“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.”
As I mentioned, my father’s family had been obliged to leave the city during the war, taking part in what was called the “exodus.” They ended up far from home, on a farm near Mimizan, a small town in the Landes. Having spent several months there, they came back to Reims as soon as the armistice was signed. The north of France was occupied by the German army. (I was born long after the end of the war, and still the only word used in my family to talk about Germans was “les Boches,” for whom there was a fierce and seemingly inextinguishable hatred. It wasn’t at all uncommon, well into the 1970s and beyond, to end a meal by proclaiming: “One more that the Boches won’t get their hands on!”14 I have to confess that I have myself used the expression more than once.)
In 1940, my father was 11 years old, and every day until he was 14 or 15, during the entire period of the Occupation, he would have to go out to neighboring villages to find food for his family—in wind, rain or snow, no matter what the weather. He would sometimes have to cover as much as 20 kilometers on his bicycle in the freezing cold typical of the Champagne region’s severe winter, to find potatoes or some other foodstuff. He was in charge of nearly everything at home.
They had moved into a fairly large house—I’m not sure if this was during the war or just after—in the middle of a housing complex built in the 1920s for large working class families. It was the kind of house that had been thought up by a group of Catholic industrialists who, at the outset of the twentieth century, set out to improve the housing conditions of their workers. Reims was a city divided in two by a conspicuous class barrier. On one side of the divide was the upper middle class, and on the other the impoverished workers. The philanthropic societies of the former worried about the poor living conditions of the latter, and about the harmful consequences arising from them. Worries about a declining birthrate had produced a remarkable change in attitudes towards large families: if, up until the end of the nineteenth century, they had been considered by reformers and demographers to be one of the causes of disorder and of juvenile delinquency, at the beginning of the twentieth century, they became an essential bastion of defense against the depopulation that was threatening to weaken a nation confronted by foreign enemies. If these large families had once been stigmatized and combatted by the supporters of Mathusianism, now the dominant discourse—on both the left and the right—was bent on encouraging them, valorizing them, and therefore also supporting them. Propaganda in support of a rising birthrate now went hand in hand with urban renewal projects so that these new pillars of the revived nation could have decent living spaces. It was hoped that such spaces would make it possible to ward off dangers that had often been emphasized by bourgeois reformers, dangers associated with a working class childhood in which poor living conditions meant that children spent too much time on the streets: an anarchic proliferation of rough boys and immoral girls.15
Inspired by these new political and patriotic points of view, philanthropists from the Champagne region founded an organization whose function was to build affordable housing. It was called the “Foyer rémois” [Habitations of Reims], and its charge was to construct housing projects offering living quarters that were spacious, clean, and healthy, intended for families with more than four children, with three bedrooms—one for the parents, one for the boys, and one for the girls. They didn’t have a bathroom, but they did have running water. (The inhabitants washed themselves one at a time at the kitchen sink.) A concern with physical cleanliness was, of course, only one aspect of these city planning programs. Moral hygiene was another primary consideration. The idea was, by encouraging a high birthrate and family values, to wean workers away from bars and the alcoholism they facilitated. Political concerns were also not absent. The bourgeoisie imagined it might in this way put a check on socialist and union propaganda that it worried might flourish in working class meeting places outside the home, just as, in the 1930s, it hoped by the same means to shield the workers from communist influences. Domestic happiness, at least the way the bourgeois philanthropists imagined it for poor people, was meant to keep these workers invested in their home life and to divert them from the temptations of political resistance and its forms of organization and action. In 1914 the war interrupted the implementation of all these programs. After the four apocalyptic years that swept over northeast France, especially the region around Reims, everything had to be rebuilt. (Photographs taken in 1918 of what was called at the time the “martyred city” are terrifying: as far as the eye can see, there are only fragments of walls left standing amidst piles of rubble. It is as if some malicious god had gone out of his way to wipe this area off the map, an area saturated with history, sparing only the Cathedral and the Saint-Remi Basilica. And even they were severely damaged by the deluge of fire and iron that rained down on them.) Thanks to American aid, city planners and architects built up a new city from the ruins, and around the perimeter of that city they laid out the famous “garden cities,” housing tracts in the “regionalist style” (although, if I’m not mistaken, the style was in fact Alsatian). Some of the houses were single family dwellings, some were duplexes or town houses. All of them had a yard, and all were built along wide streets with interspersed green spaces.16
