minzreads 's review for:

Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes

5.0

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I hadn't planned on reading any more books in 2020 but there was a storm in Houston and we lost power for an afternoon and I had nothing else to do except read. So I picked this up to accomodate for the melancholic nature of my last day of 2020. 2020 has been a very sad year for many. I did not think it would have been fair if I hadn't dealt with it the best way I know how to deal with grief - writing. Even though Barthes is writing about losing his mother, I think it was an important read for me to mourn the year. I lost my parents when I was very young and a lot of what Barthes dealt with hits the nail right on the head. He talks about having the right to grieve and how to an extent it's almost unacceptable to grieve in the society we live in. It's not unacceptable publicly but you are not allowed to be sad, you're always required to find hope. And although finding hope is necessary generally, it is not what you think about when you're mourning. He talks about the selfish nature of grief and the choppiness of mourning as opposed to continuity of life. I felt the latter in 2020 a lot. How we were all expected to continue life while we dealt with our personal tragedies in between zoom calls. Barthes' brutal honesty in talking about losing a loved one hurts. You can see the journey from how he does not want to trivialize his mother by making her literature to eventually deeming Literature the same as his mother because of their nobility. I think an artist of any sort will always struggle with this - thinking your art will make a mockery of your feelings and also finding out that if done with honesty, there really isn't any other expression. Barthes talked about how when people psychoanalyze your grief with generalized scientific terms, they steal it from you. I felt that deeply - not just in grief but in all aspects of my emotion. Because your emotions are a direct consequence of what happens in your life, you want to deal with them at your own pace. Talking about them too early, specially when coerced to by a society that constantly wants to talk about things, you feel robbed of your chance at expression. Wonderful collection of thoughts, will definitely be revisiting it in the future.