Your Identity Isn’t Private Property

My identity doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to you as much as it belongs to me. My homosexuality is not something I own, so anyone can talk about it — again, the only question is what people say about it, rather than who is talking.

But symbolic goods, such as language, don’t work the same way that money or land do. If I take fifty euros from you, or if I take your land, you don’t have it anymore. But if I take your story, you still have it.

Language is not something you can divide, it multiplies, contrary to material things. That’s why, in the field of art and literature, the losers of history are always the winners. The ones who were dispossessed of everything are the ones who get to talk, in the end. They are the ones who create beauty because language is not something you can steal, at least not forever. It always reemerges. That’s why the greatest writers — or a huge majority of them — come from oppressed population categories. That’s why the greatest writers are Toni Morrison, Annie Ernaux, James Baldwin, Svetlana Alexievich, Jamaica Kincaid, Yiyun Li, Tash Aw.)

People who think they are progressive but force us to talk about what we experienced, and only about what we experienced, are violent. They want us to carry with our mouth what we already carried with our bodies, with our flesh, against our will. They don’t want us to get out.

Ask women who have experienced sexual violence: many of them don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to live it again through the act of talking, don’t want to be in charge. To have someone talking on their behalf is a liberation. It was for me.

I wrote a book about rape. Thomas Ostermeier adapted it for the theater. In the last couple of years, I haven’t felt strong enough to talk about this issue, it hurts me, so every time Thomas does it, I don’t have to do it. It’s a positive appropriation. The kind of appropriation that gives to those who suffer the privilege of silence.

Politics create exhaustion, tension, anxiety, and as gay people we are already exhausted by our lives, by the insults we received in our childhood, by the rejection we faced. We have a fundamental right to rest, and therefore, a fundamental right to have other people talking on our behalf. Obviously, I want people to fight. I fight, I try to fight, I write — it’s the only thing I do. But it’s something I want to decide, not something other people can impose on me because of my identity.

I am mostly thinking of my homosexuality, here. But I believe that what I am saying works for other people, too. My mother is a working-class woman, and she doesn’t want to talk about poverty, she doesn’t want to have a political discussion about it, she is too exhausted by fifty years of poverty. In the working-class environment in which I grew up, people often spoke about the left-wing parties ignoring them — “No one is talking about us.” They didn’t say, “We want to talk.” They said, “No one is talking about us.” Many people who suffered a lot want other people to talk.

It’s a fantasy of the petty bourgeoisie to think that everyone is dreaming of talking about themselves, of adding this pain to all the other forms of pain they already went through. The problem with the political field today is that it is more and more controlled by this bourgeoisie, and they think that their fantasy of the world is the real world.

You will work. It’s art. You will talk. You will make mistakes. You will try to fix them. No matter where you come from, no matter what is on your ID, no matter who you sleep with at night.

Because once again, the only pressing matter is what you are willing to say — and I’m sure you are willing to say emancipatory things. Because once again, no one can tell you what to talk about or not. Because we live in a shared world, and everything belongs to everyone.