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lit--bitch · 4 years

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On ‘A Girl’s Story’ by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer (2020)

(Disclosure: There are themes in this review which some may find triggering, so please don’t read on if you feel particularly vulnerable to the subject matter I’ll be unpacking in this review. A Girl’s Story was first published by Gallimard in 2016 as Memoire de Fille and subsequently it’s been translated into English and published by Seven Stories Press (US) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), it came out in April just gone. So I’m working with the Fitzcarraldo Editions edition. As for Annie Ernaux, I don’t know her. I don’t know Alison L. Strayer either. I am familiar with Fitzcarraldo Editions, insofar that I applied for an internship there once which I didn’t get (and that hasn’t changed my feelings at all about the press nor the work they publish). Fitzcarraldo Editions was founded by Jacques Testard, who is joined by Tamara Sampey-Jawad and Joely Day. They’ve got two categories, fiction and essay. As for their name, they’re named after the typeface their designer came up with by Ray O’Meara. I feel like a lot of the writing they publish lies at the intersection of the writing world and the art world, they blur the two together and make them sort of indistinguishable. Not sure if they’d agree, that’s just my opinion. But I do trust Fitzcarraldo Editions, because you can tell that their selection process is careful and considered. They’re not just interested in your book, they’re interested in your whole cause, everything you’re going to write about in future. They maintain connections with their authors, explicitly so. Tbh, it’s rare to find publishers who do that without falling prey to nepotism. Their livery is beautiful: white font on blue for fiction, blue font on white background for essays. They’re lovely books to hold and to shelve.)

So onto the book: Alison L. Strayer does an amazing job. I’ve read Annie’s work both in original French and English, (I’m bilingual in French from my Algerian upbringing) and I can tell you she absolutely, hands down, conserves the entirety of Annie Ernaux’s voice. Hardly anything is compromised within her translation of A Girl’s Story and that deserves applause, because translations are an art form in and of themselves. She seamlessly keeps all the descriptions, tonality and pace of the work intact. For that reason, this text has to be commended for its precision and accuracy, because Alison hit the nail on the head.

It is absolutely clear to me why Annie Ernaux is so revered and loved in France. Her work is deeply rooted in her French experience, and of course that means her work is an artefact of French culture and history. Her work is peppered with French references, places and figures, e.g. Juliette Gréco, Mylène Demongeot, Orne, Caen, si t’en veux plus, je la remets dans ma culotte, cha-cha-cha des thons... etc. Annie Ernaux is 78 years old, so she possesses experiences quite divided from today. This makes her work a contribution to discourses on feminism, self-identity, womanhood, abortion, women’s rights, etc. within the 20th century. And she has set out to write the differences of her time in essays which divulge her trauma most acutely. A Girl’s Story is a rumination and a recalling of the events that took place in France, in 1958, at a holiday camp in ‘S’, to Annie Ernaux, née Duchesne. It recalls of her work as a camp instructor over the summer, and her first sexual experience with a man named H, her rejection and the “verbal hegemony” of her peers, prejudices and judgements made of her which she internalises as truth. Later, after the summer, she sets out to become H’s “ideal”, she dyes her hair blonde and develops an eating disorder. A Girl’s Story speaks of a time where provocation is conflated with “whoredom”, where the worth of a woman is vested in her virginity. She hammers down the volatility of the slave/master dynamic between men and women, in a time ‘pre-dating by ten years the slogan ‘my body, my rules’.’ (p.95.)

A Girl’s Story is a tough read. It’s a memoir that distrusts itself and analyses the legitimacy of memory compounded by years of separation from the event. It ruminates on the female condition, the teenage girl’s self-perception which seems to be a collection of external voices and embarrassments. This is all happening in 1958, during the Algerian War on Independence, which is when this narrative begins to slip up on oversights, misinformation and very subtle political bias. I have so much to say about A Girl’s Story but I can’t possibly say it all without boring many people to death and without it turning into a 200-page essay, and frankly I’m not interested in turning this review into a thesis, but I think I already have, because this “review” is L O N G. So I am thankful to you if you do decide to read it all, including my criticisms of the work.

