‘Oops, I’m sorry I hurt you, but I did This because you did That.’

When did it all start? When some decided to have a taste for stoner music? All gathered in the same place, dancing, stepping on each other’s feet, sweating together, screaming and being more than alive. Inside a box, all together, for fun, with those red and black colours, inside the Bataclan’s pseudo-Chinese facade. While others developed a feeling of hatred. For them, looking at Syria bursting from the inside, bombed from the outside, with no fun, no dance -
torn apart instead.

Multiple organisations were born to fight Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, one of which was Islamic State. And one of the missions they attributed to themselves was to punish France for participating to the bombing of Syria. On the 13th November 2015, they attacked Paris. Now, almost seven years afterwards, court has been in process since September 2021, hearing prosecutors and victims. Salah Abdeslam (one of the perpetrators/accused) is about to be condemned, and asked the victims for pardon, crying for their forgiveness. After a week feeling totally upside down about this, I understood I needed to understand the notion of pardon a bit more. Believing that by questioning and further thinking, I would find an answer: should I forgive? Why not?

To start the quest, I need to understand who I am addressing. Defining terrorism sounds like a logical starting point. It has this particularity of showing bravery on one side, or being terrible on the other. It is a matter of who’s killing and who’s being killed. For Islamic State, France is bad and thus a target. For France, Islamic State is bad, and thus... a target. So if it is a matter of viewpoints, we can even question if there was ever any roots to it at all. Killing was and has always been the way when people established that there was no other way. To put it in different words: are there roots to terrorism, or is it just something that has always been there and yet has only recently got a name?

Recently takes us back to 1764 in France, when Voltaire wrote his Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophic Dictionary), that questioned well established words and concepts, in the beautiful breath of the Siècle des Lumières (Age of Enlightenment). Light, reason, progress and discovery were at the forefront of the era. But if that all sounds too lovely then we can shatter the illusion: it doesn’t mean it was all beautiful and smooth back then. War and crime remained constant, and with it, the quest to understand their orgins in order to fight it. This is what we are gently trying to do here together, on a different scale. To put this frankly, Voltaire might have been a bit upset about all the sad and bad going on in the world (allow me the supposition, when you see all the lines he wrote, we can hardly say he was not passionate). It is our turn now, when such a thing as a demand of pardon upsets me, I
passionately write about it.

But.. back to mister Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary.. defining concepts in alphabetical order, he tells us about expiation, grace, war, etc. But the one that might shed a bit of light on terrorism is the article about fanaticism:

‘There is no other cure to this epidemic than philosophical spirit, which, spread little by little, softens humans morality, and foresees accesses of evil; for, as soon as this evil progresses, we must run away and wait for air to be purified. Laws and religion are not enough against this scourge. Religion turns into poison in the brain of the infected. Those people are certain that the saintly spirit that penetrates them is beyond laws, and that their enthusiasm is the only law they need to hear. What can you say to a man that tells you he would rather obey God than obey humans, and who is convinced that he will get to Heaven by cutting your throat? The effect of philosophy is to ease the soul, and fanaticism is
incompatible with tranquillity.’

-Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764.

Strangely echoing what happened 300 years afterwards, Voltaire can help us understand that the fanatic terrorist is motivated by an inner compulsion, that no one can
really magically act on, but that can perhaps be fought by spreading thoughts. This is what we are doing here, if you’re still there.

So, let’s move on to the next path—see this article as a chase. We are walking together in the forest, trying to crack as few leaves as possible, walking slowly, without being heard, getting closer to our target: the pardon. This unseeable something, that flies from the mouth of someone to the conscience of the one who asked for it, is the magic that brings tranquillity and eases the mind of the perpetrator. The concept of pardon seems a bit like a recipe to follow (cooking time is up to the level of damage): i.e. you do bad, then you apologise, you ask to be pardoned, you are forgiven, you are good. Pardon existed/exists strongly in religious contexts—though not strictly—where sins can be washed away by confession, or literally by water (such as the holy water of the Ganges). All kinds of methods have been invented to forgive: confessing; doing hard work; sending a billy goat for a procession of shame to clean the sin of the city; paying a tax for a crime to the pope (killing a priest was worth two hundred coins, four hundred for a bishop. RE sodomy, incest: you name the crime, we’ll name a price).

