My grandfather drank a lot. (“He really likes his drink,” people said of him.) After a few glasses of cheap red wine, he would launch into endless rants, demonstrating a linguistic inventiveness that was typical of working class speech of the time and that has an equivalent today in the kind of speech one can hear in teenagers from working-class suburbs. He wasn’t ignorant. He knew a good deal about many different things, and imagined he knew a lot more than he did. This meant he never hesitated to put forth a firm opinion—one that was as often as not incorrect. He was a communist in the same way that bourgeois people find themselves on the right—it went without saying, it was the natural course of things, practically in the genes of someone who had been born into the working class. In this, he was like my father (until my father stopped being communist, and even after that, because there was a way in which even then he still remained a communist), beginning his sentences with “We workers …” One day, he described to me how he had been driving down the Boulevard Saint-Germain at 5 in the morning, and a group of drunk bourgeois types, leaving a party or a night club and walking down the middle of the street had screamed at him: “Filthy beggar!” When he spoke of the class struggle, it meant something quite concrete to him. He would dream out loud of the coming revolution. When I moved to Paris, I got into the habit of having Sunday lunch with my grandmother and him quite regularly. Sometimes my parents would come from Reims to join us and occasionally they would bring along my two younger brothers. But I would have been mortified if anyone I knew, or, a bit later, anyone I worked with, had found out exactly where they lived. I was quite discreet about this; when people asked me questions, I would be evasive or else tell outright lies.
It was obvious to me that there was some kind of tension between my mother and my grandmother, but it was only after my grandmother’s death that I learned the reasons for it. At that point, my mother was eager to tell me what until then she had more or less kept quiet about: her abandonment, the orphanage, her mother’s refusal to take care of her after the war. My mother had never spoken to anyone about any of this. “My subconscious had kept it hidden,” she said, making odd use of some psychoanalytic lingo she must have heard on television. But clearly this was something that she had always remembered, while preferring to keep it to herself, even if it couldn’t help but slip out a bit from time to time. (For instance, when, as a child I would complain about something or other, she would sometimes yell at me, “Maybe you’d prefer to grow up in an orphanage?”) But then she added something else to the story she told me, making it seem as if a family’s history was nothing other than a successive series of shameful events, one hiding inside the next, and none of them spoken about either inside or outside the family. This revelation made the picture she had been painting seem even a shade darker than it had already appeared. Even she had known nothing about this until her brother told her while explaining why he refused to pay any part of his mother’s nursing home expenses. Along with reminding her of how their mother had abandoned them, he told her about other events that up till then she hadn’t known about. My mother didn’t repeat these stories to me until months later, after their mother was dead. She must have suddenly felt free to tell me, all in one go, both what she had always hidden from us about her childhood and what she had just learned about her own mother. It made me think again about the strange woman my grandmother had been. In spite of her kindness, there was also a harshness in her that one could see in her eyes, and that sometimes snuck out in the tone of her voice. Perhaps this is because she had never forgotten that terrible day: how she was screamed at, beaten perhaps. And never forgotten the weeks that followed, the time it took for her hair to grow back, for the neighbors finally to stop thinking about it, for it to shrink down to the size of a rumor that would only pop up from time to time in conversations about her. She “liked to have a good time.” If I understand the expression my mother used about her correctly, it means that she liked to live as a free woman, to go out at night and have fun, that she liked having sex with different men without feeling the need to become attached or to stay together with them for too long. Her children were probably, for her, an annoyance, and motherhood something she had to put up with rather than something she chose. At the time, contraception was hard to come by. An abortion could land you in prison. In fact, she spent time in prison after the war for having had an abortion. How long was she in prison? I don’t know, nor does my mother. Men were certainly free to exercise their sexuality as they liked, but not women. Doubtless in working class environments there was a certain kind of sexual freedom available, or, at the least, freedom when compared to the rules laid out by bourgeois morality—the very freedom that would have caused the defenders of bourgeois morality to denounce the dissolute lives of those who enjoyed living by other rules. But for women, the choice to live freely was risky in many different ways.
