![]() ![]() ![]() I leave the house, I slam the door and head off into the cold, surrounded by the redbrick walls of northern France, by the smell of fog and manure and then, somehow or other, I realize that I’ve forgotten something in my room, so I turn around. She nods without taking her eyes off the TV. I let my mother know that I have to go see a friend in the village to help him fix his bike. My mother and brother are laughing in front of the television, throaty, booming laughs, and they’re still smoking. I’m coughing, I had a lot of asthma in those days. They’ve been up for only twenty minutes but have already smoked four or five cigarettes each and the room is stuffy with thick, cloudy smoke. They awakened a little while ago and are smoking while watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. You have to imagine the scene: I’m drinking hot chocolate in the kitchen, sitting next to my mother and my big brother. The story of my revenge begins very early one morning. Because I was the one who’d provoked this fight between my father and my brother, I’d wanted it. She was shrieking, too, Oh shit, don’t, you’ll kill each other, calm down, hollering at the top of her lungs He’ll kill his father, he’s gonna kill his own father, then she’d whisper in my ear Don’t look sweetie, don’t look, Mama’s right here, don’t look. She was throwing glasses at my brother to stop him but missed every time and the glasses kept falling, exploding, shattering on the floor. So then a week later, without any connection to the attacks except that the striking closeness of the events gives me a time frame for the attempted murder, right in the middle of dinner, in front of the rest of the family, my big brother grabs my father by the hair and starts bashing his head against the kitchen wall: he was killing him, and my father was howling, begging-I’d never seen my father beg anyone-with his face disappearing under the redness of the blood, under the accumulation of gaping, bleeding wounds, and my big brother was yelling I’ll fucking waste you, you son of a bitch I’ll fucking waste you while my mother tried to shield me. I was nine and I was crying too, like a kid who cries when he sees his parents cry, without really understanding, crying precisely because of this incomprehension, this void, crying because I was afraid of death and because I was too young to realize that my father’s words were only an expression of his violent and racist impulses, the words of a man I would learn to hate in two or three more years. With my father I’d watched the twin towers burst into flames, implode, collapse, my father draining a bottle of whisky in front of the television trying to get control of his grief and he was crying, crying, saying Fuck now the sand niggers and ragheads they’re gonna kill us, this here’s the start of the war, I’m warning you my son get ready because this, I’m telling you now, I’m telling you we’re bound to die, all of us and he was moaning, warning The next bomb they throw will be right in our faces, our French faces and then that’ll be it for all of us for sure. It was a few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and that’s why I remember the exact date it happened. On the stage, linking up images to words and the body to the theatre, Louis and Ostermeier together explore the relations between these political decisions, perceived of as abstract solely for those who are not hurt by them, and the concrete consequences they have on the victims of these decisions, unduly invisible victims.I saw my big brother try to kill my father one September evening in 2001. Not only do these forces impact on personality construction, deforming it via class and gender taboos and norms, but they also act on bodies, destroying them and condemning them to an early death.įrom the theatre adaptation of History of Violence, Thomas Ostermeier set in motion a fruitful dialogue with Édouard Louis. Qui a tué mon père is an attempt to understand the social and political forces which shape and transform the lives of those for whom society has no room. Following the traces of this other person in his memory, frequently discovered “by chance or by others”, Édouard Louis progressively reduces a distance which words seem to make insurmountable. Qui a tué mon père is the story of the author’s discovery that his father, violent and introverted during his childhood, “had once been a different person”. “I don’t have happy memories of my childhood”, wrote Édouard Louis at the beginning of his novel The End of Eddy. ![]()
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