The joy of reading Christina Sharpe is one of knowing that this book, this thing here, in your hands, these words will become part of your cellular stThe joy of reading Christina Sharpe is one of knowing that this book, this thing here, in your hands, these words will become part of your cellular structure. I'm mesmerized by her work, emotionally and intellectually, and often upended by it. To read such intelligent, rigorous, and luminous insights—about art, grief, memory, community, and what it means to eke out a sense of “beauty as a method” in times of great rupture—feels like an enormous gift and I can only begin to speak my gratitude. If I could venture out into the world right now and reverently press this book into every single reader’s hands, believe me I would....more
It is difficult not to emerge from this book feeling scoured from the intimacy of it. Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux is a writer who brings things doIt is difficult not to emerge from this book feeling scoured from the intimacy of it. Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux is a writer who brings things down to the most vulnerable, to the concrete and particular. She writes the personal with clear, controlled precision; every detail, every careful rite described, brings us into a rare and almost intolerable sense of privacy. To abide in these pages is, after all, to be constantly overhearing a confession.
In Simple Passion Ernaux confesses, without pity or piety, to a two-year passionate love affair she had with a married man. All the facts of this “passion,” brutal in their simplicity, are disinterred, disentangled, and resurrected. For Ernaux, it was an obsession, a sickness, as if she were possessed by something other than herself. Her life in those two years was lived out in its recurring patterns of absence and collision and, in between: a desperate, ecstatic, near-devotional waiting. Everything else was an unbearable interruption—except the writing, which was a necessity, a striving back towards the familiar and comforting and sane. The resulting book is, then, first and foremost a ritual conducted in private, only later stripped bare and turned public.
There is something powerfully subversive about Ernaux’s determined attention to the intimate, the messy and vulnerable, the stories regarded as private and shameful which—through the act of writing—become fully lived, deliberately realized, and even liberating. Ernaux turns the truth of her experiences into words that might allow her to overcome the tradition and tyranny of female silence, to feel embodied so she may not be erased. It is here, inside the book, that the author has permission to lose herself and not be wrong. But the story is not just a cathartic purge; it is a way of connecting our isolated (and therefore insufficient) stories to other isolated (and therefore insufficient) stories, and to do so without constraint or morality or apologies for where one has been or what one has done. This book is, to summon Ernaux’s own words, “an offering of a sort, bequeathed to others.”
Because Ernaux conceives of Simple Passion as an offering, she is resistant to interpreting her story. For the majority of the book, Ernaux avoids justifying or deciphering her love affair, and seems equally uninterested in forcing some kind of meaning to land. The point is that this happened, the book says, and something about it feels like life. It is interesting, therefore, that the very last page of the book attempts to close that circle into a definite whole. Part of the conclusion of Simple Passion is Ernaux’s proclamation that this “simple passion,”—this frenzied, unpredictable, world-shattering submergence in another person—made available for her a self-knowledge that could only be accessible to her through an intimate relationship with the other; a means to a meaning that could only be made intelligible through the risks that all-obliterating desire necessitates. And while it had never felt like love or not being alone, this passion afforded Ernaux the luxury of living outside and away from herself, of being nothing but “time flowing through” her, before retuning at last to a truer and (in her words) “closer” relationship with the people and the world around her.
What one senses in this final gesture towards closure—regardless of whether one is convinced by it or not—is the inevitable invasion of the public space into the writer’s private sanctuary, and the difficulty (if not impossibility) of fully overcoming that. In its brilliant transgression of societal and literary norms, Simple Passion ultimately leaves us with the question of whether one is actually free to transgress at all....more
What a thunderously powerful book. Happening might be just a little over 100 pages—but I’m still reeling from the punch of it. Writing from a distanceWhat a thunderously powerful book. Happening might be just a little over 100 pages—but I’m still reeling from the punch of it. Writing from a distance of more than forty years, Nobel Prize Winner Annie Ernaux recounts an abortion she had in 1963, at the age of 23 years old, when abortion was still illegal in France. The bulk of the story concerns itself with the short months stretching between when Ernaux finds out that she’s pregnant and—“the moment it's all over.”
This is, in all ways, a tragedy and Ernaux tells it with an openness that I can only describe as astonishing, something beyond generosity. The language here is staggering; it rings—fraught, vibrant, implacable—through every page, and the words have nothing to hide behind. We do not so much read this book as live in it, live through it. I remember Happening as a sequence of overwhelming snapshots, both gorgeous and brutal, intimate and violent, each bringing the reader into a rare and almost unbearable sense of privacy, and culminating in one of the most singularly horrifying sequences that I have ever read. My skin itches just thinking about it.
What a tremendous feat it is, for Ernaux who actually lived it, to throw this deeply personal a pain on the table, to unleash herself with such abandon, to turn the page into a room where she might bleed in and break apart and literally almost die. It makes an agonizing kind of sense: when the boundaries of your body are violable and violated, when your existence is negated, sometimes all is left to do is to appropriate what has already tried to obliterate you. To immortalize which cannot be undone by remembering.
