Book Review: “I Will Write to Avenge my People”

The Nobel Prize Literature Lecture by Annie Ernaux: <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Will-Write-Avenge-My-People/dp/1644213613/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Z4XR21UU7MUA&keywords=I+Will+Write+to+Avenge+my+People&qid=1703593372&sprefix=i+will+write+to+avenge+my+people%252Caps%252C140&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=7cfa629ad3ad86e176209ddde0326c62&camp=1789&creative=9325">I Will Write to Avenge my PeopleI Will Write to Avenge my People

Annie Ernaux is possibly the most important writer in French Letters of the last 100 years.  A prolific author, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022.

Her books <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Place-Annie-Ernaux/dp/1609804031/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WHHRN6GFAKRV&keywords=a+man%2527s+place+annie+ernaux&qid=1703588792&sprefix=a+man%2527s+place+annie+ernaux%252Caps%252C144&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=e3dcb9c9ce4654e064ea2b83aa464805&camp=1789&creative=9325">A Mans PlaceA Man’s Place (about her father) and <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Womans-Story-Annie-Ernaux/dp/1583225757/ref=sr_1_1?crid=38H34Y65PFB2L&keywords=a+woman%2527s+story+annie+ernaux&qid=1703588822&sprefix=a+woman%2527s+story+annie+ernaux%252Caps%252C134&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=b56e14994a0c3be3874d9e247f8b63c9&camp=1789&creative=9325">A Woman's StoryA Woman’s Story (about her mother’s struggles with Alzheimers) are seminal works and of that genre to have made them instant classics.  I will admit to my ignorance: prior to her winning the Nobel Prize I had not heard of her.

I picked up this book at the till in Daunt Books on Marleybone Lane in London, one of my favourite bookstores.  I didn’t know what it was about, but I liked the title.  A bit like a literary version of choosing a sports team because you like the uniform.

This book is verbatim of her Nobel Prize lecture.  It is a short read.  My kinda thing.  But no less powerful for it.

Her Background

Annie Ernaux was an only child of parents (her sister died at the age of seven, before she was born) who owned a small village store in the town where her parents had previously factory workers.  They sent her to a posh, girls’, Catholic boarding school.  It was the contrast of her working-class roots and the privilege of that educational environment which became the spark informing her writing, her desire to write, and the finding of her voice.  “Her people” refers to the working class.  Her writing was born from a place in her which recognised that her people had no voice.

It isn’t a stretch to see where this book landed for me, lands for me, and how this blog in part taps into the same base feeling—that neither I, nor my people, have a voice.  I write because I have to.

It was this compulsive energy that led Annie Ernaux to forge ahead with writing even though to appease her parents she learned a trade, that of a schoolteacher, and stuck with that trade, even with literary success, because she never wanted to depend on star power or for lightning to strike.

After her years in Catholic boarding school, and bouts with ill health, she showed great academic promise, and so was enrolled in another school even further from home, her nest.  She struggled with it, struggled with bulimia and depression followed by anorexia.  She writes of the sacrifice of her parents so that she could be clothed as her peers, and have books to read.  She writes of how she found solace with <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Second-Sex-Simone-Beauvoir/dp/030727778X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3CS1T2TGVIPLT&keywords=Simone+de+Beauvoir%E2%80%99s+Second+Sex&qid=1703593402&sprefix=simone+de+beauvoir+s+second+sex%252Caps%252C165&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=177db7acf56b26a4b2478b1e13e6b8d5&camp=1789&creative=9325">Simone de Beauvoir Second SexSimone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, a book which should be required reading for all human’s on this earth…it is about ‘a world made by men for men’.  

And in this bend of her sickle, ‘her people’ also becomes that of all women everywhere.  I no longer exclude myself from this group.  Something has happened in my brain and my body, a sense of knowing that my tribe is the tribe of women, and that I am not only not a man anymore, but that I am a woman, with just a few months left in the waiting room before my physical body is brought formally across the line.  I think it began in earnest on those days where I carried around the affidavits to have my birth certificate changed, and not mailing them for days, almost as if it were a requiem for my man’s life.

My People

With my sisters and their families, over the holidays, for the first time I asked to be gendered female.  The people that have come into my life just naturally seem to see me that way, but I recognise how hard it is for someone who has known me for decades as a ‘he’ shift to ‘she’.  But they did it.  It was challenging, even for their children, but helped by how all of the strangers that we encountered gendered me female.  I don’t know that I look so different, but I am told that my gestures and mannerisms are female.  I can’t imagine this consciously, but it just seems to be that oestrogen has such a deep affect, that it even shapes how we walk, talk, move our hands, and hug.  

With one of my new best friends, the reflexologist, who my children think is the GOAT, we spoke of hugging, and how when I hugged one of my children, who is now taller than me, I did it completely face to face, and they remarked, “Oh my gosh Papa, boobs!”  And I realised that men don’t hug straight on, and that I didn’t used to either.  But now my bits are so much smaller and non-reactive, my orbs have shrunken to the size of peas, and looking at my front in anything you would not know that there was anything there, and tucking is a permanent part of my life at the moment (though not for long).  She noted the same—men don’t hug straight, and we had a good laugh about what they’re hiding.

