Stranger of the century

When the break occurs, what happens? A cursory look at the glossary of displacement reveals the many returns of the rupture. Kundera himself is an example: the distance between Prague and Paris has been reduced by the chemical unity of memory and awareness. Or, as his essay on Stravinsky argues, Conrad’s English and Nabakov’s Americanness — these adoptions carry within them the evolutionary tale of the emigre: “People generally think of the pain of nostalgia, but what is worse is the pain of estrangement: the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign. We experience that estrangement not vis-a-vis the new country: there, the process is the inverse: what was foreign becomes, little by little, familiar and beloved”.So familiar, themost beloved. And the expression of it is not always a translation of homecoming. It is creation itself — of a home. A home not defined by national absolutism but by the sheer relativism of life. The last glow of a century illuminates this home, so precariously situated in a world where the frontiers are disappearing only to take refuge in the mind of the purest son of the purest soil. He refuses to accept the outsider’s pretence of having created a home. The immigrant, the exile, the refugee –they are the ones who repudiate the linear arrogance of borderlines.

And they have even denationalised France ’98. As bleu, blanc and rouge multiplied on cheeks and flags, as glory swamped the Champs-Elysees in the delirious aftermath of the French victory in the World Cup, it was certainly an elemental display of national pride. But not as national as Le Pen’s nationalism. Oh, there was Zidane, and before him, in the semifinal, Thuram. It was Zidane’s heroism which made the devastating difference onSunday. Did the colour of his blood matter? Did his ancestral bondage make him less French on the day of France’s greatest sporting glory? Sometimes ultra-national unification is achieved by the son of Algerian immigrants to Marseilles (the den of Le Pen).

Today Zidane is playing football on the national lips of France. Last year, Tony Blair adopted a dead princess and made her the people’s princess. That was necrophilia at its political best at a time when Britain was a nation of quivering upper lips. Jacques Chirac, president of a nation which is historically more emotional and more spontaneous than Britain, held aloft the golden cup to unify, to declare that it was more than a tricolour victory. He needed a Zidane to silence the neo-racists without being so political. Le Pen wanted the French team nationally cleansed. Post-victory Chirac declared, “Jacquet (the coach) incarnates all that is best in France; its seriousness, its humanity, its determination to be close to the people … andtolerance”.

True, you need a lot of tolerance to have a Zidane in today’s Europe. The glory that has turned Zidane, the son of immigrants, into a national mascot is quite accidental. Moments like this occur only on Planet Soccer. The less sporty world, particularly Europe, is shrinking to the rhythm of the national anthem — and, periodically, to the wail of the Turkish mother. A world where the immigrant is the pollutant. In that world, every politician is not a Mitterrand. The last larger-than-life socialist, always swayed by the idea of immortality, threw flowers into the Seine to remember the murdered immigrant. It was a history-seeking gesture of repentance as well. Today’s politician passes black laws to contain the tide of the outsiders. He wages war. He copies the architecture of Auschwitz. His blue-blooded follower keeps his identity intact by denying the outsider an identity — a life.

The identity is written on the body. Or, in the history of the alien’s blood. In America, the biggestenterprise on earth achieved by the immigrant, an NBA match is of course a unifying madness in which race is so thrillingly human. But a Rodney King comes scarred out of the melting pot; an OJ Simpson brings out the racial stereotype. In America, where mythology is a synonym for history, the colour of the African-American and the romance of the immigrant continue to make the mythology a historical exception. The outsider is not exceptional everywhere. Even if he is so exceptionally heroic on the playgrounds of his adopted country.

Germaine Greer writes: “Failure to recognise the fact that earthly home is a fiction has given us the anguish of Palestine and the internecine raging of the Balkans … Our earthly journey is a journey away from home. Exile being the human condition, no government subsidy can provide the chariot that will carry us home.” So you play home, write home. The journey of the immigrant, the exile, the stranger, is a rebuttal of national absolutism. The Mediterranean sun brightenedCamus’ sensibility. Perhaps, Zidane also owes his rhythm to Algeria. The immigrant has no borders to preserve. He romances the idea of home. He achieves it by winning a game, writing a book. He achieves it even in unsolicited martyrdom.

From the waystation of history, the immigrant, the most intimate stranger of this century, challenges your national triumphs — even if it has something to do with soccer. He may even quote Larkin: To create an object/Books; China; a life/Reprehensibly perfect.

You must have seen that perfection much before the World Cup.