“I’m talking to you about a mother who wants to ‘succeed in her mourning’, failing to have ‘succeeded in her child’. I’m talking to you about all these mothers with empty stomachs.”
Magnificent book by Doan Bui following in the footsteps of his father who became mute after a stroke.
Mê-Linh was Doan Bui’s third daughter. “March 13, 2013. That day, while his little daughter was dying, the indifferent world would continue its absurd and grotesque parade. A new pope would be designated. At 5:25 p.m., death of Mê-Linh.” She only lived 358 hours in the hospital, then left for Neverland, the land of Peter Pan’s lost children. “The Land of Nowhere”says the title of the novel.
Quickly, she wrote words as she knows how, the outline of a book in Mê-Linh. “It was sweet because every time she (the writer) nestled between the silences of the ellipses. She sheltered herself “behind the illusion of the word.”
But then, for ten years, she writes, speaking of herself in the third person, she “applied to fleeing these words written or rather vomited in a few months after the death of the child. Terrified by this text, by the fact of having written it.”
“Writing is shouting without noise” said Marguerite Duras. “You shouted silently. But as soon as possible, you shut up again“, writes Doan Bui.
gullThe wound we forget becomes gangrene.
She carried within her the “shame” for writing about it. In his family, “We hated people who talked about ‘that’: illness, death, road accidents. We found it embarrassing. It was intimate, those things.”
Succeed with your baby?
Doan Bui has an enchanting art of digression and uses humor well as a form of defense and tenderness. She notes that in 2013, the year her child died, the press was talking more about the death of President Bush’s dog and Princess Kate’s pregnancy. She notes that after the death of her daughter, she received even more congratulations for the birth than condolences for her loss.
She searches Wikipedia for cases of “stillbirths” and “mamanges” (mothers who have lost their “angel”). She prefers not to answer the question “How are you ?”. “If she says ‘yes, it’s okay’, she feels like she is killing her child a second time. But to say ‘no, it’s not okay, you understand my daughter is dead’, It’s not happening.”
The company’s injunction is to “make a success of your baby”. She didn’t succeed. “The mother who has failed at being a mother feels like she is nothing.”
Doan Bui recounts a Tower of Babel in Paris
Doan Bui seeks comfort in a support group for bereaved parents but she collapses unable to speak. The group believes that she is not ready. “She feels worthless. She can’t even join this club of losers, failed parents whose child is dead.”
The story is moving when she recounts the hopes then the end of them throughout the fortnight in the hospital, the gestures and words ultimately proving to be in vain.
A book that shows how literature can heal wounds. “We mortals advance blindly in the labyrinth of our lives, we have no other tool than language, this imprecise language, mushy in the mouth, made of teeming and uncertain words which always deceive and distort”she writes. “Writing, this trivial and yet painful task, consists of peeling the bark, tearing off the little skins, then the skin itself, to discover the wound, because the wound that we forget becomes gangrene.”
⇒ The Land of Nowhere | Autobiographical novel | Doan Bui | Grasset, 256 pp. €20, digital €15
EXTRACT
“I wrote about the dead little girl. About all the other missing children. It didn’t save them, but I didn’t know what else to do. I write to make up for it. I write to erase the guilt , helplessness. I write because I don’t know how to do anything else. Sometimes, and it’s even worse, when misfortune happens, I know that I will write, and that is perhaps the most important thing. indecent, which makes me feel most disgusted with myself.”
