Something powerful emanates from Our shames will come back to you armed. The honesty, the lucidity and also the audacity of the subject touch in the heart of the reading of very intimate, often painful stories, on rape or rejection. In her collective essay, Mélodie Drouin brought together six voices, to which she added her own, in order to explore the feeling of shame in order to better reveal its social roots.
“I wanted a diversity of words and forms, explains the activist author straight away. I wanted us to be as close as possible to reality, without frills or fluff. This is why each of the texts tells a personal story, but always with a social or political perspective. »
Throughout the pages, the reader discovers this very complex feeling of shame through the eyes of each author and author sometimes addressing domestic and sexual violence, sometimes racism or fatphobia. Poems in prose, autobiographical reminiscences, raw memories and frontal reflections – where different levels of languages from orality to joual mingle – the work brings together content and form. “It feels good to vary the tone,” says Mélanie Drouin.
The book also gives pride of place to eclectic and brutal experiences, such as that of Mélodie Nelson’s bittersweet (men’s gaze on the female sex) or that post-traumatic of Martine Delvaux, as a beast of prey. “I find it important to be able to represent different types of writing to ‘de-hierarchize’ the feathers,” says Mélodie Drouin in an interview with The duty.
A path that is both inclusive and universal which, according to the author, gives strength to literature when it becomes “active”. The title Our shames will come back to you armed refers to the image of an increasingly powerful defense weapon for victims. “Like a boomerang that goes against the executioners and the dominants, she imagines. There is also this idea of the plurality of shame, because there is not just one shame. »
The presence of Édouard Louis
Behind the collective essay, we detect the presence of Édouard Louis, a writer who shook up French literature in 2014 with his punchy book Finish with Eddy Bellegueule (Threshold), an autobiographical work written at the age of 21 and in which the young author returned to his childhood marked by poverty, violence, homophobia and the shame that results from it, first sexual shame and, later, social.
Mélodie Drouin does not hide her admiration for Louis, from whom her work is inspired. She also devoted her master’s thesis to her sociological work. “Her texts are based on the question of exclusion and on the reproduction of violence,” she says. I in turn realized that shame was also a great engine for exclusion. Basically, it is this issue that interests me. »
For the record, as soon as she had her project in mind, Mélodie Drouin contacted Édouard Louis. The latter pushed her, by interposed messages, to go to the end of her literary adventure and will go so far as to welcome the publication of the book on social networks. “We first saw each other in New York last May during the presentation of his play Who killed my father?, she says. I brought him a copy of the book, of which he afterwards spoke highly. »
A true tutelary figure, Édouard Louis is present in the essay through short quotations taken from his own corpus. They are scattered between each chapter and act as an organic link. “I believe that the best way to get rid of shame is to talk about it”, can we read on page 102, just before starting the poetic story of the writer Mariève Maréchale.
A desire to hit hard
By tweaking the origins of shame with words in an attempt to lay bare its sociological mechanism, the collective essay first and foremost provides avenues for understanding. “Take fatphobia,” says Mélodie Drouin. When I see certain embarrassed looks fixed on me, I understand today that it is the mirror of the fears and the embarrassment of these people. When you grasp all of this, it’s much easier to detach yourself from your own shame. »
With her work, Mélodie Drouin admits to having wanted to “hit hard”, to go as far as possible in order to let go of her shame, as one gets rid of an old skin, and finally welcome the “beginning of something else”. “. The 31-year-old author herself delved deeply into the depths of the intimate while recounting her sexual assault, but found strength in the group of writers she formed. “The collective work was a bit of a pretext to share my testimony after four years of silence,” she confides. It was perhaps to secure myself that I surrounded myself with other collaborators, so that we could walk together. »
Shame must change sides, we often hear since the #MeToo movement and the liberalization of speech. OK, but still? replies Mélodie Drouin. “I share this slogan,” she said. But that’s harder to do than to say. Beyond the formulas, she stresses that she does not like “circular logic” which has no measurable effects. “As a victim or survivor, you manage to keep your head above water, and then suddenly there is the attacker or the members of his entourage who silence you by accusing you of lying. There is a whole systemic question behind it. »
And this is as true for racism as for sexism or homophobia, observes the author. “I have the impression that we often forget to remember that a system is made up of a multitude of people with different power relations. Mélodie Drouin hopes that the book will be “a helping hand” to those who need it most.