Speechless

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Tom Lanoye. Speechless

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A MONUMENT OF LANGUAGE FOR A FLAMBOYANT MOTHER

Flamboyant, proud, and dominant, Josée is unrecognizable after suffering a stroke, which strips her of the ability to speak. Harnessing his power as a playwright and dexterity as a poet, Lanoye weaves together autobiography and fiction to recount the last years of his mother’s life. At the same time he paints a colorful picture of growing up and coming to terms with his homosexuality. Humor, pain and copious amounts of love run throughout this critically acclaimed novel.

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Let her read over my shoulder as much as she likes, let her make comments into the bargain, even she will have to put up with my first writing a few pages about myself, because I haven’t finished with that—on we go—paralysed nail-biting in my whale, that indecisive fretting on top of my mountain of compelling material. Its weight does not rest under my backside. It weighs on my chest, while I type this and this and this.

Why is it only my stories that will have to replace her, now she herself has gone? Why not those countless other stories of those who knew her? Daughter, sons, grandchildren, all those remaining relatives—an expanding list, an upside-down bread tree of bloodlines? Plus all her friends and protégés, because she had them, by the score—what would a diva of life be without an ample and loyal public in the only true arena, that of reality? What is a matriarch worth without some additional children outside her own family—orphans, rejected scions? Old friends, schoolmates even, for ever loyal, until death do you part?

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