Writing as A Resistance: Agota Kristof

“Writing is like sculpture,
chisel the marble by quarrying the stones
to give shape that delights the heart.”
(Stefano Romano)

 

“Agota Kristof”. Photo by Jean-Pierre Bailllod

Writing has always been a way of healing the soul.

Writing helps us to see our wounds, to press a finger inside them to make them bleed and use that blood to fill the empty pages so that those wounds become dry.

If writing, like everything else, can never make them disappear, it can somehow heal them.

If done in a tremendously sincere way, writing helps precisely to the extent that it hurts, because once the word impressed on paper it cannot be ignored, but therein lies its redemptive power.

The ink brings with it all the elements of pain it feeds on.

That's why, since I was a child, I have always wanted to use the pen with black ink, both for drawing and writing, because black is the color of pain and darkness, as if writing was a shamanic ritual to eradicate from the soul every dark phenomenon of fear, suffering, anger.

 

This same blog has become a place to hang on, so not to go crazy in my closed room, without the possibility of going out to photograph and express myself.

This has been my greatest need since childhood: to express myself in order not to explode or go crazy, to find a possibility of not being alone with myself for a long time.

Whether it was drawing, painting, poetry, music, photography, anything rather than silence and stillness.

“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” is a famous drawing by Francisco Goya of 1797, for me it has always been the sleep of creativity.

This is why I am fascinated and attracted by those who do the same in the forms of art, in which I find that same artistic urgency in order not to lose balance, by those who must express themselves to tame their inner demons.

This is the reason why I want to introduce you to a poem that from the first moment I read it has been planted in my flesh and does not abandon me, because it is terrible and sweet as only inner pain can be.

It's the last poem in the “Nails” collection – never a title was more appropriate – by a Hungarian writer Agota Kristof, whom many known for her “Trilogy of the city of K”, one of the most disturbing books of the twentieth century, with an often unsustainable reading but that is never forgotten for a lifetime.

For many literary critics the works and the life of the artists must always be separated in judging the first ones: it does not matter who wrote the book but only the work of art itself should be considered. For others, however, the bond is indissoluble.

I have never believed in the idealist abstraction of the first type: every form of art is inseparable from the life of those who created it.

Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" would never have been so yellow or the skies full of black crows had he not been mad.

For this reason, since I was a boy, I have always alternated reading novels and poems with reading the biographies of those who wrote them.

 

Agota Kristof has been dazzled by love of writing and reading since she was four years old, and she immediately started writing and reading from that age.

Raised in a loving family, everything seemed to go back to normal until the war, Nazism, and the choice to escape secretly in 1956 from Hungary invaded by the Russians, with her husband and her young daughter, abandoned her family, without a word .

She will choose exile in French-speaking Switzerland, where she will find work in a watch factory and where she will die in 2011.

She will also abandon her language, to adopt the French with which she will compose her latest poems; and this is another typical theme of psychoanalytic analyzes on the life of writers.

I have read many poems in my life, but it's difficult to find one so heartbreaking and soaked with solitude; perhaps only Samuel Beckett's poems – another writer who chose to write in a language other than his own – hurt as bad as Kristof's “Nails”.

Here, she writes to spit demons away, because she has no other way to fight loneliness and pain.

“I cry so much that afterwards I will not be able to cry almost never again, as if I have already cried enough for the rest of my life,” she will write telling the pain of her escape from her land and from her family.

She has exhausted her tears, not her wounds: they never disappear.

Fortunately there are the words, sparse, essential, hard as stones, but to which it is still possible to get hold of in order not to fall into the void below us.

With a gesture that contains all the importance of details, which are – for me – the secret of perfect writing: arranging glasses.

 

I apologize for my English translation, look for it, read it, love it.

 

It's not only a poem with literary value, but it's a poignant letter of resistance to our pains.

Because, even in an interview, to those who asked her if in writing it was possible to see a light at the bottom of the tunnel, Kristof replied “absolutely not” – the same that the photographer Antoine D'Agata said about his work, but this we will see next time – it is also true that she remained up to the last on that table, smoking and filling the empty pages.

With black ink.

 

Don't die

Don't die
not yet
too early the knife
the poison, too early
I still love myself
I love my hands that smoke
that write
Holding the cigarette
The pen
The glass
I love my shaking hands
that clean despite everything
that move.
The nails still grow there
my hands
put the glasses back
so that I can write.

“Agota Kristof”. Photo by Jean-Pierre Bailllod

 

Agota Kristof: “Clous \ Szogek” (Editions Zoé, 2016)
Agota Kristof: “Le Grand Cahier, Mac Preuve, La Troisième Mensonge.” (Editiond di Seuil, 1986)
Agota Kristof: “C'est égal” (Editiond di Seuil, 2005)

 

Italian version