Excuse my French

Most of my work is in French but I tend to think it could have been in English all the same. Sometimes I even used to write the text in English, then in French, then in English, then in French and so on until I couldn’t squeeze any more meaning out of it. Switching from prose to poetry. Going from topic to topic but always writing the same text. And I guess this is all my work is about. To me I mean, because I hope it's something entirely different to you. What I do. What I've always done is write. Describe. Talk. Explain. Translate my feelings into words without ever finding the right one. And it took me ages but I ended up realizing that I never really managed to say what I meant. Worse than that, I had to admit that the more I tried to say something the less certain I felt about what I was saying.

See, when you're born bilingual you're also born crazy. Essentially, it's in your bones. There's nothing you can do about it. The first time you use a word you also know there's another word supposedly able to say the same thing in a world that has all the same referential as the one you're talking in but that is also totally different. And there's no way you can keep calm and relax when the first thing you discover about reality is that it's the biggest joke of all. The only thing you can do, the only strength you can find in such a torn way of being, is using your ability to be only half of yourself as a way to escape those things about the world that are too painful to live. When your French being is soiled, you still have that little bit of pure English in you to save your soul. At least that’s how I went through life for the past 28 years.

But growing older is also learning that on this Earth, no boundary is strong enough to prevent life and experience from growing and that, eventually, all the fake worlds you build to live in communicate with one another, there’s nothing you can do about it. All the skins of the world are porous; it’s what makes them so smooth. So you go on living, talking, writing and you forget the games of hide and seek. You forget your silly stories. You start writing for the pleasure of it. For the pain. For the sake of your style: that amazing result of years of work. The only reason why writing means something – when, at last, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.