On behalf of the lost Andalucias, the silent Alexandria, the divided Tangier, the massacred Beirut, we ought to remember that European culture was born on the shores of the Mediterranean, in the Middle East. Europa, lest we forget, was a Phoenician goddess abducted by Zeus!
Forgive me, but I can’t rid myself, when I talk about Marseilles, of this fear of being marginalized. Just as the cultures of central Europe are already marginalized. The philosopher Predrag Matvejevi writes: “Our century is coming to an end marked by ‘ex-worlds’: ex-communist, ex-Soviet, ex-Yugoslav.” Tomorrow, the Mediterranean may well be one of these “ex”es. And Marseilles with it.
From the Sainte-Marie lighthouse, I do not turn my back on the city, no, on the contrary, I lean over her. And I look at the sea. The open sea.
That horizon from which one day the boat of a Phocaean named Protis emerged.
Protis is our Ulysses, the Ulysses of Marseilles. I assume that before dropping anchor here he had travelled for many years, known many countries and met many Calypsos. The legend does not say whether there was a Penelope waiting for him in his country. It simply recalls that a young girl from this region, Gyptis, handed him a glass of cold water and chose him as her husband.
The myth has no meaning unless we read it for what it is. And unless it becomes a project. Marseilles proudly proclaims its experience of the world. We might add: its Mediterranean experience. Because we have no other. But could we ever have any other? That is the question I ask, as a bastard from Marseilles, a half-breed product of Italian, Spanish and Arab cultures. And although I may be a French citizen today, the sea—this Mediterranean of ours, on which my eyes, my heart and my thoughts are focused—remains the only place where I feel that I exist. Where I can envisage a future for myself. In spite of everything. That is how much trust I have in Marseilles. Marseilles. The one true survivor of the worlds of the Mediterranean will, I hope, be able to avoid becoming the border post—a modern version of the Roman Empire’s limes—between the civilized world and the barbarian world, between Northern Europe and the countries of the South, as advocated in a World Bank report to the European elites.
Yes, I believe, as I look at the sea, that there is a future for Europe, and beauty in that future. It lies in what Edouard Glissant calls “Mediterranean Creoleness.”
Those are the stakes. The choice between the old economic, separatist, segregationist way of thinking (of the World Bank and international private capital) and a new culture, diverse, mixed, where man remains master both of his time and of his geographical and social space.
This I demand. All this. Out of loyalty to the first two lovers of Marseilles, Gyptis and Proteus. In other words, out of love.
I AM AT HOME EVERYWHERE
You may be surprised to hear this, but I am not a traveler. I am a child of migration. My father, having met a beautiful woman from Seville, halted on his road of exile. In Marseilles. I could have been born somewhere else, like my cousins. In Buenos Aires, or New York. Or else in Canada, where my parents dreamed of going to live soon after the war. It wouldn’t have made any difference. Here or elsewhere, I would have been the son of an exile. That is my only baggage. My only inheritance. My memory. And therefore my story. That means that the blood that courses through my veins does not belong to one race, one country, one land. Or even one nation. One day I will have to explain all this, better maybe than I have done in my novels. Telling the itineraries of my old friends, Armenians and Greeks, Spaniards and gypsies, also children of migration. To be “from somewhere else” changes everything. You look at the world in a different way. I mean that wherever I am, I am at home. Even in those countries whose language I do not know. I just have to read a travel story or a novel by a writer to make his territory, his memories, my own. And become his twin. I had this sensation for the first time when I read Wedding in Tipasa by Camus. I felt as if I was an Algerian. I felt a passionate need for Algeria. Not long after that, I found myself in Ethiopia. In Hara, to be exact. In the footsteps of Rimbaud. There, I learned the freedom of wandering, of moving from place to place not to discover, to meet, to learn, but to merge into the Other, and see through his eyes “the other world,” the one from which you come. And so I became an Ethiopian. I was an Egyptian one night in Cairo. I’ve been a Turk sometimes. But also Irish, and Argentinian out of love. Often I am still Italian or Spanish. And if it’s true that I have been so many other nationalities, today I dream of being Laotian, and sometimes also Japanese, thanks to a writer named Haruki Murakami. There are times, I must say, when I no longer know if I have lived in Havana, in Bali, in Missoula or in Shanghai, or if I’ve simply read too much Cendrars, Hemingway, Luis Sepúlveda, Jim Harrison and James Crumley, Vicki Baum, Stevenson, Melville, Conrad, and Pierre MacOrlan, whom nobody reads these days. None of this really matters, when you come down to it. Truth and falsehood. Imagination is a reality, sometimes more real than reality itself. Conrad could explain that better than I can. The importance of allowing reality to find its own logic.
