{"id":11814,"date":"2020-03-30T13:24:27","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T17:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/?p=11814"},"modified":"2020-03-30T13:35:24","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T17:35:24","slug":"lettre-ouverte-de-lauteure-annie-ernaux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/lettre-ouverte-de-lauteure-annie-ernaux\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Letter from Author Annie Ernaux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cergy, March 30, 2020<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mr. President,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00abI\u2019m writing you a letter \/ That you might read \/ If you have the time.\u00bb For those of you who are literature buffs, this opening line probably rings a bell. It\u2019s the opening of Boris Vian\u2019s song \u201cLe d\u00e9serteur,\u201d written in 1954, between the Indochina War and the Algerian War. Today, no matter what you may claim, we are not at war; the enemy here is not human, not our fellow man, it has neither thought nor intent to harm, ignores borders and social differences, and spreads indiscriminately, jumping from one person to another. The weapons\u2014since you insist on this war-like vocabulary\u2014are hospital beds, ventilators, masks, and tests; they are the number of doctors, scientists, and healthcare workers. Yet, ever since you\u2019ve been leading France, you\u2019ve turned a deaf ear to the cries of alarm from the healthcare community, and what was written on a protest banner last November\u2014\u201cThe government counts its pennies; we\u2019ll count the dead\u201d\u2014resonates tragically today. But you\u2019ve preferred to listen to those who advocate for the state\u2019s withdrawal, pushing for resource optimization, flow regulation, and all that soulless technocratic jargon that obscures the reality of the situation. But look: it is public services that are currently keeping the country running for the most part\u2014hospitals, the National Education System and its thousands of teachers and elementary school teachers who are so poorly paid, EDF, La Poste, the metro, and the SNCF. And those whom you once dismissed as nothing are now everything\u2014they are the ones who continue to empty the trash, ring up items at the registers, deliver pizzas, and ensure that material life, just as indispensable as intellectual life, goes on.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a strange choice\u2014the word \u00abresilience,\u00bb which means rebuilding after a trauma. We\u2019re not there yet. Be careful, Mr. President, of the effects of this time of lockdown, of this upheaval in the course of events. It\u2019s a time ripe for reevaluation. A time to yearn for a new world. Not yours! Not one where decision-makers and financiers are already shamelessly trotting out the old refrain of \u00abworking more\u00bb\u2014up to 60 hours a week. Many of us no longer want a world whose glaring inequalities have been laid bare by the pandemic, Many of us, on the contrary, want a world where basic needs\u2014healthy food, healthcare, housing, education, and cultural enrichment\u2014are guaranteed for all, a world whose very possibility is demonstrated by the solidarity we\u2019re seeing right now. Know this, Mr. President: we will no longer let our lives be stolen from us\u2014we have only this life, and \u00abnothing is worth more than life\u00bb\u2014another song by Alain Souchon. Nor will we allow our democratic freedoms\u2014which are currently restricted\u2014to be permanently muzzled; freedoms that allow my letter\u2014unlike Boris Vian\u2019s, which was banned from the radio\u2014to be read this morning on a national radio station.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Annie Ernaux<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cergy, le 30 mars 2020   Monsieur le Pr\u00e9sident,   \u00ab Je vous fais une lettre\/ Que vous lirez peut-\u00eatre\/ Si vous avez le temps \u00bb. \u00c0 vous qui \u00eates f\u00e9ru de litt\u00e9rature, cette entr\u00e9e en mati\u00e8re \u00e9voque sans doute quelque chose. C\u2019est le d\u00e9but de la chanson de Boris Vian Le d\u00e9serteur, \u00e9crite en<\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":11815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","rank_math_focus_keyword":"","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"","rank_math_canonical_url":"","rank_math_robots":null,"rank_math_facebook_title":"","rank_math_facebook_description":"","rank_math_twitter_title":"","rank_math_twitter_description":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-latribune"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/antilla-martinique.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}