I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions. All they see if some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd. But what I see is millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue.
(For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal’s point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me. When I say to the criminal, ‘This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong,’ or, ‘This deed is bad, and this other deed is bad, and this one is also very, very bad,’ the criminal understands the word ‘wrong’ in this way: It is wrong when he doesn’t get his fair share of profits from the crime just committed; he understands the word ‘bad’ in this way: a fellow criminal betrayed a trust. That must be why, when I say, ‘I am filled with rage,’ the criminal says, ‘But why?’ And when I blow things up and make life generally unlivable for the criminal (is my life not unlivable, too?) the criminal is shocked, surprised. But nothing can erase my rage—not an apology, not a large sum of money, not the death of the criminal—for this wrong can never be made right, and only the impossible can make me still.)
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