Who Killed My Father

by Édouard Louis

Although they stand close together, neither can reach the other.

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,

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

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

Violence doesn’t just lead to violence. It was a phrase I repeated for years, that violence causes violence, but I was mistaken. Violence had saved us from violence.

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.

I came to see you for the last time, but I remember all the things I didn’t tell you. 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 seaside just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing. This is something I realised when I went to live in Paris, far away from you: the ruling class may complain about a left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing government, but no government ever ruins their digestion, no government ever breaks their backs, no government ever inspires a trip to the beach. Politics never changes their lives, at least not much.

There is no pride without shame:

A friend of mine says it’s the children who mould their parents and not the other way round.