I have read lots of reviews talking about A Girl’s Story from a feminist slant. I have no desire to repeat a review totally akin to them. I’m interested in the political bias and implications of that bias, and the ignorance of Annie Duchesne and Annie Ernaux, respectively. That will be the main focus of this review. If you want pure praise, and to read a review on this book that focuses on the girl and the girl’s suffering in A Girl’s Story, you can go here, here, and finally, here.

I want to say, firstly, that I respect the acute self-awareness of Annie Ernaux’s writing, and her courage for writing these painful chapters of her life. I am expressly grateful to her book, Happening. She has, at times, helped me. So I don’t want anyone to think that I’m being heartless or insensitive about the predicaments and sadnesses Annie unpacks in her writing. Because I do understand these traumas.

What I don’t share, is age. There is a massive age gap between myself and Annie Ernaux, which means that the way she’s had to deal with shit has probably been harder because when she was 18, men had the upper hand way more than they do right now, women weren’t invited to exploring their sexuality without being rendered a whore, and abortion was illegal.

There are times where I find Annie’s reference to herself at the age of 18 as, ‘the girl of S’, or ‘the girl of 1985′, a bit melodramatic and corny, but at the same time I’m empathetic of the pain these memories must stir inside her psyche. The fact that this torment has caused Annie to mentally create divisions of herself in such a way, that she requires an entirely different name for herself at a specific point of her life, that’s upsetting. That is an incredibly vulnerable thing to expose about yourself, in your writing, and for this text, it’s an integral part to digesting Annie Ernaux’s multi-faceted perceptions of memory.

There’s a sort of clairvoyancy-esque tonality to Ernaux’s voice at times, points where she makes predictions based off her past self, because she distrusts her memory so much. For example, ‘I perceive, in the persistence of these memories, the girl’s fascination for a rigorously organized world...’, ‘I perceive a desire to acclimatize to the new environment [the camp] but also a pervasive fear of being unable to do so’(p. 38). This voice brings about new dimensions to Annie Ernaux’s voice which characterise her as historian, archaeologist and psychologist to the remains of this “long-lost” identity:

But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things [...] something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded and can help us understand — endure — events that occur and the things that we do?

What I’m most upbeat about in A Girl’s Story, is the universal truths Annie unpacks about the philosophy of writing the truth, and writing about writing. It’s so good that it sometimes makes me jealous. And that’s how I know I’m reading good writing, when I actually wish I’d written some of these things myself. When Annie (Ernaux) in the present, confesses to wanting to call some of the people who tormented her from the camp, she elaborates:

I wanted physical, tangible proof of their existence, as if to continue writing I needed them to be alive, as if I needed to be writing about what is alive, to be endangered in the way one is when writing about the living and not in the state of tranquility that prevails when people die and are consigned to the immateriality of fictional characters.

And then the Big Truth:

There is a need to make writing an untenable enterprise, to atone for its power (not its ease, no one feels less ease in writing than me) out of an imaginary terror of consequences. Unless, now that I think of it, there is some perverse desire in me to make sure they’re still alive in order to compromise them, as I attend to my business of disclosure: to be their final Judgement.

There is a desire in writing, sometimes, to condemn and call out the people who’ve hurt you or fucked you over by name, especially if that betrayal is acutely felt, even more so if it stands the test of time. There is an urge to feel the quality of consequence, and to dissolve our sealed lips. I resonate with this: I have, sometimes impulsively, taken it upon myself to write writing that condemns hurt other people have caused, and no matter what anyone says, it does feel good. Especially if the work gets published. There are good and bad reasons for why it feels good, they are mostly all futile, and jejune.

It’s the ‘pushing the big red button’ of writing, I feel. It says don’t do it. But you do it anyway, because you can. As Annie says:

I do not envy him [H]: I’m the one who is writing.

Certainly in A Girl’s Story, this whole memory contains the pain behind Annie Ernaux’s whole impetus for writing, it marks the origins of where her work is seated. On shame and abuse and the convolutions of self-image as female. I don’t think Annie so much condemns the people in this essay. Rather, she is reconstructing scenes, and deconstructing her feelings and the projections she creates for herself as a result of being manoeuvred by the expectations and sensitivities of other people. Confessing all this is admirable, and makes for a book which is acutely self-aware.

