Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis review – dangerous masculinity

The French literary phenomenon focuses on his father’s story, in an exploration of different forms of machismo

There is a kind of privilege that consists of being more or less unaffected by politics. This, the French literary phenomenon Édouard Louis writes, “is what separates some populations, whose lives are supported, nurtured, protected, from other populations, who are exposed to death, to persecution, to murder”. Like his previous books The End of Eddy and History of Violence, this short work tackles the intersections of class, gender and sexuality in contemporary France, but instead of relating his own experiences, Louis gives voice to the way the cruel, crude hegemony of masculinity has essentially destroyed his father’s life, making him “as much a victim of the violence” he inflicted as of the violence he endured.

The body politic has, as ever, an unrelenting impact on the bodies of the poor. The question of the title, Who Killed My Father?, is not to be taken literally; Louis’s father is disabled but alive, having been injured at the factory where he worked until 2000. He was left barely able to walk, dependent on a machine to help him breathe, which led to obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol and a bad heart, and a ventral hernia, his belly having been “torn apart by its own weight, its own mass”. “You’re barely fifty years old,” Louis addresses his father. “You belong to the category of humans whom politics has doomed to an early death”. Through a non-chronological series of memories – fragments of his childhood concerning his father – Louis takes aim at the self-defeating masculine ethos of the place where he grew up, which led to the humiliations and abuses suffered in The End of Eddy. It includes a taste for violence, vengeance, the imperative not to do “effeminate” things like cry or take school seriously, not to take anything seriously that could improve his lot in life: as “far as I can tell, constructing your masculinity meant depriving yourself of any other life, any other future, any other prospect that school might have opened up. Your manhood condemned you to poverty, to lack of money. Hatred of homosexuality = poverty”.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SuTfW2