So what happened after the armistice was signed in 1940 and the region was occupied by the German army? It wasn’t just that my grandmother, 27 years old, went voluntarily to work in Germany. She was also accused—was it true or wasn’t it?—of having an affair with a German officer. I can imagine something of what might have been going on: her desire to survive, to have food to eat, not to be poor or to have to endure the food shortages. Who was this enemy soldier? Did she love him? Or was she simply trying to obtain a better standard of living than the one she had had up till then? One possibility doesn’t, of course, exclude the other. And then how did she come to the decision to abandon not only her children, but also her partner? I won’t ever be able to answer these questions. Just as I’ll never know what it felt like for her to have to endure the consequences of her choices, becoming like the “victim” in the “the ripped frock,” the “hapless one who lay still on the paving stone,” “uncrowned” and “disfigured,” about whom Éluard writes with compassion in a famous poem, a poem of sadness and of “remorse.”2
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So it was that when the Liberation came my grandmother met the fate of that group of women who hadn’t managed to foresee the significance and the consequences of their actions. Was she all alone in that moment, one that must have seemed to her to last an “eternity,” when she was subjected to “the exercise of a hasty, ridiculous justice” (to cite Marguerite Duras’s words in Hiroshima mon amour), when she was subjected to “the ultimate of horror and stupidity”?3 Or perhaps it took place during one of those scenes of collective punishment, images of which are sometimes found in documentaries about the end of the war, where one sees groups of women obliged to parade through a jeering crowd, insulted and spat upon? I don’t know and my mother didn’t tell me any more about it. In fact she told me there was nothing else she knew, nothing except for the basic, brutal fact of the matter. Her brother had told her that their mother’s head had been shaved. Having lived through defeat and the Occupation, the French nation reasserted its virility by punishing women for their sexual misbehavior, real or imagined, by reasserting masculine power over women.4
Ever since I learned about this, each time I happen upon photographs of one of these scenes of humiliation—knowing, as we do, that so many highly placed collaborators, in so many middle-class circles, for instance, never had to experience this kind of opprobrium, or any loss of status, or the violence of public condemnation—, I can’t help looking to see if there is any indication of where the photo was taken, and asking myself if perhaps my grandmother isn’t one of the people pictured. Is one of those distraught faces or terrified gazes hers? How did she ever manage to forget what was done to her? How long did it take her to “come out of eternity” (Duras again)? Of course I would have preferred to learn that she had been in the Resistance, that she had endangered her own life by hiding Jews, or simply that she had sabotaged components in the factory where she was working—or anything else that one could be proud of. We always dream of having a glorious family, whatever kind of glory it might be. But there is no changing the past. The best you can do is to ask yo
urself: what can be made of this history of which I am so ashamed? What can be done with these past horrors when there is no getting around the fact that, no matter what you do, no matter what happens, this really is your ancestry? Could I simply take refuge in imagining that this history, given that I only learned about it recently, held no significance for me? (But suppose I had known of it? What would I have thought of my grandmother? Would I have dared ask her about it? Asking myself these questions upsets me even today.) Yet this whole series of events—my grandmother abandoning her children, her stay in Germany, etc.—had such an impact on my mother’s life, on the shape of her personality and her subjectivity, that it’s impossible not to conclude that it must therefore also have had a huge impact on my early years, and on those that would follow.
All of this serves to explain why my mother never continued her schooling, a fact that upsets her still today. “It’s because my mother and I were both cursed,” she suggests in order to explain all these misfortunes, all this distress. This inner conflict has remained with her throughout her life: she could have become something other than that for which she was intended had the war not brutally destroyed all her childhood dreams. Knowing perfectly well how intelligent she is, she has never been able to accept this injustice. And one of the major effects of this fate was that she was never able to aspire to “find someone better” than my father. But social endogamy is as rigidly controlled as is academic success. The laws governing the two processes are tightly intertwined. She has never given up thinking—even today—that she could have become an “intellectual” and met “someone more intelligent.” But she was a cleaning lady, and she met a worker who, like her, had not been lucky enough to stay in school, and who, on top of all that, was not particularly open minded.
