The language I didn't choose

Five years after arriving in Switzerland, I can speak French, but I can't read it.
I'm back to being illiterate.
Me, who could read at the age of four. I know the words. When I read them, I don't recognize them. The letters don't correspond to anything.
"L'Analphabète" is a collection of autobiographical texts written between 1989 and 1990. Agota Kristof explains the circumstances under which she fled Hungary in 1956, at the age of twenty-one, with her husband and four-month-old daughter.

In her precise, chiselled language, Agota Kristof reveals that the real tragedy of her exile was the loss of her mother tongue. Without her words, she lost her identity. For her, learning to speak French was a real struggle to rebuild her life.
Inspired by her personal story, and by current events that place the migrant at the center of our century's history, La compagnie offers us a stage adaptation of "L'Analphabète", enriched by some of the author's other texts, under the title "Cette langue que je n'ai pas choisie".
Very sensitive to the identity issues closely linked to language, and to the idea of "linguistic exile": the struggle for each word, the trial and error until the saving power of writing, that's what she wants to bring to the stage.