Who Killed My Father

by Édouard Louis

politics is what separates some populations, whose lives are supported, nurtured, protected, from other populations, who are exposed to death, to persecution, to murder.

I reconstruct the image as best I can, but reality has the quality of dreams: the harder I try to grasp it, the more it slips away.

It often seems to me that I love you.

What we call history is nothing but the story of the same emotions, the same joys, reproduced across bodies and time,

Your life proves that we are not what we do, but rather that we are what we haven’t done, because the world, or society, stood in our way. Because verdicts, as Didier Eribon calls them, came crashing down on us — gay, trans, female, black, poor — and made certain lives, certain experiences, certain dreams, inaccessible to us.

You were ashamed because I was confronting you with a school culture that had excluded you, that had wanted you out. Where is history? The history they taught at school was not your own. We were learning world history, and you were left out.

there are those to whom youth is given and those who can only try desperately to steal it.

A classic pattern: because you felt that you hadn’t lived your youth to the fullest, you spent your whole life trying to be young. That’s the trouble with stolen things, like you with your youth: we can never quite believe they are really ours, and so we have to keep stealing them forever. The theft never ends. You wanted to recapture your youth, to reclaim it, to resteal it. Only those who have always had everything given to them can truly feel what it is to possess. A sense of possession is not something one can acquire.

You were fascinated by all technological innovations, as if, through the novelty they embodied, you could infuse your own life with a newness to which you were not entitled.

In general, when I look back on the past and our life together, what I remember most is what I didn’t tell you. My memories are of what didn’t take place.

Among those who have everything, I have never seen a family go to the seashore just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing.

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 history of your suffering bears these names. Your life story is the history of one person after another beating you down. The history of your body is the history of these names, one after another, destroying you. The history of your body stands as an accusation against political history.