16/11/2015
Dear friends from all over the world, please excuse this laborious and hesitant translation of this beautiful French article published in French newspaper Liberation - by Luc Le Vaillant - 15/11/2016 - "On s’embrassera en abominables pervertis" :
"We will mourn our dead. We will take the time necessary to realize what you did to us. And then we'll start again as before, severely hurt, shaken, but convinced that you cannot take what constitutes us.
We will be back listening to music at the Bataclan. We'll return dinner at "Le Petit Cambodge" restaurant. We will think again that we are the kings of the world on rue de la Fontaine au Roi (aka "King's fountain" street). We will be "Une Belle Equipe" (aka "A great team", the name of one of the bars) who will reinvent a beautiful time, on rue de Charonne. We will even go rue Bichat (aka "Doe's street) with prudence of does enveloped in shadows, chipped, but not terrified.
Of course, we will often surprise ourselves by looking over a shoulder to watch for suspicious shade, shuddering at the sound of a silly firecracker, foolishly looking for lice in the tonsures of bearded, but we won't abjure our lifestyle, our zest for life.
Tomorrow (...) we will sit again on the terraces of eastern Paris, these cosmopolitan and colorful neighborhoods which are the best that we have.
We will kiss our friends to say hello, we will hug our laughing girlfriends, we will still date as uncertain lovers. Men and women will kiss, proud of this flirtatious diversity, these seductive and relaxed bodies, these multicolored skins to rub hard against each other as do the buffs when they are grieving. We will kiss, happy and proud of these desires that throw the veil. We will kiss as "abominable perverted" souls.
Sitting in the mild late autumn, we will enjoy watching the people wandering along the Canal Saint-Martin and Quai de Jemmapes, their origins and genders mixed, their religions and convictions faced and accepted, laughing at some nonsense jokes in the festive night and slightly drunk of this freedom to live that you will never take us.
(...)
We will salute the Republique place and its statue, old moon lit with a new light from the candles burning to remember our friends of Charlie you killed in January. And if we are willing to forgive (note: "Tout est pardonné" was Charlie Hebdo title the week after the attack, aka "Everything is forgiven"), we do not forget.
Tomorrow we will return sticking against each other, fists clenched, elbows to the body, on this place emerging as the most beautiful and saddest of Paris, the most moving and most meaningful.
Tomorrow we will finally understand that Charlie fell for all of us (...) Tomorrow we will have finally recognized the need that all the newspapers publish caricatures of all the gods to dilute the threat. Tomorrow, there will be no question of putting to one side the "innocent victims" and on the other those who "deserved it".
To remember the lives mowed down by bullets, tomorrow we will return to hear rock at the Bataclan, eat shrimp spring rolls at Le Petit Cambodge and cut the head to theocracies as we did to royal absolutism.
Tomorrow we will throw the veil and remove the hood to watch the starry night. And we will tell ourselves that it is better if the sky is empty, because that's how it is the greatest. And that can shine the memory of those you killed.
