“A few minutes and everything changes. There is no turning back, never. A child is born and at that point you are no longer a woman, but only a mother. Society looks at you just like that. You have lost your identity, forever”. Talk like that Ariana Harwicz autrice of ‘Kill my love’ (Ponte alle Grazie editions), a novel that describes the life of a woman who lives with her husband, six-month-old son and mother-in-law in a remote corner of the French countryside. A normal existence, apparently without drama. But it is an illusion because the nameless protagonist recounts a year and a half of struggle against psychological and social constraints. The rules she fights are: motherhood, love, marriage and family, considered the only possible goals for those born female. For her, they are yokes to which women must bend to be accepted. Those who do not get sick. Here then is the disease, post partum depression, madness.
Ariana Harwicz let’s talk about the motherhood of her protagonist. Is there the refusal of a life that is proposed for screens?
“In my novels, I’m not just talking about motherhood, but how it changes women’s lives. Motherhood makes us strangers. We are in a foreign land, like the protagonist of the book, who lives in France but is not French. We do not know his nationality. By becoming mothers, we become strangers to our deepest being, to our culture, to our country, to our family. In a more radical way, one is also a stranger to one’s own son. I think this is the philosophy that my novels trigger. Motherhood for my characters, as in ‘Kill yourself my love, represents exile. Women become mothers overnight and at that point they are seen only in this new guise. They are just ‘mothers’ for society, for their family. They dress up as ‘moms’ and they are just that. It is a complete metamorphosis, which is much heavier today than in the past. These young mothers cannot relate to and understand this role of “mother”. They do not accept this role that society imposes on them ”.
In the book, the young mother is very lonely. He lives in an alienating situation
“In the context, the woman in this novel lives in an old, dilapidated house in the countryside, in a rural area. She is not French and is very isolated. She is not a local and this makes her different even for the inhabitants of the village. where she lives. She is a mother, but she does not recognize herself in this role. In several episodes, she runs away. She escapes to get away from the peasant mentality that suffocates her. There is a famous saying: ‘Small village, big hell’. For her, life it is hell: the neighbors and the people of the village isolate her but do not give her respite. They observe her constantly. This leads her to isolate herself and become almost autistic, completely alienated “.
She is also from Argentina and lives in France, lives in Paris and spends a lot of time in a small country village along the Loire. Is the book autobiographical?
“It is not strictly autobiographical even though I am a mother too, a foreigner in France and I know the French countryside. There is a distance from reality, the one mentioned by authors like Becket and Brecht, but it tends to come very close to what When I write it is me and I am not. Can I describe something that I do not know? No. But I also know that it is not possible for me to speak openly and freely about myself, about my deepest thoughts. it is an autobiographical element. I have experienced similar situations. Writing is a mirror that captures reality, but does so in a completely deformed way “.
In the book you describe postpartum depression. But the theme of mental distress is present in other of his works. Why?
“I describe insanity, isolation, autism, postpartum depression. My novel does not have a real relationship with these diseases but it has a metaphorical point of view. We are not talking about a depression or a mental illness. which could be diagnosed by a doctor. But in the book the protagonist is interned in a nursing home for the mentally ill. Her husband brings her and here we find again society’s gaze on her. All this oppresses her. Her mentality does not coincides with the dominant thinking of the village, nor with that of society she expects from motherhood. She becomes the object of gossip and is excluded from others. She is a stranger. Perhaps insane in that sense. But from a clinical point of view she is not. . In the novels my protagonists are sick people. But are they crazy or was it the society in which they live that made them sick? “.
What relationship does a woman have with her depression?
“She is not sick in the strict sense. There is almost a play, a performance. For her, saying that she is sick is just a way to escape the gaze of others. To say leave me alone.”
What does the protagonist of the book think of her son?
“She is not a murderous mother, nor dangerous to her child, she is not crazy, but she is not a ‘normal’ woman. She is ironic when she talks about her role as a mother in society. She says ironically: ‘I come from a normal family. “But what the normality hides. Sometimes she treats the baby as an individual, at other times as an animal. Or as a stranger. It won’t hurt him, but she always remembers how difficult it is for her to identify with this role of mother. the fact that she hates motherhood. She talks about the fatigue of being a mother and how difficult it is to take on these responsibilities. She doesn’t want to wear the ‘mask’ of the perfect woman. It’s an ambivalent relationship “.
The protagonist has a very active sex life. Here too there is a taboo to overcome
“I would say that eroticism, orgasm, pleasure of the body is a taboo in a woman who is pregnant or has just given birth. A pregnant woman or a mother cannot be a being she desires. There is no question of orgasm or penetration. In our society there are two types of women: the pornographic one, the object of fetishism, and the mother. The mother cannot wish. In the book she has sex with her lover and her husband. But the neighbors who observe it consider it perverse. A misguided person. Here too she is controlled and what she does becomes sinful in the other’s gaze. And for her, so young and full of sexual impulses, the child is a foreign element that imposes on her a motherhood devoid of sexuality ”.
What role does the deer play in the story?
“The deer is a symbol. It is reality but also something that is not there. For some it is the male sex, for others it is freedom because it cannot be taken, captured. According to others it is femininity, for others it is The father, the son or the lover. It is what we do not know. Everything is true. For the protagonist of the novel it is everything that is not human. He is not her husband, he is not her lover nor her son. ‘the symbol of everything he is looking for, everything we do not know. It is an element that escapes any kind of alienation “.
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