I know you might be thinking, what about prison? You name a crime, we name a sentence. Prison is not something we will put here as part of the pardon process, because pardon cleans the conscience. Jail punishes and does not forgive. This, here, is important in the current situation: Salah Abdeslam is about to be imprisoned—punished—but still, he asks for pardon, forgiveness—either a trick to lower his sentence or to clean his own mind.

No matter what his reason was, what matters to me is understanding why when the terrorist that hurt me asks for pardon it boils my blood?

Because after all, why not forgive, move on, and make a better world? ...wait? Did you hear that? I heard a leaf crack... something went wrong and I felt it. Did you sense it too? There is one key something that bothers me: in order to ask for pardon, the first step is to agree on what happened. And- oh dear- we don’t. His statement is the following: he believes in Sharia law, acts on behalf of Islamic State and does not disapprove of his brother’s actions (one of the terrorists that committed the attack). But then, he cries, and asks for pardon—an unbelievable twist. Also, despite the pardon allowing for a possible healthy relationship in the future, I do not—and I can spoil it now—plan to go for a coffee with him in the foreseeable future.

This is why, when I go to court, you, Salah Abdeslam, won’t get my pardon. I will read my testimony, and then a shorter version of this track, in French, to reply to the demand. And this only on the grounds that I think you misplace the demand; you follow the law of killing, I don’t. From this day on, my desire to ease your mind is gone. You have provoked the victims into further emotional confusion, twisting the situation and giving us a role we didn’t ask for: feeling bad for our persecutor. And this, thanks to deliberation and writing this, I don’t welcome in my heart. Give space to thoughts, as big as they seem; processing just creates more room.

If bitterness is echoing in our head when we think of not granting pardon, this is particularly this unpleasant feeling we are aiming to deconstruct with all this writing. Indeed, if pardon shouldn’t be asked, no guilt is to be felt and so it is not bitter to say no. Overall, there is never a bitterness in saying no if it doesn’t sound right to say yes. For a simple reason, that walk together in the forest has gotten us closer to the core concepts of asking and giving- and bitterness did not get a part
during the auditions.

But, know this. If you do cross my path and get to know me more, you will find that what inhabits my heart is mostly constituted by endless creation, thoughts, lots of thoughts, laughter, the ‘ding-ding’ of my bell on the cycle path, sweaty energy when I dance, and a smile when someone steps on my foot and says ‘oops, I beg your pardon’.

This is what I thought I’d say, when I got to court, but you, Salah Abdeslam, actually didn’t get any answer. As I entered the court, a box built in the middle of the courthouse, I closed my sketchbook with the whole pardon writing, and I held my testimony instead. Two A4 pages, that I folded twice, that I could carry close to me the two days before court, and change any words, anytime. And all of a sudden, it clearly appeared to me, why answer a question that shouldn’t be asked? And why not instead stand for myself, and tell my truth. So when I walked to the stand, my lawyer to the right, the perpetrators to my left, the judge in front of me, eyes and ears behind, I looked at them, and I felt good, and I shared this feeling with them. In the eyes, for the first time, we knew each other. Eyes back to my folded sheets, unfolded, I start reading, this text that I embody to a point that I feel that my fingers connect to the paper and we flow together.

When I read “what are you going to remember about this testimony? You? You, the perpetrators, those whose gaze is the heaviest”, I turned back to them, 14 half faces which I could only see the eyes of (masks on), and suddenly, that monstruous shape I feared the most of the terrorists’ ethos faded away, and in front of me were just eyes, listening carefully. In the eyes I found ease, I found humanity flowing through my body. I said I felt like I was walking on a wire since the attack, held by two giants, my strength and my joy; sometimes that wire is tensed, and even if it is hard to walk on it, I handle. But what happens when Joy or Strength fall apart? I fall down, deep, endlessly. And because this feeling might be universal and does not only apply to a survivor of an attack, the look they gave me helped me find ease, and I understood it is possible to communicate when you speak for yourself. This is why I only read my testimony, and spoke a universal language, the one of imagery.

You can now close your eyes for a second and listen to any leaves cracking on your side. This is the end of our track together - maybe you can look up to the treetops. Perhaps realise the bigger picture is not about defining one word or two, heads to the ground and the leaves, but about making justice to an experience. Thoughts can help you figure things out, but nothing is as neat and putting into action often leads you to your own key of liberation.