by Julia Blakeney
L’amour plus fort que la haine.
Love is stronger than hate.
This is the central theme of Antoine Leiris’s memoir, You Will Not Have My Hate.
On November 13, 2015, a Friday night in Paris, Leiris’s wife, Hélène, was killed by members of an ISIL terror cell. She was enjoying the night at a rock concert at the Bataclan, a beautiful red-and-yellow painted theater in the 11th arrondissement, the heart of Paris, when gunfire erupted across the city. A heartbreaking and terrifying event in and of itself, it is even more heartbreaking to know that people were there on a fun night out after a long week at work; there to listen to music, not expecting anything bad to happen. Not a single person, Parisian or visitor, who decided to attend the concert, or the football match, or any of the restaurants throughout Paris that were attacked, expected to be killed or wounded that night. That is not how life works.
Hélène and Antoine certainly didn’t expect to never see each other again.
Leiris’s book was born from an open letter to the terrorists who besieged the city on that fateful night. He posted the letter to Facebook three days after her death (authentic translation here), where it almost instantly became viral. After inserting his original open letter in the book, he tells the reader he began writing the book the next day. The book chronicles the night his wife died, and the three days following, how he struggles with finding the right words to tell their seventeen-month-old son that his mother has died, how he has to be present for the next few days, taking care of their son as well as making funeral arrangements, when he really wants to crawl into a hole and mourn “the love of his life.” He ends the memoir by saying he and his son will overcome, that they have each other to love and will miss Hélène, but will be okay in time.
Beautifully written in French by Leiris and translated into English by Sam Taylor, the book, although leaving me in tears each time I went to read another chapter, is an incredibly moving account of the night the lights went out in Paris. He writes so openly and unashamedly about his pain and grief that by the end, I felt like I knew him; had met him and his little boy and spoken personally with him about that night and the following days. His book drives home the sentiment echoed by millions each time another city is attacked: love will always conquer hate. Through this book, this message is universal and eternal in a world filled with so much hatred.
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