Sans soleil Page #5

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Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine.

To please me he puts in my best beloved animals:

the cat and the owl.

He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal

with sentiment, memory, and imagination.

Mizoguchi's Arsne Lupin for example,

or the no less imaginary burakumin.

How one claim to show a category of Japanese who do not exist?

Yes they're there; I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves

out by the day, sleeping on the ground.

Ever since the middle ages they've been doomed

to grubby and back-breaking jobs.

But since the Meiji era, officially nothing sets them apart,

and their real nameetais a taboo word, not to be pronounced.

They are non-persons.

How can they be shown, except as non-images?

Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race,

the only plan that offers a future for intelligence.

For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time

is contained in the Pac-Man.

I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him

that he was going to conquer the world.

Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate.

He puts into true perspective the balance of power

between the individual and the environment.

And he tells us soberly that though

there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks,

it always comes a cropper.

He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared

in funerals for men and for animals.

He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno

in memory of animals that had died during the year.

For two years in a row this day of mourning

has had a pall cast over it by the death of a panda,

more irreparableaccording to the newspapers

than the death of the prime minister that took place at the same time.

Last year people really cried.

Now they seem to be getting used to it,

accepting that each year death takes a panda

as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.

I've heard this sentence:

"The partition that separates life from death

does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner."

What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die

is surprise.

What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity,

as if they were tryingin order to understand the death of an animal

to stare through the partition.

I have returned from a country where death

is not a partition to cross through but a road to follow.

The great ancestor of the Bijags archipelago has described for us the itinerary of the dead

and how they move from island to island

according to a rigorous protocol until they come to the last beach

where they wait for the ship that will take them to the other world.

If by accident one should meet them,

it is above all imperative not to recognize them.

The Bijags is a part of Guinea Bissau.

In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves

a gesture of good-bye to the shore;

he's right, he'll never see it again.

Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later

on the canoe that was bringing us back.

Guinea has by that time become a nation and Luis is its president.

All those who remember the war remember him.

the half-brother of Amilcar, born as he was

of mixed Guinean and Cape Verdean blood,

and like him a founding member of an unusual party, the PAIGC,

which by uniting the two colonized countries in a single movement of struggle

wishes to be the forerunner of a federation of the two states.

I have listened to the stories of former guerrilla fighters,

who had fought in conditions so inhuman

that they pitied the Portuguese soldiers

for having to bear what they themselves suffered.

That I heard.

And many more things that make one ashamed for having used lightly

even if inadvertentlythe word guerrilla

to describe a certain breed of film-making.

A word that at the time was linked to many theoretical debates

and also to bloody defeats on the ground.

Amilcar Cabral was the only one to lead a victorious guerrilla war,

and not only in terms of military conquests.

He knew his people,

he had studied them for a long time,

and he wanted every liberated region

to be also the precursor of a different kind of society.

The socialist countries send weapons to arm the fighters.

The social democracies fill the People's Stores.

May the extreme left forgive history

but if the guerrillas are like fish in water

it's a bit thanks to Sweden.

Amilcar was not afraid of ambiguitieshe knew the traps.

He wrote:
"It's as though we were at the edge of a great river full of waves and storms,

with people who are trying to cross it and drown,

but they have no other way out, they must get to the other side."

And now, the scene moves to Cassaque:

the seventeenth of February, 1980.

But to understand it properly one must move forward in time.

In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison,

and the weeping man he has just decorated,

major Nino, will have taken power.

The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other

will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy.

We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions

which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle,

there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness,

and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion,

but the wounded pride of a hero who felt

he had not been raised high enough above the others.

And beneath each of these faces a memory.

And in place of what we were told had been forged

into a collective memory,

a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration

in the great wound of history.

In Portugalraised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau

Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life

against the dictatorship wrote:

"Every protagonist represents only himself;

in place of a change in the social setting

he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image."

That's the way the breakers recede.

And so predictably that one has to believe

in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes

through mercy

or calculation to those whom it recruits:

Amilcar murdered by members of his own party,

the liberated areas fallen under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants

liquidated in their turn by a central power

to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.

That's how history advances,

plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears.

Luis exiled to Cuba,

Nino discovering in his turn plots woven against him,

can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history.

She doesn't care, she understands nothing,

she has only one friend,

the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror.

That has a name and a face.

I'm writing you all this from another world,

a world of appearances.

In a way the two worlds communicate with each other.

Memory is to one what history is to the other:

an impossibility.

Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable.

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