A Girl’s Story is a narrative I and many women share. After the narration of Annie Duchesne, Annie Ernaux moves away from the shame of her memories and gradually begins to walk towards herself. She sees the symmetry of her experiences in the histories of Billie Holliday and Violette Laduc, sadnesses of love and intoxication of other in the same year of 1958. She begins to experience resonance:

the eighteen-year-old girl [...] were less alone, less forlorn — saved, in a sense — because these forsaken women, unknown to her then, even by name, had lived in desperate solitude at the same time as her. [...] to shatter the singularity and solitude of an experience that is more less shared by others at about the same time.

This realisation is part of the second half of the book which contains all the reasoning and steps Annie Ernaux makes towards articulating her selves in language. That these memories, though she is dubious about the reliability of them, and of her feelings, she can write this as part of the purpose to write A Girl’s Story. She can realise her intentions for her writing, recognise a purpose in sharing the experiences so that they might perhaps “save” other women from the solitude of their own experiences. And as she does, the memory of ‘the girl of 1958′ begins to “fade”, and what is left is the now, the now, being the most reliable source to yourself at any given point in life. A part of this book’s nature, for me at least, is one of reciprocity, in the sense that we as an audience might reflect on the banks of our memories, and unite ourselves with our pasts and futures in the collective whole of our present selves.

It’s for these reasons I enjoyed the text, but there are more difficult things going on in the background which pertain to Annie Ernaux’s, and of course Annie Duchesne’s, politics and ignorance. For me there are three very different narratives going on. I’ve unpacked the first two as briefly as I could, above. There is Annie Duchesne and her perspective of the world, her feelings, her torment, and the events unfolding at the camp in S. Then there’s present-day Annie, as Annie Ernaux, recalling these events and writing in the first-person to administer her present-day reflections and hindsights.

The third narrative is the narrative which is rarely acknowledged and mostly alluded to: it’s what’s happening in the rest of the world, and how both Annies remain still pretty oblivious to it. It’s this third narrative I’ve felt most engrossed by.

It is really hard for me to not make this book about Algeria in many ways, but the fact that both Annies gloss over the subject of the Algerian War, gives me impetus to address this “glossing” as being a problem in and of itself, and highlights other issues within the work. You’d think this dismissive inclusion of French political affairs is intentional, because by her own admission, she states her attention towards these world affairs was displaced by the agonies of men and love: ‘Perhaps as a result of that blindness to everything that was not the camp, I come to an abrupt halt when my eye is caught by the date of 1958′. It would make sense that Annie skirts around these issues when she speaks of herself at the age of 18, and that’s implied from the very start.

Annie tries to recreate the version of herself in youth by aligning you to her ideology and her principles at that age. Just three pages into the essay, she says:

That summer [1958], too, thousands of servicemen left France to restore order in Algeria. Many had never been away from home before. In dozens of letters, they wrote about the heat, the djebel, the douars — tent villages — and the illiterate Arabs, who after one hundred years of occupation still did not speak French.

You immediately get an impression for the mentality she once harboured. And it’s also a really misinformed one, because she implies that Algeria is made up of Arabs and that’s not true, the dominant demographic in Algeria and most of North Africa is the Amazigh, also known by the derogatory term “Berbers”. This is true of back then and it remains true of now. The thing is, what’s so enraging about this particular statement, and at several other points of this book, is that she oscillates between her present self and her 18-year-old self at random junctions, and she doesn’t really come back to Algeria in great detail, because as I say, her mind is elsewhere occupied by her affections for H at this camp and the reduction of herself as slave to his desires. That how she legitimises her ignorance as Annie Duchesne, y’know, which is understandable of a young girl looking to fall in love. I mean, of course the book isn’t about Algeria, it’s about her mind and desire for affection and to be seen, in a tiny, damaging bubble at a camp, at a time when Frenchmen were being sent away to fight for a mythical land called “French Algeria”. In which case, what’s the point in being so deliberately inflammatory about something you’re not going to later unpack in detail, as your present-day self? (I’ll come back to that in a couple paragraphs).

