It has been hailed in France as Louis’s best book yet, a poetic, tender, joyous and melancholy postscript to his earlier stomach-punching account of Picardy village life. The resulting autobiographical novel, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, is written from Louis’s perspective, growing up with Monique and then witnessing her going from being stuck at home frying food and mopping floors to an improbable moment smoking a cigarette with Catherine Deneuve in Paris. And one day she broke her chains, left and totally reinvented herself, and in her 50s found a beautiful freedom, leaving for the city for the first time in her life.” My dad always told her: you stay home, you do the housework, you raise the kids, you don’t wear makeup – he would mock her if she tried to. The heart of his mother’s story, Louis says, is: “She leaves a man she was a prisoner of for 25 years.
“I put all his things in bin bags and threw them out on the pavement.” He was in a Paris flat reading, when his mum called from the village. By then, Louis had gone from a teenager devastated by poverty and homophobic bullying, whose only prospect of happiness was drinking plastic cups of hard alcohol at the village bus shelter and who hadn’t read a novel until the age of 17, to starting work in his late teens on what would become his massive bestseller and bring global fame. It was about falling into the rhythm of time set by a man.”īut decades later, after Louis had escaped to Paris and was becoming a writer, something surprising happened. Not only did he go out, but we had to wait for him to get home to have our dinner, because he couldn’t eat alone. My dad would have a tantrum if we didn’t wait up for him. “That waiting is so often at the heart of masculine domination. “My mother’s role was to stay at home, take care of the kids, do the housework and wait for my dad when he went to the bar,” Louis says. As she put it: “I’m a slave to this shithole.” She had no driving licence, no qualifications, no money and made no decisions. Hers was a life of cleaning, putting meals on the table and being called a fat cow by her husband in front of everyone at the village fete. Louis’s father didn’t like her smiling because “it didn’t correspond to what he expected of her”, Louis says. Monique ended up in a tumbledown village house, raising five children (her husband refused a termination of her last pregnancy, which turned out to be twins). Enter the aftershave-wearing (“rare in those days”) factory worker with whom she would later have Louis. The only way out was to find another man. At 23, she fled with her two children to her sister’s crowded tower‑block flat in a northern industrial town. Have a first look here.Monique, from a poor family in the north, became pregnant at 17, abandoned her training at a hospitality school, married for convenience at 18, and by 20 found herself stuck with a man she hated. To mark the occasion, an extensive “ Catalogue of Resistance” is published, with contributions by Mohammad Al Attar, Srećko Horvat, Vandana Shiva and many, many others.
The event takes place in the splendid Saint Jacob’s Church, in collaboration with the bishop of Ghent – for the last shall be the first! Via panel discussions, film screenings, concerts and workshops, we will imagine new futures of global citizenship. Together with #GentZonderGrenzen, In My Name and L’Union des Sans-papiers pour la Régularisation, the undocumented refugees voice their political will. On March 4 and 5, a new edition of School of Resistance will address the issue of regularisation of refugees and migrants in Europe and their struggle for citizenship and recognition. Last December we devoted a whole School of Resistance (“ Art in Conflicted Areas”) to the situation in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands are already fleeing, millions may follow. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed the face of our continent. “The Interrogation” will be followed by a conversation between Édouard Louis and Milo Rau. Can we escape our biography through art, or is art only the record of a failed liberation? „It’s a deeply melancholic play, a fragmentary play, a tender play”, as Louis and Rau said in an interview. Performed by NTGent global ensemble actor Arne De Tremerie, „The Interrogation“ is a „demonstration for vulnerability“, a moment of poetic standstill. This Wednesday it’s finally live to see, in Amsterdam at the ITA. Last year, they had do cancel the show only some days before the premiere. This Wednesday, the 2nd of March, they present their performance „The Interrogation“ that they wrote and staged together in spring 2021 for the Kunstenfestival in Brussels. French author Édouard Louis and director Milo Rau have been friends for a long time.
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