Despite the dust covering them with their resolutely outdated lyricism, these are the words of the poet John Donne which, like snowflakes thrown by small handfuls from the sky, fall delicately on me, while I set foot on the island.
« No man is an island […]
Any man’s death diminishes me,
because I’m a man involved in mankind,
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls,
it tolls for thee. »
Île Verte, all dressed in white, haloed in its northern light, welcomes me by making me once again feel like a house, I who own nothing there, except for a closeness of heart that brings me back there, when I need to land, in an elsewhere that is no longer on the known side of things.
I also find there this precious link to Brigitte Bournival, psychologist, psychoanalyst and islander, who receives me in what she called “The gardens of memory”.
She offers therapists and artists a very special form of residence there, which makes it possible to recreate the space necessary for listening to others, to deepen what needs to be said while receiving something from the powers of the wild nature of the territory.
In its place in the north of the island, whipped by a wind that spares us in no way, faced with the tumults created by the meeting of the salty and fresh waters of the estuary, we find there, yes, something of this sudden want to kneel down, humbled, before the immutability of the elements.
I lied to you a bit, therefore, and I hope you will forgive me, despite the relative youth of our relationship. I took a break last week, but not just to spend time with my children, no.
I even dared the ingratitude of the fleeing woman, the moment of nurturing this quest towards an interiority that will not make me a forest woman, but an island woman, for three days, in order to regenerate the disposition necessary for the care of the other.
Nobody is an island, but it seems that knowing oneself as being-alone-in-the-world is also an inextricable part of living well together.
So here I am in this place of suspension, to take up with you the thread of this Time.news-correspondence on this new theme which will cover March.
It imposed itself by shame first, this theme. The moving songs of a Ukraine standing among the new ruins of the century made these tears of helplessness flow down my cheeks, of those that you may have also shed, of those of this solidarity that does not run out, despite the repetition of history. The shame came from this privilege which I no longer knew what to do with, that of being able to hold on on an island to face only the tumults created by the battle of the waters, while humans, men, women and children, undergo, in the same temporality, the cruel traumatic devolution making them pass from alive to “survivors”.
And, as if to further press the spell, it is the If it’s a man, by Primo Levi, whom I reread, during my stay, for an interview which will bear on these readings which constituted us.
“Here we are transformed into these same ghosts glimpsed yesterday evening.
Then, for the first time, we realize that our language lacks words to express this insult: the demolition of a man. »
So I switch from one war to another, in a decor of tone-on-tone whites, the river below my feeling of imposture, as gigantic as it, almost encompassing as it no longer discriminates against the rest of the sky , both necessary and shattered, bearing these thousand fractures in as many faults on the ice floe.
Nearly eighty years passed between Levi’s arrival at Auschwitz and the advance of the Russians on Ukraine. And still, however, remains, full, eternally renewed in a thousand and one conflicts covering these years, the question implied even in the title of Levi, which questions what, in each human, the human fact, precisely.
Jorge Semprun, another survivor of the camps, to talk about the feeling of exile that persisted among the deportees, and this, long after their return home, said: “We are not survivors, but ghosts. »
How many “returnees” are being thrown onto the roads of this humanitarian corridor? How many lineages will carry the stigmata of the unspeakable, over generations?
The intergenerational transmission of trauma being very real, imprinting itself even in the DNA of the descendants, it is also tomorrow which is damaged a little more every day in Ukraine.
So, reduced as we are to our relative powerlessness, without ever denying the immense privilege of the security in which we are bathed, but because I do not believe that it is possible to write about anything else, I invite you, this month, to write the war to me, that of your lineages, that which you yourself have perhaps experienced, that which you fear or even those, intimate, which you maintain in your own failures of dialogues with the ‘other.
Because, no, no one is an island.