dreaming of one thing [subversive chronicle]
BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics))
1961/62]
# in december 1960 the french poet danielle collobert joined a militant group collaborating with thealgerian resistance organisation fln in its struggle against colonial france. in her cahiers 1956-1978 she records her desire to leave, as soon as possible, before the resistance dies out, to flee from personal boredom + exhaustion. later the attempts during countless journeys, in which everything more + more resembles everything else, to lose herself. by all accounts, she smuggled weapons + money into algeria in support of the movement [porteurs de valises]. she does not reveal much about her involvement, keeping her experiences by and large to herself. imagination may be sufficient to picture what activities she was involved in. the mute screams. simply in order not to hear oneself. the blocked passageways to light. the boundless separation, the starting point no longer within view. who is speaking?
# collobert understands algeria as a real beginning to which she binds her hopes. but as early as february 1962 she declares her militant activism over + views it as having failed. she is forced to go into hiding for some time in italy [rome, then venice]. she goes, she departs, she cannot stop departing, to the point that departure, that disappearance, finds its fulfilment. a question of distance. her claustrophobia between the walls of the porte de vincennes, just as between those of a gallery where she worked for a while [and which hardly any visitors ever entered]. unable to take any more she observed events from the distance. while from the outset she was concerned with endings. the end of writing, of language, of life. in this not unlike the naysayers beckett or rimbaud. sensation, the access to routine things, was lost to her. life without a centre. isolated from the cries of others, the infection of self-inflicted wounds. erosion of time. places + travels becoming interchangeable, a kind of nomadism that she lives, a restlessness or disorientation in which the one is as good as the other [the hostility of things]. she misses the direct influence of political events. direct action, she writes, immediately justifies itself in its entirety. political struggle yields to inner struggle. the events in algeria have only intensified her feeling of disillusionment.
# at around the same time in paris, on the evening of 17 october 1961, while nearly 40,000 people march [following the call of the fln to protest a curfew that forbade algerians to leave their homes after 8.30pm], the security forces of the police + crs open fire on peacefully demonstrating men and women. throughout the city there are confrontations in which people are physically abused or killed [more than 50 algerians alone are driven into the inner courtyard of the prefecture + shot]. many of the victims are later thrown into the seine [dead, unconscious, or chained], paulette péju, ratonnades à paris, 1961/2000. the events were concealed + censored for decades. jacques panijel’s film, octobre à paris (fln, guerre d’algérie), 1962, work on which begins a day following the massacre, presents in documentary footage + interviews with demonstrators the victims of the police violence. this film, too, was subject to censorship for a long time. at least 14,000 people were then forcefully detained by the police for days in two sports stadiums.
[. . .]