Issue 18: The Imminent Word

About to Speak

Annie Ernaux begins The Other Girl with the description of a sepia photograph: an infant posed upon a mound of scalloped cushions, the embroidered nightdress fastened by an oversized bow, the arms extended as though flailing in some arrested gesture. The image conveys more than stillness; it carries the sensation of imminence, of a body about to surge forward, to leap from the table, to cross the invisible threshold that separates the captured instant from life itself. It is this tension — the perpetual about to that never resolves — which endows certain photographs with their most haunting quality, as if they were always on the verge of speech yet condemned to silence.

From that first photograph Ernaux leads us into silence. The child she describes is not herself, as she once believed, but her elder sister Ginette, who had died two years before her birth. This sister was the invisible presence of the family, her existence hidden from view, her name never uttered. She lived only in the secrecy of a few photographs, in discreet visits to a cemetery, in objects handed down without explanation. Ernaux never dared to ask her parents about her sister. To do so would have felt obscene, catastrophic — she recalls Kafka’s paternal threat: “I will tear you apart like a fish.” The silence became law, and with it a form of memory.

At times people themselves resemble photographs. They stand before us with the stillness of images, always about to say something yet never speaking. Ernaux sees this in her parents’ portraits. In the photographs with Ginette they are young, smiling, full of energy; in those taken with her own presence, their faces are heavier, worn down by loss. The first child is absent but inscribed in the sorrow that has settled into their features.

Reading Ernaux, I recall the same sensation of imminence in my own work. In 2015, for a project called Cinco, I spent months photographing children with severe mental and physical disabilities. What struck me most was not only the children themselves, but the things that surrounded them: toys and books left untouched, objects that seemed to wait forever for gestures that never came. I felt it also in the heavy silence of the only couple among the parents who were still together, their faces bearing the strain of endurance. And later, when I showed the photographs to close relatives, I noticed how disturbed they became, as if the images touched an unspoken fear — the fear, when becoming parents, that a child might arrive marked by illness or limitation.

Ernaux’s text ends at the cemetery. In 1967 her father was buried in a grave beside Ginette’s. Even then, she and her mother pretended not to see the small coffin that had long been there. The denial was carried into the earth itself, as though speech must be excluded even from death. The photograph that once seemed about to leap, the parents who seemed about to speak, all resolved finally into gravestones: the ultimate silence.

What Ernaux makes visible is this condition of imminence, the sense of something always on the verge of articulation. It can be found not only in photographs, but also in people, in words, even in objects. They sometimes carry this suspended charge, as if life itself were caught in a pause, leaning forward without stepping across the threshold. To notice it is to steal a glance around the corner, into one of the hidden passages of existence — a place where everything is about to speak, but never quite does.