Author/Publisher David Applefield, US Legation Museum, Tangiers, November 2006.

Aside from the time off, the good food and drink, the quality time with family and friends, the holiday season is good for reflection and introspection.

Sitting in Paris on a gray afternoon in late December 2006, I was trying to decide what did I do this year that was important. The humanitarian work in West Africa was certainly significant -- bringing used fire trucks to Guinea Bissau and flying three kids from Sierra Leone to Paris for emergency heart surgery -- and continues to be essential.

But, as a Paris-based writer, editor, and publisher -- there was one major contribution in 2006 that I believe will have positive historic impact. That´s the publishing of Jean Lamore´s book, AKA. As I´ve told a lot of friends and professionals in the cultural world: of the 30 000 manuscripts I´ve read and commented on over 20 years of editing and publishing, Lamore´s AKA spoke to me in a way that I could not ignore. That´s why I call Lamore "the next Joyce."

Remember that every published book you read began as an unpublished manuscript. And before that, as an unfinished work on a hard drive or pile of papers. A book is the fruit of one man or one woman´s mind.

AKA was written in a Paris suburb over the course of six years. Its author is a Franco-American with a terrifying mastery of history and language. AKA is hard reading ... as Ulyssees is or Sound and the Fury ... of Clockwork Orange ... or Danté´s Inferno. But, it comments on the contemporary state of geo-politics via the imaginative world of an intellect.

I´m pasting in below a recent interview I conducted with Jean Lamore. It´s worth a few minutes of your time as you, like me, take spiritual inventory in the special days before the new year.

Some of you may be thinking that this is not the Paris that I signed up for, or that this is inappropriate for a site and/or newsletter that features the joys of Parisian discovery.
If that´s how you feel, please accept my apologies, as well as my invitation to come back next week for some topical discussion on a Paris market or stroll through a Paris quartier.

If some of you connect with the world of AKA and the vision of Jean Lamore, that´s significant enough.

For all my readers, I wish you a wonderful holiday season, good health and prosperity in the new year, and some quality time in the city that we love.

David Applefield
david@paris-anglo.com

Jean Lamore, author of AKA

Fiction & America

With Frank Editor David Applefield

Forthcoming in Frank 20 (Winter 2007)

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Frank: You were born in Washington, D.C. and raised in rural Missouri; you write in English, and yet you are a writer of great linguistic and cultural diversity and international influences... What is your relationship to the United States?

Jean Lamore: There is a very complex capillarity which ties together the United States and Europe (indeed the entire Occident) with Africa, the Arab world, Asia and South America. However this arterial system has become progressively obstructed. Unfortunately the knowledge stream has been interrupted and if it flows at all it´s been reduced to a mere trickle and only in one direction; a sort of residual fluid adhering to military and economic expeditions. For one thing, contemporary western philosophy has totally obliterated the afro-arabic matrix of our occidental civilisation. In this context the writing of AKA was first undertaken as an emetic, a form of self-administered angioblast.

America has become extremely self-centered. There is a patent absence of political analysis. Culture is deeply affected by the general absence of contestation. Americans have no idea of what their succesive governments have been perpetrating abroad for the past fifty years. We (and other occidental powers) have become very proficient at constructing dissonant worlds. The master plan, if there is one at all, is based on brute power alone and the sole objective is one of economic hegemony. Ho Chi Minh´s formula, "an army without a political line is like a tree without roots" is not only valid for the military, it perfectly reflects the state of the American public today: totally ignorant of politics not only on an international scale, but even to internal US politics. In the opening pages of AKA, the narrator enjoins the reader to participate in a complete knock-down of the Mount Rushmore monuments, starting with "blowing off George Washington´s nose"; but the purpose is diametrically opposed to the fantastic sensationalism of Hollywood genre. If icons are to come down, as in Shelley´s «Ozimandious», it has to do with the passage of time, and more specifically it is the creation of a tabula razza; a clean sweep propitious to new thinking. The adventure is strictly a mental one, it is an interior adventure. For this reason, I would be totally opposed to bringing any part of this work to the screen and I sincerely don´t believe that it could be done anyway.

