“The earth was ours before we were its. » It was with these words that the inauguration ceremony of the youngest elected American president, John F. Kennedy, opened on January 20, 1961. They are recited by an 85-year-old poet, Robert Frost – recited because the old man, dazzled by the sun, cannot read the poem he had specially composed for the occasion. From his memory, he draws another old poem: The Gift Outright.
The United States is celebrating the 250th anniversary of this gift today: it is that of independence. Before her, this is the meaning of the first line, “the land was theirs”, but not their soul, which belonged to England – to the Old Continent. Now, continues the poet, to recover this soul, to find their independence and truly keep the promise of the New World, it was not enough for the Americans to drive out the English. They still had to give themselves entirely, without reserve, to this land which they themselves had seized.
Lend the Mona Lisa
At a time when the colonial dimension of this conquest can no longer be ignored – when Elon Musk forcefully reaffirms the ambition of the “New Frontier” in space that John F. Kennedy helped to popularize – and when relations between the United States and Europe are strained, it is important, to better celebrate it with our American friends, to fully understand this “unreserved gift”.
Another writer helps us, this one French, but who also happens to be celebrated this year, because it is the fiftieth anniversary of his death: André Malraux. He also had a special relationship with John F. Kennedy, and he also made a donation to him – or almost.
In 1962, then Minister of Culture, Malraux was received with great fanfare by the White House; delighted with his visit, and in particular his conversation with Jacqueline Kennedy, he promised the Americans to lend them the Mona Lisa – something he did a few months later, despite the boos from Paris.
“Culture is not inherited, it is conquered”
As René Girard noted while playing on the word gift, which means “present” in English as well as “poison” in German, a gift is often ambivalent: it obliges as much as it serves, and the relationship it allows to establish, although friendly, can quickly degenerate into conflict.
The philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called for 19th-century America to “free itself from the court muses of Europe,” would no doubt have considered Malraux’s gift a poisoned chalice: at best a humiliating reminder of Europe’s cultural superiority, at worst a form of neocolonial soft power.
A few years earlier, at the Acropolis, Malraux himself had, through one of those famous formulas of which he had the secret, expressed an idea going, apparently, along these lines: “Culture is not inherited, it is conquered. » In other words, it is not enough to receive the Mona Lisa and hang it in a museum: we must fight for it; it is only by paying the price that we know the cost.
Robert Frost, who wrote The Gift Outright in the heart of the “Great Depression,” and gave its first public reading on December 5, 1941, two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, would no doubt have agreed: “The act of gift was many an act of war,” his poem reads.
Free yourself from the colonial yoke
But does fighting for the Mona Lisa necessarily mean fighting against those who own it? And does fighting for land necessarily mean fighting against those who occupied it before us? The last lines of the poem, evoking a land “without history, without art, without adornment” before the arrival of the Americans – and thereby forgetting the indigenous populations – force us to ask the question. As if America could only free itself from the colonial yoke by imposing it on others.
No ! It is against these temptations, against these omissions, that we must forcefully assert the true meaning of Malraux’s formula: if culture is conquered, it is first of all against ourselves – against our comfort, our self-satisfaction, the easy slope of our habits. It is only afterwards, and without ever forgetting this primary requirement, that we can celebrate who we are, and who we have been.
Now this is also the whole meaning of this “unreserved gift” by Robert Frost: “Something that we kept for ourselves made us weak/Until the moment we realized that it was ourselves/That we kept so as not to give ourselves to this land of life/And immediately, we found salvation in abandonment. »
The myth of the “New Frontier”
Just as Malraux, by “giving” the Mona Lisa to the United States, was only recognizing that it had never belonged to him – just as he never possessed it better, better conquered it, than at the moment when he put himself at its service by transmitting its heritage – the Americans found their independence the day when, in the words of Robert Frost, they accepted to be “possessed” by their land, and not the other way around.
How can we define this land today? It is certainly a territory. But it is also a story, a myth, always the same: that of the “New Frontier” – to the west, then in space, ever further.
Rather than worrying about them for ourselves, let’s celebrate them with our American friends while recognizing, with Malraux and Frost, the threats that await them. The culture that is conquered is not that which is produced en masse, without effort for a user who is content to receive without having anything to give of himself, artificial intelligence.
If the conquest of space has no other goal than to save our skin by abandoning the Earth to climate change, it will never be an “unreserved gift”, and will betray the heritage of the pioneers who gave themselves to this earth. Malraux also said that “barbarism is what sacrifices men to myths, and we want a civilization which subjects myths to men”. To help Americans control their myths, let’s redouble our Mona Lisa donations.
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