Happening

"I walked back to my halls of residence. In my journal I wrote: 'I am pregnant. What a nightmare"

--Happening, Annie Ernaux

Happening is a biography of Annie Ernaux, set in France in 1963, telling a real story of how the 23-year-old she struggled and managed to get an illegal abortion with 12-week pregnancy. In face of the risk of going into prison and postponing her literature study in university forever, she tried several clinics, knitting needles, overexercise, none of which could lead her to miscarriage. The pregnancy also dragged her study, making it so hard for her to focus with a constant sickness and a craving for food. She started seeking help from friends, hoping to find a place to conduct an abortion, and finally paid a high price for a secret procedure at a woman’s place. After a long night’s unbearable pain and suffering, she finally dropped the undeveloped baby from her belly at the residence hall’s bathroom, and was sent to hospital for massive blood loss.

At the end of all this, she survived and was able to continue her study as a gifted literature student, which is the beginning of her writing and teaching career.

I watched Happening movie in cinema this Saturday and read the book today. Suppression and Rebellion are the two words haunting me throughout this weekend.

At the time when abortion was not accessible for women and conducting abortion could be a crime, women, especially young girls’ sexual desires are suppressed. Abortions were banned, and young girls’ curiosity and freedom to explore sex were constrained. Young boys would avoid talking about pregnancy and leave it as a matter of girls’. While Annie informed her sexual partner, a young political science student, of her pregnancy and sought for help and connection, all he actually cared was how to prevent this from his upper-class friends and from affecting his own academic career.

"(Leg. sp.)—The following persons shall be liable to both a fine and a term of imprisonment: 1) those responsible for performing abortive pratices; 2) those physicians, mid-wives, pharmacists and other individuals guilty of suggesting or encouraging such practices; 3) those women who have aborted at their own hands or at the hands of others; 4) those guilty of instigating abortion and spreading propaganda advocating contraception. The guilty parties may also receive an injunction requesting that they leave the country. Moreover, those belonging to the second category will be deprived of the right to exercise their profession either temporarily or definitively.

Nouveau Larousse

Universel 1948 edition"

Sex to Annie is pleasurable rebellion. She enjoyed making love, “when I made love and climaxed, I felt that my body was basically no different from a man”, and “I likened the embracing and writhing of naked bodies to a dance of death”. Sex, a dangerous idea that led her to unbearably emotional and physical and decades of relieving, yet a natural desire, had caught up with her and grown inside her as the stigma of social failure.

"During my first year at college I would fantasize about some of the boys without their knowing: I would stalk them, settling a few rows behind them in lecture halls, checking out when they came to the canteen or the library. These imaginary romances seemed a thing of the past—those were carefree days verging on childhood.

A photograph taken in September that year shows me sitting with my hair falling around my shoulders, a scarf knotted in the neckline of a striped blouse, sun-tanned, smiling, mischievous. Every time I look at it, I feel it was the very last picture of me as a young girl, caught up in the invisible yet pervasive web of seductiveness."

It was also with other women and young girls that Annie held hands through hard times. On her way to get the secret abortion, she was listening to Soeur Sourire, who herself didn’t imagine going on a different and unpredictable life path, hit rock bottom and passed away. To Annie, she was “a lost, solitary figure” that gave her the strength to go on living that afternoon.

“Soeur Sourire is one of the many women I have never met, and with whom I might have very little in common, but who have always been close to my heart. Be they dead or alive, real people or fictional characters, they form an invisible chain of artists, women writers, literary heroines and figures from my childhood. I feel that they embrace my own story.”

The book also uncovered the hierarchy between “people from humble backgrounds” and people from working class. Annie was born into a family of labourers and shopkeepers (in the film, her family ran a local bar and her sister started working at local factories from a young age). Public’s bias on working class people was embedded in doctor’s examination. After being sent to the hospital, Annie encountered a young male doctor who talked to her rudely , and later changed his attitude, realizing that she is not a shopkeeper but a university student, someone just like him, someone belonging to his world. From the doctor’s rudeness, she sensed the “distinction between on the one hand, doctors, on the other, workers or women who abort, between those who rule and those who are ruled”.

“In the sheer impossibility of ever imagining that one day women might be able to abort freely. As was often the case, you couldn’t tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn’t judge the law.”

While reading this book at Waterstones’ café, I imagined myself in Annie’s place, how I would hide this secret through my life, or unveil it at a certain time, how I would feel about my body, myself, and if there’s one clue or one meaning of life to support me going through decades without looking back? For Annie, I guess it is the meaning of writing :

“I have rid myself of the only feeling of guilt in connection with this event: the fact that it had happened to me and I had done nothing about it. A sort of discarded present. Among all the social and psychological reasons that may account for my past, of one I am certain: these things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”