As I followed the news coverage of the award of the Nobel Prize in literature to the French novelist Annie Ernaux (82), I noticed how little attention the Western press has paid to her political views. Ernaux is an active supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which aims to pressure Israel into ending the injustices it perpetrates in violation of international law and Palestinian rights. The movement has gained momentum in France and other European countries where there is a growing tide of solidarity with the Palestinian people who have lived under Israeli occupation for over 70 years. One aspect of BDS’s work is to promote an international boycott of Israeli companies based in the occupied territories and utilise the land and resources of the occupied people, and then pass their products off as “made in Israel.” In 2019 Ernaux signed a letter along with many other French intellectuals and artists calling for a boycott of the Eurovision Song Contest which was being hosted in Israel that year. Last year, she signed another letter denouncing Israel as an apartheid state.
It is significant that the Nobel Prize committee chose Ernaux over other likely candidates such as the British writer Salman Rushdie, against whom Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death, or the French author Michel Houellebecq who was prosecuted for inciting racial hatred because of the hostile depictions of Muslims and Islam in one of his novels. Could awarding the prize to Ernaux be an expression of the Nobel organisation’s support for the need to right the injustices to the Palestinian people? I doubt it. The Nobel has gone to 13 Israelis, the first being Shmuel Yosef Agnon, for literature, in 1966. The next three were Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Yitzhaq Rabin for peace. The other laureates were in various fields such as chemistry or medicine.
The Nobel Prize committee, in its press release, said the prize was for the courage with which Ernaux defended the causes she believed in. Ernaux is an ardent advocate of women’s rights, including reproductive rights and the right of access to safe abortion, the subject of her first novel, Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out, 1974), and a subsequent novel, L’Événement (Happening, 2000). She treated the theme of women’s liberation more generally in her autobiographical novel, Les Années (The Years, 2008). To Ernaux, it is not enough for a writer to write well; they must defend truth and justice. Not surprisingly, after winning the Nobel she said that it placed on her a greater responsibility to fight the injustices in the world.
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