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232 pages, Paperback
Published February 4, 2026
‘I understood that history is written in the voice of the majority, and for the majority’s sake. I went searching for my history so I could offer it to myself.’
‘I came to understand that our lives take on meaning through becoming linked to the lives of others. And that these others had, first, to be found—I travelled to meet my elders, to listen to them, to consult their images and visit their archives. I returned from these trips with a little more of a past, and with a new sense of depth to my life. Much of the time this new amplitude propels me forward; sometimes it weighs me down. What I have accumulated is threaded through with power and joy, but also with profound violence.’
‘We often attach ourselves to a story because of some detail that resonates with our own life. These intimate echoes are arbitrary, subjective, and yet they can be very powerful.’
‘I am generally indifferent to this type of architecture, to its purpose of embedding a moment of history into a cityscape—But this one moves me, perhaps—because on that particular day I understood its function. Collective grief is so often experienced in solitude, I felt relieved to have, for once, a place to go. After depositing our flowers, we each take some time alone.’
‘Knowing my own family was never enough for me. I had a need for other affiliations, to expand and augment the primary ones: affiliations that had nothing to do with blood. I sought out people who, before my time, had built their lives around shared hopes and desires. I know how much I owe them, that they made my life possible— It is a political history, a history of struggle and of friendship, of ‘minor’ attachments that are not inscribed in the archive, that disappear when those who embodied them disappear. It is a story that is still being written, still being reconstructed from often fragile traces, and must extricate itself from silence and from shame.’
‘I have the feeling that she’s offering me her trust and, above all, that she is teaching me my own history—I oscillate too: I adore her, and the next instant I want to leave her. I recognise that we are divided not so much by our age difference as by our experience. She sees me entering my twenties without a care in the world, and can’t stop recalling that at my age she was watching her friends die.’
‘She tells me how wonderful he was, and about his brutal death. ‘By the end, he was completely blind,’ she exhales. I tell her I’m sorry, and she glares. ‘To be sorry doesn’t help, it’s what people say when they don’t have anything else to say.’ I was instantly ashamed of my reflexive response. I have nothing to do with all of this, I don’t have anything to be sorry for, her story is not about me.’
‘The news hits her hard: she cries over her loss but also for herself—for her youth, which—has suddenly and irretrievably ended; for her guilt over not having been able to fix things—to disappear without a word—the distance that has become definitive.’
‘Old people—I brake to let them by—I remind myself that most of the people whose testimonies I am about to read never had the chance to reach their age. I—cultivate what she awakened in me: an interest in the archives of communities—desire to know my own history. As I write—her voice is never far. She gave me space to think, ‘memory asserts its urgency,’ and becomes ‘a form of struggle against destruction and death’.
‘To learn from earlier generations, to come to know their struggles and what they have given us, is what allows us to situate ourselves in the present; these legacies bind us. The ideas, gestures and actions we inherit from them far surpass those we receive from our families.’
‘Language can be impoverished at times, reflecting what society offers us.’
‘To live with history is to develop a memory not just of our own lives but of the lives of others, people we have never met but whose voices and actions connect us to our collective selves—How many testimonies are missing from our archives? How many diaries have been tossed out—And, for that matter, why do we have this instinct to preserve the traces, the proof of our lives, when we’ve been told for so long that they’re worth nothing? People without a history are more vulnerable than others to the hazards of the world—their voices are largely ignored. When I insist on working in the archives, it’s because I have the sense that each life I discover there adds something to my own, and helps empower me to stand firm in my struggle against forgetting.’
‘Some documents are modest, neither beautiful nor exceptional at first glance. It takes patience to decipher their voices, even more to let them have their say, and resist the urge to bury them beneath our own words. It also takes patience to accept what is missing from them, what is not said. Literature is the ‘discourse of “infamy”’, Foucault writes, and I take this as a form of encouragement.’
‘‘We can become more than allies who are concerned with defending our own individual identity and lecturing others on what they must do to aid us in this defense. We can become comrades struggling together to change the world.’ Instead of proclaiming what makes us unique and spending time reprimanding everyone for the words they use, maybe we should be working to build solidarities, to soften our differences, to get in touch with what unites us so that we can act. It seems to me that friendship can contain the seeds of this movement, that in attaching us so intensely to others, it allows us to break free from ourselves, to become reoriented. And this movement is also a vector of joy and empowerment.’
‘Are houses political? The slogan of materialist feminism – ‘the personal is political’ – was never intended to mean that to live in community, as housemates or with your friends, is itself a form of activism; that would be too easy. This assertion emerges from a theory of domination, one linked specifically to labour; it invites us to interrogate the distinction between a so-called private and public sphere, which only ramifies gendered power relations.’
‘I also wonder how our relationships will survive the political crises we are in now, and those that lie ahead. The modes of connection we are inventing save us, but they also expose us; they are powerful and forward-looking—It’s up to us to hold each other close, to keep building on the power we’ve amassed; it’s clearly one of the only reasons for hope that we have left.’
‘The phrase engraved—excerpted from a poem—There is no extant translation in either French or English. I take out my phone again, copy-paste the Dutch text and offer my friends a rough translation of the poem that has captured our attention. ‘Roses are less beautiful than your cheeks / Tulips less sweet than your naked feet / And I have never seen a gaze / Possessed by such an excessive desire for friendship.’ In the final stanza he writes: ‘I am exhausted from having so deeply loved.’’