Lby dint of being reborn after abandonment is in Anny Romand’s DNA. Armenian, the grandmother arrived with her son in Paris, fleeing the genocide of his people, in the twenties of the twentieth century. She was rejected at birth by her father and her mother during her pregnancy was determined to give her away, leaving her in a clinic where she did not go too far on the subject of adoptions. We interviewed her for the Italian release of Abandoned (La Lepre edizioni, € 15, out on October 28): he tells us where he found it the strength to be reborn after abandonmentafter having had to deal with being unwanted from birth.
The strength to be reborn after abandonment in Anny Romand’s novel
“I knew I wasn’t wanted”
“I always knew my father existed and that he didn’t want to know about me. And I always knew my mom didn’t want to know why either getting pregnant at 19 at the time – in the late 1940s – it was a terrible thing. So she thought for three days whether to abandon me or not and certainly this climate in which I grew up it had a great influence on my artistic temperament.
“The strength to be reborn after abandonment”
«It was precisely my artistic temperament that allowed me to take my suffering in hand and to transform it. And therefore, through my parents, and the suffering they caused me, I became an artist. I was lucky enough to take this pain and do something positive with it, otherwise I could have been depressed, I would have passed the days under the supervision of a psychiatrist. I had the strength to be reborn after abandonment ».
Did she do it all by herself?
«Who helped me in this transformation was my grandmother, this absolute love. She was the land where I was able to plant my roots, she who encouraged me, who told me “go do what you feel like doing” ».
Anny Romand from cinema to novels
Anny Romand’s curriculum is very broad: as an actress it was directed by directors of the caliber of Jean-Luc Godard and Manoel de Oliveirashe acted in TV series and in theater, she was a translator, she is a photographer. And he wrote. In 2015 My grandmother of Armenia, published by the publishing house La Lepre in 2020. And now Abandonedalways for the same publishing house.
The story of a family
Anny Romand’s first novel: the story of the Armenian grandmother.
There are people who return, in the two books: the Armenian grandmother, who escaped the death march, which cost her people the genocide, the uncle entrusted on that occasion to strangers and fortunately found again, the mother born in France from a fleeting encounter . What sense does it make for you to write memoirs?
«The task I give myself as a writer is to delve into memories, into memory, into my past and to understand it thoroughly. But I wouldn’t define these books as just autobiographies. The idea is, but me I consider them novels, because of the writingbecause the way to organize memories and put them in a historical perspective, their reworking becomes a work of writinga literary work ».
The ghost of the father
Throughout the book the father hovers like a ghost. First she hesitates to look for him, then she decides to give herself a chance to get to know him. And to give him a second chance
My father abandoned me before I was born. With great violence to my motherwho was his woman, and who informed him she was pregnant, only said: who assures me it’s my son? She was a 19-year-old daughter of an Armenian refugee. She left, and she didn’t want to know anything about him anymore.
A merciless father or king?
Yet, writes Romand Anny little girl attributed to this father that he had refused her fantastic gifts. “Since he was rich, in his eyes he had all the qualities of the world. in any case, qualities different from those of his mother. He was rich, self-confident In society, he was gifted with humor and had a comfortable and serene life away from deprivation … A powerful and authoritarian man, a king, in short! ” he writes. Yet, he tells us “When I proposed to my mother to meet him, he kept telling me, don’t go there, don’t go thereit will be unpleasant to you, it will hurt you. You will not make it ».
Because I didn’t look for him right away
And she waited a long time before going to look for him …
“I understood that I did to protect my mother … Instead having found the courage to take this step gave me great confidence in myself. She gave me the strength to be reborn, after abandonment .. ». The meeting with the father, however, was a missed meeting, as it is told in the book.
“I think if you never met him my life was going to be a mess. The ghost of his absence would remain inside me. I understood that if he was my father I could create the relationship and that if he had not been kind to me, if he had not loved me even I could not be nice to him and take a stand. In this sense it was not a missed meeting: I met with my courage to have taken that step ».
“Who pushed me to meet him”
“I had a gynecological problem, an ectopic pregnancy. The day after the surgery the doctor who had operated on me asked me “what is your problem with your mother? What is your problem with bearing children? ” I never knew my father was my answer and then he encouraged me, “Go and see him, go and meet him”. This wound to my ability to generate woke me up, me made it more alive, more ready to face the challenges of existence. I understood that I existed in that moment in that moment I had the strength to be rebornI have put the abandonment behind me once again ».
Pain in his books is something you are confronted with, therefore, not something to be avoided at all costs. Is that so?
«Yes, exactly: the pain made me understand that life is a struggle and that you had to fight to survive, otherwise I would almost die. It’s like when they burned me with the baby bathI talk about it in the book, and I screamed with all my voice … “
Anny Romand. (Press Office)
What the step family did
At the center of the novel is the scene of the (failed) reunion. Which melts unexpectedly. There is a lot of ease in the father’s family in accepting his existence … maybe too much?
“It’s a form of violence, the superficiality with which they took note of my existence. The funeral scene, then…. My father’s wife is always very kind, we talk every year at Christmas, she sent me a gift. This year she sent her a wool scarf: “she is very beautiful, she told me, very warm”. And I always wear it “. What did you give me? Anything. I am still the one who gives gifts while they…, Twenty years have passed since that day that I presented myself at their door and nothing has changed.
“Because my brothers never looked for me”
«They don’t make me suffer, of course. No, I think theirs is a poorly functioning family, with structural problems, I was the hidden face of the family. And even though they knew I existed, they never looked for me. Because they were the family of a big bourgeois and I was the daughter of an Armenian refugee, and therefore there was a difference of social class, and it may be that they thought that my mother was on the hunt for a rich man to take away his money. ‘
Anyway, I thank them for allowing me to write the book.
For whom I wrote Abandonata
Why did you want to write Abandonata then? He had already won her victory, right?
«I wrote this book because it’s full of women like my mother because it is full of women who have had unwanted children, that they had to hidewho had to defend themselves .. Why them they feel like a mistake, like a fault, because they raise their heads and say it is not my fault, I have no fault to pay. And then for the children, because very often these people who are born without a father, they are very creative, interesting people, who must not feel ashamed. And feel free to express themselves ».
How do women today in France live the situation that your mother found herself facing?
«In France the climate is very different from when I was born thereand single mothers are respected, loved, helped. The birth control pill it is free for girls up to 18 years oldwho has to see the gynecologist for an obstetric problem does not pay the visit … maybe they will put in the Constitution the right to abortion“.
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