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ABSTRACT
Jean-Paul Kauffmann is a travel writer whose work obliquely interrogates his long and difficult confinement as a hostage in Beirut from May 1985 to 4 May 1988. His work engages, in part, with sites and traces of French imperialism that sponsor a reflection upon confinement and freedom and on a self that is ruptured from the past and in search of the reparative. This article examines traces of French colonialism within Kauffmann's work, tracking them, in particular, in La Maison du retour (2007). It is argued that his engagement with the colonial is a self-limiting, if paradoxically doubling, discursive exploration that explicitly rejects the horizontal expansion of the rhizome towards an oppressed other in favour of the root's verticality that might offer a connection across the void of his crushing experience, and gravitational pull, of confinement. His work offers a restricted form of microspection that, understandably, shores up the self.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Henri Sannier, the news anchor of Antenne 2 news, 20 heures, notes that the circumstances of the two hostage dramas were very different https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2hj9BwuIOU (accessed 12 January 2021). To Sannier's comment we could reply “Yes”, and “No”. The release of the French hostages Marcel Carton, Marcel Fontaine and Jean-Paul Kauffmann took place three days before the second round of the French presidential elections in which the prime minister, Jacques Chirac, faced the incumbent, François Mitterand. Jacques Chirac was the first to greet the three as they descended from the airplane. It was subsequently revealed that Chirac, using backchannels, had organised a payment for their release. See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Charles_Marchiani#Affaire_de_la_lib%C3%A9ration_des_otages_au_Liban (accessed 11 February 2021). It is clear that the ending of both hostage dramas was part of a larger political strategy.
2 Keenan co-wrote Between Extremes: A Journey beyond Imagination (2000) with follow hostage John McCarthy in which they recount their journey to Chile and Patagonia and in 2005 published Four-Quarters of Light: An Alaskan Journey.
3 The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that the imprisonment lasted some five years (1572–76) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Luis-de-Leon (accessed 19 January 2021).
4 My reference here is to the work of Pierre Nora (Citation1989) as well as to the important postcolonial re-evaluation of the notion and sites of realms of memory undertaken by Achille, Forsdick and Moudileno (2020).
5 This moment of the press conference can be viewed on YouTube and is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzykmMgEtNA (accessed 10 January 2021).
6 Biographical details of Kauffmann's life can be found at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Kauffmann (accessed 11 February 2021).
7 Michel Seurat died in captivity in March 1986. His body was “discovered” in Burj El Barajneh, a Hezbollah controlled neighbour of Beirut on 24 October 2005 and repatriated to France on 7 March 2006 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Seurat (accessed 18 February 2021).
8 And we could list New Orleans (after Orléans), Louisiana (after Louis XIV) and reflect upon the Louisiana State Penitentiary also known as “Angola”, the prison being on the site of a plantation where most of the slaves were trafficked from Angola. The prison is infamous for its practices of long term solitary confinement. Albert Woodfox spent 44 years in solitary confinement https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/19/albert-woodfox-interview-solitary-confinement-44-years (accessed 19 February 2021).
9 The documentary, made up of interviews with those who were involved in the events as well as relatives of those who were killed, can be viewed at https://www.mediapart.fr/studio/documentaires/france/documentaire-retour-ouvea (accessed 15 February 2021).