Who are ‘my people’?  Certainly the entire trans community: male, female, and anything else besides.  So too are women, all women, even TERFs because even TERFs live a life of discrimination, and I can’t help whatever is inside of them that makes them hate trans women, even if doing so undermines them and the cause of women.  My community is also the non-white, the global south, those who have less, the have-nots.  It is everything that I have consciously left behind when I gave up white male privilege and came out as a trans woman.  

And you know what?  The greatest that I have been given is to discover what it feels like to be discriminated against.

Her Life and Becoming a Writer

Annie Ernaux worked as a cleaning woman to help pay for her studies.  In her spare time she read voraciously, and from that was born a desire to write a novel.  She began to write.  She envisaged a future for herself earning a living as a teacher and writer.

Success did not come easy, she married, got pregnant, had an illegal abortion, failed the exams she needed to pass to please her family and to get a job whilst her husband passed his.

Later, she was accepted to take competitive exams to become a literature teacher.  She went home to see her parents and her father died on her visit.  

“This was the most violent and unspeakable separation I would ever know in my life.”

She was successful in her exams and secured a series of teaching positions, had children, and her mother came to live with her growing family and to help out.  She continued to write in secret.  Her first book, gestating inside of her for four years, <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Cleaned-French-Literature-Annie-Ernaux/dp/0916583651/ref=sr_1_1?crid=27TQRVD7W4FMT&keywords=cleaned+out+annie+ernaux&qid=1703589034&sprefix=cleaned+out+annie+ernaux%252Caps%252C159&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=3da4a422d536a79fb3ee392b0c696206&camp=1789&creative=9325">Cleaned OutCleaned Out, was published when she was 33.  She continued to teach, raise a family, and wrote a second book <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Do-What-They-Say-Else/dp/1496228006/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3L1MKW4W9KW4J&keywords=do+what+they+say+or+else+annie+ernaux&qid=1703589108&sprefix=do+what+they+say+or+else+annie+ernaux%252Caps%252C135&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=21cf5493d2d6e9987c32f403e0b7dd68&camp=1789&creative=9325">Do What They Say or ElseDo What They Say or Else.

Her lived experience, so common to women of assuming the material burden of domestic life, being primary caregiver when there are children, and coping with the demands of a profession inspired her to write <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Woman-Annie-Ernaux/dp/188836338X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2YTUMU6AE154P&keywords=A+Frozen+Woman+annie+ernaux&qid=1703589133&sprefix=a+frozen+woman+annie+ernaux%252Caps%252C140&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=4c9531062b6476e1980b2e3d7ed52bdc&camp=1789&creative=9325">A Frozen WomanA Frozen Woman.

This book foreshadowed her separation from her husband and going to live on her own with her children.  She wrote the book about her father, A Man’s Place, which was her first book that broke away from the novelistic structure, and one which proved decisive.

Despite her growing success, she chose to continue to teach so as not to become dependent on her art.  Books kept coming.  A Woman’s Story about her mother’s fight with Alzheimers came next.

In the runup to her eventual retirement from teaching and from thereon, she published prolifically if sporadically.

I can’t help but be reminded of the James Baldwin dictum: “If you’re going to write a book, don’t just write a book, write a shelf of books.”

The title of her Nobel Lecture, “I Will Write to Avenge my People” was a sentence she wrote in her diary sixty years before winning the prize.  She makes the parallel to Arthur Rimbaud “I am of an inferior race for all eternity.”

Excerpt from the speech

“I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of land-less 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…How could my personal achievement have redeemed any of the humiliations and offences suffered?…It was not the rejection of my first novel by two or three publishers—a novel whose sole merit was its attempt to find a new form—which subdued my desire and my pride.  It was life situations in which the weight of difference between a woman’s existence and that of a man was keenly felt in a society where roles were defined by gender, where contraception was prohibited and termination of pregnancy a crime.  Married with two children, a teaching position and full responsibility for household affairs, each day I moved further and further away from writing and my promise to avenge my people.”

annie ernaux

Second excerpt

“…it was a matter of delving into the unspeakable in repressed memory, and bringing light to bear on how my people lived…In writing, no choice is self-evident…but those who, as class defectors no longer have quite the same language [as their parents]…feel the difficulty, even the impossibility of writing in the…dominant language.  I had to break with ‘writing well’…to root out, display the rift running through me.  What came to me…was the clamour of a language which conveyed anger and derision, even crudeness; a language of excess, insurgent, often used by the humiliated and offended as their only response to the memory of others’ contempt, of shame, and shame at feeling shame.”

Her first book was about the discovery of pleasure and of periods, and her female body.  More specifically, the violence of the state against the female body.  The idea that backstreet abortion was the only path.  “Avenging my people and avenging my sex became one and the same thing.”

annie ernaux

If there is any doubt that her words are less relevant today than at any point in her career or life, one needn’t look far: the plight of women in Iran or in most of the developing world, the rollback of Roe v. Wade in the US, the ever widening gap between rich and poor.  These issues also exist in the invisible, in the liberal and educated and privileged West.

The revolution has not even begun.

Her speech made me cry and feel anger and motivation in equal measure.  This blog is without literary pretensions and may forever be just a whisper in a windstorm, but it is a cri de cœur.  Mine.  It may not be loud, but it is no less felt.

Annie Ernaux on Amazon

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