Édouard Louis - Who Killed My Father ?

When asked whatthe word racism means to her, the American scholar Ruth Gilmore has said that racism is the exposure of certain populations to premature death.

The same definition holds with regard to male privilege, to hatred of homosexuality or trans people, to domination by class to social and political oppression of all kinds. If we look at politics as the government of some living people by other living people, as well as the existence of individuals within communities not of their choosing, then politics is what separates some populations, whose lives are supported, nurtured, protected, from other populations, who are exposed to death, to persecution, to murder.

Last month I came to see you in the small northern town where youve been living. Its a gray, ugly town. The sea is just a few miles away, but you never go. I hadnt seen you for months it had been a long time. At first when you opened the door, I didnt recognize you.

I looked at you. In your face I read the signs of the years Id been away.

Later, the woman you live with explained that by now you can hardly walk. She also told me that when you sleep you need a breathing machine or else your heart will stop. It cant beat without assistance, without the help of a machine. It doesnt want to. When you got up to go to the bathroom, just walking the thirty feet there and back left you winded. I saw for myself, you had to sit and catch your breath. You apologized. These apologies are a new thing with you, I have to get used to them. You told me that you suffer from an acute form of diabetes and from high cholesterol, that you could have a heart attack at any moment. As you were telling me all this, you ran out of breath. Your chest emptied of air as though it had sprung a leak. Even talking required too intense, too great an effort. I saw you struggling with your body, but I pretended not to. The week before, youd had an operation for what the doctors call a ventral hernia Id never heard of it. Your body has grown too heavy for itself. Your belly stretches toward the floor. It is overstretched, so badly overstretched that it has ruptured your abdominal lining. Your belly has been torn apart by its own weight, its own mass.

You cant drive anymore. Youre not allowed to drink. You cant take a shower or go to work, except at great risk. Youre barely fifty years old. You belong to the category of humans whom politics has doomed to an early death.

I spent my childhood longing for your absence. I would return from school late in the afternoon, around five oclock. I knew that if I reached our house and your car wasnt parked out front, it meant that you were at the caf or at your brothers and that youd come home late, maybe after dark. If I didnt see your car out front I knew wed eat without you. Sooner or later my mother would shrug and give us our dinner, and I wouldnt see you till morning. Every day, when I reached our street, I thought of your car and prayed: let it not be there, let it not be there, let it not be there.

Its only by accident that Ive come to know you. Or through other people. Not long ago I asked my mother how you met, and why she fell in love with you. The cologne, she said. He wore cologne and you know in those days it wasnt like now. Men didnt wear cologne. But your father did. He was different. He smelled so good.

He was the one who pursued me, she went on. Id just split up with my first husband, Id finally got him out of my life, and I was happier that way, without a man. Women always are. But your father kept at it. He was always showing up with chocolate or flowers. So in the end I gave in. I just gave in.

2002 That day my mother caught me dancing, all by myself, in my room. Id been trying to move as quietly as possible. Id tried not to make any noise, not to breathe too hard. The music wasnt turned up, either, but she heard something through the wall and came in to see what was going on. I was startled and out of breath, my heart in my throat, my lungs in my throat. I turned to face her and waited