It is in reading that I first found evidence of alterity. First it was in my childhood reading of the collected issues of the Journal des Voyages from the years 185-70, a present from a friend of my grandfather who bore the astounding name of Claudius-Veran. I read the journals as if they were about current news; they presented the world as a mystery to which the key must be found: unreal, ghostly Africa, where the other--the African--always wears a mask, stripped of humanity, belonging to the animal kingdom. Yet I had known Africa, at the age of eight, during a trip to the Ibo country, where I met my father for the first time, doubtless the only traveling I had ever done. Fortunately, the imperialist fantasy of the Journal was exorcised by the reserve of emotions, intuitions, recollections that the real Africa had given me--the smell of the earth after tropical rains, the vault of the forests on the road to Abakaliki, the mountain where gorillas lived near Obudu, the steppe scattered with giant termitaries around Ogoja, on the bank of the Cross River.

Those were the last days of colonial society, its terror and banality. Day after day, the voice of the BBC spread news of the extortion of the leopard-men in the Congo and of the Kikuyu in Kenya. Soon rebellion would come to Morocco, war to Indochina and Algeria.

Very early on, I got the feeling that the principal function of books was not to distract but rather to take the measure of things. Doubtless I will never be able to locate exactly the memory of reading Don Quixote, Treasure Island, or Lazarillo de Tormes knowing nothing of literature; the books spoke inside me then, in my own language, as if they were my own memory. I paid more attention then to the woodblock prints illustrating the old editions, to the drawings by Tony Johannot or Gustave Dore, to the engravings in the Hetzel edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

The world's mystery cannot be found through exploration; mystery resides rather in the world's imaginable power. During the time I am remembering, there still appeared in the Atlases (The Advanced Atlas of Modern Geography by Bartholomew) immense "frozen regions" and rivers such as the upper Xingu that disappeared into stippling toward the source. Jack London, Jean Malaurie, P.E. Victor, Colonel Fawcett were the last explorers: those who brought the stuff of dreams back for children, growing close to and distantly witnessing their own savage beginnings. On the eve of an era of exploitation, on the morrow of one of the greatest crimes organized by modern society, must we not believe in savage man, in the wolf-child, in the lost world of some valley in New Guinea, so that we may exorcise fear, racial hatred, the sterilization of the police city?

The Infinite Library. Later, when my father returned from Africa, I discovered a universe of reading in books which had returned to us through...