#confinement reading

I grew up reading mostly English literature, so I am slowly trying to fill the French gap, specifically reading up on feminist texts or French classics written by women (Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is eyeing me from the coffee table as I write). One of the books I read this year is a French classic, Goncourt Prize winner, written by Marguerite Duras. She is an important and famous French writer, journalist, film producer, screenplay writer... you name it, she did it. She authored many well-known and widely acclaimed books (you’ve probably heard of ”Hiroshima mon amour”), which is why many of my friends were surprised to hear that I had never read anything by her.

“L’Amant”, which translates to “The Lover” was published in 1984 and is an autobiographical/autofiction take on Marguerite’s life in Vietnam, where was was born and lived until the end of high school. She talks about her childhood and adolescence, on her much older lover, “Le Chinois”, “The Chinese Man” (more on that later) and her highly dysfunctional family (erratic, depressed mother, violent older brother, traumatized younger brother).

I must say that I was expecting the story to be more centered on her romantic and sexual affair with “Le Chinois”, but I felt like her family took the centre stage of the book. I also felt that her lover, by virtue of his “name”, was made invisible, even if he was clearly an important part of her life. (She actually wrote another book 7-8 years after “L’Amant”, called “L’amant de la Chine du Nord” where she explores her affair with the same 28 year old man when was she was only 14 in an apparently more nuanced and mature manner.) Duras, fortunately, doesn’t romanticize or fetishize the Asian origins of her lover as much as I thought she would/could (different times, yadda yadda yadda).

I was also particularly intrigued by a section of the book when she reminisces about (what I interpreted to be) her crush and desire for Hélène Lagnonnelle, a peer from her boarding school who is equally ostracized by her fellow classmates because of her loose morals.

bell hooks is without any doubt a household name of intersectional feminism. I have read excerpts of her most famous works, including Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and, even on the shortest paragraphs, my highlighter always runs dry.

Reading “All About Love” was very challenging for me because I tend to be very skeptical of any books that fall under the "self-help” handle. But if there is anyone who could make me read 200+ pages on love, that would be bell hooks.

In these 13 essays, hooks says the word “love” a thousand times and offers us precious insights on how love, as a verb, affects every single part of our personal lives, and every layer of public society, politics and policy. While I was not very responsive to her more spiritual take on love for very personal reasons, I was taken aback by certain self-evident truths that she graciously spilled in the pages of her book.

“Work occupies much of our time. Doing work we hate assaults our self-esteem and self-confidence.”

Can I say how violently I stuttered when I read that line? I am no stranger to the punches bell hooks packs in her essays but, blimey, that one shook me to my core. Like many of us I am currently in confinement, stuck in an apartment with my thoughts and anxiety, painfully and replaying and rethinking various aspects of my life. This sentence sent me down one of those dark rabbit hole paths I usually try to not venture down. My first job experience was one of the worst experiences I’ve been through and, 4 years later, I still bear its consequences on my self-esteem and self-confidence. Reading this chapter on the importance of bringing love into the workplace, of giving ourselves the means of doing something we love, even if it means temporarily doing something we don’t enjoy (bell hooks gives the example of when she worked as a night-shift cook in a club because it gave her the freedom to write during the day) are all ways of helping us find purpose. Refer to the chapter “Commitment: Let love be love in me” if the highlighted quote also hits (too strongly) home. My DMs are also open if you need to chat.

“If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction.”

That’s another banger right there. bell hooks has no business serving hard truths, and yet she does. We have no other choice than to, as the young people say, ‘stan’. The chapter “Values: Living by a Love Ethic” is what you need to read to understand that love is not just wishy-washy concept that only belongs in highly addictive young adult fiction. It is an actionable verb that is currently MIA from our politics and policy-making and, having grown accustomed to its absence, we can no longer empathize with those lower down the food chain and demand justice from a system that is supposed to serve all of our interests.

Our current capitalist system has been built on narcissism, individualism and self preservation, eroding links and bonds with a wider community that once kept us grounded and connected.

“When love is present, the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day”. This hits even harder today because we are currently witnessing how our system isn’t geared towards the care and health of people and how it crumbles at the first sign of trouble and stress.

This structural lack of “love”, of empathy, of compassion, in the way our governments prioritize, allocate and slash budgets, in the manner in which they decide who deserves bail-outs and who does not, is responsible for the death, impoverishment, and humiliation of millions of women and men, and we have unfortunately become numb to the havoc it has been causing.

What immobilizes us on, an individual level, to spring into action in the face of such injustice is fear. Fear of the unknown, of being duped, of getting caught, of earning less...

bell hooks explains we are brainwashed into thinking that our safety in this world can only be secured by earning and possessing more than the next person, giving us a sense of perpetual dread and threat that annihilates any desire or will to change the status quo and reach out to people in our community who need a helping hand, who are in need of human solidarity. 

To that effect, she claims that “...fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination”. Therefore, when we choose to “love our neighbour”, to reach out and to connect, we slowly manage to overcome this fear and, hopefully, with time, realize the strength in our numbers and in our solidarity.

My confined brain is incapable of expressing any more thoughts even if I do feel like I haven’t penned half of what I was intending on writing on this collection of essays. What I can say is that this read was a phenomenal eye opener for me but, even if I do believe that we do need to embrace a love ethic in both of our personal and public lives, nothing permanent or fundamentally altering will come out of it if our societies and governments don’t get the love memo too. If they don’t, patriarchy, racism, sexism, income and wealth inequalities, will remain as entrenched as they are today.

I’ll conclude with some other quotes that I furiously highlighted along the way:

“There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society.” (P. 90) 

“One of the ironies of the culture of greed is that the people who profit the most from earnings they have not worked to attain are the most eager to insist that the poor and working classes can only value material resources attained through hard work.” (P. 118) 

“Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and made abuses of power more possible.” (P. 130)