This year marks a watershed for the power of the pen wielded by women the world over. It is a triumph of women’s imaginative power to fathom the depths of reality and translate their realisations into words creating verbal magic. And the world’s best forums are recognising the feminine talent. For, the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2022, has gone to the French author Annie Ernaux, the first French woman to win it, only months after India’s woman novelist Geetanjali Shree won this year’s International Booker Prize. Coincidentally, a common thread binds the two women as they weave their tales using human memories.
Ernaux’s winning the Nobel Prize cannot come at a better time. She is one of the most powerful voices asserting women’s rights and she bags the greatest literary award of the world at a time when Far-right forces are alarmingly rising across the world, including Europe. Rightly has she diagnosed that women’s rights are curbed most ruthlessly under Far-right regimes. In fact, she is so disturbed by the rise of these forces in Europe – Italy and Sweden in particular – during the past few months that she remarked “the extreme Right in history has never been favourable to women.” Her own country was dangerously close to embracing the Far-right in the Presidential race recently.
The 82-year-old Ernaux has been writing for the past 50 years from her deep convictions that one’s personal memories can form the raw material for novels and not merely for autobiographies. It means one’s personal experiences have the power to transcend the limited boundary of a single individual’s life and become valid for the whole human race. Once she said that writing is a political act, opening our eyes to social inequality. “And for this purpose she uses language as ‘a knife’, as she calls it, to tear apart the veils of imagination,” the Swedish Academy announcing the Nobel Prize for Literature said.
Her very first novel, “Les Armoires Vides” written in 1974, is born of this conviction. It deals with her own personal experience of abortion which was then illegal in France. It was an assertion of any woman’s right to do with her body as she pleases. It is remarkable that nearly half a century later the apex court in India recently pronounced a landmark verdict on an unmarried woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy as she thought it was the only way to stop her mental agony and tortured social life.
She took the decision as the man, who had promised to marry her, ditched her after she became pregnant. The woman’s plea had been rejected outright by the Delhi High Court which found the existing laws did not accord this right to unmarried women. But, the Supreme Court took a different view and granted her the right. However, the apex court’s verdict does not give this right to all unmarried women since it is specific to this case only.
It is not without reason that Ernaux recently declared: “Until my last breath I will fight for women’s right to choose whether they want to be a mother or not.”
Ernaux was born to a modest family of grocers from Normandy in northern France. This background has shaped her mind and enabled her to write in a frank, direct style about class. She tried hard to adopt the codes and habits of the French bourgeoisie while remaining firmly rooted to her working class origin. She uses various angles of vision and consistently examines a life marked by strong disparities regarding gender, language and class.
The Swedish Academy has made a brave choice of someone who writes unabashedly about her sexual life, women’s rights and her experience and sensibility as a woman. It is in the fitness of things that the Academy has termed her “a courageous woman” who has traversed a long path.