Contents

On the art of making the earth uninhabitable

A conversation with God

From Jens Bjørneboe, The Silence (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions; Norwich, Norvik Press, 2000). Translation of Stillheten (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1973). ©1973 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S.. Used by permission. English translation ©2000 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.

It sometimes happens, when I'm walking through this great city, that I once again long for Europe. I can long for the altar at Isenheim or the Palazzo Vecchio, for Chartres and the Tower of London. I long for everything which is my own interior, which formed all the pictures I had inside me when I was young—and which I thought was the world. And for the landscapes, for the west coast of Jutland, for the Cinque Terre coast north of Portovenere. For the Arctic coast and Mont-Saint-Michel and the rocks on the Atlantic coast of Brittany. And it's a strange pain to break out of all this which was once truth for me, and which gradually became a cage of prejudices and compulsions. Were I to put it in the classical manner, in the style of the great tradition, then I'd have to say: A European isn't something you are, it's something you become. And you become one only when you settle your account with Europe, which is simultaneously an account with yourself—that is, the reckoning with the prejudices and with the terrible burden of guilt which clings to this continent, and which we ourselves participate in right up until we see that this burden of guilt is our own, and that it lies not so much in our actions as in our whole way of thinking, and in our enormous ability to choose wrong. I almost said: To choose Evil.

I was talking with Ali about Europe, and Achmed, as he does so often, was standing beside us and smiling.

"Pardon," said Achmed, "but tell me how things really are in your own country. What's happening up there?"

"Everything's just fine, thanks," I said; "the population loses its teeth and the vegetables wither. In the lakes the trout drift around with their bellies in the air, and along the river banks the salmon float ashore with open mouths. In short: Trade and industry are flourishing. We've always lived on war profits, and thanks to continual wars in the Middle East we're living high on you—a few years ago the shipping industry achieved a profitability which far surpassed the bull markets during the First World War."

"So it's really going splendidly!" replied Achmed seriously.

I went on: "There's money, sunshine and progress on all fronts. Taxes are rising, but only for the poor. Overuse Inc., the Exploitation Co., Fjord-Pollution Ltd. and the Mercury & Prussic Acid Corp. between them control almost the whole country in close collaboration with Wiretapping Inc. and such enterprises as Eurosulfur and Euronapalm. In the shipping industry we have in particular Global Graverobbing Inc. Agriculture has been taken over by Bankrupt Estates Ltd., the fisheries are controlled by the Church's Emergency Fund. The Garbage & Refuse Corp. looks after the cultural life. As you see, Achmed, we've come pretty far for such a small country. Confess that you admire us?"

Achmed didn't smile, but because Allah has made him a waiter, he filled our wine glasses. "Yes," replied Ali, "we really admire you. We've even copied your idiotic European clothes. You've managed to make the earth uninhabitable to a degree one wouldn't have thought possible. By dint of your precocious weapons technology you've succeeded in destroying the social structures and economic foundations in Africa as well as Asia and America. You've squeezed gold and wealth out of the colonies, and you're still doing it. You've transformed paradise into hell —and for that we're actually insane enough to go on admiring you. The madness goes so far that today a great many politicians in the former colonial possessions want to imitate the European form of society—in other words, to copy the economic system which has made the earth uninhabitable. We admire the bandits who've seized other continents'—our—riches for themselves, and who've used these riches to destroy the world. All of it—wars, genocide, exploitation and now finally the pollution of air, earth and sea—it all has the same cause. And this we admire. But you can be sure that some of us understand this—and that we won't end up building a copy of Europe after the wars of liberation are over."

"Listen," I said, "how are you going to create a new society with all the age-old compulsions you lug around? I need only mention the way women are viewed in the Arab countries. We can take one of the psychiatric examples from the war—a case which is internationally famous, in fact. It concerns patient X, an active saboteur, guerrilla and freedom fighter. While he's in the resistance he finds out that the European military police have abused, tortured and raped his wife. A while later he breaks down, he becomes wildly depressed and, above all, impotent. His wife writes to him that she is dishonored, that he mustn't think of her anymore, just forget her. Now to everybody around him the man is the main person, they're only concerned with him and his fate. The wife is simply regarded as a spoiled and rotten piece of fruit which can be thrown out. On the other hand, everybody finds it quite natural that the man, as a free guerrilla soldier, should go after other women— the trouble is just that now he can't make it. He's totally impotent. He becomes the object of everybody's sympathy and concern—and no one would have regarded him as dishonored if he'd been able to make love to the women he went after. The wife—who was raped—she is lost and dishonored. And she herself shares everybody's view of the matter: she regards herself as ruined for life, a disgrace to her husband and her family. Now the husband, the patient, says to the psychiatrist almost these very words: ‘If they'd just maltreated and tortured her, that wouldn't have done anything to me. But who can forget something like this?’ See? It wouldn't have done anything to me! And everybody else has the same attitude: it's the husband they're sorry for. The most macabre thing is that even the doctor obviously takes the same view: it's the husband who is dishonored by the rape. Nobody gives a damn what happens to the wife. Do you think, Ali, that this shows a view of humankind and society which is better than the European one?"

