The new Nobel Prize for Literature Annie Ernaux, He warned this Wednesday against the increase in Europe of an ideology of “retreat and closure”, based on the exclusion of immigrants, the abandonment of the most disadvantaged and the surveillance of women’s bodies.
The 82-year-old French writer he considers writing a political act and, in his Nobel acceptance speech, intertwined bits of his world view with memories of why he started writing and the mission of literature, which for Ernaux is “a place of emancipation.”
Achieving the Nobel did not consider it “a single victory“But in a certain way, a collective victory” and that is why he wanted that pride.
And he did it with “those who want more freedom, equality and dignity for all human beings, regardless of their sex or gender, the color of their skin and their culture”, with whom “they think about future generations” and in safeguarding “an Earth that the desire for profit of a few makes less and less habitable.”
Ernaux has made his literature a commitment to the defense of the rights of the most disadvantaged and of women, whom he reminded throughout his speech.
He also cited the war in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin, although without naming them, when referring to the “dictator at the head of Russia”, who carries out a “imperialist war”.
The violence of that conflict still conceals in Europe the increase in “an ideology of withdrawal and closure” that does not stop gaining ground “in European countries that have been democratic up to now.”
An ideology founded on “the exclusion of foreigners and immigrants, the abandonment of the economically weak, the vigilance of the body of women”, this ideology “imposes on me, as on those for whom the value of a human being is always and everywhere the same, a duty of extreme vigilance ”.
In addition, he considered that “the burden of saving the planet, destroyed in large part by the appetite of the economic powers, should not fall, as is to be feared, on those who are already helpless. Silence, at certain moments in history, is not appropriate.
The Nobel Prize winner began her speech looking for a phrase that would give her “the freedom and firmness to speak without trembling” and he chose one written sixty years ago in his private diary: “I will write to avenge my race.”
A promise that runs through his entire production and his life: From a humble family girl -his parents were shopkeepers in Normandy- until the University, which opened the doors of the bourgeoisie for him. A journey that has given him a feeling of a defector of social class.
The death of his father, about whom “El lugar” (1983) is about, a new teaching position and the worldwide movements of contestation, returned to Ernaux the need for writing, from which he had distanced himself in a society “where roles were defined based on sex”.
A return to “delve into the unspeakable of a repressed memory and bring to light the way of being of my people. Writing to understand the reasons, inside and outside of me, that had distanced me from my origins”.
His first book, still fictional, was “Los armarios vacíos” (1974), about the clandestine abortion that suffered in his youth, a subject to which he would return autobiographically in “The Event” (2000).
In that first book, she defined the field in which she would place her writing and which was both social and feminist. “Revenge for my race and revenge for my sex would become one from then on.
The commitment of the new Nobel laureate to writing is to do it from her experience of “woman and immigrant from the interior” with the certainty that a book “can contribute to change personal life, to break the loneliness of things suffered and buried, to think in a different way.”
And it is that, “when the unspeakable comes to light, it is political” and it is seen today “with the revolt of those women who have found the words to disrupt masculine power and they have risen, as in Iran, against its most archaic form”.
Ernaux wanted the Nobel to be a sign of hope for all female writers, since “there are men in the world, even in the western intellectual circlesfor whom books written by women simply do not exist.