Francesca is a writer of non-fiction from London. She is currently working on a full-length work about appetite, in all its myriad forms. When not studying at Goldsmiths, she teaches high octane indoor cycling classes.

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For Chantal Akerman, and our mothers 

My illness had developed from early infancy when I didn’t realise I had a father, or maybe my mother hadn’t let me realise I had one, because maybe my mother and I were too bonded, a bond that was fatal for me.

I am reading My Mother Laughs by Chantal Akerman. It is right up my Strasse. It is sparse and self-consciously artistic and fucking good. I am reading it in part because I want to and also as a way of warding off evil spirits. My mother is about to have a hysterectomy and my cervical cells came back weird. There is a lot going on in our uteruses. Apparently Jewish women are especially predisposed to cancers, something about the speed at which our cells divide. It’s the same reason we are often so clever. A doctor told me this. You aren’t supposed to say that, of course, it sounds like Jewish Supremacy, but if my mother is going to lose her ovaries and her uterus, then we may as well celebrate her brilliant brain. 

A gay, Jewish, female, Belgian filmmaker: Chantal Akerman didn’t like to be labelled. Her book, My Mother Laughs, feels like an intrusion on a deeply personal moment. Akerman’s mother, Nelly, a survivor of Auschwitz, is dying and Chantal has come home to take care of her. We know that she was beautiful once and that now she lies in bed groaning. While she lies there, her daughter hides in a room and tries to write. Shielding herself, unsuccessfully, from her mother’s decline. It’s written in pieces, fragments, sort of like a screenplay, or perhaps it’s more visual than that – it is Akerman, the filmmaker, compiling her list of camera shots. The text is interrupted by stills from her films and old family photographs. The language is plain and clear, the sentences short. It is difficult at times to know whether it is Akerman or her mother who is speaking. 

I am finding it an uncomfortable read, so I look up Chantal Akerman on my phone to distract myself. A mistake. Her mother died and then she killed herself. I wish I didn’t know this. Now each letter on the page is infused with more tragedy. A Daliesque drooping of words and sentences, looping along, spelling out impending doom. This book appears to me, glowing orange on my bookshelf, as I confront my own mother’s mortality and so now, every night, before I go to sleep, an eerie dread seeps through my sheets and locks me in a kind of sleep paralysis. She’s going to die, breathes out a ghostly voice, which feels around me and inside me all at once. I picture the operation I can’t be present at. If I could watch it, I might have some control over how it goes, I could make sure they sew her up neatly and administer the right amount of anaesthetic. But I can’t be there, before, during or after. I will be at home, fretting. If I worry about her uterus, perhaps I don’t need to worry about mine. Hers has already done its job; she doesn’t need it anymore. But mine is still waiting to be used. It sits there, languishing.

When I do eventually fall asleep, I dream that we are in a hospital, run by cowboys. They wear 501s under surgical coats and muddy boots with spurs that slice through the linoleum. My mother and I glide together down a corridor and as we pass a cowboy doctor, the fluorescent square blinking overhead catches his bolo tie, which I see is shaped like a uterus, glistening with rubies. This hospital smells like disinfectant and horse shit and has the vaguest whiff of gay bar about it, as though these cowboys are in fact leather daddies in dress up. There’s a time lapse in my dream, two scenes have been crudely spliced together in the edit, and my mother and I are suddenly in an operating theatre, side by side. She’s having a hysterectomy, as planned, and I’m having my left arm amputated, seemingly for no reason. They’ve forgotten to give us anaesthetic. Or maybe that’s just how they roll here. These gorgeous, grubby cowboys. If I can imagine every single terrible thing that might happen, everything will be fine. 

I told this dream to someone. They said, it sounds like you’re afraid of something. 

I’ve stopped reading My Mother Laughs, for now. I’m too frightened of it.

Chantal Akerman’s most notable work is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Made in 1975, when she was just twenty-five, the film has a running time of 202 minutes. Jeanne Dielman is considered a seminal moment in feminist cinema. Jeanne is a widow who turns to prostitution to provide for her son. The three hours and twenty-two minutes follow three days in the life of this woman and take place almost entirely within the four walls of her apartment. Banal tasks are performed in real time, slowly and methodically. Akerman’s work depicts moments that are not usually deemed worthy of narration, she forces us to experience the passing of time whether we like it or not. In her hands the banal is rendered radical.

