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That is when Brossard and I started losing our complicity. I was the student advisor’s favourite in the whole batch, for the entire year of 6th grade. But times changed. A couple years down the line, and I was spotted holding a girl’s hand, or caught on the school’s courtyard giving a surreptitious peck. Not that I ever was a Casanova, but I had grown up a bit, and was lucky enough to be accepted in the competitive circle of adolescent crushes. Kissing was not an affront to tradition, mores or even authority, though it was indeed already a social quest. But ‘social’ in the sense of a peer-pressure, self-oriented concern: kissing or not kissing, that was clearly the question. It was not about the kiss, there was something beyond: social esteem.
That is the paradox of the kiss, or the baiser, this labial sound my forefathers picked to conceptualise specifically a unique kind of encounter: that of two persons’ lips. A paradox indeed. The baiser is the end of casual friendship and the beginning of love. The end of public rapports and the beginning of physical intimacy. The end of childhood and the beginning of romantic and sensual agency. The end of observation and the beginning of action. The kiss is an achievement, a quest, a fruit of patience, persuasion, seduction. It is an end. But it is also a promise, an opening, the primal word of a future: a mute word, a direct word; silent, unperturbed, undistracted by meaning, it finds its way straight to its designated and cherished counterpart. The baiser: an end, but certainly a beginning too.
The reactionary, prude and often fascistic Opponent was standing there, faithful and reliable, constant across the societies and decades of social quests. But the fight-against remained indeed more visible than the fight-for: the infamy of the moral guardians was recalled every minute, while everyday, so many occasions for a quick brush away from their controlling eyes are missed in the heart of the Indian democracy. The condescending tone remains untouched: we are still asking for permission. |
For a few weeks, kiss has indeed been on everybody’s lips in India. A loud word, encouraged by the songs and speeches of a generation leaving the softness of the act for a minute, to shout its right to public existence with blaring punch lines. The reactionary, prude and often fascistic Opponent was standing there, faithful and reliable, constant across the societies and decades of social quests. But the fight-against remained indeed more visible than the fight-for: the infamy of the moral guardians was recalled every minute, while everyday, so many occasions for a quick brush away from their controlling eyes are missed in the heart of the Indian democracy. The condescending tone remains untouched: we are still asking for permission.
When the Enemy refuses to change faces, the Good Ones must step back and introspect to change the terms of the fight. What is hiding behind the cultural ‘revolution’ of tolerated kisses in public, if not the absurd taboo of romantic lives always kept out of the parents’ sight? What is the future, what is the promise of this kiss understood as something on its own, as an end in itself, thus making of the enthralling story of what happens after the kiss a trivial concern? While the impatient struggle blames ‘the tradition’ for shutting their kisses, it misses the centuries of subversive explorations the said tradition has known. On that other side of history, those explorers were certainly less loud but also more creative. More concerned, certainly, to discover the worlds of the kiss, rather than just to utter its word.
Image courtesy: Jastrow
Originally published on LILA Parapluie