All too often we do not dare go deep enough into ourselves. We meet the gaze of the Other as an invitation. But we remain on the dock. Because the dock is the safest thing that exists, isn’t it? Terra firma. The earth, reminding us that we are from here, from one country, one race, one nation. We generally prefer docks when we have a set reason to be there. A journey. A vacation. For a specific time. With a guidebook in our hands and a return ticket in our pockets. We know that we are leaving and that we will come back, of course, to the same dock. It is often at that moment that we look away from the Other. And that he becomes a stranger to us. Hostile. A stranger is necessarily hostile to the country, the race, the nation to which we claim out loud to belong. I don’t know if you’ve followed me so far. I like to think you have. I also like to think that there is no point going anywhere else if we do not recognize ourselves in the eyes of the Other. That, I think, is why most tourist resorts resemble fortified camps. We don’t try to meet the Other. We only want what belongs to him. His sea, his beaches, his palm trees. All these things I learned from my father.
And Marseilles completed my education. Beyond the horizon, toward which I looked from the end of the sea wall, down in the harbor, I knew that I had cousins, with their many children. They are still out there somewhere, but I no longer know where. On which side of the barbed wire that divides Cyprus between Greeks and Turks? On which hypothetical border in Rwanda? In which nation of the former Yugoslavia? Or in which unsanitary gypsy camp at the gates of the city? It’s when I think about them that my feet start to itch, and I take out my cardboard suitcase and dream of setting off. To go and meet them, and share what we have in common, the pleasure of the universe. The pleasure I taste when, at home, in the still air of summer and noon, I read Louis Owens and put myself in the shoes of an Indian.
I dream of wide open spaces. I reinvent the meaning of the earth. And then I remember a civilized people once saying that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and realize that I’m shivering, because on the road of exile the weather is cold.
THE BLUE AND THE BLACK
In the beginning is the Book. And that moment in which Cain kills his brother Abel. In the blood of this fratricide, the Mediterranean gives us the first noir novel.
There may well have been other murders before this, but this one is written down, and establishes forever the singular problem of mankind: that crime is the driving force that, over the centuries, will govern relationships between people. Whoever they are. Masters or servants. Princes or emperors. Free men or slaves. In the beginning, indeed, all the motives for murder already existed. Envy, jealousy. Desire, fear. Money. Power. Hatred. Hatred of others. Hatred of the world.
That is the basis of all the Greek tragedies. In case we had forgotten, the chutzpah of Patrick Raynal, editor of Gallimard’s Série noire, was there to remind us. When he published Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex in his famous series, some in the narrow circles o
f the publishing world thought he was joking. But he wasn’t. Far from it.
It was an academic, Didier Malmaison, who adapted the Greek text into a Série noire novel. This magnificent book, which opens with a classic noir scene—a stranger arrives in town, everyone watches him, closing their doors and windows as he passes, he crosses the street—can be read in one sitting. Like a real crime novel. “Well, if you look at it that way . . . ” many teachers were forced to admit. Indeed, if you look at it that way, the line of descent from Greek tragedy to the noir novel becomes obvious. In Oedipus we witness a search for the truth of a man’s life. In the noir novel, beginning with the Americans, the same process is developed, in parallel with an investigation into the social conditions of contemporary man, the modern form of fate. This is very clear in the works of David Goodis and Jim Thompson, who both deal with the tragedy of modern societies.