My grandparents moved into one of these housing projects either during or shortly after World War II. When I was a child, towards the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the spaces dreamed up and then realized by the philanthropists had deteriorated quite a bit. The Foyer rémois “garden city” in which my grandparents and their youngest children still lived had been poorly maintained, and was utterly rundown, eaten away at by the very poverty it had been devoted to housing, a poverty that was everywhere visible. It was an extremely unhealthy environment, and in fact incubated many different social pathologies. In purely statistical terms, a drift into delinquency was one of the prime options open to young people from the neighborhood. This of course remains the case today in those similarly appointed spaces of urban and social segregation—the historical durability of these phenomena is striking. One of my father’s brothers became a thief, went to prison, and was banned from Reims; we would catch glimpses of him from time to time, sneaking in at nightfall to see his parents or to ask his brothers and sisters for money. He had long been absent from my life and from my memory when I learned from my mother that he had become a street person, and had in fact died in the street. As a young man he had been a sailor. (He did his required military service in the navy, and had then enlisted permanently before being discharged because of his conduct—fights, thefts, and the like.) It was his face, in profile, from a photograph of him in uniform that my grandparents had on the buffet in their dining room, that came to my mind when I first read Querelle. In general, petty or serious crimes were the rule in the neighborhood, as if they constituted some kind of obstinate popular resistance to the laws imposed by a state that was perceived on a daily basis to be an instrument wielded by a class enemy, an enemy whose power was visible any and everywhere, all the time.
In accordance with the initial desires of the Catholic bourgeoisie and with what it considered to be the “moral values” it wished to inculcate in the popular classes, the birth rate was a healthy one. It wasn’t unusual for families in the houses close to that of my grandparents to have 14 or 15 children, or even 21, my mother claims, even though I have a hard time believing this could have been possible. Yet the Communist Party also thrived. Actual membership was reasonably common, at least among the men. As for the women, while sharing their husbands’ opinions, they nonetheless stayed away from organized political activities and “cell meetings.” But official membership wasn’t even necessary for a certain feeling of political belonging to spread and perpetuate itself. The feeling was spontaneously and tightly tied up with the social situation of the people involved. People spoke easily about the “Party.” My grandfather, my father and his brothers—and also on my mother’s side, her step father and her half-brother—commonly went as a group to attend the public meetings organized by national party leaders at regular intervals. Everyone voted for the Communist candidate at every election, ranting about the false left that the socialists represented—their compromises, their betrayals. But then, in the runoff, they would grudgingly cast their vote for the socialist when they had to, in the name of realism or the “republican discipline” no one dared go against. (Yet in these years, Communist candidates were often in the strongest position, so this kind of situation only rarely presented itself.) The words “the Left” really meant something important. People wanted to defend their own interests, to make their voices heard, and the way to achieve that—aside from strikes or protests—was to delegate, to hand oneself over to the “representatives of the working class” and to political leaders whose decisions were thus implicitly accepted and whose discourses you learned and repeated. You became a political subject by putting yourself into the hands of the party spokespersons, through whom the workers, the “working class,” came to exist as an organized group, as a class that was aware of itself as such. One’s way of thinking about oneself, the values one espoused, the attitudes one adopted were all to a large extent shaped by the conception of the world that the “Party” helped to inculcate in people’s minds and to diffuse throughout the social body. To vote was to participate in an important moment of collective self-affirmation, a moment that affirmed your political significance as well. So on election nights, when the results came in, people would explode with anger upon learning that the right had won yet again and would rail against the “scabs” who had voted for the Gaullists, and thereby voted against themselves.
