 So, joining me on the Navarra Media Orange sofa is author and essayist Edouard Louis and to really hammer the point home we are here in Topshop, just in case you didn't pick up on the visual cue. So, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much. Thank you. One of the things that I wanted to ask you, and it's because it was a phrase that really stuck with me, or a question that stuck with me in your writing, which is, is it normal to feel ashamed of loving someone? And I thought in a very pure way it got to the problem of solidarity, which is what happens to love when you throw dispossession and mistrust into the mix. Can you tell me a bit about how that question emerged for you? Yeah, you know, because in my books I write about poor people, dispossessed people from the north of France, the region where I grew up. I grew up in a small village that used to be an industrial village in the 70s, 80s, and suddenly all the factories started to close and people were jobless and hopeless and moneyless and everything. And when you suffer that much, it's kind of difficult to create room for love in your life. We all experience, in a way, in our everyday life, all of us experience that. Sometimes you have a bad day at work, you suffered for something bad, you had an experience that you didn't like, and you go home and you are mean with the person that you love and you understand that this violence that you express doesn't really belong to you, that it was a violence that was crossing your body, that you didn't hone. And so sometimes the violence that we express is not belonging to us. We can carry a violence that's not ours. And so when you are exposed to constant violence and constant social violence, like the poor people are, like working class or post-working class are, it's extremely difficult not to be tensed. The story of my father and of my mother is a story of people who had to struggle with so many difficulties, with so many problems, with so many issues, that it was very difficult to say, I love you, to say, home children, you know. So I'm trying really to understand that, you know, how, what is the room for love when your life is made out of suffering and problems, yeah. So your essay, Why My Father Votes for Le Pen turns into almost a detective novel, which is Who Killed My Father, and I thought that that shift was really interesting. Can you tell us a bit about your father and what his story is and why you're so interested in telling it? So yeah, my father grew up in a small village in the north of France where I grew up and my grandfather was living there, my grandmother, my grand-grandmother, my grand-grandfather and no one would escape this place. My father, like everyone in his family, stopped school at 14 or 15 years old and he went straight to the factory to work as a factory worker and as I say in the book, In Who Killed My Father, when he was 35 he had an accident as a factory that completely destroyed his body and he had to stay in bed for four years. And what I suddenly figured out when I started to think about my father, when I started to want to write about his life was to see how much, like, how strongly politics was involved in the story of his body and in the story of his flesh, on the story of who he is, you know. And so I wrote a book about his life, about his trajectory, about his body that would involve the history of politics, of French politics in the last 30 years, you know. And it was in quite a literal way. I think one of the phrases that you used was, you know, Jacques Chirac ruined my father's intestines. Yeah, you know, because what I try to show in Who Killed My Father is that for someone like my father, a political decision made by Chirac or made by Sarkozy or by Macron is as intimate for him as his first kiss or as the first time he made love, you know, when Jacques Chirac started to stop reimbursing some medicine, you know. One day, Jacques Chirac took a decision to stop paying for medicine for poor people and suddenly my father couldn't buy the medicine. So he was in pain, you know, he was suffering because of that. And so this pain was something deeply intimate, you know. And so what I really tried to show in the book is it's exactly that. And furthermore, I really believe that the more you are dominated socially speaking in the social structure and the more you are exposed to politics, you know. Today I can say that I don't like Macron because I don't like his violence. I don't like the political violence in France today. But Macron, he can't take food out of my mouth, you know. He can't really do anything to my body. But for my father or for a migrant, for example, the decision of Macron to welcome and not to welcome a migrant means am I going to die in the sea, you know. Am I going to drown? Is my sister? Is my brother? Is my father? Is my son going to die in the sea, you know. And so the more you are excluded in the world we live in and the more you are exposed to politics. And politics doesn't mean the same thing depending on like which part of the world do you belong to, you know. And really so for me to talk about the length of politics within the working class is to really talk about their lives because people like my father are exposed to that political violence all the time. I mean what I found really interesting is that on the left we tend to use the word violence in quite a metaphorical sense. So we talk about the violence of language or we talk about, you know, microaggressions. Whereas in your work you talk about violence, vulnerability and suffering in a very, very visceral way. And one of the things that struck me in thinking about the connections between who killed my father and the end of Eddie is that you do explore in unflinching detail the humiliation of men. Do you think that that's got something to do in a broader sense with where France and perhaps Europe more generally finds itself politically? Yeah, I mean that the truth of what we call politics is the border between people who are exposed to a premature death and people whose bodies are protected and people whose lives and bodies are privileged, you know. In France today if you're a working class man or working class woman you have 50 more percent chance to die before 65 years old, you know. If you are a queer person you have four times more chance to commit a suicide when you are a child or when you're a teenager. If you're a person of color you can be killed by the police like Adam Atraore was two years ago in France. So... Or the humiliation, right, which sort of spearheaded the whole Justice Porteo movement is that it was such a public humiliation and violation of the body. Yeah, because this humiliation is part of this mechanism and this system of persecution. The fact that in our societies some bodies are persecuted, you know, by politics and in fact it's very bizarre because, you know, I