This 26-year-old boy, a new scourge of power, unbearable, who appeared in our lives with a first autobiographical novel renouncing his identity not only gender but filial, stripping his family origins of misery, racism, sexist violence, alcoholism , etc., and was nominated by the Goncourt Academy (new category). That then unraveled the causes that led a stranger to rape him and try to kill him, to blame him, and everything, for political power, the rightist bulldozer disguised as a liberal, the Macron, Salvini, Trump, Boris Johnson and "other clones "; The little Eddy the bassoon (fag), turned today into the writer Édouard Louis, is a sweet boy, with blond and wavy hair, who appears on my monochrome blank screen. T-shirt, complexion, walls, spines of books, shelves, very white teeth.
Immediately I adopt him as a desirable son and, at the stroke of questions, I penetrate the violence that fed him long before he was born. October 1992, commune of Hallencourt, working population in northern France and voter of Le Pen in its 55%, last elections. Louis (formerly Bellegueule, with whom he ended up in his new installment, To End Eddy Bellegueule ), a Doctor of Sociology, a degree in History from the elitist ENS-Paris, a novelist, essayist, translator and theatrical author, will lead a kind of new current of Vérité literature that uses biographical experience as a form of commitment to shake the sleeping conscience of the left and salon writers lost in aesthetic issues (Houellebecq and company, as noted).
The boy Eddy who knocked on the door of the neighbors to eat at the end of the month, who remembers the first time the State sought a medical visit from his father and, also, when Sarkozy laws forced him to be a public sweeper, herniated and counterfeit as a result of an accident at work , it has become an intellectual event in France. Who killed my father , who now publishes Salamandra, has been answered by President Macron himself: 90 pages that do not leave you or get up in the bathroom, confronting, forcing the reader to "c ruir the destruction of my father in two hours without escape , as in a Greek tragedy. "
"Politics does not decide the lives of the rich but yes, that of the poor." Why is something so simple that surprises us so much? Because we are used to having politics lie to us, a politician will never say that he cares about a radish that refugees die, which is what he really feels. For the poor, politics is a matter of life or death, which decides that 50% will die before age 65 and will be highly prone to suicide and chronic illness, that if you are a woman you will be exposed to sexist violence, and if You are Arab, to the shot of a policeman. The policy ensures and protects the lives of some groups and ignores that of others. When I came to study in Paris, people told me that I was exalted by arguing that I was a radical. Of course, I had known in my own flesh how politics makes it possible for you or prevents you from going to the doctor or taking away five euros a month that for the rich is nothing, but that in my house it meant to have or not the pasta and tomato that we would eat during two days. Is it necessary today to speak louder against power, to take up weapons like literature, as Sartre and De Beauvoir did? It is very necessary to renew the connection between literature and politics. From the 70s we have attended an involution against what these intellectual writers and others like Duras, Genet, and so on. The commitment disappears from the literature, and an aesthetic pose arises: the less you approach the socio-political reality, the better writer you are. While sharing with them the amalgam of novel and essay, that existentialism is far from its autobiographical hyperrealism that would be a kind of nouvelle vérité ? There is a new vanguard attached to autobiography or memory as a way of confronting the reader, since the word compromise has disappeared. They are the new utensils, yes, in a world that works avoiding seeing reality, trying not to look at the cripple that approaches you at the exit of the supermarket. It's hard to escape what a writer tells when you know that character exists while you read. And all this, written with the same literary requirement of the Houellebecq and company. A decision of Macron reaches in the life of my sick father the same level of intimacy as the first kiss he gave my mother, when for example they change the law and the phone starts ringing demanding that he present himself to this or another job, for the one who is disabled, or will lose the subsidy. Of course, it is normal for writers to come from social media where this does not happen. Macron, whose propaganda apparatus came to say of his thesis that they were "Maronian." The last straw? Manipulation is its characteristic. One of his ministers responsible for the cuts was defined Marxist. All this is very serious. They have been strongly accused of saying that "violence does not generate violence," justifying it. Can you fight it? Unfortunately, sometimes yes. But the best way to stop it is to understand its causes: the more violence, the greater the need to understand it. Yellow vests have no alternative but to be violent; When I look at the life of my brother and most of them, what I wonder is how they don't assault the Arc de Triomphe every day, if they can't go to the doctor when they are sick or feed their children on a daily basis. The responsibility of their attacks is of the Government. As a class fugitive, I am very sensitive to the extreme political violence of the Trump, Salvini and Macron, who allow themselves to dominate and insult the poor. It is a verbal violence that makes cuts of all kinds possible and normalizes abuse. The social movements of the twentieth century created a curtain of decorum, conservatives feared insulting the working class for its consequences: you have to restore this curtain and feel ashamed of what they say. He did his doctoral thesis on that class transfugism. Did you find it easy to migrate and get a scholarship nothing less than in the École Normal de Paris? I needed to escape from the world of my childhood where being male was an obsession: if you weren't, they killed you. But I didn't do it to be a hero, but because I had no other choice. My dream was to fit in, not to be an outsider like Julien de Stendhal, a different being by sensible, intelligent, predetermined. No, it all happened to me against me; I became different, as De Beauvoir explained: "One is not a woman, she becomes a woman." And he left me no other way out, which becomes a political issue: what do we do with different people? I fight for the social class of my childhood, but it does not mean that I love it, that it seems more authentic, as was the case in Italian neo-realism. No, in the working class there is racism, homophobia, classism. My vision is not naive. His family reacted very much to his first novel, what happened to this third one? My mother became angry, yes, it hurt that she said we were poor, she was ashamed; What is again a political question: if we hide their misery, how are we going to improve their lives? The same thing that feminism did is what must now be done now against the right of the world. My father's reaction instead was to call me and say: "I am proud of you!" That's why I saw him again. Have you forgiven your father? I still doubt if I love him or not. He made my mother's life a terrible thing, he didn't let her work or put on makeup, she called her publicly a fat cow, she destroyed her dignity. And I was "the fag": we were victims of his macho madness. But I defend him for his condition as poor; and despite his misogyny and homophobia, I fight for him. Why did you stop voting for the National Front of Le Pen? Yes, you voted for the FN throughout your life, like the rest of my family and the people; because they are the only ones who mention them in their speech, telling them that they suffer because of immigrants, and because the left has stopped talking about class suffering, as a consequence of the neoliberal counterrevolution. If the left made a hole for them, they would win them, but today it does not represent them. It is necessary to speak again about the class struggle and in a new way: making it permeable to gender struggles; putting in the heart the idea of masculinity, which forced so many men to leave school and work as expected of a male. Éduoard, the father dead, what will come? I am fully involved in the theatrical adaptation of my last two novels, together with Ostermeier and Ivo van Hove, who were my idols at the university. We will tour all over the world, it is a dream for me.According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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