We are constantly told that we should "think the world after": the world after the pandemic, after the #MeToo wave. If we want a feminist post-world, the best solution is surely to listen to those who strive to think it, to theorize it, to research it. They are women, artists, researchers, politicians, experts in their field who want to make things happen, so that we never go back to the world before. Each week, The Elephant gives them the floor, to think together about feminist futures.
"An author to watch out for", "brilliant", "dazzling in maturity": these are the words that appear when we go through some of the many critiques written about Capucine Delattre's first novel, Les Déviantes. Released in August 2020, the book was an immediate success, much to the delight of its author, who is already working on new literary projects.
With a big smile painted on her red lips, Capucine Delattre meets us in a small café hidden in a pedestrian alley near Odéon. Radiant with enthusiasm, she answers straightforwardly when asked if she is a feminist, first declaring with humor that she does not feel like a "feminist but rather like a humanist."
Then she takes it back and says more seriously "absolutely, I am a feminist. I've been a feminist for years, I got my kick-start when I arrived in Paris in my last year of high school, when I was sixteen. I started reading, opening my eyes, meeting people who thought differently. The feminist lens has greatly enlightened my political, artistic and personal awakening."
Between two sips of mint tea, she invokes the multiple references that contributed to this militant awakening: from Geneviève Fraisse to bell hooks, swinging by Amandine Gaye or Chloé Delaume, she confesses that she is afraid of forgetting a few names in this web of illustrious women that she weaves around her.
With the publication of her first novel, the author also entered the media and public space, with all the difficulties that this entails when you are a woman, and a young one at that. "I've been told a lot that it's a woman's novel, for women, a book to give to your female friends. I am both a woman and young, which diminishes my credibility doubly. In the questions I was asked in interviews, there was a systematic tendency to reduce everything to autobiography, as if a woman could only talk about herself and her life. As if imagination and great political stories were a man's thing, while stories of intimacy, family and friendship were feminine. Whereas in this case, my book is not autofiction."
The eternal duality between a feminine intimacy and grandiose masculine politics still has a long way to go, according to the novelist's testimony. Her solution is then simple: to take the counterpart of this systematic devaluation of the emotion in the art, often catalogued as feminine and therefore as insignificant.
"As women, we are conditioned to cultivate empathy, interiority, and I try to make the best of that by working on the interiority of my characters. This empathy, this gentleness and this benevolence are often denigrated as something silly, whereas I think there is something to cultivate there. It may seem a bit essentializing, but I try to draw something artistic from this construct and go beyond it."
Using art to revalue the intimate, Capucine Delattre places herself in a feminist movement at the same time very current and timeless. As early as 1981, the African American intellectual and activist bell hooks wrote in her novel, Ain’t I a Woman? "The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence against women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill the emotional parts of themselves”. To reinvent a world and relationships that are more feminists, the revaluation of our emotions is therefore essential.
"For me, sisterhood is the future"
For Capucine Delattre, emphasizing intimacy and empathy goes first and foremost through sisterhood, a word she claims to be fond of. "We hear it everywhere, but I think it's a very good thing. For me, it is one of the most promising avenues today for reinventing love and relationships, all of our ways of relating to each other. We can and should all feel sisterhood. Even the men between them, it would be good. I want to feel sisterhood with my male friends too”.
This specific form of feminine solidarity, which is often heard in feminist demonstrations, is sometimes brandished as a standard, an alternative to an overly virilist or brutal vision of the world. For the young author, however, this concept is not limited to something exclusively feminine, but crosses gender boundaries to become a way of approaching the world and relationships with others.
"Sisterhood is above all a refusal of competition, of jealousy. There can be tension, confrontation, debate of ideas within sorority, but always with respect for the other's word. There can be disagreements. But there is always an absence of judgment, a work of empathy, at the same time very emotional but also political. For me, sisterhood is the future."
When asked about the next battle literature will have to fight in the feminist arena, the author hesitates for a moment before telling us about "family and motherhood. These are things that obsess me at the moment. How to make a family, how to build feminist families. We have to write about our feminist, queer, apatriarchal families, the ones we dream of and that we will build.”
It is clear that in order to create a feminist future, we must rethink our human relationships. For Capucine Delattre, the road to a more inclusive society will be paved with the valorization of intimacy, emotions and sisterhood.
Capucine Delattre's reading advice
"On the matter of the family seen from a feminist perspective, the excellent book La trajectoire des confettis, written by the Quebecer Marie-Ève Thot has just been published in paperback. It is a wonderful book, sublime. It is a choral novel with a gallery of characters who are struggling to love each other and to build a family. It is wonderfully written and very interesting politically.” Published in August 2020 by Éditions du sous-sol, this novel immerses us into a real family fresco and tears our narrow representations of love and family into a thousand pieces of confetti. This first novel – since this is the theme of the day – is like a new stone in the edifice of our dreamed feminist families.
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