write about working class, I write about poor people and very often when people talk about poor people they talk about excluded people. They talk about exclusion and exclusion is a word that you often hear in politics in the media and everything but when I think about people like my father it was not excluded, it was persecuted, you know. Politicians were obsessed with people like my father, they would say all the time they have to work harder, they have to study harder, they are responsible for what they are, they have to get less welfare, they have to work more, you know. And so the history of the poor people or working class or no matter the world in Europe is a story of a persecution, you know. And it's even more true if you're a person of color, you know, because in France if you are black, if you are an Arab person, you can be arrested by the police for nothing, you can be killed by the police for nothing, you can be raped by the police for nothing. And so I really wonder if we should maybe change the word exclusion with the word persecution because it's when you have privileged, it's when you have money that you can exclude yourself from your society. So do you think that the appeal of Le Pen and of this insurgent far right is that they offer the permission to persecute another group more than you're being persecuted? Or is it actually genuinely a hopeful project where they think the nation will deliver for me? No, I think it's your right. I think it's part of it, it's part of a kind of like survival mechanism to put other people under you, you know, so for the white working class that my father or my mother belonged to, they, by voting for the national front, by voting for the far right, they put some people under them, you know, they feel the things that they are doing it. But it's also due to the history of French and European politics and the fact that a huge part of the so-called left, of the institutional left, the SPD in Germany, the Labour in the UK, the Socialist Party in France, progressively in the 70s, 80s, they stopped talking about poor people, they stopped talking about poverty, they stopped talking about pain, they stopped talking about work, and more and more they talked about responsibility, they talked about going back to work, they talked about effort, they talked about gestion, and so many people like my father and my mother, they suddenly felt that they were not represented by the left anymore, and so there was a massive movement from the left to the far right, because suddenly people were saying, and my father, during my childhood, was always saying the far right is the only party talking about us, they are the only one talking about our bodies, so it was awful, of course, to vote for, of course there were some people who were deeply racist and everything and some people will never change on that regard, but I truly believe that a huge part of these people in my childhood, like my father, were voting for the far right, if they had a strong left fighting for them, they would have voted for the left. Well, let's, you know, prod and pro about this a little bit more, because one of the things that I'm constantly turning around in my own head is what is the relationship between left populism and anti-racism, because for me, first and foremost, my politics are anti-racist, because also I saw directly what happened to my mum and how she was treated by our racist neighbours. They would, you know, shit and piss all over the door just to watch her clean it up, and there was something about the bodiliness of that humiliation that stuck with me and motivated me, and now in the UK, the left are this close to power, and all that the right has in order to discredit the left is identity politics, you're obsessed with identity politics and making it a big culture war. There are some socialists who would say, if the left want to win power and to deliver a better economic future for everyone, they've got to then stay away from anything that could be interpreted as identity politics, so don't be so noisy about anti-racism, shut up about queer and trans people, why are you going on about me too? What do you think about that? I really believe, like as the French philosopher Didierre Boncet, that the border between politics and identity politics, between class politics and identity politics, is a lie. I don't see any difference, you know, when you are fighting for people's life, when you are fighting for people's bodies, what's the difference between class and identity, you know, to be exposed to primate chudas because you are a working-class man or to be exposed to primate chudas because you are a black woman, it's the same thing at the end, your body is precarious, you know, and precisely what I try to show in my book, Book in My Father, is that the links between masculinity and class and what we call identity doesn't really exist because, for example, someone like my father, during his whole childhood, in order to build his masculinity, and he had no choice, he had to build his masculinity or other people would have excluded him and call him faggot like they did with me during my childhood. In order to build his masculinity, he had to exclude himself from the school system as young as he could, you know, because to perform the fact of refusing to obey the teachers, the fact of disobeying, to refuse the authority from the school system was a way of performing masculinity. So because of the masculinity domination and because of the obsession with masculinity in our society, my father stopped school very young and because of that, he didn't have any diplomas, and because of that, he had very bad jobs in his life that were very badly paid, not bad as such. I don't believe that a job is better than another one, but they were so badly paid and he had to work so much. And so I say in the book that the economical poverty of my father is due to masculinity in a way, not completely but in a huge part. So we see with this example that the border and the difference between identity politics and class politics and economy is an illusion, you know? And it's really what I try to do in my books. I really try to find a contemporary way of talking about class. I think we really need that. We really need, sorry, to reinvent the language about society, about class, about violence, about domination, because so many people are talking the same way the Communist Party was talking in the 50, and it's not possible, as you were saying. I mean, in 2017, from a UK perspective, looking at the French elections, it was being reported in the media that Macron single-handedly had defeated the far right forever and ever, our men, job done. And then what we see with Gilles Jean is this ruined surgeon energy, ostensibly over fuel tax, but I think there's a lot more going on besides. And even when Macron backs down on issues like, I