I am still avoiding My Mother Laughs, so I search endlessly for Jeanne Dielman online – this act alone is an exercise in radical banality. I have decided that Chantal and I are inexorably linked, so I must devour her entire oeuvre to gain insight into my own life and to continue to ward off the spirits that threaten to take my mother away from me. I am amused by a Google review of the film, written by someone who might have missed the point. U could press fast forward on this piece of garbage and watch the whole thing in 10mins. If u wanna waste ur time, do it by watching the whole film. One star from Adam. It is astonishing, given what the internet usually yields in just a few clicks of a mouse, that I am unable to access this important piece of cinema. And yet Adam has had no problem finding and fast-forwarding through it. I find a Blu-ray on eBay, but I don’t have time to wait for it to be delivered from a man in Sunrise, Florida. Although the name of his location makes me want to know everything there is to know about J Walker and why it is that he’s selling this forty-five-year-old film – a film he is lucky enough to own in glorious high definition. Frustrated, I post something on Instagram asking if anyone knows how to get hold of it. A Syrian fashion photographer I used to teach Pilates to gets in touch almost immediately with a link to the full film, with English subtitles. My faith in the internet is restored.  

I am hesitant to veer too far into the role of ‘Film-Studies-Student-explaining-arthouse-cinema’, but I will say that the film, like her book, is fucking good. It still feels ground-breaking and exciting. I watch it and I am confronted by the relentless labour of being a woman, I’m transfixed by the household chores that Jeanne carries out, slowly and dutifully. Every movement careful and repetitive, until that crucial moment when her behaviour changes and the order she has created in her life starts to melt away, with bloody consequences. Female labour that is not confined to housework – and in Jeanne’s case sex work – but which also constitutes the reproductive labour mothers endure and the persistent pain necessary to fulfil that biological duty. I spend a great deal of my life preoccupied by what is going on in my underpants. When I’m bleeding, if I’m bleeding, why aren’t I bleeding? And then when all of that is over, and the bleeding stops and the hormones settle, a giant mass can form and affix itself to your ovary. The size of a grapefruit. And this citrus cyst can weigh so heavy on you that it causes your ovarian ligament to twist and turn, so that it feels like your womb is having a heart attack. This is true of all body parts, of course, illness and disease can strike anywhere at any time, and yet I am taking this attack on my mother’s womb personally. 

I take to googling Chantal Akerman obsessively. My computer starts to autofill her name as soon as I’ve typed Cha. I find an interview with her, filmed in November 2013, just two years before her death. In a sunny New York apartment, an unseen man asks her what part her mother played in inspiring Jeanne Dielman. “It’s really what I saw when I was a child, you know, my mother and her aunts and the way they organised their lives, so they didn’t have any… holes… in their lives. So, they didn’t have the time to feel too much. Because the real feeling was too much for them.” She is haughty and beautiful, with startlingly blue eyes. She’s smoking, obviously. I am falling in love with her. Chantal Akerman is my friend, and she gets me, and I can talk to her, because it feels like our minds are linked. She’s the bad girl in the year above, inching towards womanhood before me, corrupting me as she goes. She tries to get to me to smoke and makes me frightened of the inside of my head. 

The tasks my mother completes look different to Jeanne’s, but they are no less distracting. She too has organised her life in a way that fills all the holes. It is less than twenty-four hours before her hysterectomy, and she is downstairs working. Applying to universities to train as a psychotherapist, and also for a big job in feature documentaries. She is lecturing undergraduate students and she is executive producing two films. Last night, she pitched an article in which she will examine why she is feeling ashamed of having to have this operation. A womb does not make you a woman, I whisper during one of our hugging sessions. She has also managed to wax her legs, dye her hair, and tint her eyebrows. When she’s lying there being sliced open, she wants to look her best. A woman’s work is never done. 

I want to tell my mother: you can’t make yourself indispensable and then get sick. But I can’t. Akerman spent her life trying to draw her mother out of the silence she had shrouded herself in. She wanted to give her mother a voice and also, I suppose, to liberate herself from the intergenerational trauma that plagued her life. My mother and I don’t suffer this silence, we talk openly about our anxieties and our fears. So, what am I supposed to do, after a lifetime of being made to feel that every thought and feeling I have is worth exploring, how am I supposed to deal with the fact that I can’t say to my mother: I am petrified of losing you, I don’t know if I can exist in the world without you.  

