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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 2
Cartier-Bresson’s photographs never gossip. They are not ideas; they give us ideas.
Without doing so deliberately. His Chinese are disconcerting: most of them never look
quite Chinese enough. Being a witty individual, the tourist asks himself how they manage
to recognize each other. Personally, having looked through the album, I ask myself rather
how we could confuse them, and classify them all under the same rubric. The idea of
what is Chinese recedes and pales: it is no longer any more than a convenient label. What
remain are human beings who resemble each other in that they are human beings – living
presences of flesh and blood who have not yet been given their appellation contrôlée. We
must be grateful to Cartier-Bresson for his nominalism.
The picturesque takes refuge in words. If I present this old eunuch to you in words,
what exoticism! He lives in the monastery, with other eunuchs. He carefully preserves his
‘jewels’ in a jar. At the time when the Empress Tseu-hi, the yellow Agrippina, was still
only a concubine, on certain evenings he would undress her, wrap her in a purple shawl
and carry her in his arms to the imperial bed: naked empress, Agrippine concubine – it
rhymes – purple shawl, all these words light each other up with their fire. What is missing
is all that can be made visible, reality. Now open the album. What do you see first of all?
A life which is coming apart, an old man. It is not his incidental castration, but universal
old age which gives him that wrinkled, waxen face; it is old age and not China that has
tanned his skin. He looks like a woman? Perhaps, but this is because the difference
between the sexes tends to fade with age. He looks down sanctimoniously, slyly, and
holds out his hand to grab the bank note shown to him by a cheerful, blasé interpreter.
Where are the lights of the Imperial Court? Where are the empresses of yesteryear? So he
is a eunuch: but what more could he do, at his age, if he were not? The picturesque is
wiped away, farewell European poetry; what remains is the material truth, the poverty
and greed of an old parasite of the fallen regime.
This peasant is having lunch. He has come to the town to sell the produce of his land.
At this moment he is eating rice soup, in the open air, in the midst of the townsfolk who
ignore him, with the voracity of country people: famished, weary, solitary, he has
brothers, at this very moment, in all the world’s large farming towns, from the Greek who
drives his sheep along the boulevards of Athens to the Chleuh, who has come down from
his mountains and is wandering through the streets of Marrakech. Here we have other
peasants: hunger has brought them down to Peking and there they have stayed. What can
they do in a capital without industry, when craft skills require a long apprenticeship?
They will ride bicycle taxis. We have scarcely glanced at them, but these vehicles look
familiar to us: we had our own during the Occupation. It is true that they seemed less
filthy; that is because we put our filth elsewhere. And poverty is the best-distributed thing
in the world: we are not short of wretched people. It is true that we are no longer in the
habit of harnessing them to carriages to make them pull the rich. But have they, for all
that, ceased to be our beasts of burden? We now harness them to machines.
And who are the people who have themselves pulled along like this? Fine gentlemen in
felt hats and long robes, the very men who at the moment are leafing through books on
the shelves of a second-hand bookseller, and who are delighted that they are able to read.
Do you laugh at their robes? Then you must laugh at our priests. At their hats? Then
laugh at yourself. The uniform of the elite over there is a felt hat and a robe; in our
country it is the suit. In any case, what is laughable, about them and about us, is that there