We inherit many things from our mothers, from the color of our eyes to our bad skin. Is it possible we inherit the traumas they’ve experienced as well?
Belgian writer and director Chantal Akerman was the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, and her mother was the subject of much of her work. My Mother Laughs, recently translated from the French by Corina Copp, is a memoir that draws from the experience of Akerman witnessing her mother’s last days, illustrated with family photographs and stills from Akerman’s films. “I have the impression it’s the end but it’s not the end,” Akerman writes, in what would turn out to be her last book. She killed herself in 2015, at the age of 65, not long after her mother’s death.
In deceptively simple, childlike prose, Akerman directly and plainly records life on all its levels. Death consumes the dying in a different way than it does those around them, who still have to contend with a mouse problem, or water in a washing machine that won’t drain.
Unlike a diary, none of the entries are dated. Akerman skips forward and backward in time, repeatedly coming back to particular moments. Through these snippets, stories and characters emerge – intimate, intriguing, sometimes confusing, the way family histories can be. It’s only after putting the book down that they synthesize into a cohesive narrative.
The translator’s note gives us the kind of concrete facts we expect from a literary biography, and they’re helpful. It’s here, for example, that we learn Akerman’s mother’s name: Natalia, Nelly for short.
Akerman refers to people by their first names, and in the case of her lovers, a single initial. The story of C., Akerman’s young, unstable, abusive lover whom she meets over Facebook, who is frequently mistaken for (the childless) Akerman’s daughter, is a kind of counterpoint to the main narrative. “She listened with intense attention. . . . No one had ever listened to me like that,” Akerman writes.
The women try living together in New York City, although Akerman keeps an apartment in Paris. “But I don’t feel like I have a home or an elsewhere,” she writes. She’s tied to her mother, and at the same time always trying to escape her, writing “elsewhere is always better. So I’m just leaving and leaving again and coming back forever.”
Akerman seems muted in her mother’s presence, sometimes boiling with impatience, waiting for some kind of revelation about a persistent, lifelong feeling: “I had the impression that everything was my fault even if it wasn’t true.”
Central to Akerman’s understanding of herself is a feeling of being born old. “The child was born an old child, and as a result, never grew up,” she writes. “The old child said if its mother passed away, it would have nowhere to come back to.” In fact, she is the eldest, with a younger sister who lives in Mexico with her grown children.
En route to her granddaughter’s wedding, Nelly suffers a heart attack on the plane and is subsequently hospitalized. A period of surgery and convalescence follows. Nelly looks frightful at the wedding, her makeup crudely applied (she insists on doing it herself), and Akerman notices the strain it takes for her mother just to sit up, how grotesque she looks smiling for a photo while people come over and congratulate her on how well she’s doing, how good she looks. Akerman writes that “instead of rejoicing, I was saddened the entire time, and what’s more, saw nothing.”
When Nelly is well enough to travel, she returns to Brussels, where everyone expects her to die. At ninety, she is racked with arthritis, a broken shoulder, an ailing heart. Akerman describes her as a “bag of bones” with “a few hairs on her head, she who had been so coquettish. She was so beautiful.” This shock registers on every page: this can’t be her, this can’t be happening.
Nelly moans in pain, but only when none of her aides are around. “She reserves it for me or for alone-time since she isn’t aware of it,” Akerman writes, the same way Nelly doesn’t hear herself talking aloud, sometimes in Polish: “It simply crossed her mind and she said it.” It’s as if Akerman is so much a part of her mother, Nelly doesn’t know where one stops and the other begins.
Akerman’s landmark film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerces, 1080 Bruxelles, was made in 1975, when she was twenty-five. Its story focuses on three days in the life of a middle-aged widow whose life is sustained by her daily routine, which stabilizes her even as it brings about a kind of madness. In this film, Akerman (with an all-female crew) established some of her trademarks: shots framed in doorways and long hallways, captured by a camera that rarely moves. The film is long, nearly four hours, and sometimes the apparent nonaction on screen – watching the protagonist dust or peel potatoes – can feel excruciating. Akerman didn’t want moviegoers to escape for a few hours, but to really experience what time feels like for this housewife – perhaps a stand-in for her mother.
Here as in her films, Akerman uses repetition as a narrative device. “She laughs over nothing. This nothing is a lot,” she writes. Akerman uses this laughter as a kind of gauge of her mother’s well-being, like taking her temperature: the capacity for joy is a line that separates the living from the dead. Nelly perks right up whenever Akerman talks groceries. A favorite cheese is “always first on the shopping list,” Akerman writes.
Akerman finds this domesticity stifling. For her mother, it’s sustaining. Their different ideas about femininity are another tug-of-war. Indifferent to her appearance, Akerman writes, “The press about me, my films, compensated a little, but not quite. She cut up the newspaper articles and kept them. But if only I had nicely combed hair, it would be better. Yes, truly better.”
But what’s at stake is more than just appearances. Horrified by her own lack of empathy towards the homeless living near Akerman’s Paris apartment, Nelly confesses, “I can’t face this filth. . . . Nor especially to see it, not at my house or anyone’s. . . . There is not only seeing in life there is also feeling. And sometimes feeling is worse.”
When Akerman writes “no one understands how she’s survived,” it’s a loaded statement. All the suffering in her mother’s life leads back to the trauma of her time imprisoned at Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. Akerman can only address this horror, as her mother does, obliquely. “A woman on borrowed time. Who survived.” The homeless, it turns out, remind Nelly of her time in the camp.
The Holocaust is a specter whose shadow colors all of Nelly’s conversations: “You never know what can happen, and I know less than everyone because what happened to me happened to me, and who could have thought such a thing.” Another time she says, “Everything was possible before. Even falling in love.”
Yet when pressed for details, Akerman writes, Nelly might say, “a friend saved me by going to steal some potatoes. She mentioned only positive things. Otherwise she couldn’t say anything.”
Other types of confessions tumble out: memories of a cousin Nelly loved as a child, an Israeli soldier she was involved with before she married Akerman’s father. “In the end, it doesn’t matter. It was only letters, beautiful letters but only letters,” Nelly protests, mirroring the best part of Akerman’s courtship with C., the messages and emails with which they first correspond.
Faith is a difficult topic to broach in conversation, even at the end of life – maybe especially then – but the women venture to have it. “I’m not really religious but a little anyway. I feel there’s something in the sky above me, but I don’t know what,” Nelly admits.
Throughout, Akerman contends with her lifelong depression, reflecting on suicide attempts (“I told myself I could not do this to my mother. Later, when she’s not here anymore,” she chillingly warns), time spent locked up in a mental hospital, an addiction to sleeping pills. Overwhelmed at first seeing her mother laid up in the hospital in Mexico, Akerman wants nothing more than to go to her sister’s house and take a pill. “Stay with us,” her sister begs, poignantly.
My Mother Laughs doesn’t offer the kind of illumination or closure we’re used to in stories like these. It offers something deeper, richer, more unsettling, because it’s closer to how life really is when it’s not compressed into the ball of a narrative and easily tossed in a familiar arc.
Near the end, Akerman has a conversation with her mother about her reconciliation with a lover, a relationship her mother supports. “She’s a good person, I only saw her once but I know she’s a good person. Good and nice. I sense these things,” her mother assures her. Although Akerman took her own life, the story she wrote ends on a note of love.
