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.

In your face I read the signs of the years I’d been away.

She also told me that when you sleep you need a breathing machine or else your heart will stop. It can’t beat without assistance, without the help of a machine. It doesn’t want to.

You can’t drive anymore. You’re not allowed to drink. You can’t take a shower or go to work, except at great risk. You’re barely fifty years old. You belong to the category of humans whom politics has doomed to an early death.

was startled and out of breath, my heart in my throat, my lungs in my throat. I turned to face her and waited — my heart in my throat, my lungs in my throat.

To write the story of his life would mean writing the story of my absence.

Your father left when you were five years old. This is a story I often tell.

Should I not repeat myself until they listen to us? To make them listen to us? Should I not cry out?

I am not afraid of repeating myself because what I am writing, what I am saying, does not answer to the standards of literature, but to those of necessity and desperation, to standards of fire.

Violence had saved us from violence.

1998 It’s Christmas. 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.

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.

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, and my mother experienced that same feeling of happiness when she threw you out of the house.

Everything hurt. It is as if the pain of the separation had opened up a wound and everything around you — your world in all its violence — came rushing in

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.

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.

I’ve forgotten almost everything I told you when I came to see you for the last