Knowing where to begin

 Annie Ernaux, the French writer who won the Nobel in 2022, said she always knew where to start. It’s a line written in her diary when she was 22:

I will write to avenge my people, j’écrirai pour venger ma race.

 

The people she’s talking about are farm laborers, factory workers, shopkeepers, “people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education.”

I had to remind myself she was writing about despised people in France. I picture the despised people I’ve known in my own neighborhood.

The world is full of people who face injustice all their lives, and Ernaux spoke of an ideology that is rising in Europe that heightens the threat. She described the ideology’s main traits in these words:

 

• the exclusion of foreigners and immigrants

• the abandonment of the economically weak

• the surveillance of women’s bodies

 

It sounds like the ideology that took this country hostage in 2016 and seeks to do so again.

• Source: Annie Ernaux, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature,” translated by Alison L. Strayer, is here:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2022/ernaux/lecture/