“My mother laughs is only an immersive experience. Just as Chantal Akerman refused (at least publicly) the labels ‘lesbian’ and ‘feminist’ in her life and her art opting instead for the more precise, vague, relational term ‘daughter’, we as readers are cast into this shifting space of a world that hovered within spitting distance of Chantal Akerman’s mother’s death and the tangible end of both of their lives intersecting.” - Eileen Myles, New York, August 2019 (from the Introduction to My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman).
The following is a edited excerpt from My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman.
I wrote it all down and now I don’t like what I’ve written. That was before, before the broken shoulder, before the heart operation, before the pulmonary embolism, before my sister and my brother-in-law called me so I could say goodbye to her (for ever). Before she returned home to Brussels for the last time.
Before she laughed.
Before I realised that maybe I’d got it all the wrong way round. Before I realised that my vision had been narrow and delusional. And that this was all I could manage. Not even faithful to my own truth.
For now, my mother is alive and well. That’s what everyone says and everyone also says that she’s strong and nobody understands how she’s managed to survive.
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I was there before she went into hospital and I was there when she came out again to prepare herself for going back in. She was very ill and I was scared, scared she would suddenly stop breathing in front of me, in her armchair. She fell asleep and I could feel the effort her heart was making to beat so I kept watch, breathe maman, don’t leave me, breathe. Don’t leave me, not yet. I’m not ready and maybe I never will be.
Breathing became so hard for her that we had to take her to A&E. In hospital they made her strong enough for the operation. They keep saying that the operation will be nothing. But will this bag of bones with its few hairs and dull eyes be able to hold out. One thing at a time.
I always say one thing at a time. I say one thing at a time knowing that anything could happen. But in this case there are only two things, life and death. And if life leaves her body, she’ll leave with it.
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She rarely gets hungry these days but she knows she must eat to regain the weight she lost and to stay well, so we spend hours discussing what might give her back her appetite and we always come to the same conclusion, she’ll eat herring with onions any day of the week, either herring in oil or herring in brine it doesn’t matter as long as it contains herring. She also likes shrimps but only in a salad with fresh onions and in a light mayonnaise dressing and the mayonnaise has to be well seasoned with salt and pepper or else she loses her appetite. And then there’s the fromage blanc. She doesn’t know what she’d do without fromage blanc and it’s always at the top of her shopping list.
I like fromage blanc too but having spent so much time talking about it I can’t bring myself to eat it. The thing I like most and the only time of day when I feel as though I’m really living is when I rush to the shop to buy cigarettes. All of a sudden I’m a person. A free person, a person with something to do. And today in particular because it’s sunny after so many grey days.
I like to write down what’s happened. Because then I feel as though I’m a person who has something to do even when nothing is happening. But something always happens, small insignificant events.
The phone rings. Words are spoken and exchanged. Silence. Occasional sighs. The neighbours make noise. The lift sometimes gets stuck. The bins have to be taken downstairs and this often involves some words spoken and barely exchanged.
Read more in My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman (translated by Daniella Shreir, with an Introduction by Eileen Myles and Afterword by Frances Morgan).
In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.