In 1950, at the age of twenty, she married the young man who was to become my father. They had two children in the next few years, my older brother and me. We were extremely poor, nearly destitute. So as not to make matters any worse, my mother decided not to have any more children, and therefore had no other choice than to have, I believe, several abortions. They were clandestine abortions, of course, and thus dangerous in every way—both legally and medically. (I remember my parents traveling one day to a town outside of Paris, Juvisy-sur-Orge. The preparations for the trip, as well as the trip itself, seemed very mysterious. I remember the worry written on my mother’s face, my father’s silence. Once in Paris, they dropped me and my brother at my grandmother’s. Several hours later they returned, and my mother, elliptically and in a low voice, explained to my grandmother that everything had gone well. My brother and I were quite young at the time and yet, strangely enough, we knew what was going on. Or is it that I have the impression that we always knew, whereas I only understood it later but have superimposed that understanding on my memories of the earlier moment?) My parents would, in the end, have two other children, but later, eight and fourteen years after my birth.
It was quite soon after her marriage that my mother became able to feel for her husband nothing but a constant sense of hostility, a sense that found its expression in shouting matches, the slamming of doors, or the shattering of dishes on the floor during their frequent arguments. It found more profound expression in nearly every moment of their daily life together. Their relationship seemed to be one long, continuous domestic dispute, as if the only way they knew how to speak to each other was by hurling at each other the most painful and damaging terms of abuse they could think of. On a number of occasions, she decided to divorce him. She went to see a lawyer who urged her not to leave before any official decision was pronounced. Otherwise, she would put herself in the wrong (for “deserting the marital home”) and would lose custody of her children. She worried about my father becoming violent once he learned what she was planning, and about the “living hell” she would have to endure for the months (or even years) the legal procedure—which would also be costly—would take. She also worried that she wouldn’t be able to “make it” on her own, and so to avoid “depriving” her “kids” of anything, she gave up the idea. Their routine went on: arguments, shouting, the trading of insults, just as before. Detesting your partner became a way of life. It was quite different from what Stanley Cavell calls “the conversation of marriage,” or, in any case, it was a sad and strange version of that model.5
Still, it’s important not to impose too quickly on her situation an insufficiently nuanced vision built on a certain kind of feminist framework, since that would hide part of the truth. (Feminism, which enables us to see and understand so many things, could in this case become a kind of epistemological obstacle.) For my mother was quite violent, perhaps, in reality, even more violent than my father. In fact, in the one physical confrontation between them that I know of, it was she who injured him by throwing at him the handle of the electric mixer she was using to make soup. It hit him hard enough to break two of his ribs. And, as it turns out, she was quite proud of this feat of strength, since she recounted it to me in the way one tells of a sporting triumph. It was proof in her eyes that she never let herself be taken advantage of. Still, whoever was in the right or in the wrong, the atmosphere was a harsh one, painful on a daily basis, even unbearable. This constant climate of conjugal warfare, these repeated scenes of verbal confrontation, the yelling, the shared madness, all with the children as witnesses, must have counted for a lot in producing my will to flee both my family and my circumstances (and for the longest time to wish to escape even from the idea of a family, of a couple, of married life, of a long-term relationship, of living together with someone, all of which horrified me).
It was thanks to my mother that I was able to attend high school, and to continue my education. She never put it in so many words, but I believe that she saw in me someone she could help to have the chance she had never had. The dreams she had been forced to abandon could be realized through me. But the process reawakened many old forms of sadness and resentment that had remained hidden in the depths of her soul. When I had just entered sixth grade, we learned a little Christmas rhyme in my English class. When I got home, I told my mother (I was 11 years old): “I learned a poem,” and I began reciting it to her in English. I still remember it: “I wish you a merry Christmas, a horse and a gig, and a good fat pig, to kill next year.” Her anger, her fury even, burst out before I had even finished. Was it that she thought I was trying to make fun of her? To make her feel small? To show my superiority over her now that I had finished my first few months of secondary education? She began screaming like a madwoman: “You know I don’t speak any English! Translate what you said to me right now!” I translated. It was over in a moment; the hysterical crisis lasted only a brief instant. But from that point on I became aware that a divide now existed—and it would, of course, only grow wider—between the outside, represented by middle school and high school, by what I was learning, and the inside, which is to say, our home.
