The shame about poverty

Francisco van Jole The shame about poverty

I doubt whether to tell you this because it's so deeply personal, but a book I just read makes me understand my own life better. I grew up in a social assistance family. I'm not saying that to be sad — my parents went out of their way to make sure I didn't lack anything — but it did give me experiences I won't forget in my life.

I must have been about 10 years. My mother asked me to do some shopping at the local supermarket, which was even more of a grocery store at the time. For cheese and meats, someone stood behind a counter from whom you ordered something, just like real bakers or butchers. I read the shopping note. “An ounce of ham please.” The clerk placed a ham on the slicer and cut off a hundred grams of slices. She wrapped them in waxed paper, handed the package over the counter and spoke words that are still clear to my mind today: “As long as you know you're eating this out of our money.”

I was reminded of the humiliating incident when I read The Shame, a book by French writer Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this month. She describes without any frills her life as a teenage daughter in a poor family in a town in Normandy in the 1950s. Sometimes the compact book looks like a novel, sometimes a diary or some loose notes.

The Shame touched me more than I expected. Reading made me realize something about myself that I never realized before. In a moving scene, she describes how, during a rare trip, she became aware of her own social position, which is the result of poverty. At dinner, at a roadside restaurant at another table, she sees a girl her age who is beautiful, with well-groomed hair, perfect clothes. She then feels ashamed of who she is. A sense of failure. I recognized that feeling from that counter and other similar occurrences. But, and that was a real revelation for me, she also realizes that dividing line between her and that girl will never disappear no matter what happens, no matter how much her life changes, no matter how good she will get it later.