A [b]room of one's own

I was changing the sheets on my bed the other day and I noticed that they are banana-yellow. This puzzled me. Why have I got banana-yellow sheets?

If they were sand-coloured it would be understandable - they would fit in with
the whole Beach House ambience I’ve tried to create Chez Moi: my sea-blue quilt splashes over me as I sleep, and in winter I naughtily turn up the radiators full blast so that I can walk around my apartment in my bikini, a straw hat shielding me from the lamplight as I gently water my mini palm trees.

But these banana-yellow sheets just aren’t me.

And then I remembered that French and I used to have sheets like this. It seems that what must have happened is that when I finally decided to clamber out of my shackles and find a place of my own (a bed of my own), I could still feel the hot peppermint breath of French burning up my neck and like an automatism, I bought the kind of sheets that would best suit his tastes.

I guess I had an uninteresting power relationship with French: It was him who decided everything and I just went along with it, happier-than-Larry to be living in Paris.

Designated bedtime was much too early for a night-owl like me, but because French had to go to the office the next day and because if I read a book in the other room the crinkle of the pages turning would keep him awake, I’d find myself obeying the call to sleep and smothering miserable hoots in my pillow.

The apartment was decorated according to his tastes. The kitchen floor was swept with his brooms and in the anti-clockwise direction which is often attributed to the direction water goes down a sink in the northern hemisphere but the opposite of my southern hemisphere ways.

I was a prisoner in this apartment. But I’m not giving you a soggy story about a poor little bourgeoisie who pricked herself on hairpins while undoing her chignon, and who was imprisoned in a spacious apartment overlooking a Monoprix stocked with fancy ready-to-eats.

No, I was imprisoned inside myself. This was not the fault of French, who despite being an interesting character study is not a bad person. It was just that the particular dynamics that were born from the smashing and grinding together of French and Pinochiette quashed my normal initiative, passions and taste for anything sea-related. My roars were imprisoned deep inside me and all that could escape me were feeble squeaks.

When I finally had the courage to leave French and move to my new place, my current home, I unleashed my lioness within. Those first few days in my apartment I remember opening the cupboards and looking at all the objects inside, my things, touching the newly-bought broom, my precious, mine, mine, mine (the kind of mentality that keeps capitalism kicking).

I was over-joyed to be able to close the door and sit in my very own (rented) space (although admittedly the first day I moved in my bathroom was leaking and due to some French glitch, instead of hosting a plumber, I had two truckloads of dashing pompiers stomping around in my bathroom complaining that I didn't have any coffee and writing official reports on how many pompiers it takes to stop an itsy bitsy leak).

In France, and many other places, as late as the 1960s women couldn't open bank accounts without their husbands' permission. I find myself lucky that I live in an era where financial independence and intellectual freedom are a possibility for me and where I have managed to forge a space for myself, like Virginia Woolf's metaphorical and physical room of one's own.

On the weekend, while thinking about all this, I came across the sculpture by Mâkhi Xenakis called Les Folles D'enfer in the gardens of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital.

This sculpture is a memorial. In this place Louis XIV locked up what him and his cronies saw as the "undesirable" elements of society - poor people. Later, the general hospital became a hospital for women and I found this information on it:

At the end of the 17th century, according to the uses of the era four categories of women were emprisoned there. "Bad" adolescents were kept enclosed in the "Correction" section, with the idea that they could be rehabilitated. Women labeled as prostitutes filled the "Common" section. Women who had been imprisoned with or without sentences were quartered in the "Jail," and inhabitants within the "Quarter of the Insane" were those who usually had been sent there by their families. In 1679, the institution housed 100 women who qualified as "mad" and 148 women with seizure disorders. By 1833, the numbers had increased to 117 insane women under treatment, 105 insane women labeled as sick, 923 women with mental illnesses characterized as incurable, and 266 women with seizure disorders. (Charcot Library Archives, Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris)

I also read a review of the sculpture which mentioned that here, in the sculpture, the women are finally liberated. I'm not so sure. They are cordoned off by rope and there is a sign that says ne touchez pas which makes me think that, even in art, they are still imprisoned and segregated.