All my mother’s frustration at not having been able to stay in school expressed itself in that outburst of anger. It would appear again and again in the following years, in many different ways. All it would take was a small critical observation or the slightest expression of disagreement for me to be upbraided: “Just because you’re in high school doesn’t mean you’re any more important than we are,” or “Who do you think you are? You think you’re better than us?” I don’t know how many times she felt obliged to remind me that “you’re no different than the rest of us.” But the words that came back the most frequently were the simple reminder that she had been denied what I was receiving: “I never got to …” or “No one ever gave me …” Yet, unlike my father, who was always reminding us about what had been denied to him as part of his astonishment that it wasn’t being denied to his children (and sometimes as part of his own effort to deny it to them), when my mother’s resentment found expression it was part of her way of admitting that I was going to have options that she had never had, or that had been foreclosed before she had more than a glim
pse of them. She wanted to be sure I knew how lucky I was. When she would say, “I never had …,” what she meant was, “You should know what it means that you get to …”
When she did try to take up her studies again, it was a huge disappointment. She had come across an advertisement in the regional newspaper. A new private school had opened—it was probably some kind of a scam, or at the very least the project of some quite unscrupulous people—that claimed to offer courses in computers to adults who wanted to retrain themselves for new careers and new professions. She signed up, paid a lot of money to attend classes several nights a week after work, only to quickly realize that she wasn’t understanding a thing. She stuck with it—stubbornly. For several weeks she insisted that there was no way she would quit, that she was going to catch up. But finally she admitted the inevitable, and gave up in defeat. The defeat was a bitter and galling one. She had just watched her last chance disappear.
Having cleaned houses for years, my mother stopped working after my youngest brother was born, in 1967. But that didn’t last. Economic pressures forced her to look for a job, and so she began working eight exhausting hours a day in a factory (the single month I spent there during the summer vacation after I took the Baccalaureate exam allowed me to experience what such an “occupation” was really like), all so that I would be able to take courses on Montaigne and Balzac in high school or, once I started university, so that I could spend hours holed up in my room struggling through Aristotle and Kant. While she was sleeping at night in order to get up at 4 a.m., I was staying up till dawn reading Marx and Trotsky, then Beauvoir and Genet. Annie Ernaux expressed the brutal truth of this situation with great simplicity, writing about her mother, who ran a small neighborhood grocery store: “I was both certain of her love for me and aware of one blatant injustice: she spent all day selling milk and potatoes so that I could sit in a lecture hall and learn about Plato.”6 As I look at my mother today, her body stiffened and painful as a result of the harsh tasks she performed for nearly fifteen years, standing on an assembly line attaching tops to glass jars, with only one ten-minute bathroom break each morning and another in the afternoon, I can’t help but be struck by what social inequality means concretely, physically. Even the very word “inequality” seems to me to be a euphemism that papers over the reality of the situation, the naked violence of exploitation. A worker’s body, as it ages, reveals to anyone who looks at it the truth about the existence of classes. It is nearly impossible to imagine the pace of the work flow in that factory—in most factories, really. One day an inspector had timed one worker for a few minutes, and that measurement determined the quota of jars that needed to be finished in an hour. It was already unimaginable, inhuman. And yet then you must consider that a good portion of their salary was tied to bonuses that were linked to the total number of jars finished in a day. My mother told me that she and her colleagues would sometimes manage to double the required number. She’d come home at night exhausted, “done in,” as she’d say, but still pleased to have earned that day enough for us to maintain a decent standard of living. It is impossible for me to understand how and why the issue of harsh working conditions and all the slogans that denounced them—“Slow down the assembly lines!” [À bas les cadences infernales]—have disappeared from discourse on the left, and even from its perception of the social world. Because after all, what are at stake are the most concrete realities of many individual lives—people’s very health, for example.
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