Poor people

Est-ce que quelqu'un parmi vous a déjà entendu parler d'un dude qui s'appelle William T. Vollmann? Si non, laissez-moi vous le présenter brièvement. Vollmann est un écrivain américain, né en 59, représentant typique de ce que j'appelais dans mon mémoire de maîtrise une certaine "ambition démesurée". Il a publié, depuis 1987, plus de quinze romans, quatre desquels font partie d'un cycle historique racontant la conquête de l'Amérique depuis les Vikings, qu'il appelle The Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes. Aucun de ces romans fait moins de cinq cents pages. Il a publié aussi, dans son incarnation parallèle de journaliste/reporter international, plusieurs essais, dont le monumental Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (2004), un livre monstre sur le concept de violence de sept volumes qui est introuvable en ce moment sauf sur craigslist pour 500$. Il a gagné le National Book Award en 2005 pour Europe Central, un roman absolument extraordinaire sur les échos entre le fascisme et le communisme durant la première moitié du XXe siècle. Talk about procrastination.

Si je parle de lui, aujourd'hui, c'est parce que je suis en train de dévorer, dans une expérience de lecture un peu trop immersive à mon goût, un de ses derniers livres: Poor People. C'est un essai magnifique et profond qui a récemment été traduit en français sous le titre Pourquoi êtes-vous pauvre? Vollmann s'est promené partout dans le monde durant plusieurs années et a posé cette question à des dizaines de mendiants, de putes, d'ouvriers, de voleurs, de joueurs compulsifs, de junkies, de punks. Ça donne lieu évidemment, à travers une série de vignettes qui se promènent entre le portrait et la philosophie, à une réflexion extrêmement puissante sur les principes même de pauvreté et de richesse, puisque dès les premières pages, Vollmann se voit dans l'obligation de poser philosophiquement et éthiquement les bases de son enquête, qui sont plus bien compliquées qu'on pourrait le croire.

Un extrait fascinant qui s'enfonce lentement dans la relativité et les questions de perception:

"1. We never had normal conditions. 2. The rich take advantage of the poor, and the poor hate them. 3. The government gives them too much! It is almost certain that in all these three statements the crucial terms normal, rich, poor and too much come into play implicitly when not explicitly, that the sense of them varies in each statement, and that my own understanding of them falls into some equally isolated fourth category. (Handbook of Income Distribution, 2000: Depending on how ressources, poverty lines and equivalence scales are defined,... poverty in Ireland increased a lot, a little, did not change or decreased a lot using the same data set between two years.)

Who then am I, to call Wan [une mendiante thaïlandaise presque morte d'inanition] poor if she thinks, or at least claims, that she is rich?

But she is poor all the same.

How do I know it? - Her dull-eyed, blotchy scrawniness tells me. Would I bet my own life that she is dead now? Not quite; few doctors would be so rash with their own terminal patients. All the same...

Poverty is wretched subnormality of opportunity and circumstances. This definition can be applied by any observer who understands the external realities of his own normality. It makes a useful first approximation; and the United Nation's shorthand of poverty is an income of less than four dollars a day is a practical approximation of the approximation. Some difficulties with this materialist conception have already been discussed. Here is a more fundamental one: It adresses merely the physical, measurable aspects of being human. Such a person might as well be Rousseau's savage: The only goods he recognizes in the universe are food, a female, and sleep; the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. Of course the thoughtfullest policymakers of governments and relief organizations will supplement Rousseau's catalogue of goods with such treats of civil society and education, gender equality and the like; the more they add, the more disagreements they will suffer as to which should be funded to what degree - in short, the further they fall into the subjectivity to which this book has already abandoned itself. Poverty is wretched subnormality... But what is wretchedness? As long as these two Colombians have their food, their sleep and their females, who are they to pull at our hearts? The question's very offensiveness proves that we know they deserve more. Yes, they deserve it.

Poverty is deservingness of a portion of what I have. This is charity's definition. Deservingness need not be tainted by the Victorian ethos which, deficient in charity, excludes vagabond and habitual rogues.

I may not be as educated as I would like; all the same, my life more or less suits me. That beggar over there has food, sleep and a female, but he's illiterate. How much education does he "need"? Why not answer, as much as I have? Why not even as much as I wish I had?

What if he wants less? Once I rescued a child from coerced prostitution. I paid for her school for a year. She chose to learn to sew, not to read. Should I have insisted that she do otherwise? The last I heard of her, she was married, illiterate, self-supporting and not unhappy.

If someone owns less than I, and is unhappy about it, I'll call him poor. If he claims to be rich, but I see him failing to thrive, as medical textbooks put it, best to call him poor. When there is any doubt in the matter, why not call him poor? Charity demands it.

But if based on my perceptions of his reality and my judgment of his logical coherence I call him sane (for this is where the Marxist notion of false consciousness went wrong: it failed in that sort of charity which requires us to respect the self-awareness and self-judgments of others wherever possible), and if this sane person, no matter how much or how little he possesses, insists that he is rich, charity requires me to believe him."

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Il me reste une cinquantaine de pages à lire. Vollmann m'a amené en Thaïlande, en Russie, aux États-Unis, en Afghanistan, en Irak, au Kazakhstan, au Japon, en Chine, au Yemen, en Colombie. Il a pris des photos de tous ces gens pauvres. Il leur a donné de l'argent pour les interviewer. Je ne sais pas s'il va tirer de grandes conclusions, mais je ne crois que ça soit le propos de son livre. Il n'a pas l'intention ni la prétention de sauver qui que ce soit. Ces gens vont rester pauvres. La seule chose qu'il accomplit, c'est leur enlever leur invisibilité pendant 300 pages. Est-ce que c'est déjà ça?