The English language is an immense treasure. Unfortunately, it has been severely neglected through journalism, business and media where the constraints of speed, concision and entertainment lead to a generalized impoverishment. Obviously there exists "peer writing" of contemporary thinkers and philosophers, a highly specialized and elitist language which is another form of impoverishment in that it doesn´t really contribute to the advancement of universal culture. The knowledge of other languages and cultures is always an enlargement of one´s universe.I have had the good fortune of being bilingual (fluent in French) right from the beginning. My father was an arachnologist who went on to linguistics while my mother started with insect biometry before also going on to lingistics. I remember contributing to their work with my brother, when I was about ten years old, by seeking out metaphors and other images to help with the preparation of their thesis work. Living in America gave me the occasion to pick up notions of Indian languages such as Osage. I also speak Italian and read and write Arabic and speak Sango, the central African riverine language of the area where my wife is from. Each experience has brought along not only different ways of expression but also different ways of apprehending (and comprehending) the world. Extremely different perceptions of history, culture and the understanding of how humanity has been, rather violently "braided" together, brings on the paradox of a devastating sublimation which is difficult for me to live with; but I assume that this is also the origin of a certain "pourriture noble" which is inherent to AKA.

In literature or cinema as in art, one single work can be interpreted in many ways. See how Gillo Pontecorvo´s "The Battle of Algeria" can serve as a reference for a government faced with what it qualifies as "terrorism" or, to the contrary, it can be considered as the reference for insurgency against repressive regimes. The same holds true of Frantz Fanon´s work, diversely qualified as being an apology for terrorism or the reference for revolutionary thinking while also being precursory in the field of psychiatric treatment for both the victims and the tortioneers in modern warfare. This then is reality, a mobile ever-shifting thing. It is a quality which I also seek to provoke in writing.

Frank: France?

JL: France plays a mojor role in my life. I was immersed at an early age in French culture. I came regularly to France with my family throughout the 50s and 60s and this gave me a very special intellectual and sensorial stimulus. It became a stepping stone to Italy and the rest of Europe. Later, France became for me a form of trampoline to the African continent and to the Arab world. It is a country of considerable political maturity, though I´m vigorously opposed to its stance on certain issues like the Western Sahara question. America is still teething as far as geopolitics are concerned, especially concerning its rapport with the Arab world and the African continent. Since America has yet to suffer invasion, or modern warfare on its lands,(and thankfully so) it is easy for an American to overlook the fact that there actually were real Cold War battlefields in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Consider for example what devastating results the cumulative effects of slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, and persistent occidental economical wars have had on the African peoples. As a result, we as Americans have wiped away from our collective conscience the fact that our country´s position as the wealthiest nation in the world is basically due to the fact that we got a head start by stealing the land from the Indians and building our economy on the back of slave labor. By nature the French have, along with a certain arrogance, the quality of contestation. With the French it is an inborn reflex and though sometimes it can get to be fairly annoying it preserves them from being completely manipulated by their leaders. It also permits the French to stand up to major world powers and hold firm. Politics and religion are not taboo subjects at the dinner table either. In France even the children are interested in political matters.

Frank: Do the gaps, hyphens, and oceans that punctuate your life – America, France, Africa – serve to unify the man and his voice or do you reside in a state of permanent alienation? What effect does the eclectism of your experiences and origins – or alienation – have on your work as a writer?

JL: While giving profundity and generally broadening the vision of humanity, there is a reverse side to eclecticism and multiple experiences. Contradiction and paradox ride along with the oceans like flotsam. The real struggle involves being able to succeed in working with what could become destructive at any moment. Inner conflict is a constant.

Frank: Lost? Found? Comment....

JL: Lost and Found could be a resume of the genesis of the work! Destruction becomes the genesis for a new construction; however, things aren´t really destroyed, they´re taken apart (including language) to serve again in a totally different way. In this manner AKA is an alternative representation of knowledge, where having been dismembered, the debris is used as the building material to create a new universe: one where almost anything is possible and where almost everything does occur (or will happen, since a work which shares with AKA, the Book of Fever, is now in progress). This alternative eternity is better defined as being the remote present, a lieu where unrest born of social and political degradation leads to bleak perspectives which become the setting, an artificial landscape that often interferes to usurp the role of the protagonist. The pain of rebuilding a new world with the rubble of the old one, where the stains of previous suffering are indelible, is an integral part of the narrative experience. However, a certain feeling of beauty, serenity and even a degree of ecstasy permeates the story, the architecture of the narrative structure being that of a lengthy love letter. AKA is a pilgrimage through a world in which mental disorder serves to create aesthetic principles. Insanity is brought out of its exile (actually confined to institutions) to become a constructive factor. But whenever hope emerges it is shipwrecked. There is very little peace. Tremendous conflict, both internal and external, is a constant. Often promised, the action invariably evaporates. The adventure is a mental one. In this eternity which is the result of a voluntary exile, scores remain unsettled. Situations of conflict are pushed to a point slightly beyond the limit only to be confronted with their own mirror image. Death is an illuminating condition, not in the sense of light but in the possibilities which its coming can offer. In reversal, the native land is that which becomes alien. Home is the unknown, never familiar. Never the wise and all-knowing guide, the role of the narrator is a composition of imposed suffering which serves to explore and get lost in the universe which he builds and destroys. Through the evacuation of theory and the dispossession of values an extraordinary distance is established between ourselves and the standard reassuring image of what is known. So it is with language which is taken beyond possibility to a territory of new potential where it contributes to the building of an acute sense of isolation, creating an extremely remote zone where nothing is secure. Unrest is the prevalent mood, bringing on the sense of a mutilated universe. In this work it is as if I were writing from the land of my liver; the mind and the heart being underequiped to filter the toxins that have gone into the brew. "I´m writing to you from a land of fire" could very well serve to introduce the work in which the writing and its object become confused as with mirage. The "love letter" quality also has a rapport with the ambient high temperature. Loyalties and affiliations appear unnatural but upon examination they actually may be more well-founded than what we consider to be our family ties. The narrator doesn’t seek to leven the environment; but rather, asperities are built upon in order to reach new interzones, however precarioius they may appear. Excavation leads to abyssal depths constantly threatened by imminent folding over; the foraging begins in the gaps of contemporary philosophy. The pilgrimage is a journey of transgression composed of barrier-breaking and border-crossing in which the notion of the "self" is progressively extinguished. Upon entering AKA, a voyage without direction, the orthodox native land appears alien; and to a certain extent so now does usual language.

