Three things are required which are very rarely found together. Genius and charm (do not imagine that the people can be made to swallow anything insipid, anything weak). A very sure tact. And finally (what a contradiction?) there must be a divine innocence, the childlike sublimity which one occasionally glimpses in certain young beings but only for a brief moment, like a flash of heaven.
I flashed on Michelet’s insight when the new president of Sénégal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, denounced a “dog-eat-dog world” in his address at the UN last week…
If President Faye manages to engage you (despite being drowned out by the simultaneous interpretation), you can learn more about the people’s movement he helms (along with his partner in virtue, Ousmane Sonko) here and here.
……….
Addendum: Perhaps I’ve missed something but I don’t believe our major intellectual journals have chronicled the democratic revolution that went down in Sénégal during the past year. What we get instead is stuff like this London Review of Books piece by Professor Emeritus T. J. Clark.
Dr. Clark, prompted by Adam Shatz’s new biography of Franz Fanon, ponders Fanon’s trajectory. Looking backward from a post-vanguardist vantage point, Clark’s movement of mind culminates with a Fanon quote (even as Clark mulls over its translation)…
‘Yes,’ [Fanon] says, ‘everyone must be compromised in the fight for le salut commun.’ (Farrington settles for ‘common good’ here, Philcox for ‘common salvation’. Philcox puts ‘involved’ for ‘compromised’. I too recoil from the Great Terror diction. But Fanon has only just started.) ‘There are no clean hands, there are no innocents, no spectators. We are all constantly dirtying our hands in the filth of our homelands and the terrifying emptiness of our minds. Every spectator is a coward and a traitor.
Clark concedes Fanon’s lines seem overwrought. Yet he’s quick to quash his own anti-Stalinist reflexes. He mocks biographer Shatz for seeming to “shudder” at Fanon’s rhetoric. To Clark – artful hard guy? – “The lines, read again, are horrible, slightly gloating, slightly beautiful, slightly overdone (Sartre on amphetamines). They are literature – and they won’t go away.”
Ok. But I get more from the Michelet lines I invoked at the top of this post, which clarify what the Senegalese people require right now. If T.J. Clark paid attention to what’s going on in their homeland, he might cut the fustian and talk up the hard work of democratic renewal. I’m not pressing him (or anyone) to forget Fanon. I just wish Clark and his kind would use their words to amplify the war against despair being waged in our time by President Faye et al.