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A Bound Life: “A Worker” by Didier Eribon
The French author Didier Eribon devotes himself to the life of his mother in “A Bound Life: “A Worker” (archive image). Photo
© Arne Dedert/dpa
“She was condemned to lack freedom”: The author of the bestseller “Return to Reims” paints a moving portrait of his mother in his new book.
All he has left is a painful look back at the life of his mother, a worker from whom he turned away decades ago. He was a “class traitor”: the son of a cleaning lady and an unskilled worker became a famous sociologist and philosopher. His name is Didier Eribon.
Years ago, in his bestseller “Return to Reims”, Eribon described his alienation from his parents’ home and his proletarian background, but also how he slowly tried to get closer to his mother again after the death of his hated father. He came to the following conclusion: “The traces of what you were in childhood, how you were socialized, continue to have an effect in adulthood, even if your life circumstances are now completely different and you believe you have moved on from the past.” Today he attributes selfishness and ingratitude to himself because his mother made it possible for him to get a higher education and study through her backbreaking work. His current book is not only a bitter indictment of the inhumane care system, but also a kind of reparation to his mother.
Freedom only at the age of 80
“A Worker” traces the path of a woman who never had a chance in her life. Possible approaches to advancement that she would have had based on good school performance were destroyed, especially by the war. “She was an unwanted child raised in an orphanage and had started working at the age of fourteen, first as a maid, then as a cleaning lady, and later as a factory worker.” At the age of twenty, she fell into a marriage with a man she didn’t love, who was prone to outbursts of anger and raging jealousy. In addition to work, she had to manage the household with four children. It was only at the age of 80, after the death of her husband, that she would experience something like freedom and real passion for the first time. This freedom was quickly taken away from her in the nursing home: “She was condemned to lack of freedom. What she wanted no longer mattered.”
As with his French colleague, Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux, and to a certain extent also with the author Édouard Louis, with whom he also shares homosexuality, Eribon’s major theme is the cultural alienation from the milieu of origin caused by social advancement. From now on there are no similarities in reading, leisure habits or language. Encounters become a difficult balancing act: “During visits to my mother, my entire mental and physical behavior changed before returning to normal as soon as I said goodbye to her.” Similarly, Annie Ernaux describes in her autofictional books how the bourgeois language she acquired created an almost unbridgeable distance from her dialect-speaking parents.
Racism as constant “background noise”
In addition to homophobia, racism in his parents’ home was the main reason why Eribon broke off contact. In “A Worker” he presents the mother quite unvarnished as a die-hard racist who supposedly feels alien in her own country. The son perceives this racism as a constant “background noise” that he has to endure while spending time with his mother. He interprets it as part of their class affiliation: “In the white working class, racism seemed to be a unifying element, it seemed to strengthen people in their relationship to the world and to others.”
Overall, “A Worker” is a sensitive and unvarnished portrait of a son and his mother, to whom he is both close and far at the same time. It describes the tragedy of a woman who was never able to live independently and freely, either professionally or privately. The fact that at the end of this powerless and chained life there is “imprisonment” in a soulless nursing home only appears to be the final bitter consequence.