In a 1995 interview appearing in the review Les Temps Modernes, Patrick Raynal explained this lineage: “If we can broadly define noir writing, noir inspiration, as a way of looking at the world, at the dark opaque criminal side of the world, shot through with the intense feeling of fatality we carry within us due to the fact that the only thing we know for certain is that we are going to die, then Oedipus can indeed be said to be the first noir novel.”
James M. Cain, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, is another exponent of modern tragedy. I have not plucked Cain’s name from the air. We now know that his work was a major influence on Albert Camus’s The Outsider. The similarities are striking. A man, in no way predisposed to become a criminal, kills another man and finds himself in prison. Beneath “the stars in the night sky,” he discovers the “benign indifference of the world,” and his last wish, in order for the drama to be fully consummated, is “that there should be a crowd of spectators at [his] execution and that they should greet [him] with cries of hatred.”
For me, The Outsider is the beginning of the modern Mediterranean crime novel. More so, in my opinion, than the novels of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who owes more, in both form and content, to Chandler and Hammett than to Cain. Today, there are many authors continuing this line of descent from Greek tragedy. The Spaniards Andreu Martín and Francisco Gonzales Ledesma, the Italians Peppe Ferrandino, Nino Filasto, Santo Piazzese, Nicoletta Vallorani and Carlo Lucarelli, the Algerians Yasmina Khadra and Abdelkader Djemaï, and the Frenchmen René Frégni, Pascal Dessaint and Marcus Malte. All of them combine the viewpoint of Camus with that of Montalbán. The inspiration comes from this observation by Camus, in Helen’s Exile (1948): “Such moments make one realize that if the Greeks knew despair, they experienced it always through beauty and its oppressive quality. In this golden sadness, tragedy reaches its highest point. The despair of our world, on the other hand, has fed on ugliness and crisis. For which reason, Europe would be ignoble, if ever suffering could be.” The Mediterranean crime novel is the fatalistic acceptance of this drama that has hung over us ever since man killed his brother on one of the shores of this sea.
Individual tragedy is echoed in the collective tragedy of the Balkans and Algeria, where the same dark blood flows. Faced with these conflicts which have punctuated the history of the Mediterranean, artists have tirelessly responded with their passion for the sea that unites. Paraphrasing Camus, I would call it a recognition of our ignorance, a rejection of fanaticism and of the limits of the world and of man, the beloved face, and finally beauty: that is the theatre in which we play out the same drama as the Greeks. And along with the other authors of these two shores, I affirm here, in the Mediterranean, in the name of a blue Mediterranean against a black Mediterranean, that the meaning of the history of tomorrow is not what we think. Far from it.
MARSEILLES
MARSEILLES IS IN MY HEART
I was born in Marseilles. Of an Italian father and a Spanish mother. One of those crossbreeds to which this city holds the secret. Nobody is ever born in Marseilles by chance. Marseilles is, and has always been, the port of exiles, of Mediterranean exiles, of exiles from our former colonial routes, too. Here, whoever disembarks in the port is inevitably at home. Wherever you are from, you feel at home in Marseilles. You see familiar faces on the streets, you smell familiar smells. Marseilles is familiar. From the moment you first look at her.
That is why I love this city, my city. She is beautiful because of that familiarity, which is like bread to be shared by all. She is beautiful only because of her humanity. The rest is just chauvinism. There are plenty of beautiful cities with beautiful monuments in Europe. The world is full of beautiful harbors, beautiful bays, magnificent ports. I am not a chauvinist. I am a Marseillais. That means I am from here, passionately so, and from everywhere else at the same time. Marseilles is my world culture. My initial world education.
It is through those ancient navigation routes toward the East, Africa, then toward the Americas, those routes that are real to some of us, and merely dreamed about by most people, that Marseilles lives, wherever we go. Paris is an attraction. Marseilles is a passport. When I am far from her, which I often am, I think of Marseilles, without homesickness. But with the same emotion we feel for a beloved woman whom we have left behind to go traveling, and whom we desire more intensely to see again as the days pass.
