Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis
Édouard Louis does not mess around. He is angry. Angry at society for not respecting or caring about and for its working class; for denigrating its workers and looking the other way when they cry for help or just long to be seen.
Louis is angry, and his is an anger felt in his bones, born of his own life experiences and researched at an academic sociological level. A combination which has resulted in an intense eighty-one page Molotov cocktail of a book.
Who Killed my Father is many experiences, emotions and outbursts, all rolled up tightly into a beautiful, moving, empathetic memoir. It is a short, sharp attack on French society and the politicians who are so far removed from the people that they don’t see them and are surprised when they lash out.
“What’s strange is that they’re the ones who engage in politics, though it has almost no effect on their lives. For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.”
The book is also - and equally - a love letter to Louis’ father who worked his entire (albeit brief) working life trying to support his family, longing to be a better father than his own had been, all the while ignoring his own dreams and aspirations, realising early on that that was not what life was going be for him and that he would be better off resigning and setting aside any foolish notions of true happiness or fulfillment.
“…and I think you pretend to hate happiness in order to make yourself believe that, if your life seems an unhappy one, at least you’re the one who chose it. As if you wanted to pretend you had some control over your own unhappiness.”
Édouard Louis, a well known writer and activist in his native France, grew up in a poor working class home, where violence, hardness, silence, and anger were part of everyday life.
“….nothing was unexpected anymore because you no longer had any expectations, nothing was violent because violence wasn’t what you called it, you called it life, you didn’t call it, it was there, it was”.
Louis longed to be seen and understood by his father, and while there are moments of connectedness, it is a father/son relationship fraught with denial, misunderstanding and a tragic inability to show affection. In Louis’ mind much of this is due to circumstances beyond their control and the result of a societal framework that does nothing to lift up the ones who really need it.
“One night, in the village cafe, you said in front of everyone that you wished you’d had another son instead of me. For weeks I wanted to die.”
It isn’t until much later in life after many conversations and brutally honest exchanges that father and son learn to approach each other with understanding and appreciation.
This is not, however, a story with a happy ending. It is in its own way a call to arms. Louis wants to hold up a mirror to French society, one that will show politicians the entire population and not just the parts they want to see.
The first few lines of Who Killed my Father sum it up well:
“When asked what the word racism means to her, the American Scholar Ruth Gilmore has said that racism is the exposure of certain populations to premature death. The same definition holds with regard to male privilege, to hatred of homosexuality or trans people, to domination by class - to social and political oppression of all kinds.”
Now, there’s something to think about.
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