Open Letter to the French Minister of the Interior

To the Minister of the Interior of the French Republic, on the occasion of his visit to Martinique:

Martinique is an old ground of slavery, of colonization, and of neo-colonialism. But this interminable sorrow is a treasured master: it has instructed us in exchange and sharing. Dehumanizing situations have such worth that they preserve, in the heart of the dominated, palpitations where a demand for dignity always grows. Our land is one of the most eager.

It is inconceivable today that a Nation shut itself into a narrowness of identity as much as this Nation has been brought to ignore that which makes a modern-day global community: the serene will to share the truth of a common past and the determination to equally share the responsibilities to come. The greatness of a Nation is not a matter of its power, economic or military (which can be but one guarantee of its freedom), but of its ability to gauge the stride of the world, to take itself to the places where the ideas of generosity and solidarity are threatened or weakened, to always cultivate, in the long and short term, a truly common future, of all peoples, powerful or not. It is inconceivable that such a Nation propose (or impose) by law doctrinaire orientations in its scholastic institutions, as did the first authoritarian regime to come, and that these orientations aim simply to mask its responsibilities for an enterprise (colonization) that brought profit to the Nation in every way, and that is in every way irrevocably reprehensible.

The problems of immigation are global : poor countries from which immigrants arrive are more and more impoverished, and rich nations, which took in these immigrants, which at times organized their coming for the needs of their labor markets, practicing this as a sort of trade, let us say, perhaps have today achieved a saturation point and orient themselves now towards a selective trade. But riches created through these exploitations generated infinite poverties everywhere, which are fueling new floods of humans: the world is a collective where wealth and want can no longer ignore one another, above all if one proceeds from the other. The proposed solutions do not measure up to the situation. Politics of integration (in France) or of community building (in England): there lie the two general orientations that self-serving governments are adopting.

But in these two cases, immigrant communities, abandoned without recourse in unbearable ghettos, have no real means of participating in the life of their host country, and can only participate in their cultures of origin in a truncated, suspect, passive manner: these cultures become, in certain instances, cultures of withdrawal. Not a single governmental choice has proposed a veritable politics of relation: the frank acceptance of differences, without the difference of an immigrant being liable to some nondescript community life; the implementation of resources, global and specific, social and financial, without setting off a new type of segregation; the recognition of cultural interpenetration, without incurring the dilution or loss of diverse populations thereby connected: to succeed at locating ourselves at these points of equilibrium would be to truly live one of the beauties of the world, not, for all this, losing sight of the landscapes of its horrors.

If each nation is not inhabited by these essential principles, the model appointments on the basis of physical appearance, the virtuous discriminations, the de-culpatory quotas, the sponsorship of faiths by a secularism forced to go further, and all the aid poured out to the humanity of the Global South, still victims of ancient dominations, merely graze the world without confronting it. Moreover these measures permit flourishing around them daily charter flights, detention centers, rewards to police intransigence and triumphant scores of annual deportations: all theatrical responses to threats that we invent ourselves or we wave like scarecrows; all failures of a policy that remains blind to reality.

No social situation, even the most degraded, and even above all that one, can justify a policy of cleansing. Given an existence, even one scrambled by the most overpowering legal pedigree, there is first the unspeakabity of distress: It is always about the human, the most often crushed by economic principles. A republic that offers residence permits in fact opens its door to a human dignity, wherein lies the right to think, to make mistakes, to succeed or fail as every living being may do, and this republic can thus punish according to its laws, but in no case take back what it has given. The gift that reduces life to things, the greeting that presupposes a lowered head and silence, are closer to disintegration than to integration, and are still far away from humanity.

It is in the name of these ideas, for these principles alone, that we are able to wish you, from afar but serenely, welcome to Martinique.