REINVENTION
Paris, June 2021
Throughout his books ÉDOUARD LOUIS has never ceased to think about the possibility -or the impossibility- of reinventing oneself. His texts are calls for freedom.
For SHADOWPLAY, Louis presents a number of reflections on metamorphosis and self-fashioning, themes dear to Oscar Wilde and Michel Foucault, whose legacy he continues to extend.
T-shirt Acne Studios
Monday, 1pm
For several days I have been trying to write, but I don’t know where to start, and how to start. Every word I try to put down on the paper sounds fake and cold, every sentence tastes like ashes - like always, I must admit, in my !rst attempts to write something.
In his diary, Imre Kertész says to himself, when he is confronted with the diculty of writing: “Just write, without thinking, as it comes” - but it doesn’t come.
Sometimes, I wish I could just write or say “I’m sorry, I’ve tried to write but I failed”. What would people think of me? Would they be angry, disappointed, would they hate me?
I truly believe, though, that there is something deeply emancipatory in talking about failure. When I started to write books, because it was unbelievably dicult, I remember I would read biographies of interviews with writers like Toni Morrison, Elfriede Jelinek, Claudia Rankine or William Faulkner, and every time I came across a sentence saying that they sometimes failed too, when trying to write, I felt stronger. To hear Rankine or Morrison say “I fail”, gave me a strength that went beyond any kind of support, “I fail” was a much more helpful statement than “You can do it”. For months I was obsessively looking for these weirdly magical words: “I fail”, spending hours on the internet just to !nd a page where I could read it, or a video where I could hear it.
In my book Who killed my father, I wrote that throughout my whole childhood, my father would repeat, almost every day, that a real man should never cry, that only women were supposed to cry. And yet, I realized, looking back towards my past, that he was crying almost every day; crying when he was drunk, crying when he was happy, crying after an argument with my mother.
My brother was crying a lot too, but the women in my family, my sister and my mother, almost never did.
So, my father, through his words, through what he was saying again and again, was reproducing a norm -the norm of masculinity- that he failed to fulill. What would have happened if another man in the village had come to my father and had told him that he was also failing to !t to the norm of masculinity? Could it make a difference?
If I think it through, I realize that our history is full of norms and standards that we fail to fulill. So maybe, talking about failure is a way of challenging these !ctions that we create, the !ction of masculinity, of what is a real man, of what is a writer, of what is a good life, these !ctions that continue to shape our existence, even if they have nothing to do with our lives, even if nobody can completely !t into them. Maybe, talking about failure is a way of presenting things as they really are, as we experience them, in spite of all the ideologies, illusions and expectations. Maybe, talking about failure, if it means talking about things as they really are, is the highest form of autobiography.
Conclusion:
I say I fail, therefore I say I. Je dis j’échoue, donc je dis Je.
But let’s come back to the issue I am dealing with today, CHANGING.
When I look at the definition of this word, in the (French) dictionary, I find: Changing:
1. Substitute (something) for something else;
2. Replace (something, someone), by something else or someone else;
3. Abandoning, Leaving (something, someone) behind for something or someone else.
If the dictionary tells the truth, then, changing is almost synonym to abandoning. What do we leave behind, in order to change? Who do we abandon?
Monday again, 7pm
Before I stop working for today, I shouldn’t forget to mention something. I should not forget to talk about beauty. Talking about changing is talking about violence, yes, but it also means talking about beauty.
After deciding to change my name, after spending months with a lawyer to make this change, to get the authorization from the French state, the day I got my new ID with my new name on it, ÉDOUARD LOUIS, I was walking down the street, it was one of the most noticeable days of my life, I was crying, of course, and I was thinking: this is your new name now. Édouard is a name you chose, it’s the name of your reinvention and your freedom. I carry the name of my reinvention.
Every time my closest friends Didier and Georoy would tell me Édouard, I was bursting with joy inside myself.
Édouard, can you give me the salt on the table next to you. Édouard, look, it’s raining.
All these sentences where magical, the most powerful I had ever heard.
All these daily sentences, casual and not noticeable for most people, were, for me, the most unforgettable ones.
I want other people to experience this joy, one day.
Left Jumper and pants Icicle, shoes and belt Ann Demeulemeester, socks Falke
Right Long sleeves t-shirt Études, turtleneck Ludovic de Saint Sernin, belt Ann Demeulemeester, pants Dries Van Noten
Tuesday, Noon fifteen
If changing is abandoning, who or what did I abandon?
Last month, my mother called me on my cellphone. She asked me if I was okay, and after a brief and casual conversation about my little brothers and sisters and about what she had done the week before, she told me she needed a job to make money. She now lives with a man she met a few years ago, right after she had left my father.
This man, her new partner, got a job as a doorman in Paris, after years of unemployment in the North of France.
This man asked my mother to follow him to Paris, so she did, but as soon as they moved in his new appartement, my mother felt trapped. She is fifty years old, has no degree, no job, and, before moving to Paris, as part of her plan to move, she left the house in the small village up North, where I grew up with her and the rest of my family.
