Review of 'The Illiterate' by Ágota Kristóf

Review of The Illiterate by Ágota Kristóf

“I read. It is like a disease. I read everything that comes to my hand, everything that meets my glance”. This is the quote that opens Ágota Kristóf’s The Illiterate (New Directions, 2023 [2004]), a short memoir in which the author somatically recalls her childhood in Hungary—before and during the Soviet occupation, the surreptitious border crossing to Austria and the relocation in Switzerland as a refugee. After reading Kristóf’s chronicles of the crossing, my mind remembered a quote by Sayak Valencia, who wrote “the memory of my body is my desire and my desire, similarly to my subjectivity, migrates”[1]. This remembrance maybe occurred because in this journey marked by displacement, relocation and dislocation, the activities that connect the discursive with the material—those activities which are located in the in-between of the discourse and the body such as reading and writing—arise as the potentiality of living in the middle of surviving, as a way to catalyse and be able to embody—and write—the desire to live and to remember what was lived. The body hence becomes not a mean but a radical site of immanence, an “embodied affective and intelligent entity that captures, processes, and transforms energies and forces”[2] inscribing memory and remembering as affirmative processes and tools for resistance through writing and reading.

This memoir is organised in short chapters titled after the main resonances that are explored within; while, throughout the work, the writing style juxtaposes descriptive passages with a profound reflexive tone. Landscapes, faces and objects become not only aesthetic resources for the narration but also spaces of embodiment through which emotions and physical sensations are echoed. In “Beginnings”, the first chapter, Kristóf introduces her relationship and passion towards reading departing from a childhood memory, in which that activity is portrayed as a viral device that had “infected”, since then, all her life. In “From speech to writing”, oral stories appear as a joyful site of expression later castrated by the Soviet occupation in Hungary, when writing and the desire to write became then a way of “bear[ing] the pain of separation”. “Poems” takes the reader to Kristóf’s arrival to a girl-only boarding school, relocated away from her family. Time passes melancholically and a cry is constantly enacted. As a result of this mental and physical state triggered by the pain of separation and homesickness, poetry arises as a critical and creative space for the littler girl. The whispers of sorrow are turned into rhymes, verses and early poems which draw a mental landscape of the land that was missed. In “Clowning”, silences and absences are brought to the fore as constituents’ elements of the self: silences in conversations with her mother and lack of resources make her discern her abject condition while, joyfully, she tries to navigate those negative feelings by composing light-hearted texts for her classmates. Writing becomes here a site to create affirmative forms of intersubjectivity and survival. “Mother tongue and enemy languages” narrates the linguistic dislocation: first, it is portrayed as something unimaginable—“In the beginning there was only one language (…) I couldn’t imagine that another language could exist”. Then, the dislocation occurs as a result of disidentification and erasure, consequence of colonialisation—“I confront a language that is totally unknown to me. (…) This language [French] is killing my mother tongue”. Kristóf exposes different forms of coloniality beyond forced migrations and exile, such as forgetting one of the core parts of identity: language.  The effects of colonialisation continue to be explored in “Stalin’s death”, here the author departs from the childhood memory in which Stalin died to rebuke the cultural consequences and the lack of restorative acts, addressing the consequences of colonialisation and occupation of certain Central and Eastern European countries by Soviet forces. “Memory” and “Displaced persons” narrate the clandestine crossing of the Hungarian border to Austria, the arrival to Vienna and the displacement to a refugee camp in Lausanne and in Zurich (Switzerland). In both chapters writing and reading are claimed as acts of resistance: a way of not losing the remaining sense of identity, of preventing the subjugated stories from being buried. In “Memory”, trauma and losses are the topics explored through the haptic power of words in triggering memories blurred by amnesia. Kristóf tackles how losing memories, losing people, losing objects, and losing writings lead also to the loss of “the sense of belonging to a people”. In “Displaced persons”, attention is also drawn to the gaze[3], and how it can create precarious others insofar as certain faces and bodies are dehumanised, and how those lives become “suspended”[4]. The action of being looked at displaces the possibility of being looked after and activates a process of dehumanisation, exploring also how the space you inhabit creates a particular form of being seen or perceived: as something inhuman. “The desert” describes the new beginning for Kristóf and her family in Vallagin (Switzerland) outside the refugee camps. By recalling their ordinary life and routines—in which writing and reading are still surreptitiously at the core, Kristóf also bethinks solitude resulted from inhabiting “a social desert, a cultural desert” for not sharing the language and for not wanting to be castrated by the new linguistic and cultural landscape. Here resistance, even when articulated by sadness, remains highly political. In “How do you become a writer?”, the author tallies her methods for writing, such as evoking childhood memories and physical feelings, as well as the process of how she got published. In relation to both writing and publishing, she states: “you become a writer by writing with patience and obstinacy, without ever losing faith in what you write”. The last chapter shares its title with this memoir, “The illiterate”. It collects in three pages all the painful becomings enacted by being a dislocated subject. In this dislocation, language is the cornerstone element in the process of othering, which is not only drawn by outside forces, but also by the relationship that Kristóf establishes with language. In the end, the sense of being illiterate emerges as the eternal return of being forced to be separated from her mother tongue and her home. The new language, French, appears as a new landscape to which the author has been forcefully displaced, bringing the joy of being able to write, read, publish and narrate her displaced story, while also circumscribing a challenge that has been “imposed on [her] by fate, by chance, by circumstance (…) something [she is] obliged to do. It is a challenge. The challenge of an illiterate”. The lack and absence of those possibilities that could be to come, or could have been done differently in her chosen terms become also affective and affirmative potentialities for re-signifying rage and pain, catalysing a new landscape by writing from these emotions. A landscape in which the memories of those who are forgotten by History are unburied and rabidly vindicated from a situated narration.

The Illiterate is translated into English by Nina Bogin who, within the section of the “Translator’s note”, writes “When I read L’analphabète a year ago, I felt I had to translate it (…) I am deeply grateful to her for having published them [these short texts], because they speak to me as If I had always been waiting to read them”. Translation, a task that remains veiled, also appears here as an affective site for weaving genealogies and for transnationally creating forms of resistance. This affective translational approach helps to render visible those testimonies and narratives aimed to be drawn to silence and subjugation, undoing the idea of History as a homogenous and lineal map towards creating a contested cartography of different voices.

[1] Valencia 2019, 77

[2] Braidotti 2006, 41

[3] I echo a Lacanian approach to the gaze here, which considers “the awareness and feeling of being looked at; ‘it preexists the subject’. The subject views the gaze as a threat” (Arya 2014,  194)

[4] Butler 2004, 140-143

References

Arya, Rina. 2014. Abjection and   Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in The Visual Arts, Film and   Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic   Ethics. Malden: Polity Press.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers   of Mourning and Violence. London:   Verso.

Valencia, Sayak. 2019. "∀mor decolonial" In El libro de buen ∀mor. Sexualidades raras y   políticas extrañas,   edited by Fefa Vila Núñez and Javier Sáez del Alamo, 76-85. Madrid:   Ayuntamiento de Madrid.