Citizen: An American Lyric (7 page)

October 10, 2006 / World Cup

Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas

BLACK-BLANC-BEUR

Something is there before us that is neither the living person himself nor any sort of reality, neither the same as the one who is alive, nor another.

What is there is the absolute calm of what has found its place. (Maurice Blanchot)

Every day I think about where I came from and I am still proud to be who I am …
(Zinedine Zidane)

Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorist, nigger. (Accounts of lip readers responding to the transcript of the World Cup.)

Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. (Ralph Ellison)

The Algerian men, for their part, are a target of criticism for their European comrades.

Arise directly to the level of tragedy.

Notice too, illustrations of this kind of racial prejudice can be multiplied indefinitely.

Clearly, the Algerians who, in view of the intensity of the repression and the frenzied character of the oppression, thought they could answer the blows received without any serious problem of conscience. (Frantz Fanon)

BLACK-BLANC-BEUR

And there is no (Black) who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked, and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance … to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as the dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled; no black who has not had to make his own precarious adjustment … yet the adjustment must be made—rather it must be attempted. (James Baldwin)

Do you think two minutes from the end of a World Cup final, two minutes from the end of my career, I wanted to do that?
(Zinedine Zidane)

Each decision gave rise to the same hesitations, produced the same despair.

No one is free.

For all that he is, people will say he remains for us an Arab. “You can’t get away from nature.” (Frantz Fanon)

BLACK-BLANC-BEUR

Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorist. (Accounts of lip readers responding to the transcript of the World Cup.)

Let him do his spite: My services which I have done … Shall out-tongue his complaints. (William Shakespeare)

When such things happen, he must grit his teeth, walk away a few steps, elude the passerby who draws attention to him, who gives other passersby the desire either to follow the example or to come to his defense. (Franz Fanon)

Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorist, nigger. (Accounts of lip readers responding to the transcript of the World Cup.)

That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it, knows … something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable.

This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words.

We hear, then we remember. (James Baldwin)

The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. (Homi Bhabha)