On the phone, she was telling me “And now I am completely subjected to the man I am living with. If I want money to buy bread I have to ask him, if I want money to buy an ice-cream I have to ask him, if I want to take the bus I have to ask money to buy the ticket”. Then she paused. She let two or three seconds go, she took a deep breath and asked me: “That’s why I need a job, to make my own money, and I thought I could become your cleaning woman. I will be very discreet, I promise, no fuss, no trouble, I will just come silently every week, clean your place and go”. I told her it was impossible, I can’t aord to hire someone, and anyway it was impossible for me to hire my own mother as my cleaning woman. But she was insisting “You don’t have to pay me a lot, its !ne”, and I was saying “No”, no, I told her I could give her some money to help her, but she kept going “What I need is a job”.
When I put down the phone, I felt as if my body was melting, I was unable to move. What she just asked me left me breathless. I was forced to ask myself, “What did I become, what is my mother seeing when she sees me, if she asks me to hire her as a cleaning lady? What kind of distance has grown between us? When did this question become possible, thinkable for her? When did I become that person, to her”?
When I was a child and I would see privileged people, I often hated them, because I thought they had privilege that I didn’t have.
I hated their body, their freedom, the way they moved with ease.
If my mother asked me to work for me as a cleaning lady, does it mean that I became this person?
What does it mean, to become the person I hated?
Reminder : I am not sorry.
Tuesday, 4pm
I was born in a small village in the north of France, where up until the beginning of the 1980s a local factory employed almost all the inhabitants. By the time I was born, in the 1990s, after several waves of layos, many inhabitants were out of work and trying to survive on welfare. My father and mother quit school at the ages of 15 and 16, as had my grandparents before them and as would my younger brother and sister. My father worked at the factory for 10 years, until a weight fell on him and destroyed his back. My mother didn’t work; my father insisted a woman’s place was at home taking care of the children.
At 14 years, I went to high school. I was, as Didier Eribon puts it in Returning to Reims, a class transfuge (some people would call it a class defector, but I don’t like the negative connotation of this expression). Being the !rst in my family to study, and the first to live in the city where my high school was, I found myself confronting situations that I never experienced before. The other kids at school were speaking a language that I did not completely understand, they would talk about theatre, classical music, opera. At that time I had never been to the theatre, I would never go to the cinema, I didn’t know that there was such thing as a history of cinema. Even the clothes I was wearing were dierent from the ones these kids were wearing, most of them coming from the cultural middle class. They were wearing jeans, polos, shirts, when I was wearing sportswear, jogging pants, because of the influence of rap music in the working-class milieu of my childhood.
Tuesday, a few hours later.
Some scenes that revealed to me my difference with the others in high school:
One day, a girl in the corridor talked about a musician called Wagner. I hadn’t heard his name before. While she was talking about Wagner’s music, I kept silent. I felt a certain sense of pride in her voice when she was mentioning this Wagner, and I was ashamed of not knowing him. In the evening, I went on Wikipedia and I looked this man up, Richard Wagner. I took a piece of paper, and I wrote down as many things as possible about him, about his work, and I tried to memorize them. The day after, I came back to that same girl and said, trying to sound natural and spontaneous, “Last night I listened to Tristan and Iseult all night long. Wagner was always my favorite composer”.
I don’t know if she believed me or not.
Every day I would measure the distance with the other kids, and I was realizing that my life was a collection of negatives.
They did travel during their childhood, and I did NOT.
Some of them spoke, already at 14, a good English, and I did NOT.
They knew the names Jean Luc Godard and Isabelle Huppert, and I did NOT.
One day, a girl asked me why I had such bad teeth. I lied. I didn’t tell her that !xing teeth was not an issue in my family, that going to the dentist was not something people would do, because of lack of money and because teeth, in my working-class milieu, were not considered a priority. I told her that my parents were both intellectuals, two kinds of May68 creatures, that they were so focused on literature and arts, and they didn’t pay attention to anything related to the body.
Another day, I said to a friend that people in my family were playing Playstation quite often, and also that when we would get money from the welfare, our way of celebrating was to go to the video game store and buy a new game. My friend told me: “But why don’t they take a subscription to the newspaper Le Monde, instead? It would help them to elevate themselves”.
I didn’t even know how to answer.
Every Wednesday and Saturday, between my 8 and 14 years old, me and my aunt would get dressed up to go to the supermarket. We arrived at the giant mall at 2pm, and we stayed till 6 or 7pm, without buying anything, eventually just some Coca Cola and candies. At the supermarket, we spent hours, every week, just walking around, fascinated by the thousands of things we could never buy. Every week, for several years, while these kids in high school were spending their times at the theatre or watching movies, or playing music.
I knew it was impossible to talk about it in high school.
T-shirt Acne Studios, belt Ann Demeulemeester, jeans Ernest W Baker
Wednesday, 5pm
In his book analyzing the history of virility and masculinity, George Mosse says that the ideology of masculine strength, was built upon the rejection of all the beings who were considered too weak, not strong enough. The ideology of virility in the modern world, according to Mosse, was created through the elaboration of some countertypes: homosexuals, women, the effeminate and feeble Jews. In order to build his identity as ‘virile’, one has to perform again and again that he is not gay, not effeminate, not like a woman, not like a supposedly feeble Jewish person. Which is to say that most of the time, in order to become, we have to de!ne ourselves by, and against what we are not, what we don’t want to be. If we follow Mosse, we can consider that identity is, before all, a negative energy, an eort not-to-be something, not-to-be a certain kind of person.
