By Owen Richardson
Memoir
You Will Not Have My Hate
You Will Not Have My Hate. By Antoine Leirs.
Antoine Leiris
Harvill Secker, $29.99
Review by Owen Richardson
Antoine Leiris is a French cultural journalist whose wife Helene was killed in the Islamic terrorist attack on the Bataclan theatre in November 2015, leaving him with their 17-month-old son. This short book covers the 12 days between the attack and Helene's funeral; its title comes from the Facebook post he wrote during that time. "So, no, I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you. That is what you want, but to respond to your hate with anger would be to yield to the same ignorance that made you what you are."
This book isn't simply about the refusal of hatred; Leiris doesn't make a show of liberal attitudes either. There is virtually no politics at all. When Leiris describes how the mothers at Melvil's nursery school band together to make food for him (which he rejects for being unfamiliar: all that kindness goes down the drain), or talks about how incapable he feels when he tries to cut Melvil's fingernails and ends up nicking the little boy's skin, Helene might as well have died in a car accident or after a sudden medical emergency.
"Guns, bullets, violence: this is just background noise to the real tragedy taking place: absence." His friends wonder at his ability to shut out the circumstances of Helene's death, and he replies that he has neither forgotten nor forgiven, but that anger would just be a displacement of loss, a cheap consolation.
At times there is a fatalism that suggests another absence, the absence of religion. Leiris says that he will tell Melvil that, "Death awaited his mother that night. They were just his ambassadors." He also makes contemptuous remarks about the counsellors hovering around, the dead language of the police he talks to, the bureaucratisation of grief.
Leiris seeks to withdraw his grief and his son's from the spectacular global media event of November 13 and its ideological meanings. The saturation coverage, the responses from moderate Islam and the left and the right and the far-right, the displays of solidarity – all the social activity that follows on a terrorist attack makes almost no appearance. (He does get letters – in envelopes, in such a day and age – from strangers saying his Facebook post has given them hope, but doesn't dwell on them.)
Not only does he not want to become a revenge fantasist, there is another repudiation here: not to be press-ganged into a bad collectivity, not to have his life and Helene's and Melvil's draped in an unsought-for identity — "victims of Islamic terrorism", or "Enlightenment martyrs". It is all too easy to imagine how a right-wing reader might take Leiris' refusal to answer that call.