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By Root 830 0

death and therefore with life, with the fear and therefore with the feeling of existing that are unlike anything you’ll experience in fortunate places among the well-to-do. I was happy in Sarajevo. I have pleasant memories of my time in Huambo or Luanda, in Angola. In Tenga, in the suburbs of Bujumbura, I was caught up in a shoot-out, which I have described in one of my books. Obviously, that’s not a good memory, but it taught me more about myself, my reflexes, my most obscure desires than hours and pages of patient introspection. My report from this year in Darfur came from that desolate savannah where the people live in fear of seeing a Janjaweed soldier appear at any moment in that desert that has been so methodically desertified that you can travel for days without coming across any trace of another human being or even a ruin, nothing but the odd, vague animal looking at you with the eyes of a child. I lived through moments there that were very strange, not at all unpleasant, that made me reflect on time, forgetting, memory, debris and the end of debris, the body’s mute words, its freedom. I know that this isn’t a good thing to say, that it makes me a tourist of disaster. But it’s true.

Then, there’s a taste for performance, which I’ve always had. I’ve always been tempted (this is even more indecent, obscene, attention-seeking, inappropriate, but I’m telling you the truth) to do what other people don’t do, or if they do, to do it in some way that belongs to me alone. I liked going off to take part in the revolution in Bangladesh, while in 1971 my comrades believed that Paris was where the revolution was taking place, and thirty years later I enjoyed writing a preface for Cesare Battisti,* when all of the press in France and Italy were calling him shallow, scabby, a brute, a bastard, a born criminal. I liked setting off on the tracks of Daniel Pearl when everybody else seemed to have forgotten him, helping to turn the case of Hirsi Ali, whose name was unknown, into a French national cause, going to Sarajevo before everyone else, when the city was still being blockaded … In my Darfur struggles, I liked not going through the official channels used for most of the testimony you can read anywhere. And, on my way back, I loved being able to suggest, insidiously, with an appearance of false modesty but in reality terribly pleased with myself, that I wasn’t one of those naïve American actors who believe that they have “been there” just because some Sudanese walked them around a couple of refugee camps. This morning I enjoyed being able to point out in my “Bloc-Notes” that I am one of the only French people to have spent a day—during my “forgotten wars” period—with Iván Rios, that FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] commander who was killed by his bodyguard and whose severed hand was brought back to the commander of the San Mateo barracks. I also liked, in the same series of reports, having been one of the very, very few to have succeeded in traveling through the bush on board an improbable sort of rickshaw into the heart of the Nuba Mountains among people who hadn’t seen a white person since Leni Riefenstahl. Once again, I’m embarrassed to tell you this. In doing so, I’m quite aware that I’m making myself look less deserving against the horizon of a humanist and “committed” eternity. But that’s how it is. Jean-Marie Colombani and Edwy Plenel will remember. They are the ones who approached me with the suggestion that I should report for Le Monde. I named only one condition (presented, naturally, as a choice dictated by cold military efficacy and not at all by this desire I’m sharing with you, of being the best and first at everything): that I could take the collection of papers over, let’s say, the last fifteen years and go to those places that their reporters had not or had hardly visited …

There’s one more thing, and this time I don’t know how to say this without sounding completely ridiculous. It’s wanting to exceed my limits, to live beyond myself, literally to live beyond my means. The idea, if you prefer, that