In this sense, I could say that my father, for example, was even more marked and socially determined by homosexuality than I was, precisely because he is straight, and homosexuality was his countertype. Because, in his milieu, to perform his masculinity, as a man, my father had to pay attention to everything he was doing in order to avoid being seen as gay, in order not to look gay: eating a lot during lunch and dinner, not a small plate because it would have looked gay, not crossing his legs because it would have looked gay, not saying to another man that he found him beautiful, for the same reason, not being afraid to get naked in front of other men, because it would have sounded gay, because only someone who is troubled by other men’s bodies is afraid to get naked with them.
Homosexuality, for my father, was a ghost, constantly haunting him, de!ning, negatively, who he was.
Wednesday, 7pm
Dear Mother,
We all have our ghosts, and when I started to change, you became that ghost. I am sorry. After only a few days in high school, every move or every decision I made was driven by the desire of being dierent from you. You became an obsession. You have never been as present in my life as after my departure. The way I chose my clothes at the shop, the way I was walking, everything became against you. You became, to put it in Mosse’s word, my countertype.
If changing is abandoning, you were the part that I abandoned in order to become someone else.
I stopped scratching my nose in front of other people, like you used to do.
I tried to erase my northern accent, because I didn’t want to have an accent like you. Erasing that accent also meant erasing you.
I started to despise all the shows you were watching on TV, because I didn't want to be like you.
The first times I went to the theatre in high school, to see Krzysztof Warlikowski, Thomas Ostermeier or Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, I thought : “I’m far from her now”.
In Returning to Reims, Didier Eribon says that, after leaving his family to become someone else, he would, from time to time, and I quote him, “send them a postcard, all that remained of an effort to sustain a connection that for my part I wished as tenuous as possible”. When I would send you a postcard, it was not to sustain a connection. It was to show you that I was not like you anymore, that I was part of the world of people who travel. I am sorry.
Wednesday, 11pm
An important thing, when thinking about self-reinvention and self-fashioning, is to avoid overestimating the violence of changing. I must be careful. I’m rereading my notes and I realize that I wrote about the potential and violent consequences of changing, like when I was using my mother as a countertype, but there is also a certain way of overestimating the damages of change, which can become nothing but a suspicious self-contentment, a self-celebration, a way of reinsuring ourselves: I’ve changed, I’ve changed.
Because if we ask, “Is changing necessarily violent for the people who used to surround us?”, we assume, in doing so, that they care, that they care about us, that they care about us leaving and changing.
A souvenir:
It’s spring. It’s years after I left the village of my childhood. I am studying philosophy and sociology in Paris. That day, I called my mother to tell her I was going to visit her, I was coming to the village. It was a big thing for me, I hadn’t seen her for several years, I was returning after years of absence to the place of my past, of my childhood. I built a whole tragedy in my mind, the son returning after years of silence. It’s a beautiful picture, but when I told my mother I was coming back to the village, she told me she was not available. “Why?”, I asked her. “I am having lunch with a friend”. I kept going “But you are in the village, and you can’t see me? It’s been years since I came, the last time”. She told me again “Sorry, I promised to my friend”.
Here is what I was forced to understand: she was not waiting for me. For years, I had built in my mind, unconsciously, the idea that the people I left behind were waiting for me, while I was running away from them. But I was wrong. I was living my life, and they were living their life. They were not waiting. In one of her books, Assia Djebar draws the same conclusion about her family. She left her family to go to Paris and invent herself as a writer, but when she understands her family built a new life, without her, a voice whispers in her mind “You ran away from us, and you thought we were waiting for you?”. After the call to my mother, a voice whispered in my mind too, a voice like my mother’s voice, and this voice told me “You ran away from us, and you thought we were waiting for you?”.
If changing is abandoning, changing is also being abandoned.
Left Jacket Acne Studios, pants Prada
Right Top and pants Maison Margiela, turtleneck Ludovic de Saint Sernin, socks Falke, shoes Ann Demeulemeester
Thursday, evening
Dear Past,
A few years ago in Paris, I met a man in a bar. I went to his place, a giant apartment where he had a big white sofa. Before I sat down on the sofa, he gave me a glass of wine and told me: “Be careful with the sofa, it’s polar bear”.
The day after, I visited my father, and I saw his body destroyed by a life of poverty and hard work, bending down every day as a street sweeper to collect other people’s garbage.
Seeing the cracked face of my father, I thought of the man with the polar bear coach, probably a millionaire, and I felt an anger that I cannot describe. I can only try to illustrate it.
Dear Past,
One day I will write about all these things. I promise.
Words by Édouard Louis
Photography by Edward Lane
Fashion by Jonathan Huguet
Grooming by Carole Douard
Photographer’s assistant Iris Guillaume
Stylist’s assistant Marie Soares