Bad Words is an audio series conceived by Fabian Saul and Mathias Zeiske that invites different authors to respond to a literary text. Readings, conversations, voice messages, and music come together to create a polyphonic audio piece. This episode takes Marguerite Duras’ memoirs La Douleur (translated into English as The War: A Memoir) as the starting point for a reflection on individual and collective grief. In Paris in the days immediately after the war, Duras describes how she anxiously waits for the return of her husband Robert Antelme, who was deported to Germany as a resistance fighter. In the process, she observes how a new nationalist consensus is being established: “The days of weeping are over. The days of glory have returned,” Duras quotes General Charles de Gaulle (1890 – 1970). She, on the other hand, tries to write against this state-imposed forgetting. In doing so, she develops a poetics of mourning that does not resign itself to the restoration of the old order, but maintains alive the memory of the victims of fascism.
Claudia Durastanti, Enis Maci, Raphaëlle Red, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tanasgol Sabbagh, and Fabian Saul respond to Duras’s work of grieving with their own new contributions.
