A few comments.
First we must destroy a myth. Being a stranger in one’s own country is a positive condition.
These are not comments on a worthy individual who, when there is no one to stop him from waiting patiently, follows migratory flows because patience is not really the most attractive virtue, nor are they a reference to Mameli or to extremism that naturally avoids the possibilities offered by nuances of grey. Perhaps for most people there is only the disturbing ideal of an inevitable defeat seen from two different viewpoints, two sides of the same coin: “take it out on the stranger / do not take it out on the stranger, because in any case it is not my country, I am not among the few.
So what is it? Human nature makes us automatically accept the condition of citizen of the world and to consider the problem as if it regarded every human being from the start of time. And now the positive aspect of being a stranger in one’s own country in the words of our beloved Derrida :”…the stranger is the one who asks the first question, or the one who is asked the first question…”. So if I am the stranger, as a human being, and I ask myself the first question, I question my own existence, and we have always maintained that a crisis (=change) is a condition of existence that may not be positive but is at least promising.
The issue of the stranger is a symbol of the question that each society asks itself “as if the stranger were the very question being questioned”.
And now that we feel reassured and hopeful in this positive condition of strangers in our own country, we would like to consider the relationships between the individual and the crowd and between the crowd and power, between the assertion of the individual who may learn from others, like the pugnacious chimp Caesar in one of the sequels to “Planet of the apes” that understands that fear of other people, of man, comes purely from recognising him as different, a stranger, an unknown part of himself, a desire for self-determination and a desire to be an individual who is recognisable in a crowd, perhaps an individual not yet well put together.
For lovers of quotations, particularly when they seem to be created on purpose, and above all to dampen this optimistic tone that imposes the certainty and positivism of being a stranger in one’s own country as a driving force, we will conclude with cries of hatred:
“…And I also felt ready to relive everything. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the benign indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself – so like a brother, really – I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators on the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hatred.”
(L’Etranger – Albert Camus)
Portage
