
Mr. Orélien, for not passing the test of perfection, your guilt is relentless: you are condemned for having had the audacity to draw from the darkness, thus from their place, those wretches whom the throat of life, accustomed to the sumptuous dishes of respectable people, must regurgitate; you cannot be their spokesperson if your life is not whiter than Canadian winter. Thus, your genius, because it is guilty of being too loud by inviting itself both into grand salons and in the agora, is condemned to indecency. The proof, in reinforced concrete, confirming your guilt is irrefutable: a mere suspicion, an anonymous denunciation. But this anonymity bears the name of all the keepers of this retroactive light, capable of unraveling time to make it spit out, in the abyss of the present, the imperfections of the past.
The verdict is dry, swift, irreversible, unassailable, therefore final.
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