I was in front of the ocean, observing the spectacle of canoes which come and go and govern the economy of this piece of land which shelters the last strips of sand before the Atlantic, when I received Helmut’s message accompanied by photos of trenches dug on a huge pile of voids. The monster that we have been talking about among friends for months, arises and spreads its wings of steel and concrete to annihilate any possibility of life in this place, once the territory of artists, poets and weavers of nets and life. We talked about it again on the banks of La Rosselle, a small calm stream that flows into La Sarre. We evoked the monster with dread, fearing its conflagration, which had now become inevitable. The monsters do not miss appointments with the commission of sinister packages, which makes their violence on men and their living areas premonitory. They arrive with this destructive poetry driven paradoxically by the desire to qualitatively transform our lives.

I felt in Germaine and Helmut a desire to believe that the gods could exorcise the monsters, delay their advance or even divert their gaze elsewhere, far from this coast they cherish so much. Their lair of sweets and friendship and love is thus threatened because, a cumbersome witness risks being the first spectator of Henriette’s dancers whose body movements are a poetry of the absolute. Their conviction is in no way an energy of despair, but the embodiment of a trust in Providence, that which in the end of the ends makes life triumph over death. This is believing, overcoming certainty to vitalize the possibility of dreaming at every moment.

Read the column: For Me, Violence Is Never an Option

A few weeks ago, the day after yet another futile conspiracy against the monster, I thought back to our conversation while facing the final slopes of the drop to climb the tower of the castle of Schlossberg propelled to the sky by the eponymous hill. From this sublime position, we overlook the magnificent valley of La Sarre and the town of Forbach below, an almost haunted place where, due to deindustrialisation, the stigmata of abandonment and social downgrading survive. It was the epilogue of my walk for two hours in this forest populated by nearly 80 species of trees. I took long breaks to admire the numerous cypresses in this place called « Path of the Stars », because it was once a stopover on the route of pilgrims who left La Sarre, the Palatinate, Lorraine and Alsace for Saint- Jacques de Compostela. The ruins of the castle, the decor of the Middle Ages offer a beautiful spectacle and a return to the majestic past of this place whose vestiges are a symbol of the fierce struggle that life leads over death.

Read the column: Preserve our Arts from the Barbarians

Silence reigned in the middle of the vegetation, conducive to meditation and long pensive crossings that chop the frantic march of days filled with activity and sterile excitement. Loneliness here refers to a quest that is never satisfied. We only steal moments of connection with the living, where everything is in its place in a harmony that is beautiful because it is imperfect. The voices of men are distant, we ignore their echoes to seek sanctuary only in the company of ourselves. I climbed the hill, then read a story devoted to the amorous and intellectual passion that bound for a time, certainly too short, in the forest of the Ardennes, the adventurer Elisabeth Prévost and the writer Blaise Cendrars. I closed the book and closed my eyes and thought back to the frenzy of the last days of the country far away but so close thanks to the news of friends and family, the media stories and the sad emotions that the tragic feeling generated by a withering Nation and who takes pleasure in unravelling all that she has built and cherished in a little over half a century.

There is a pleasurable terror that seizes the real country and this excitement of the crowds that we do not judge a priori but whose springs we observe with worry. Like an unmissable rendezvous with death that this pack has, there is a tragic parallel to be made with the monster of Toubab Dialaw who arrives while men and women taste the ultimate joys of a life far from the mirages of the development whose beautiful promises always give way to the extinction of life.

Read the column: Senegal Will Win Again

There too, on this little piece of Moselle land, we had a party; we celebrated Germaine’s birthday as a group, like a reconstitution of the great family of humanity, in a forest of colourful people of different colours, faiths, origins and destinies as if to give substance to this demand to always be careful to delay the end of Man. Germaine and Helmut here, like the associations and their friends there, proud and courageous and dignified in the ordeal, once again pleaded the cause of the Green Lung in front of a convinced audience but without any influence on the course of tragic history in progress. We are only artists corseted in an aesthetic of incapacity.

We only have our ears to listen to, our good intentions, our vain harangues and our words of compassion, our hugs and our strong handshakes. We also sang the hymn of hope which, it is said, brings life. Basically, we are all convinced of our inability to face the monster that haunts the inhabitants and frightens this solar couple whose last evening prayer is « to die together ». This powerful prayer repeated this day, when Germaine blows out her candles, deeply moved me. I hope it will be heard by the ancestors as late as possible and that until then, may they keep the strength to plant trees, fight their fight and defeat the monster together.

I left the Schlossberg Tower and finished the book of this magnificent storyteller of the depths of the human soul that is François Sureau, slumped on the damp grass. A light wind was blowing, sending music whose author or words I could not pinpoint exactly. Not far away, children escape the vigilance of their parents and sing. One of them, a little blonde girl with curly hair, plays the monster, and her classmates pretend to be frightened. Like an allegory of life, like the eternal restarting of things, as if we were only living the rerun of a film whose ending is always happy. At the end of ends, life triumphs over death.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE