Returning to Reims Read online

  When I returned to Reims, I was confronted by the following question, a tenacious one I had not acknowledged (at least I had not really acknowledged it in my written work, or in my life): in taking as my point of theoretical departure—by which I mean establishing a framework for thinking about myself, my past, and my present—the seemingly obvious idea that the complete break I had made with my family was due to my homosexuality, to my father’s deeply rooted homophobia, to the homophobia rampant in the milieu in which I was living (and doubtless all this was absolutely true), had I not at the same time offered myself noble and incontestable reasons for avoiding the thought that this was just as much a break with the class background I came from?

  In the course of my life, following the typical path of a young gay man who moves to the city, builds up new social networks, and learns what it means to be gay by discovering the gay world that already exists, inventing himself as gay on the basis of that discovery, I had also followed another path, a class-based one: this is the itinerary of those who are frequently labeled “class traitors.” And surely a “traitor” or a “renegade” is what I was, one whose only concern, a more or less permanent and more or less conscious one, was to put as much distance as possible between himself and his class of origin, to escape from the social surroundings of his childhood and his adolescence.8

  Of course I retained a political solidarity with the world of my early years, to the extent that I never came to share the values of the dominant class. I always felt awkward or incensed when hearing people around me talking scornfully or flippantly about working class people and their habits and ways of life. After all, that’s where I came from. I would also experience an immediate hatred on encountering the hostility that well-to-do, well-established people would express towards strikes, political activism, protests, and forms of popular resistance. Certain class reflexes persist despite all our efforts to separate ourselves from our social origins, even those efforts aimed at personal transformation. And on those occasions in my daily life, rare but not non-existent, in which I gave way to hasty and disdainful opinions that characterize a view of the world and other people that we might as well call class racism, my reactions nonetheless more often than not resembled those of Paul Nizan’s character, Antoine Bloyé. A portrait of Nizan’s father, Bloyé is a former worker who has become bourgeois, and he still feels hurt by the derogatory remarks about the working class that he hears made by those people around him who now constitute his social milieu. It feels as if he were being targeted along with the milieu to which he used to belong: “How could he share their opinions without completely betraying his own childhood?”9 Every time I would “betray” my own childhood, by sharing in deprecatory opinions, inevitably a nagging bad conscience would make itself felt, if not sooner, then later.

  And yet, an enormous distance seemed to separate me now from the universe I had once belonged to, a universe that I had devoted so much energy—the energy of despair—to breaking with. I have to admit that however much I felt close to and in solidarity with working class struggles, however loyal I remained to those political and emotional values that are stirred in me whenever I watch a documentary about the great strikes of 1936 or 1968, still, deep inside myself I experienced a rejection of working class life as I knew it. The “organized” working class, or the working class perceived as organizable, and thereby idealized, even rendered heroic, is different from the individuals from whom it is made up, or who potentially make it up. And it became more and more unpleasant for me to find myself in the company of those who were—of those who are—members of this class. In my early days in Paris, when I still visited my parents, who were still living in the same public housing project in Reims where I had spent my adolescence (it was only many years later that they would move from there to Muizon), or when I had lunch with them on Sundays at my grandmother’s, who lived in Paris and whom they would sometimes visit, I felt a nebulous and indescribable discomfort in the face of their ways of speaking and being, so different from those that characterized the circles in which I was now moving; or when faced with the subjects that preoccupied them, so different from my own preoccupations; or when faced with the deep, obsessive racism that flowed freely, no matter what we were talking about, and left me without any way of understanding why or how any and every subject of conversation brought us back to that. These meetings became more and more of a burden the more I went on changing into someone new. When I read the books that Annie Ernaux devotes to her parents and to the “class divide” that separates her from them, I recognized in them precisely what I was going through at this time. She provides an amazing description of the uneasiness or distress a person feels upon returning to her or his parents’ house after not only moving out, but also after leaving behind both the family and the world to which she or he nonetheless continues to belong—the disconcerting experience of being both at home and in a foreign country.10

  To be perfectly honest, in my case this kind of return became nearly impossible after a very few years.

  Two different paths, then. Each imbricated in the other. Two interdependent trajectories for my reinvention of myself, one having to do with the sexual order, the other with the social order. And yet, when it came to writing, it was the first that I decided to analyze, the one having to do with sexual oppression, not the second which had to do with class domination. Perhaps in the theoretical gesture made by my writing I only increased the existential betrayal I was committing. For it was only one kind of personal implication of the writing subject in what is written that I took on, not the other. Indeed, one ended up excluding the other. My choice was not only a way of defining myself, of constructing my subjectivity in the present moment, it was also a choice about my past, a choice regarding the child and the teenager I had been: a gay child, a gay teenager, and not the son of a worker. And yet …

  3

  “Who’s that?” I asked my mother. “But that’s your father!” she replied. “Don’t you recognize him? It’s because you hadn’t seen him in such a long time.” She was exactly right. I hadn’t even recognized my father in a photo taken shortly before he died. Much thinner, hunched over, his gaze unfocussed, he had aged tremendously, and it took me a few minutes to make the connection between the image of this enfeebled body and the man I had known, the man who shouted at the slightest provocation, stupid and violent, the man who had inspired so much contempt in me. Suddenly I felt at sea, being confronted with the understanding that in the months, or perhaps even the years, that preceded his death, he had ceased being the person I had hated, and had instead become this pathetic figure, once a domestic tyrant, but now in decline, harmless and weak, beaten down by age and illness.

  When I reread James Baldwin’s beautiful text on the death of his father, one remark in particular struck me. Baldwin recounts that he put off a visit to the man he knew was very ill as long as he possibly could. Then he notes: “I had told my mother I did not want to see him because I hated him. But this was not true. It was only that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin: it was not a ruin I had hated.”

  Even more striking to me was the explanation he offers: “I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”11

  Pain, or rather, in my case—since the extinguishing of the hatred I had felt did not give rise to any pain in me—an urgent obligation to figure something out about myself, a pressing desire to track backwards in time in order to understand the reasons why it had been so difficult for me to engage in even the smallest of exchanges with this man, a man who, when it comes right down to it, I had barely even known. When I really think about it, I have to admit to myself that I know next to nothing about my father. What did he think about? Or about the world he lived in? About himself? About other people? How did he see things? The circumstance of his own life? In particular, how did he see
our own relationship as it became more and more difficult, more and more distant, and finally non-existent? I had a moment of stupefaction not too long ago when I learned that when he saw me on television one day, he broke down into tears, overcome by emotion. He was overwhelmed by the realization that one of his sons had achieved what seemed to him a nearly unimaginable degree of social success. And he was ready the next day, this man who had always been so homophobic, to brave the looks of his neighbors and anyone else in his village; he was even ready, should it be necessary, to defend what seemed to him to be his honor and the honor of his family. I had been speaking on television that night about my book, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, and, concerned that such an appearance might provoke sarcastic remarks and comments, he declared to my mother: “If there’s any smartass who says anything to me about it, I’ll smash his face in.”

  I never had a conversation with him, never! He wasn’t capable of it (at least with me, and me with him). It’s too late to spend time lamenting this. But there are plenty of questions I would now like to ask him, if only because it would help me write this book. Here again, I could only be astonished to discover these sentences in Baldwin’s account: “When he was dead I realized that I had hardly ever spoken to him. When he had been dead a long time I began to wish I had.” Then, describing his father’s past—his father had belonged to the first generation of free black men, his father’s mother having been born in the time of slavery—, he adds: “He claimed to be proud of his blackness but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed bleak boundaries to his life.”12 Under such circumstances, it seems nearly impossible for Baldwin not to have reproached himself now and then for having abandoned his family, for having betrayed his own kind. His mother never understood why he left, why he went to live so far away, first to Greenwich Village so he could be a part of the literary circles there, and then to France. Would it have been possible for him to stay? Obviously not. He had to leave, to leave Harlem behind, to leave behind his father’s narrow-mindedness, his sanctimonious hostility towards culture and literature, the suffocating atmosphere of the family home. How else could he become a writer, how else live openly his homosexuality (and take up in his work the double question of what it means to be black and to be gay)? Yet still the moment came where the necessity of a “going back” made itself felt, even if it was after the death of his father (in reality his stepfather, but still, the person who raised him from the earliest years of his childhood). The text that he writes to pay homage to this man might therefore be interpreted as his means of accomplishing, or at least of beginning, this mental “return,” the effort to understand who this person actually was, a man he had so detested and so wanted to get away from. Perhaps too, beginning this process of historical and political deliberation would allow him one day to reclaim his own past on an emotional level, to get to a place where he could not only understand, but also accept himself. It’s easy enough to see why, obsessed as he was by this question, he would insist so strongly in an interview that “to avoid the journey back is to avoid the Self, to avoid ‘life’.”13

  As had been the case for Baldwin with his father, so I began to realize that everything my father had been, which is to say everything I held against him, all the reasons I had detested him, had been shaped by the violence of the social world. My father had been proud to belong to the working class. Later on, he was proud to have risen, however modestly, above that condition. Yet his condition had been the cause of any number of humiliations and had set “bleak boundaries” to his life. It had planted a kind of madness in him that he never overcame and that made him nearly incapable of sustaining relationships with other people.

  Like Baldwin in his quite different context, I am certain that my father bore within him the weight of a crushing history that could not help but produce serious psychic damage in those who lived through it. My father’s life, his personality, his subjectivity had been doubly marked and determined by a place and by a time whose particular hardships and constraints continually played off each other in a way that only made them proliferate. Here is the key to his being: where and when he was born, the timespan and the region of social space in which it was decided what his place in the world would be, his apprenticeship of the world, his relationship to the world. The near-madness of my father and the impaired relational abilities that resulted from it had, in the final analysis, nothing psychological about them, if by psychological we mean a link to some kind of individual character trait. They were the effect of the precisely situated being-in-the-world that was his.

  Just like Baldwin’s mother, my mother said to me: “He worked long hours so you’d have enough to eat.” Then she went on to speak to me about him, leaving aside her own grievances: “Don’t judge him too harshly. His life wasn’t an easy one.” He was born in 1929, the oldest child in what was to become a large family. His mother had twelve children. It can be hard today to imagine how many women were destined to become slaves to motherhood. Twelve children! Two of them were stillborn (or else died very young). Another, who was born on the open road during the evacuation of the city in 1940, while German planes were ruthlessly attacking the columns of refugees, was mentally disabled, perhaps because it hadn’t been possible to cut the umbilical cord normally, or perhaps because he was injured when my grandmother threw herself and him into the ditch to protect him from the machine gun fire, or perhaps simply because he didn’t receive the kind of care that is required immediately after birth. Who knows which of these different stories retained in the family memory is the right one. My grandmother kept him with her throughout her life. I always heard that it was for the sake of the social security subsidy, because that subsidy was crucial to the economic survival of the family. When I was young, my brother and I were terrified of him. He drooled, only expressed himself in strange rumblings, and would stretch out his arms towards us, perhaps seeking a bit of affection, or perhaps offering some. Yet he never received any in response; we would shrink away, when we weren’t screaming or actively pushing him away. In retrospect, I am mortified by our behavior, and yet we were only children at the time, and he was a grownup whom others called “abnormal.”