Secondly, it’s important that we know Annie Ernaux no longer “agrees” with the French Occupation of Algeria. She doesn’t identify with her 18-year-old self. On page 19, she says:

The longer I gaze at the girl in the photo, the more it seeems that she is looking at me. Is this girl me? Am I her? For me to be her, I would have to be able to solve a physics problem and a quadratic equation in maths read the whole novel given out with Bonnes soirées magazine each week [...] support the continuation of French Algeria

There’s the confirmation. But I’m not convinced that Annie Ernaux feels for the collective destruction that annihilated both sides, I’m not convinced that she really cares beyond the confines of French life and French borders. When she speaks in her present-day voice, she is still clearly biased, and I have no care for the logistics of this, that it’s more convenient for her to not turn this into a political essay. This is because about halfway through the book, she remarks:

My memory retains no trace of world events, reduced to a distant rumble that reached the camp by way of the television set in the dining hall. [...] I don’t believe the boys ever mentioned the constant threat they faced, from which none was exempt, of being sent to fight in the djebel, in Algeria.

On the Internet, I read the list of terrorist actions that occur almost daily between late August (fifteen attacks on the 25th) and the end of September 1958: an attack against Jacques Soustelle that killed one passerby and wounded three, the sabotage of railways, machinegun attacks on cafés and police stations, fires at factories (Simca in Poissy, Pechiney in Grenoble) and refineries (Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon-Marseilles) [...] All were perpetrated by the FLN, [Front Libération Nationale (the Algerian rebels fighting for independence basically)] which brought the conflict to metropolitan France.

I don’t think Annie Ernaux has ever left France, at least not mentally. And for me it’s this essay’s downfall, which is still clearly blinded by French propaganda. This is the extent Annie Ernaux goes into detail about the Algerian War for Independence. And there’s nothing in that entire passage, nor in any part of the essay, about the genocide native Algerians were abjected to. You’d think that age and knowledge would bring this clarity to Annie Ernaux, at least, but it doesn’t, and I’m perplexed by her choice of words, “the constant threat they [French soldiers] faced”, “terrorist actions”, “perpetrate”, as if France was a victim here, and still coming back calling North Africans ‘crouillat’ (it’s a racist term, look it up). I’m not saying that these events weren’t offences, or by any means, acceptable, but this is a country that took Algeria by force, and left it in a mess from which it has never recovered... And Jacques Soustelle, by the way, rendered native Algerians as “backward savages” due to their “primitive technology” and gave them second-class status. He was a fascist. He joined a terrorist group called l’Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) to fight against Algerian independence. He worked alongside Charles de Gaulle and was responsible for his renewal as France’s President and the Fifth Republic. Like, she’s coming up with all these shitty counter-attacks committed by people whose families literally had their entrails pulled out and their houses burned down. Like my own grandmother’s house. These people had shitty pistols to fight with, the French had technology you can’t even imagine. The only reason France didn’t stick with the occupation was because the fight was becoming expensive and people were just tired of rebellion, so they gave Algeria a self-determined referendum. It was a pragmatical decision.

So there’s a really big division in me created by this incredible, sad narrative of a girl’s struggle, navigating sexuality and femininity within the confines of a patriarchal, limiting society which punishes her. That’s the woman in me, reaching out, saying “Yes!”. We need memoirs like this, we need stories like this.

And then there’s this other kind of background narrative of politics and world affairs, which is one-sided, and isn’t really relevant or important to Annie’s 18-year-old self but “it should be” but it isn’t, and like, it’s so absent-mindedly written for a woman who is now 78 years old. Her focalisation is that of French suffering, not global suffering. And I think this isn’t just a style of Annie’s writing, I think it’s an outlook, you can see it in other books like The Years. This is the Algerian woman in me, that is beginning a career in narrating the reality of Algeria and what it means to have Algerian family, and possess inherited traumas beyond your understanding and control, and still read books like this written by French people. And Algeria’s not just background noise for Annie to peddle in her narratives of life without fully considering the impact and shape they’ve taken in history. Ergo, don’t loosely include it in your essay if all you’re attempting to do is legitimise your ignorance. And don’t later on, pretend to care, and then cherry pick the events which minimises France’s accountability for genocide. Cos why the fuck would you still want to?

