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I wasn’t crying because of what had just happened, which wasn’t such a big deal, just the sort of unpleasant thing that can happen to you in any situation; rather, what had just happened allowed me to cry for all the times in my life when I hadn’t cried, all the times I’d held back. It’s possible during that night, in that room, I let my eyes cry twenty years of uncried tears.
I grew up in a world that rejected everything I was, and I experienced that as an injustice because—as I repeated to myself a hundred times a day, to the point of nausea—I didn’t choose what I was.
What you also don’t know is that the insults made everything else unbearable for me, our poverty, our way of life, the constant racism in the village, as if exclusion forced me to invent my own value system—one in which I had a place.
I wanted to succeed* out of revenge.
What I didn’t yet know was that the insults and the fear would save me from you, from the village, from replicating your life. I didn’t yet know that humiliation would force me to be free.
when I realized that my only option was to escape, I looked for every possible way out.* Not a day went by when I didn’t think, I have to go, I have to go—this sentence became part and parcel of what I was.
(I’m sorry I thought like that but I had no choice, I needed arrogance and violence to rid myself of the past).
I had a sense that literature, the theater and cinema were the tools that would lead me to a new life.
even in silence there’s no equality.
That day in my hospital room I realized that maybe, sometimes, you thought about my life, my studies and my future.
I didn’t yet see in this gap between my life and yours a sign of injustice or class violence, but only that I was destined for a greater and more beautiful life.
Are there people for whom taking advantage of what’s given to them is legitimate, and others for whom it’s a scandal, an expropriation?)
In making love with a man I rejected all the values of my milieu, I became bourgeois.
The philosopher Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick speaks somewhere of the inexhaustible transformative energy a stigmatized childhood can produce.
My privilege was to have known life without privilege.
I refused to accept—naively, but later I’d understand that naivety is a condition of escape—that something could be impossible.
“A simple lack of knowledge regarding the hierarchical structure of educational institutions and a lack of understanding of how processes of selection operate might lead people to make counterproductive choices, to choose paths that lead nowhere, nonetheless imagining that they are lucky to have gotten to a place in which people who know what they are doing would be sure never to end up. This is how people from less advantaged classes end up believing that they are gaining access to what has previously been denied to them, whereas in reality, once they have that access, it turns out to mean
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The story of my life is a succession of broken friendships. At each stage of this life, of this race against myself, I’ve had to break with people I loved in order to move forward. I didn’t decide to, neither did they: I was struggling to transform myself, they didn’t have the same obsession, they remained the way they were when I met them, and suddenly we no longer resembled one another; we had nothing to say to one another, we no longer understood one another. All that remained for me to do was look for new people who would welcome me into their lives, before my desire to change pushed me
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I write because I think that sometimes I regret having distanced myself from the past, sometimes I’m not sure that my efforts came to anything. Sometimes I think that the whole struggle was in vain, and that in escaping I fought for a happiness I never obtained.