"What you're saying," he replied, "just shows that you whites are completely incapable of understanding anything about the Africans. The case is entirely different from what you see. Back of it all lie thousands of years of fine, invisible threads and unspoken thoughts. For this man the whole world has collapsed, and both of them—both he and his wife—have been marked by it for life, and for both of them what's happened is wholly irreparable. It affects not only themselves, but both of their families and also the children they already had together. No African would have difficulty understanding this, but you whites just project yourselves into what you're investigating—and you don't grasp anything of what lives inside the Africans. You think that if the natives here just learn to speak a European language and wear European clothes, then they're like you—only dumber. And with this attitude the Europeans have raped, tortured, and murdered for centuries in this part of the world. These are the reasons why Africa today is one big incurable, bleeding wound. With gun butts, bayonets and soldiers' boots you've trampled and manhandled human bodies all over the continent—but you don't know that you've trampled and battered human souls even more. What you've done here will never dawn on you.

"You're like that in everything that has to do with politics. I don't know of anything so comical and so helpless as the sight of Europeans sitting and studying Marx; he gets memorized, dogmatized, interpreted and expounded. The Russians are probably the worst. Of course they're also great chess players, eminent logicians—but their way of thinking is just as rectangular as the chessboard and its squares.

"And this European or ‘white’ logic functions splendidly in all mechanical relations, in everything which has to do with mechanics and technology, with machine-building and physics—but in respect to human beings it's a total failure. And politics is an art or a science which has to do with human souls, with human fates. And here the logic of the chessboard doesn't help any more. You see the results in history. And perhaps you see it most plainly of all in our own century, because it bears the fruits of the past.

"Look at the map of Africa: it isn't divided up exactly like a chessboard, but according to the same principle—Africa's boundaries were drawn up at desks with a ruler after conferences between military chiefs of staff. Not the slightest attention was paid to tribal boundaries, to peoples or to nations, but only to degrees of latitude and square kilometers. It will take centuries for us to recover from the damage done by this slide-rule logic. No tribal chief in the interior of Africa would have been capable of thinking in such a foolish way as the mathema- tical geniuses on the general staffs of Europe."

"So you think that in the year 2000 the Afro-Asiatic and Latin American Cultural Research Commission will declare Europe and North America to be mentally underdeveloped regions and send us foreign aid?"

"I think that man was not created for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was created for man."

"And what does that mean?"

"That man was not created for socialism, but socialism for man. It's that simple. That means that our task is not to produce the new Soviet-African man, but an African socialism—a socialism which can be used by Africans."

"At least you admit that Europe has produced socialism?"

"Are you crazy?" Ali retorted. "We had socialistic and communistic tribal societies in Africa long before anyone else thought of it. Our old tribal democracy was one of the most painful obstacles to the colonial powers—a fact which they usually expressed by claiming that the chiefs didn't have enough authority. If we were dissatisfied with a chief, he was simply deposed, something the Europeans could never conceive of because they were brought up on the idea of a centralized, absolute state power—which the Europeans still believe in. Of course the Europeans have produced a socialist theory for the socialization of industry, but they haven't made it a reality. In the socialist states of Europe they've just produced a caricature and a bugaboo of socialism, a ghost which for fifty bears has stood in the way of a true socialism. That's due to the peculiarity in European thinking—the need to rebuild society into a chessboard, and when the whole thing goes wrong, they begin making up fables about the future 'socialist soviet man', a kind of abstract dream figure who will fit into the chessboard, but who has never existed and who never will exist. When man—that is: when reality doesn't fit the plan, then you think that it's reality something is wrong with—you can't imagine that it's the plan which doesn't fit the reality.

"Just take the flock of children which stands outside here in the evening, shrieking and begging. In a European country they'd have the police round up the children and commit them to a children's home, to get the youngsters off the streets. They would have removed the visible symptom that something in this country isn't as it should be—but they wouldn't have touched the disease itself which causes the symptoms. And they would have driven around the streets with garbage trucks to gather up the poor who lie sleeping on the street like heaps of rags, so that the streets would be clean and pretty to look at—but they wouldn't have abolished the reason for the misery. You don't solve any problems by shutting the beggars up in state poor- houses—especially not when the poor themselves prefer sleeping on the street to being committed."

"Europeans would think that the commitment was for their own good."

"Europe has never understood anything but violence," he replied.