Frank: AKA .... an extraordinary work of fiction based on so many ideas, impulses, flavors.... Comment on where the work comes from? The idea? The execution?

JL: Obviously, fiction and non-fiction are interchangeable and overlapping. Our reality is extremely ambiguous and wavering. Justice remains theory, hardly ever applicable whether on a national or an international level. Democracy is in the process of devouring itself from within. The Occident is more or less grossly manipulated by fallacious media coverage. Actually, the populations of certain countries considered by us as being somewhat difficult places are perhaps more aware of the realities of the world today than we in the West who have become docilely dependant to our purveyors of lies. For example Algeria, inspite of examples of blatant censorship, has an extraordinary free independent press. Countless small but extremely alert and witty newspapers are published in Bangui Central African Rebublic. The populations of these countries are somehow already living in the future. Their reality is ahead of ours. However this is no simple reversal.

Hope is humanity´s fuel. Today it is very parsimoniously delved out when it isn´t outright quelled. Worse yet, oblivion is being artificially constructed to be positioned in the future, right across the path of hope, the future being hope´s natural dominion. Suffering, poverty and desperation are the common lot to 90% of humanity.

A word on the work and the execution: Strangely the comparison with Joyce fits well with AKA, though any such analogy seems fortuitous to me and this certainly wouldn’t be the case of the waiting glass slipper or an expectant excalibur. I say strangely because though I appreciate certain aspects of Joyce, I have never been really inspired by the work which is interesting to me only in a quaint, provincial sort of way. The Dublin/Paris axis, and with that, reduced to the early twentieth century time space. It´s a question of one cultivating his own private potato patch (granted, beyond the expected limits of that time) in a level 3 civilisation. Today, we´re borderline level 4, and such confinement, however brilliant it may have been and may still yet appear, just won´t do anymore. Thinking, the usage of language, the writing process, are acts that I voluntarily set at such an incredible distance before me, that to reach that mark, to even come near to that which is perhaps unobtainable, requires of me a sum of work which I can only define as suffering (obviously a form of suffering which can be confused with bliss). When I refer to the process of thinking, part of the preparation for AKA is the taking apart of contemporary philosophy and building upon the formidable gaps, which haven´t really ever been dealt with before. The same is true of the usage of language. In the course of breaking down the language, subjecting it to an intensified process of corrosion before attempting to rebuild, the result may ressemble a construction of errors. And this is well for it reflects the world today; but beyond that, today´s mistakes may well contribute to the making of tomorrow´s rules, which I hope will in turn be broken down again.

If my education began in the United States, it wasn’t until I began living in Europe (in the 70s) and more specifically in France, that my critical spirit began to awaken. However it was the discovery of the African continent (in the 80s) that brought on what I define as my real education. Many writers and artists have been affected by their encounter with Africa and the Arab world, from Delacroix to Burroughs. Unfortunately, few have ever gone beyond the superficial effects of stylistic and aesthetic considerations related to exoticism. The real history, the Afro-Arabic (and Afro-diasporic) intellectual contribution, contemporary writing and thinking as well as the creation of some major concepts, have been grossly neglected or even voluntarily obliterated. If nothing else, such writers as Frantz Fanon, Amos Tutuola, Soni Labou Tansi or Zora Neale Hurston (and countless others) should be required reading in American high school. Hurston´s description of the land as a protagonist in "Their Eyes Were Watching God" makes Joseph Conrad´s "Nostromo" seem glib and laborious. And in turn, how catastrophical for humanity it is that Conrad´s 19th century vision of Africa in "Heart of Darkness" still serves as a referent to contemporary philosophers when dissertating upon the "Dark Continent." The concepts of emancipation, decolonisation and independence undertaken by the Afro-diasporic community are supreme creations offered to the whole of humanity. We have yet to fully realize the significance of this.

