[Reader-list] Zidane - read this version

[Rana Dasgupta]

sorry was doing this late at night, and there were several mistakes in 
last version.  corrected here.

R

**********

Dany Laferrière is a francophone novelist from Haiti now living between 
Montreal and Miami. His commentary on the Zidane "header", which I found 
on the blog of Alain Mabanckou, a wonderful Congolese novelist -

http://www.congopage.com/article.php3?id_article=3791

- is radical and fascinating, so I've done a rough translation.  Read 
the comment too.

**********

http://www.ranadasgupta.com/notes.asp?note_id=69

I didn't sleep much last night for trying to understand Zidane’s 
gesture, especially since all the opinions I heard resembled each other 
so much it was as if only one person had watched the match.  The more 
there are of us, the more we seem to have the same opinion.  I am always 
suspicious of a crowd that speaks with one voice.  And it seemed that 
everyone was feeling sorry for Zidane: an unworthy end to the career of 
a great champion.  It’s strange, but this version seemed just too 
bourgeois to me.  In fact people weren’t really sorry for Zidane: they 
were only speaking about themselves.  Zidane was just a character from 
the fairy story they told themselves each night before going to bed. 
Hardly a month ago, Zidane was only an old, tired player.  Now he’s a 
fallen knight.

In the old, more bloody fables of the Brothers Grimm, a red card ending 
was acceptable.  But today, in this strange epoch when everyone seems to 
have drunk Disney milk in their childhood, no one tolerates anything but 
rosy endings.  Everything must finish happily.  Our heroes must be 
loveable before we will file them away in the cupboard of our happy 
memories.  So what does that leave for Zidane?  Zidane, the exemplary 
father, the discreet man who has led a faultless career?  These are the 
epithets people have stuck on him like medals.

Maybe it’s true, but what gets lost?  What did he have to swallow before 
that fateful  moment?  What did he have to endure silently before 
deciding to take his life back again?  Before becoming once again the 
proud young boy who played in the streets of Marseille?  The one whom 
one could never insult with impunity about his mother or his race?

Marseille is not a joke.  The National Front is not far away.  And 
Zidane is a child of that epoch.  Has Zidane ever believed in the 
adulation of the crowd, that monster that kills what it loves?  There 
will come a moment when he knows he will find himself looking at a man 
he abandoned long ago for money and fame, and that man is himself, 
Zinedine Zidane.  I don’t believe that the Italian player said to him 
anything that he couldn't stand to hear.  Simply, he felt that this was 
the moment.  His last match, the finale of the World Cup, at the very 
end.  It was this moment or never.  Otherwise, he had sold himself for 
ever.

Don’t speak to him of lost dignity.  This gesture was precisely about 
dignity, and he made it to recover some of his honour.  This was his 
moment.  He had already given everything to his team.  Now it was for 
himself.  Eight seconds out of a career of nearly twenty years.  Because 
if he didn’t do it then, it would all be over.  Anyway, he was 
exhausted, and the team could do without him.

I think that there are some moments in life which belong only to those 
who live them, and to no-one else.  The moment when one refuses to play 
always appears stupid in the eyes of others.  But what value has the 
pride of the collectivity when compared to the intimate pride of the 
individual?  Just because there are many people watching a game, they 
all believe that it’s only a game.  Zidane’s act was the intrusion of 
weighty reality into the game.  Zidane is not playing anymore.  He 
breaks the codes with a blow of his head.

I remember the moment of Charlebois’s death-blow, when he threw his 
drums at the French public.  In France, everyone was astonished by such 
behaviour, and yet in Quebec, Charlebois instantly became a 
counter-cultural icon.  They sensed something liberating in his gesture. 
  For Zidane, it will be the same thing.  Young rappers will surely 
introduce into their video clips the eight seconds where Zidane left the 
game to re-enter their stifling reality.  For once, Zidane, who was 
legendary for never allowing his temperature to rise, embraced all those 
who do not know how to behave in public.  His brothers from the street 
whose blood is still boiling.

**********

Comment by "Sami"

“If there were any doubts about the fact that Zidane was one of the best 
players in the history of football, after the final there can be no 
more!” wrote the popular Russian daily, Komsomolskaia Pravda, before 
adding, “Only an epic hero, a titan, a Hercules could depart like that.” 
  Dany Laferrière’s very personal commentary echoes that of many 
journalists around the world.  Nine seconds which make an absolute human 
out of a being whose shoulders would have been crushed by the image of a 
god hung on him.  The beauty of that gesture and its deep meaning are 
worth more than a gold trophy.  For me, this entire World Cup could have 
been organized only so that we could see this astonishing culmination: 
this header that sought not the goal but a chest from which poisonous 
words flowed.  For that alone, Zidane deserves the immortality that had 
already been predicted for him.  As for the disappointment of others, 
they can do with it whatever they wish.  They are truly some moments 
when others come after yourself, for they are not the essential. 
Especially when you understand their talent for condemning their 
instrumentalised heroes to absolute solitude.