For a long time, Nora Hamzawi’s public imagined her childless. He had identified her, she told herself, with the eternal teenager from her first show, a single cat in trouble with a guy. Maybe we thought she was alone because she’s not the type “to show [s]we are children with a smiley face instead of our head on Instagram.” Her life as a mother is now part of her sketches.
In 2022, when, on France Inter, she recounted her visit to the gynecologist, inviting her to “not too late to launch the second” telling him that she didn’t have “no more time to think”she remembers feeling “like in the supermarket, when you hear that the checkouts close in ten minutes and you grab anything except the pasta you came for”. She also protested the image that only children have (“Just as we say “narcissistic pervert” to mean “asshole”, we now say “only child” instead of “dirty egoist who only thinks about his face””).
At 41, Nora Hamzawi has a son in primary school. She is currently on tour for her third show and will be at the Olympia in January 2025.
The first time you felt like a mother?
The day he was born. Until then, I had been an anxious pregnant mother. Even though I felt like something was happening, the idea of going from two to three was still very abstract. I had been told things like: “You don’t have to worry, love is not immediate, you need time to trust yourself…” On the contrary, it was immediate, something dizzying made of both maternal feeling, love and wanting to protect this child.
Have you ever cried in front of your son?
Yes, and not just once! The first time it happened, he was very little. He asked me if it hurt me not to know my father, whom I lost young. I wasn’t ready and I started crying in front of him.
Some times I blame myself, others I don’t. I blame myself when I feel like my tears are coming from a bad place, because I felt hurt. I feel like I should act like an adult and don’t have to expose him to that. But if I cry for something external, fatigue, stress, then I find it healthy. What’s complicated is that I’m trying to teach him that you can show your emotions while teaching him modesty.
The mania that annoyed you in your parents and which you still reproduce?
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