Places
Words and images
“For time is the longest distance between two places.” Tennessee Williams
“….. prose performs an extraordinary dance between collective and intimate, “big” history and private experience.” From The Years by Annie Ernaux
In this post I have included four new drawings of places. Part of this current art project includes reading, poems, stories, articles, things related to the artwork in obvious or less visible ways. Narratives and images are often in some kind of relationship, even though they may seem unlinked, parallel activities. Also, sometimes one thing leads to another, and I end up finding something interesting to read, albeit unexpected. Today I will be referring to some of the things I’ve been reading recently, all written by women, all including themes of loss, loss of parents. Man overboard and Ηοw beautiful life is written by the Greek writers Ersi Sotiropoulou and Maria Laina, respectively, and La Place and A Woman’s Story written by French writer Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2022. I discovered Ernaux’s books by chance at a local book store. La Place caught my attention because of its title. This then lead to my getting acquainted with more of her work. In this post I will be focusing on A Woman’s Story, and her Nobel Banquet Speech I Will Write To Avenge My People.
Her speech I Will Write To Avenge My People begins with Ernaux describing how in trying to find the right sentence to give her the freedom and confidence to speak that evening, a phrase she had written in her diary when she was young appeared: “It instantly appears. In all its clarity and violence. Lapidary. Irrefutable. Written in my diary sixty years ago. ‘I will write to avenge my people’…” She was at the time twenty-two, studying literature, mostly with the children of the local bourgeoisie, proudly and naively believing “that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth. That an individual victory could erase centuries of domination and poverty, an illusion that school had already fostered in me by dint of my academic success.”
Ernaux tells us that initially literature was a sort of continent which she unconsciously set in opposition to her social environment. She thought that with her writing she could transfigure reality, but being married with two children, a teaching position and full responsibility for household affairs, brought her further and further away from writing and her promise to avenge her people. Her father’s death, a job teaching students from working class backgrounds and the 1968 protest movements were the factors, she says, that brought her back: “through byroads that were unforeseen and proximate to the world of my origins, to my ‘people’, and gave my desire to write a quality of secret and absolute urgency”.
She understood she had to delve into repressed memories and bring light to bear on how her people lived, adding that those who “as immigrants, no longer speak their parents’ language, and those who, as class defectors, no longer have quite the same language, think and express themselves with other words, face additional hurdles.” She realized she had to break with ‘writing well and beautiful sentences’ and “to root out, display and understand the rift running through [her]”.
Ernaux tells us that her first book in 1974 mapped out the social and feminist realm that she would situate her writing. Through reflecting on life she would inevitably also reflect on writing, on how writing reinforces or disrupts the accepted, interiorized representations of things and beings. With her fourth book she adopted a neutral, objective, “flat” kind of writing, where the violence was no longer displayed, it came from the facts themselves and not the writing.
Towards the end of the speech Ernaux writes: “In the bringing to light of the social unspeakable, of those internalized power relations linked to class and / or race, and gender too, felt only by the people who directly experience their impact, the possibility of individual but also collective emancipation emerges. To decipher the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it is to upend its established order, upset its hierarchies.”
La Place and A Woman’s Story
In her books, La Place and A Woman’s Story, which Ernaux wrote after her father and mother’s deaths, she chronicles a generation, and the process of breaking away from her class and surroundings, through her education and then through her move into the middle-class literary world, which felt like a kind of betrayal. She examines this breakage, and also, considers the dilemmas of writing about real, lived lives, and what it means to contain a life within the pages of a book.
La Place (My own translation of the Greek translation)
“He didn’t belong anywhere, he didn’t belong anywhere, he just paid his annual membership to the trade association. At his funeral, the vicar spoke of “an honest, hard-working life”, “of a man who never harmed anyone”.
“When I read Proust or Mauriac, I cannot believe that they are writing about the time when my father was a child. In his case, it was probably the Middle Ages.”
“Obsessive idea: What will others say about us (neighbors, customers, everyone).”
A Woman’s Story
Ernaux claims that this book isn’t a biography or a novel, “maybe a cross between literature, sociology and history.” She adds that when she thinks of facets of her mother’s personality, she tries to relate them to her story and historical and social background because history and social background contain and, to a great extent, shape a person’s life. She searches for explanations As the writer talks about her mother and the web of people she was linked to, we also encounter the ‘big’ history events and social norms and circumstances, and the opportunities that were not available to her mother and those of her social milieu:
“It’s a difficult undertaking. For me, my mother has no history. She has always been there. When I speak of her, my first impulse is to ‘freeze’ her in a series of images unrelated to time…….. This brings back only the fantasy woman, the one who has recently appeared in my dreams….. I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.”
“She could have become a school mistress, but her parents wouldn’t let her leave the village. Parting with one’s family was invariably seen as a sign of misfortune. (In Norman French, ‘ambition’ refers to the trauma of separation; a dog, for instance, can die of ambition.) ………In those days, nobody ‘pushed’ their children, they had to ‘have it in them’. School was merely a phase one went through before earning a living. One could miss school; it wasn’t the end of the world. But not Mass.”
“There were the black years of the economic crisis, the strikes, Léon Blum (‘the first man to be on the side of the workers’), the social reforms and the late-night parties in the café. There were the visits from her relatives….”
“The store lay in the Valley, where nineteenth-century cotton mills ruled people’s lives from infancy to death.”
“Under the Occupation, life in the Valley centred on their shop and the hope of getting fresh supplies. She tried to feed everyone, especially large families, because her natural pride encouraged her to be kind and helpful to others…….”
“In 1945, they left the Valley, where the foggy climate made me cough and stunted my growth, and moved back to Yvetot. Life in the post-war period was more difficult than during the war. Food was still rationed and those who had ‘cashed in on the black market’ were slowly emerging.”
The most poignant part of the book is about the last years of her mother’s life when she was ill. Ernaux’s frequent short sentences convey so much:
“And here her story stops for there was no longer a place for her in society.”
“Most of the patients there are women.”
“The last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.”
“I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.”
Man overboard by Ersi Sotiropoulou
Here in Greece her mother is dying and in the Arctic icebergs are melting:
“Only you and I are listening now. There is no one else. / a crackling of invisible crystals / of frost flakes breaking away. / Breathless we hear / The creak becoming a buzz / The roar of an approaching plane / Not from the air. / This mineral buzz as / a piece is detached from the mother.”
Ηοw beautiful life is by Maria Laina
“Mainly written art, the one that is written and then you look at it again, and that is torture because in the meantime it has changed, and you have changed…..”
Today’s post includes some new drawings of places accompanied by a few short texts and poems.
“He went to bring his family for a tour of the village. “Get to know our homeplace”, he said passionately to the children. Should I say my place? he wondered. MY place? He wondered a second time and sank into thought.’ Despina Kaitatzi-Houliomi