think, minimum wage and the fuel tax, the insurgent energy didn't go away. What the hell is going on? A beautiful thing, which is that people are revolting against everything they suffered from and people are finally saying, I suffer, you know? I think that saying I suffer is one of the most difficult things in our world, in our society. People in my childhood, people like my father or my mother that I describe in my life, they were suffering from poverty, from exclusion, from humiliation all the time, you know? My mother wanted to work and my father would tell her women should stay home, and but when she was talking about her life, she would always say, oh, but it's okay, it could be worse, you know? So I was always thinking, why does she say I suffer? Why is she ashamed? Why is she afraid of saying I suffer? And for me, what we call a social movement, what we call a political moment is a moment in which people finally feel safe to say I suffer, you know? Because there is a constant mechanism in the public sphere to make people shut up, you know? There is a mediatic effort, a bourgeois effort, a class effort to make the people who suffer shut about their life, about what they feel and everything. One of the words of it, one of the phenomena of it is the people who talk about victimization, you know? As if the problem in our society was that too many people were saying, I am a victim, you know? For me, if I do a diagnostic of our society, the problem is the opposite. It's like, since so many people, because they are people of color, because they are queer people, because they are working class people, so many people are suffering, why is it so difficult to say I suffer? I was a victim of something, which doesn't mean I am only a victim and only that and forever and ontologically, but why is it so difficult? So victimization, like many other words, is a strategy in order to say to people, shut up, don't talk about what you suffer, don't talk about what you and literature or social movements can, if they do it well, they can offer space for people to talk about themselves and to free themselves. I mean, I like the idea of literature and the social movement being these sort of mirror forms in which you can articulate the self. And that's something which I think finally, because otherwise I'm gonna get yelled at for taking up all your time, I wanna ask you, which is your work, to me, sits between this triangle of art and sociology and memoir. And now, because you've achieved a degree of success that lots of people are talking about your work there, praising your work, you're moving in these very, very bourgeois spaces. Do you ever feel that there's this form of co-option going on and that the nature of publishing in the literary world automatically you know, renders impotent the radical potential of a work like yours, which is supposed to be confronting society? No, you know, at some point when I escaped from my childhood and when I escaped from the village of my childhood and I arrived in Paris and was the first in my family to study and I would see the bourgeoisie, my dream was to be like them, you know, because I felt so intimidated by them. They would talk about the travel they were doing when they were children, they would talk about the opera or the theater plays that they saw with their parents and I had nothing to do with them and my dream was to be like them. But I was lucky because in a way they never accepted me because I didn't come from the same milieu, I didn't have the same past with them and they always made me understand that I will never be like them, you know. A little bit like in the masterpiece from Alan Hollinger's The Line of Beauty in which you have this outsider arriving like this in a very bourgeois milieu and this bourgeoisie always remind him, you know, you are part of us but not completely and in fact the bourgeoisie, the dominant class, no matter the word once again, they don't realize that they build weapons against them, you know, because of course I think it was natural when I was 17, 18 to be willing to be like them, to look like them and everything but because they always made me understand that I was not like them, they built a weapon against themself and now when I write I always think like, how can I challenge the dominant class? How can I make feel them bad about what they do, about what they don't do, about the responsibility in this bad world in which we're living, you know. And so exclusion can be sometimes a good thing, like I was lucky not to be assimilated if we can say so in English to that milieu. I mean it's sort of a strange parallel to Fanon's experience when he goes from Martinique to Paris and he has this moment of realization that he will never be French because he is black and then that's what, you know, sets off the whole, you know, chain of realization and the explosion that becomes black skin's white masks. So just a very quick thing, things that you want our viewers to read. Sorry? Things that you want our viewers to read, things that works, that mean a lot to you. It's shaped your way. I would suggest to read Franz Fanon, as you mentioned, who was very important for me in my thinking and also Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras and Toni Morrison and so many people, Ocean Vong, so many people that I admire deeply and also because these people are really dealing with what we are experiencing in our lives, in our societies, in the reality we evolve in and there was a kind of strange ideology in the literary field in Europe in the last 20, 30 years which was the more you were far from reality, the more you were far from society, racism, homophobia, real concern, class issues and everything and the more you were considered a literary person, the more your literature was considered serious and what I try to do when I write and what I try to do when I write, okay my father but my other books also is trying to really undo this ideology and I truly believe that the people that I just quoted were part of this struggle because often literature is a tool from the dominant class from the bourgeoisie that does, that changed nothing to our world, you know and if you want to do good literature, you have to fight against literature. When Toni Morrison was writing literature, she was writing against literature because at that time literature was a white thing by white people, for white people, about white bodies, about white stories and she said I'm going to write the story of a black woman from the point of view of a black woman and so I always say to people, I always say don't love literature too much and that's the condition in order to do good literature. I like it, it's kind of this Gramsciian approach of like within and against the novel. Absolutely, exactly. Edouard, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure, thank you so much. Cheers. Cheers.