Over the years, I have attended a form of "Barefoot University" by going to such places as Central African Republic, Algeria, Western Sahara, Palestine. These are not areas of tourism. However, the wealth of information and "perpendicular knowledge" gathered has convinced me that this may be the manner to obtain the highest form of a degree, the supreme diploma (which I am still far from acquiring). Without being guilt-ridden it is time to realize that reparations are highly overdue. Not only pecuniary, but more precisely intellectual reparations. If the influence of Afro-Arabian culture has been accepted to some degree since the nineteenth century as being part of our western civilisation, this recognition is restricted to the domain of the arts and entertainment. Meanwhile there has been an amputation of the intellectual contribution. And this is still being perpetrated with the current generation of contemporary occidental students nourished on Michel Foucault, Hanah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, (and others), all of whom have massively contributed to the obliteration of the Afro-Arabic matrix of our western civilisation.

Frank: Is AKA then a work of fiction? To what degree does Jean Lamore live in the strangely complex universe of his book?

JL: Each reader of AKA will determine to what degree the work represents fiction or another genre. It is a very personal and obviously subjective question. Yes, I am deeply involved with the work itself and indeed I do inhabit its universe. We all do, and I believe that the readers will also discover to what extent they already have a foot (or a lot more) in this universe.

Frank: If literary fiction is ultimately a comment on the state of contemporary reality, how does AKA in your thinking build on or push the boundaries of the genre? And what does the book really say about where we are on the planet in the early 21st century?

JL: In a way AKA is a children´s book, not that it was written for sub-adults, but rather that those who are still now children are the ones who, once mature, may stand a chance of tasting the flavor of the blowback. This without pretention; simply that knocking the bottom out of literature is no easy thing (I wouldn´t pretend to knock the top off). Going against rules that are still in the making, some imposed with such ferocious vigor only yesterday, can lead to rebound interpretation where the writer is totally out of time with the contemporary public. This represents a risk. If the work is positively ahead of its time in a general sense, certain aspects will nevertheless be considered as being part of the past when read by future generations. However, it will have been a different past, an alternative one which they will be relieved to have avoided or perhaps one that will be regretted as having been neither ours nor theirs. Action evaporates and is usually totally supressed. References are abolished. Language itself becomes part of the narrative structure. The language is mobile, meaning different things at different moments. Born of social and political degradation (a state of things to which I am particularly attentive) it perfectly fits one of the fundamental definitions of jihad which is to tell the truth in the face of tyranny. In AKA the universe is disassembled and only partially put together again. Don´t get me wrong; this is no manner of a kit offered to the reader. There´s some very disagreeable reading ahead. Everyone will find something about this work which they will positively hate. And this is well. Each reader is going to analyse me. I´m going to be on their couch; I´ll be their patient and they´ll either throw me out right from the start or we can go through some pretty rough water together. An exchange of sorts wherein we´ll swap heads.

The boundaries of genre? Very near implosion, an incredible recessive velocity. I´ve never given any manner of consideration to genre boundaries. We have here the same type of porosity caracteristic of "Mamba," the journal that I edit, wherein science, culture and politics are woven together. This particularity posed a problem with the marketing of the review, the distributors wanting to conveniently fit the publication into a category. I´ve always had difficulty with the idea of strict classification, defining the borderlines of genre. Feet can fit into shoes according to size (not always though), stuffed birds and pinned butterflies can be put into boxes for classification. Obviously, I´m not asking that a new category be created just for AKA.

As to where we´re at, place is never what it appears to be, and hopefully the reader will have a different perspective upon returning from AKA.

Frank: How do you co-exist as an artist and political activist?

JL: Paradoxicaly we´re experiencing an era of relatively robust political repression in the Occident today. Any artist, writer, comedian, who has become actively engaged for a non-consensual political cause knows what I´m speaking of. He or she will no longer be published, produced or shown. Contracts will be broken. Personally, I view contestation as one of the higher forms of patriotism. It is the responsibility of the citizens of a nation to make sure that their government doesn’t become an oppressive regime. And a government that does not listen to its citizens, worse, that won´t permit them to be heard, is a government that is already slipping towards tyranny. I also believe that an intellectual who doesn’t engage in political activism today is actually going against nature. ¨

Paris, 2006

Copyright: David Applefield, Frank Association, 2006