I’m thinking of the ways I fill all the holes in my life. The things I do to try not to feel too much. I read other people’s words and try to find myself in them. I spend hours with Chantal, trying to piece together her sadness so that I might make sense of mine. This is a marvellous way to avoid writing, and to avoid feeling. Life is like Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: it’s banal until it isn’t, people are healthy until they’re not.

She still has a few hairs on her head, she who was once so elegant. She who was once such a beauty. Everyone said so. And I was so proud of her, of my mother, this beautiful woman. And I loved her. 

There is a picture of my mother and me, taken from behind as she walks me through the school gates. I am small, probably five and she is dropping me off on her way to work. She wears a powerful jacket, the silhouette still conjuring up the Eighties – her favourite decade for fashion – and a tiny miniskirt which shows off her beautiful legs. Her hair, which is cut to her shoulders, is the usual explosion of curl, it’s peroxide blonde and brown and every colour in between. Her beauty is not subtle, it’s a powerful fuck-you in your face kind of beauty, sexy and glamourous. My memory is of being proud. Proud that she worked, proud that she was gorgeous, proud that she always smelt so good and wore lipstick. 

How can a person be so pretty, she always says of me. I tell her how beautiful she looks, and she replies, you only think I’m beautiful because you love me. 

I am picturing the Chantal Akerman version of events. The long camera shots, the slow repetitive tasks. The interminable wait while she is being operated on and then the prolonged period of convalescence. 

When my mother returns from hospital, my day takes on new meanings, as new rituals move in to fill old holes inside me. I help her shower, it hurts my heart, but I do it. I see there is satisfaction to be found in being useful. I brush her hair which has matted. I see as I slowly detangle it – transforming her locks from brittle straw to silken curls – that what she has been saying to me for years is true, she doesn’t have as much hair as she used to. She likes to grip mine in her fist, hoping the volume that she gave to me might transfer back to her. The wound looks good, I pretend that I’m not frightened by it. I have bought her vitamin E oil to rub on once the scabs have dropped off. I bully her into taking zinc and vitamin C, things I’ve read help with healing. In healthier times, she would accuse me of being sharp and prickly, but my new role as Head Nurse has softened me. I try not to let on how sad this all makes me. Every night at 6pm my phone lets out a squawk and spells across the screen INJECTION. Time for her blood thinning shots. A subcutaneous injection which leaves bruises all over her stomach, a sign that they’ve been administered by my untrained hand. If I don’t come down immediately at 6pm, she texts me: 

Where is Madame Stabby?

Is Lady Von Stabë on her way?

I am Nurse Ratched. Reluctantly. I bruise her and cause her pain. I hate this job. On one occasion, my hand slips a little and I feel the needle plunge deeply into her soft flesh. Though she assures me she is ok – she still has no feeling in her stomach – I run up to my room and sit on the bed to cry. The thought of hurting her rips through me. I imagine that I have punctured something inside and now everything is going to go wrong, and it will all be my fault. I am reminded of an incident some years ago. She asked me to put her earring in and I was angry with her for some reason, so I did it roughly and it bled a little and she looked at me like a wounded animal and we both knew that some part of me had done it on purpose. I saw that I was capable of inflicting pain, real physical pain on the person I love most in the world and that that must mean I am a terrible person. This is one of the shame-soaked memories that keeps me up at night. 

When I get angry I feel like my anger is horrible and that my cries and shouts will cause the world to shatter around me.

I think of every time I’ve been unkind. All of the occasions where I have treated her carelessly and I am worried I have blown the whole thing.

Time passes and gradually my mother returns to me. Slow and languorous, our life has taken on the pace of an arthouse film. Each day is punctuated by the same rituals: the hair brushing, the wound checking, the injection giving. I want to watch Akerman’s last film with my mother. No Home Movie is a companion piece to My Mother Laughs. It is a documentary depicting the last months of Nelly’s life. It is made up of conversations between mother and daughter and long, static shots of Nelly moving around her apartment. My mother hates it, from the moment it begins. It is not the kind of documentary she makes – about sexy soul singers or women on death row. No Home Movie opens with a five-minute shot of a tree in Israel, blowing in the wind. Feeling her frustration, I try to justify Akerman’s choices. My mother says, I understand it, I just don’t like it. She picks up her phone and starts checking emails. I turn the film off because watching it with her is making me anxious. I wanted to share this with her, but she does not see what I see.  

