Back to New York City 30
September 2002
François Vescia
Coming back to New York City for a few
days reminds me this evidence, I loved a lot this city which means so much to
me.
I discovered in it the
sense of autonomy, of investigation, places, people, difference. At 16 years
old, I had this extraordinary chance to study there, to get my “bacalaureat” at
NY French “lycée” on 95th street, to start there university studies. I found
there my first jobs in restaurants or apartments lent to me by friends.
I saw every season
bringing the prize of transformation. Some snow and under crossings to avoid
the rigor of the cold winter, in the gush of spring, in the hot season of the
summer, New York
metamorphoses permanently. Nature changes the decoration but the city also is
in permanent transformation, here a building or a church are demolished to give
way to a structure of trays and metal and I remember myself de1970 where bit by
bit the two towers of World Trade Center were built from day to day.
During 18 months, how
many streets I went through, how much time I dashed on foot into courses which
turned out longer than I believed. I was always struck by the insulation of
people in the street. In this city, people walk. In these sways in the crowd
split in individuals, there are these multiple careers, as a movement Brownian
ceaseless, that of the city which lives in a fervent rhythm, with the
overexcited spectacles and the subway which never stops at night.
These individuals go
or return from the work. In their hand sometimes a bag of paper or plastic
contains the meal of the lunch often made with a sandwich. For some the walk
man, the telephone and sometimes skates realize for these isolated individuals
their almost confinement in multiple itinerant bubbles. This city adds
peculiarities, mixes them, illuminates them and crushes them at the same
moment. It is a gigantic machine to transform any countryman in future
North-American. Shops or taxis can be hold by recent immigrants. Does their
qualification and their knowledge of English matter, they participate in the
big economic machine. They find a place to start and to dash into the American
dream and naturally a many stay.
Today this city is
wounded, confused. Nobody was able to miss the devastating movie “Nine Eleven”
and 3000 persons did not come home after the session. The world that left
behind them all these immigrants comes back as a boomerang. The big
watchmaker's shop so oiled well with the business and with the finance reminded
its physical reality. And in this physical world where the individuals are of
flesh and of blood appears in one concentrated incredible the old violence of
the world. The New Yorkers who fell with towers were not necessarily
privileged. They and their fellow men carried out all days the gestures of the
work in the universe disinfected by companies. Yesterday taken away from global
realities reduced to dashboards and to picture postcards, the
"survivors" are now stunned and lost of the same rough movement,
close relations and their certainties. In this emotional, very understandable
torrent, each can tell how he or she was informed about the attempt, how it
happened this day, how grown-up, children, colleagues, neighbors, friendly all
were confronted with this attempt. How the South of Manhattan was dirtied with
dust, how smell was unbearable weeks and weeks later. As they would love that
this bad nightmare ends ; release them and return them to this innocence of
front.
But American history
is so made as nobody can connect this violence with the precedent. No attack on
the American territory with part distant aggression against servicemen to Pearl Harbor, no invasion, no humiliation of the nation
forced to bow, no piling up of devastation and victims during a war as all the other peoples of the earth knew it.
And nevertheless that of interventions of the American power all over the world
!
The Americans live so
an exceptional experience. What they underwent can not go into a category, into
a comparison. They do not connect this attack with the other violence committed
against civilians, or to a crime against humanity. They did not imagine that
serial killers could appear outside. And quite as yesterday today they are
tried to deny world, to re-take the one-sided governmental watchwords: "United
we stand" and the messianic "God bless America" as if the fortress
was besieged and the rest of the humanity reduced to threats without faces.
Nevertheless this city
is filled with individuals of the other world, the victims of World Trade
Center themselves were more than 70 nationalities, the New Yorkers are often
immigrants, children or grandchildren of immigrants. All this relation in the
world which should make of such a group, an assembly in reduction of the united
nations is nevertheless denied by the American company, and the price for this
new shared identity is a negation, an expulsion of this origin, a flattening of
peculiarities. Today New York
dulled shows in his boutiques, on the walls, in its gardens that the death
affected each, modest employee, smiling secretary, laborious head of family,
brave fireman in the variety of their previous history. It saw again revised an
ever closed mourning which is celebrated in endlessly to on chocolate packages.
Americans attend in a reserved state of conspiracy of the fear, the
disappointment and the leak forward the attempt to establish a new Mc
McCarthyism. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft minister of justice and
their powerful friends (and principals) take advantage of the effect of breath
of attempts in American public opinion to move in what was anyway and before
September 11, 2001 their political project. Inside to muzzle democratic, social
or environmental laws hindering the biggest American companies. Outside to
break treaties and international negotiations which claim to establish more
responsibility, cooperation and negotiation between the 180 countries of the
planet. In a short-term vision, this team badly named "republican"
turns the back in the process of increasing progress of international law in
the search for impunity and for exemption of the law of the people. It is
nevertheless this positive evolution which allowed in Europe
to exceed for 50 years the former war succession generation after generation
for the search for compromise and for public interest by the dialogue and the
negotiation.
For the global launch
of the new Bush 2.1 version of the new American software. No effect seems
untidy battle media, part of bluff, war, international fireworks.
And nevertheless far
from this systematic bombardment, it is reassuring to notice that those that I
meet in museums, universities, public media are for the antipodes of this image
warrior. They constitute the most pleasant, the most obliging, the most
tolerant partners for the work.
They are appalled,
blocked by the love of their country and mean that "there must be another
way" On the wall of a garden, among the others, a small ceramic says on
the drawing of a blue planet "Let find the missing peace".
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