Here’s the thing, and I’m being as brief as I can here. In 1958, when Annie Duchesne was being taunted, harrassed and in my view, sexually abused, by some holiday camp leaders in S, for having not slept with a boy (I refuse to call him a man), but for somehow being “a whore”, all of which is terrible, this is what was happening in Algeria at the same time:

My grandmother and grandfather’s house had been burned down by the French in the Province of Kabylia, which is Amazigh territory, aka Algerian countryside. She fled to Algiers with her three babies.

Then, shortly afterwards, my grandmother’s 5-year-old daughter was killed by the French Army in a street in Algiers.

Algerian-Muslim votes in political elections were still considered to be unequal to that of French Algerian votes.

My grandfather was about to be shot in the leg and have to travel to France to save it (since all the hospitals in Algeria had been destroyed, and the French at the time were dismissive of indigenous Algerians and their ailments).

French soldiers were raping Algerian women left, right and centre to punish FLN members.

FLN members were bombing French army barracks. French soldiers were doing the same thing back. Mutual torture and rape from both parties was committed.

The death toll of Algerians was reaching (by my own approximations which I’ve studied hard cos this is a specialism of mine, there isn’t a confirmed statistic, because that’s how much people care) its peak. It was heading towards 20 million dead since the year of 1830, when the French Occupation started.

My grandmother went her whole life without holding her daughter’s killers accountable. She never had a voice and she never had the opportunity to write a book, or several, about it. And I hold my hands up: it doesn’t do well to quantify pain or the severity of experience. Your life is your life, there is only you living it, and whatever happens to you in your life is going to be important to you, even if the saddest thing that ever happens to you is that the flavour of ice cream you like has run out at the shop.

But it’s hard for me to really let myself just go ahead and resonate with Annie Ernaux. I don’t get caught up in the symmetry of my experiences, because a lot of the time, I’m just relating it back to the atrocities of genocide that Kabyle women like my grandmother were caught up in during 1958. I’m not saying that Annie’s miseries, past and present, are lesser than the miseries of that time for French soliders and Algerian soldiers and civilians enduring the devastation of war. I’m saying that her perspective is narrower. And that’s something I can’t change about Annie, nor this work.

I think what this text tries to do is explore a lack of accountability in many different facets. There is lack of accountability in the people that saw to Annie Duchesne’s humiliation and suffering, there’s a lack of accountability to her parents and their enforcement of religion, there’s no accountability for the people that suffer at the hands of other people, whether it’s a genocide or a sexual assault, and there’s the lack of accountability in having endured the patriarchal constructs which force you down on a bed to find out why your periods have stopped, i.e. an intact hymen (page 86).

The only resolution, ultimately, is to write about these horrors, and by writing about it you might achieve a narrative which produces a brand new discourse, or a brand new insight previously not seen or understood. By writing about it, we achieve awareness, clarity, even if we mistrust our memories of it all, as Annie does. And I do think Annie achieves clarity, at least, for me as a reader, with A Girl’s Story and this essay should be seen as a contribution to a feminine history, a lesson in where women still feel unvalidated by their own trauma, and the work it takes . I feel that Annie Ernaux has a desire to tell her stories, to admit her truths and confess her sensitive past, her vulnerability and expose the vulnerability of others. By doing so, and allowing a wider audience to access work like A Girl’s Story she carries out her justice. Her truth is evidenced and validated by her readership, by her audience, by it being a book.

But equally, for me again, A Girl’s Story is held back by some of the more subtle and problematic word choices and convoluted prose that I think is quite disillusioning and deceptively narrow-minded, this is something you’ll have to see for yourself by buying the book.

I think of this essay as an admonition to the follies of youth and of boys, not men, boys. I think of it as a documentation of female struggle and identity. I think of it as a text that intimates privilege even when it is not felt. And I’m torn by A Girl’s Story, which made this review terribly difficult to write, and I don’t think I’m blowing it out of proportion, I do think there’s an indication of a non-condemnation of France’s historical role in genocide. And maybe this subtle admission is just as brave of Annie, as is writing her autobiographies.

If you’re interested and want to make assertions for yourself, please do buy A Girl’s Story from Fitzcarraldo Editions here.

And if you want to share some of your own thoughts, please do feel free to comment and discuss. I’m interested to see whether people agree or not.

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