The day I realise she is going to be fine, I cry for nine hours uninterrupted. It is a mikvah of sorts, but I feel broken, and my eyes are puffy beyond recognition. It is a giant wave that crashes through me, sadness filling every space. I am suddenly aware of all this space inside me. For three months there has been no room for me to be more than an appendage. I am the great mass affixed to her ovary, clinging on. In looking after her I have become less me. I am like a diluted version of myself. And it feels pretty relaxing. 

I am always thinking about my uterus. She is never one to be upstaged and so, just as my mother is mending, her body adjusting to the nothingness that now exists in her lower abdomen, I receive a letter telling me that I have abnormal cervical cells. I want to have a baby right now so I don’t have to worry about not being able to have one later, which is probably not a good enough reason. When I go to hospital for a colposcopy – a charming little procedure which biopsies cervical cells – it is a Saturday and I seem to be the only patient. This lends the experience a dreamlike quality but isn’t fun and dangerous like the cowboy hospital. Hospitals would be better if they were filled with cowboys, beautiful men who’ve repurposed their scrubs into arseless chaps. I find the gynaecology department, which is a little too close to oncology for my liking and greet the receptionist with excessive cheer and warmth, as though my good mood might ward off a terrible diagnosis. 

When I’m called in for the procedure, the doctor says as I am taking off my coat: 

Don’t worry, you don’t have cancer.

That’s good, I reply.

A lot of women come in here and they think from their letter that they have cancer. So, relax, you don’t. But we need to have a look to make sure it doesn’t become cancer. Ok? Why is your hair like that, where are you from?

I’ve been preparing for the terrible news, imagining that a sympathy fibroma has grown in solidarity, but it seems I am fine. For now. I walk out and find the lift, hit the button for Ground Floor, where any normal person would expect the exit to be, but instead emerge into labyrinthine corridors which lead to the morgue. I chuckle morbidly, spirits let me be. 

I have this image of my beautiful mother that flickers before my eyes. It’s from a trip we took to Sicily. We are happiest in each other’s company; we each provide the kind of love the other requires. We stay up late sharing ideas, we hug for hours on end, our identical curly tendrils interlocking on pillows. In Sicily, we ate pasta con le sarde and drank Etna wine. Filling ourselves up with volcanic minerals. We wore new shoes in old towns, our soles slipping on the stone, our laughter echoing all around us. My mother laughs. I see her sitting across from me in a square, a Baroque church behind her providing a golden glow that washes over her brown skin. She looks magnificent. Her beautiful big nose, like a perfect triangle sticking out of her face. This is the woman that made me, the woman I aspire to be.

I’ve survived everything up until now and I’ve often wanted to kill myself. But I told myself, I couldn’t do that to my mother. Afterwards, when she’s not around.  

I find the courage to return to My Mother Laughs and read the whole book straight through. With distance I see that it bears little relation to my life. I am not Chantal and Nelly is not my mother. Her mother’s death did not cause Chantal Akerman to kill herself, she was waiting for her mother to die so that she could do it. I sit in the green velvet chair by my mother’s bed. She is healed, but habits formed over the last few months keep leading me back to this place. I tell her what I’ve read, I read her passages. I want her to be as moved by it as I am. She says it reminds her of a friend of hers. A writer she knew whose mother had come to England on the Kindertransport. Another Jewish woman, unmarried and childless, who jumped out of a window after her mother died. This is my fear, I say. My mouth frozen in a wonky square, as I try not to cry. Because without you I have nothing. I realise I am talking about my mother’s death in front of her. Now I am crying, and I keep saying, I just feel so bad for her. I feel so bad for Chantal, I can’t bear it. And my mother looks at me quizzically, and our eyes meet, and we both know I am talking about me. But I am speaking it out loud, like I’m casting a spell, so that it doesn’t happen to me. A friend warned me that worrying is just praying for something bad to happen, but I disagree. Worrying is a form of mental gymnastics. It is the psychic stretching I do to prepare for disaster. I lived her death a hundred times over with my eyes open and closed. Trying to prepare myself. 

I begin to prepare myself for her death. A friend asks, how are you doing that? I try to imagine myself without her. And I think that I’ll be OK.

But it’s meant to be impossible to really prepare yourself so I’m wasting my time.

Evil spirits done away with; she is well again.