The French author Emmanuelle Guattari grew up as the daughter of a psychiatrist in a clinic among the sick. This sharpened her eye for the unconventional in the world.
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The author Emmanuelle Guattari has published notes from New York. In the picture the Empire State Building.
Louis Christian / Imago
Emmanuelle Guattari, born in Blois in 1964, grew up in the La Borde psychiatric hospital in the village of Cour-Cheverny in the Loire Valley. Her parents worked there. The father, the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (who wrote some of his writings, including the Freud criticism “Anti-Oedipus”, with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze), had worked here since the 1950s.
The clinic emerged from the so-called anti-psychiatric movement; it is a patient collective. The sick are generally free, have meaningful employment and places that promote community. There is a lot of conversation and the language is taken seriously.
Childhood among the mentally ill
The staff’s children grow up under unconventional yet normal conditions. In 2021, Emmanuelle Guattari wrote about it in “The Children of La Borde”. “Of course we knew that the residents were crazy, but La Borde was, above all, our home.”
In “Sky over the Loire” Emmanuelle has become a teenager. The world outside plays a bigger role. Everything seems somehow temporary. She forms enigmatic sentences that aren’t actually sentences, but rather exclamations and sighs. Sometimes she just throws words at readers, words like oblivion, silence, beauty, ugliness, terror. A truly unbelievable description, even time seems to have no rules.
Growing up among mentally ill people has a decisive influence on the way they perceive things. She has this special look that, in the 1980s, when she is in New York, moves away from the tourist look and is therefore “crazy”. The wild thinking that she was used to in the clinic and at home, the connection between being, thing and phenomenon, benefits her here.
She is now publishing her records from the metropolis in “New York, Little Poland”. Here her practiced view of the outsiders comes into its own: a homeless woman, a Polish butcher, a massive prancing giant, and also people who have madness within them. Often enough she gets lost in dangerous areas without knowing it. Sometimes naivety is a defense, and a helpless smile helps.
Fleeting moments
Stylistically, she prefers short, clear sentences and goes straight into medias res. She writes like impressionists paint. Loud dab. In contrast to impressionist poets such as Herman Bang or Keyserling, no narrated story emerges. Life consists of fragments, perhaps even of countless beginnings.
This works because we never have the impression that these are random, even inconsequential events and people. They are memories from childhood and youth, from the area of the magical place La Borde, fleeting moments that can no longer escape when mentioned. Or swabs from New York and “Little Poland” across from Manhattan.
One day the father Félix visits Columbia University; he is the personified connection between the village and the cosmopolitan city. Emmanuelle Guattari’s moments as a whole form a coherent portrait of a place that is ultimately as magical as La Borde: dismaying, alienating and hopeless, and yet full of movement, wit and wisdom.
Emmanuelle Guattari: New York, Little Poland. Translated from French by Françoise Hynek and Arabel Summent. Verlag Turia + Kant, Vienna 2024. 92 pp., Fr. 20.90.
