Youth literature: “L’amoureuse de Simone”, the pretty book about two little girls who love each other
We don’t count for butter is the inclusive youth publishing house co-founded by Elsa Kedadouche and Caroline Fournier. Their idea? Publish stories that change and open the field of possibilities. Soon we will find Leo up there, by Mélody Kedadouche and Adam Rosier, who tell the daily life of an atypical little boy, his hypersensitivities and his great imagination. Or My name is Julieby Caroline Fournier and Laurier Le Renard, who talks about identity.
And the publishing house released last March Simone’s lover, for which Elsa Kedadouche wrote the text and Amélie-Anne Calmo the illustrations. The story of a little girl, Simone, in love with another little girl, Makéda, who tells what she feels. Moments of pure joy, of incomparable complicity, but also of frustration and sorrow, when disagreements and misunderstandings arise. A “thunder which rumbles in the belly”, an “arrow in the heart”, a “magic” which cannot be explained.
“Perhaps being in love is like seeing stars in broad daylight?” asks Simone, her head in the clouds. One thing is certain, these poetic pages form a beautiful work to put in all hands, and a strong story of a necessary visibility. Interview with its author.
Terrafemina: Why did you want to write this love story?
Elsa Kedadouche: It’s a theme that is strong in my life, that I put at the center – love and romantic relationships. For me, it’s universal, while experienced in such a multiple and unique way by everyone.
I like girls, I’m a lesbian, and I realized that there were plenty of characters missing from children’s literature. Anyway, if there was one that I missed as a little girl, it was this one. The fact of not having been able to meet characters like Simone and Makéda, of not having been able to read love stories between two little girls, I missed a lot.
As a child, I did not realize this because for me, unfortunately, homosexuality did not exist until I was 14 years old. To be able to discover these kinds of stories at a younger age, to know that this relationship, these feelings were possible, and in a way as simple as Simone’s lover proposing it, would have completely changed my life.
Homosexuality is not a subject in Simone’s lover.
EK: It’s not a subject and that’s how I live my love stories most of the time. It happens that we are two women, but it is not a subject that we are two women. So obviously, sometimes it becomes. Only, it was very important to me that this joyous part of living simply and concentrating on the essentials, and on what rests us all – the strong feelings, the difficulty of getting along, the harmony to be maintained as a couple – can exist.
It’s also a children’s book that illustrates the feelings of that age: loving someone and wanting to spend all your time with them. Far from the sexualization that the LGBTQIA+ community very often faces.
EK: Indeed, non-hetero relationships are very much reduced to sexuality. The problem with the word “homosexuality”, moreover, is that there is “sexuality” in it. Some people even prefer “homosentimentality” to it. Simone’s lover is a book that talks about love and feelings: what happens in the heart, what love does in the head, how you can feel and everything you can go through when you are in love. Frustration, joy, fear, momentum, the desire to be connected.
Obviously, we weren’t going to insert a sexual plan into a children’s book. And yet, we still received comments to that effect. Very violent words that accused us of pedophilia, from Internet users who immediately thought that as we are talking about two girls, it was about sexuality. It is an associated fantasy and fear, those of the sexual question linked to a non-normative desire.
This title, Simone’s loveris a bias.
EK: We chose to display this title knowing that it would provoke attraction or rejection, but that it would leave neither neutral nor indifferent. We were aware of that and we took a risk. A risk in the sense that we knew that from the outset, people would not even touch this book because of its subject, literally. Readers like booksellers, who today refuse to reference it, or hide the title on their shelves, out of personal convictions or so as not to be in conflict with their customers, we were told. Under the pretext, too, that “it was not for [leur] public”.