Wilfried N'Sondé

The Silence of the Spirits


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      Foreword / Dominic Thomas

       The Silence of the Spirits

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      FOREWORD

       “The Silence of the Spirits: From Civil Conflict to the War of Identities”

      Meeting is only the beginning of separation.

      Japanese Buddhist proverb

      On the surface, they have little in common, but N’Sondé gradually discloses information about them that will provide the coordinates of their relationship, the circumstances in which discovery and openness to the other becomes conceivable. “Like mine,” Nzila realizes, “her heart had been broken during her childhood, a nightmare that haunts her and works on her behind her veil of oblivion even to this day. The shadows of her stepfather’s hands and gaze on her bare thighs. All the years of feeling defiled. A bitter wound in her stomach, a hideous scar covering the memory of it all.” We learn that, now living alone in a small apartment, she was molested as a child and was later the victim of domestic abuse at the hands of an alcoholic husband. As for Nzila, “Every day, I kept a low profile in Paris, walking with my head down and staring at my feet to avoid looking in front of me. I’d forgotten all about the dream, which risked ending up in bureaucracy, a file with some numbers stamped on it. I was running away, heading nowhere, to avoid being detained, enclosed behind bars, with wrists and ankles handcuffed, accused of having tried everything, defied every unimaginable danger, flirted with death a thousand times, suffered everyone’s contempt, and all I wanted was simply to live!” A shared history of violence brings them together, but their hybridity threatens the social order, the monolithism of a society in which difference has no place, yet in which those very differences structure and define social relations. In her professional environment, Christelle “was about making others happy,” and rather than be governed by fear, her impulse is instead to humanize those whose paths (it is worth noting that in Kikongo, for example, nzila means a passage, a path or a way) she crosses: “She’d forgotten her own worries, escaped from her own labyrinth of anxi eties and boredom to take care of me, an illegal immigrant, far more destitute than she.”

      Christelle’s decision to extend a helping hand to Nzila, to provide him with a place to stay, a shelter, serves to address broader societal circumstances. In 2009, and therefore at the time of writing The Silence of the Spirits, the question of providing assistance to sans-papiers and refugees was being reviewed in the French parliament and was a hotly debated and divisive issue. Already back in 2003, several campaigns had been launched against laws that defined the degree to which individuals, associations, or organizations could provide assistance or help to illegal or undocumented foreigners, according to which “anyone who, directly or indirectly, helps, facilitates or tries to facilitate the entry, the circulation or the unlawful residence of a foreigner in France” could be subject to prosecution. Thus, in the face of increased government control and restrictions over immigration and the accompanying debasing and dehumanizing logic shaping such initiatives and measures, a term was adopted to designate those attempts at criminalizing such efforts, namely a délit d’hospitalité, or “offense of solidarity.” N’Sondé’s staging of hospitality, of the precarious position in which such choices place citizens, and the criminalizing of the implied intimacy, therefore shapes much of the narrative.