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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 6
to look up to see the lighthouse of America.
In all the capitals of poverty, people scavenge. They scavenge in the soil and the
subsoil; they gather round refuse bins; they slip right into the rubble: ‘What others throw
away is mine; what is no longer of any use to them is good enough for me.’ On waste
ground near Peking, the rubbish piles up. This is the refuse of the poor; they have sifted
through everything, they have already rummaged through their own rubbish; they have
only left, reluctantly, what is uneatable, unusable, unspeakable, revolting. And yet the
flock is there. On all fours. They will scavenge all day, every day.
In all the capitals of poverty, there is pilfering. Is it stealing? No, just picking things
up. These bales of cotton have just been unloaded. If they stay an hour longer on the
dock, they will disappear. No sooner have they been put down than the crowd rushes
forward and surrounds them. Everyone attempts to pull off a handful of cotton. Many
handfuls of cotton, gathered day after day – that makes an item of clothing. I recognize
the look on the women’s faces, I have seen it in Marseilles, in Algiers, in London, in the
streets of Berlin; it is serious, quick and hounded, anguish mingles with greed. You have
to grab before you are grabbed. When the bales have been loaded onto a lorry, the kids
will run after it with outstretched hands. Meanwhile, in Nanking, there is shooting in the
streets. Alone in the middle of a boulevard, a man is bent over an armchair which is
ripped open; he wants to get its stuffing. If he does not get hit right between the eyes by
one of the bullets whistling around his ears, he will have gathered enough fuel for one
hour of just one winter’s day.
Every day the poor people dig, scavenge and gather. Every day the artisans repeat their
traditional movements. At every dawn, officers do their exercises in the gardens of the
Forbidden City, while ageing ghosts drift through the palaces. Every morning Peking
reconstructs its appearance of the previous day, the previous week, the previous
millennium. In our country, industry is destroying all the old frameworks; but over there,
why should they change? Cartier-Bresson has photographed eternity.
Fragile eternity; it is a tune played over and over again. To stop it, you would have to
smash the record. And indeed it is going to be smashed. History is at the city gates; from
day to day, in the rice fields, in the mountains, and on the plains, it is being made. One
more day and then another one: it will be over; the old record will be smashed to pieces.
These timeless snapshots are precisely dated; they fix forever the last moments of the
Eternal.
Between the circular time of old China and the irreversible time of new China, there is
an intermediate phase, a gelatinous duration equally distant from History and repetition:
the time of waiting. The city has undone the sheaf of its millions of daily gestures: no
longer does anyone file, or carve, or scrape, or trim, or adjust, or burnish. Abandoning
their small living spaces, their ceremonies, their neighbours, people go and crowd
together, in shapeless masses, in front of stations, on the docks. Houses empty. And the
workshops. And the markets. In outlying locations, crowds gather, compact together,
coagulate; their fine structures are crushed. Heavy, dense pictures replace the airy photos
of old Peking. Waiting. Whenever they do not take control of History, the masses
experience great events as periods of endless waiting. The masses of Peking and
Shanghai are not making History; they are subjected to it. As are, moreover, the police
who watch them, the soldiers who move among them, who return from the front, who