How easy it has become to deplore the communist influence over various (but not all) populist milieus from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is worth remembering the meaning that influence had for all those people whom it is now all the more easy to criticize since it is so unlikely they could make themselves heard in a public forum. (Are they ever offered a chance to speak? What means of their own do they have to do so?) To be communist had next to nothing to do with a desire to establish a government resembling the one found in the U.S.S.R. “Foreign” policy, in any case, seemed a distant concern, as is often the case amid the popular classes—and even more so for women than for men. It was a given that one took the Soviet side against American imperialism, but the topic almost never came up. And even though the military enforcement operations that the Red Army carried out against friendly nations were disconcerting, we preferred not to talk about them: In 1968, as the radio covered the tragic events unfolding in Prague after the Soviet intervention, I asked my parents “What is going on?” and found myself sharply rebuked by my mother: “What do you care? It’s none of your business.” Surely this was because in fact she had no answer to give me, and was as perplexed as was I, a mere 15 year old. In fact, the reasons people adhered to communist values were linked to more immediate and more concrete preoccupations. When in his Abécédaire, Gilles Deleuze puts forward the idea that “being on the left” means “first of all being aware of the world,” “being aware of what’s on the horizon” (by which he means considering that the most urgent problems are those of the third world, which are closer to us than the problems of our own neighborhood), whereas “not being on the left” would, in contrary fashion, mean being focused on the street where one lives, on the country one inhabits, the definition he offers is diametrically opposed to the one incarnated by my parents.17 In working class environments, a leftist politics meant first and foremost a very pragmatic rejection of the experience of one’s own daily life. It was a form of protest, and not a political project inspired by a global perspective. You considered what was right around you, not what was far off, either in time or in space. Even if people were always saying things like, “what we need is a good revolution,” these pat expressions were linked to the hardships of daily life and to the intolerable nature of the injustices around them rather than to any perspective involving the establishment of a different political system. Given that everything that happened seemed to have been decided by some hidden power (“that was no accident”), invoking the “revolution”—without any idea of where or when or how it might break out—seemed one’s only recourse (it was one myth against another) in the fight against the powers of evil—the Right, the rich, the bigwigs—who inflicted so much hardship on the lives of the poor, of “people like us.”
My family divided the world into two camps, those who were “for the workers” and those who were “against the workers,” or, in slightly different words, those who “defended the workers” and those who “did nothing for the workers.” How many times did I hear sentences that encapsulated this political attitude and the choices that resulted from it! On one side there was “us” and those who were “with us”; on the other side was “them.”18
Nowadays who fulfills the role played by the “Party”? To whom can exploited and powerless people turn in order to feel that they are supported or that their point of view is expressed? To whom can they refer, who can they lean on, in order to provide themselves with a political existence and a cultural identity? Or in order to feel proud of themselves because they have been legitimized and because this legitimation has come from a powerful source? A source that, in the simplest terms, takes into account who they are, how they live, what they think about, what they want?
When my father watched the news, the remarks he made revealed a visceral allergic reaction to both the right and the extreme right. During the presidential campaign of 1965 and then during and after May 1968 he would lose his temper simply upon hearing the voice of Tixier-Vignancour, a figure who seemed a caricature of the old French extreme right. When Tixier-Vignancour denounced “the red flag of Communism” that people were waving in the streets of Paris, my father fulminated: “the red flag is the flag of the workers!” A bit later he would feel himself attacked and offended by the way Giscard d’Estaing, through the medium of the television, would manage to inflict on all French households his grand bourgeois manner, his affected gestures, his grotesque manner of speaking. My father would also direct his insults at the journalists who hosted political programs, and would be overjoyed when someone he considered a spokesperson for his own thoughts and feelings (this or that Stalinist apparatchik with a worker’s accent) would manage to break the rules of the television program in a way no one would dare do today, given how nearly total the obedience of most political figures and intellectuals has become to the powers of the media. To break the rules meant to speak about the real problems affecting workers instead of responding to the typically political questions to which the discussion was supposed to be limited. To break the rules meant to do justice to all those whose voices are never heard under these kinds of circumstances, to those whose very existence is systematically excluded from the landscape of legitimate politics.