I think about that, about all the things I have learned on the streets of Marseilles, all the things that stick to my skin: hospitality, tolerance, respect for others. Uncompromising friendship and that essential quality of love: loyalty. And, paraphrasing my friend from L’Estaque, the film director Robert Guédiguian, I will say: Marseilles is my identity, my culture and my morality. And, whether I am here or elsewhere, when I speak the language of my home, I reinvent the language that Gyptis, the Ligurian Celt, and Protis, the Phocaean from Asia Minor, invented during their night of love, 2,600 years ago. A language in which every letter of the alphabet has to be profoundly human. I say there is no risk in speaking that language. Only happiness.
I like to think—given that I grew up here—that Marseilles, my city, is not a goal in itself but only a door open to the world, and to other people. A door that must remain open forever.
I LIKE TO FEEL MARSEILLES
PULSATING BENEATH MY TONGUE
Marseilles is not Provençal, and never has been.
In most restaurants, we eat simple, inexpensive, unpretentious dishes, not according to a tradition, but out of a fierce loyalty to our origins.
As many people have said: there is no innovation in the cuisine of Marseilles, no fusion, just self-perpetuation. Eating takes us back to our countries. To sit down to a meal, whether at home or in a restaurant, with our families or with our friends, is to recover our memories.
So I won’t talk about Provençal cuisine.
That means finally sweeping away all the equivocal remarks made about Marseilles and its cuisine. A city where, supposedly, people eat, if not badly, at least never very well. And where, it is often said, there is a desperate lack of imagination. I even read one day that we should invent a bouillabaisse tagine! Why not, if there are people who like that kind of thing? But it makes me smile, because if such a thing doesn’t already exist, it must be because it has no reason to exist. Let me make myself clear: I belong to this city and, to be honest, I often get more pleasure eating a slice of pizza from Roger and Nanette’s, looking out to sea with my backside on a rock, than having to face the boredom of sole Napoleon in olive jus at a padded restaurant crowded with those who dream of a different city. A homogeneous city, devoid of passion and of course without exuberance. A civilized Provençal city, I suppose. Where garlic would be carefully rationed, even banned from noontime meals—those famous business lunches where people peck at their food rather than eat it. When I eat, I like to feel Marseilles pulsating beneath my tongue. Wild and common, the way sea bass can be, or white bream, or mullet grilled with fennel and lightly sprinkled with olive oil, the kind you find Chez Paul or at L’Oursin. In other words, the restaura
nts where I like hanging out are rarely mentioned in guidebooks and never win awards. Who cares? The people you might come across in certain places are not necessarily those I want to rub shoulders with. Such people aren’t too crazy about aïoli, bouillabaisse or anchovy purée. They don’t know anything about the pleasure of fried chickpea cakes. They’ve never tasted snails in spicy sauce, or sea urchins, or lambs’ feet and tripe, or cod in a tomato and red wine sauce, or eggplant ratatouille or fresh bean stew, and they don’t know the joy of feasting on slightly warm vegetable soup with basil and garlic in the shade of a pine. I haven’t plucked these dishes out of the air. The cuisine of Marseilles has always rested on the art of using fish and vegetables disdained by the local ship-owning upper classes, who were kept supplied with refined produce like game and poultry, lamb, truffles, cheese and fruit by the farms of the Aix region. That was how bouillabaisse was born: out of the ugly looking, inedible, unsellable scorpion fish. There are many other examples. A poor man’s cuisine, yes, but one whose genius still delights us, even if these days people argue over the thousand and one ways to prepare bouillabaisse. In order not to upset anyone, I’ll only say that it’s best to prepare it yourself. But it’s the same with all Marseilles recipes, and more broadly with the dishes of the Mediterranean: couscous, tagine, paella, or a simple pasta in sauce with meatballs and slices of veal. And through them we discover all the conviviality of the South, where eating is a celebration. When I find myself in a restaurant, that’s what I look for above all: a family atmosphere. It’s true that the daily dishes may not be on a par with those at Chez Étienne, in the Panier. But that’s a bit like life itself. You take what the day serves up. You know that one day something miraculous is going to come your way. It couldn’t be otherwise. And when it does you will be struck dumb by ravioli in olive purée, calamari in parsley, or even just a little fried fish. Nothing more. That’s how I like Marseilles.
Garlic, Mint, and Sweet Basil Page 2