But more than the unflinching lucidity with which the author recounts the enormity of what happened to her—what stuck with me the most is how Ernaux captures the sheer ordinary everydayness of living in a world where being a woman makes your life unlivable: going to class, meeting up with friends, lying to your parents, studying for your exams, worrying about money, enduring the trained violence of indifferent doctors, while your body is slowly changing in spite of you and time is progressing inexorably inside of you. All the careful rites of habit and memory that keep your body moving in the right directions while the rest of you is drowning in clear air.
It is important not to think of this story as some relic of a distant past, something so old the horror of it has already leached away. The fight for women’s reproduction rights is as forcefully relevant as ever. By turning what is for so many a secret private sorrow—something that might perpetually fester inside and refuse to come out—into an ineradicable shout of defiance, Ernaux joins her account to countless others who speak out against imposed voicelessness, who refuse the silences women are repeatedly forced to uphold, who reach out with their stories into the world so—as Elaine Castillo once said—“the things that are nameless in [them]… might touch or be touched by things that are nameless in others.”...more
The Woman Warrior is a trenchant, gorgeous, and discomforting memoir that follows in a rich tradition of feminist writing that cleaves to undisciplineThe Woman Warrior is a trenchant, gorgeous, and discomforting memoir that follows in a rich tradition of feminist writing that cleaves to undisciplined modes of thinking and unexpected forms of agency. It does so by privileging silence, refusal, indeterminacy, and a certain infidelity to form and genre; but also by thinking in terms of collectivities and communal traditions instead of the singular, all-obliterating experience of the “I”—or, at least, with an acute sense of its difficulties.
The Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong Kingston’s story of growing up in the US as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. The memoir begins with the injunction, from mother to daughter, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you,” which immediately oxidizes into betrayal when Kingston subsequently reveals the content of her mother’s words. The story Kingston is offered is a cautionary tale that rises out through layers and layers of silence: an adulterous “no-name aunt” who is punished for transgressing her community’s sexual norms by being treated as a ghost, “as if she had never been born.” It’s an intense beginning that suggests something of the weight of trauma and loss that shapes the narrative on the pages, and it is enough to press the breath from your lungs. What follows is an internal journey that leads to an equally terrifying sense of having to stand down a hostile world that holds certain lives so cheaply.
Maxine Hong Kingston tracks the processes of self-creation and self-understanding through the complicated, devastating (and in many ways unresolvable) territories of silence, erasure, misremembrance, rupture, and violence. Her coming of age is cobbled together through myth and imagination. She does more than reproduce the material facts of her life: she expands her life into a mythology more enduring and more substantial than the impoverished existence scripted for her, interconnecting her story to deep, perennial lineages that echo endlessly into the present. She shifts perspective, slips from the indicative to the subjunctive, collapses space and time: she is the "no-name" slave woman, the filial daughter, the sword-bearing warrior Fa Mu Lan, the poetess Ts’ai Yen shoring up the narrative of her life through song. In this surplus, Kingston locates an essential agency that cannot be reduced to nothingness. She uses all herself up in a desperate longing for a language that might hold her. And she refuses annihilation.
At the heart of this narrative is the author’s struggle to negotiate her subject position as a woman, on the one hand, and her dual identity as both Chinese and American, two poles laboring for mastery in her life, warping her into a permanent outsider. In this delicate negotiation, Kingston grapples with the nature of articulation itself. Throughout the book, one senses a real strain to criticize the subjugation of women and the culture of silencing that is transmuted into her, without concealing and conceding to the forces of stereotype. This effort does not always succeed, and the memoir sometimes shades into contemptuous generalizations. But this is perhaps expected: few stories, particularly ones as vulnerable as this, can be dichotomized into a neat narrative of either transgression or nothing at all. Kingston depicts the inner workings of her immigrant family as a seething cauldron of anger, resentments, misrecognition, and difficult intimacies in the wake of uprooting and displacement. Beneath this turbulent surface, however, lurks a real sense of love and caretaking, and a longing to express the fullness and earned integrity of her mother, her aunt, all the indomitable women in her life, real or otherwise—and, of course, herself. I think of Kingston’s memory of her mother cutting her tongue, an act of violence unfathomable to Kingston who “felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry.” Yet, when she asks her mother about it, the answer is not what she expects: “I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language.” The act of violation becomes an imperfect expression of love.
In this sense, The Woman Warrior reflects the porous borders between knowing and unknowing, inside and outside, betrayal and devotion, love and disillusionment. It’s a book, in other words, about translation. Maxine Hong Kingston moves through awful and tender silences, reads between the lines, attends to the gaps in the narrative, and speculates when necessary. In the process, she repeatedly loses sight of herself, of her mother, of the past, and then regains it, only to lose it again. Everywhere, the very possibility of translation cannot be made inseparable from its impossibility.
I loved this book for its gestures of refusal, its willingness to be against the grain and in and alongside the contradictions of becoming one’s self and being in community with others. The Woman Warrior holds an underlying sadness that leashes into the words like rainwater through roots. And a kind of fury too—the fury of “a first daughter of a first daughter”—still chafing against the leash of a mind too accustomed to good behavior. It all rather “translates well.”...more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
>
Books:
memoir
(30)
Loading...
