Rilke & me – Writing an existential necessity

Thus, the necessity to write—Rilke’s “yes, I must”—gradually became an epistemological question: what does it mean to think through narrative form when truth itself has been silenced?

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Jeanne Bocca POPUP, 12 mai 2025©MDH

Writing Chloroform was not a literary choice but an existential necessity. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote* in Lettres à un jeune poète:

« Sondez la raison qui vous commande d’écrire… »
(Search for the reason that commands you to write…)

After almost two decades as a journalist at Radio France Internationale — covering Albania, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the region’s fraught transition toward democracy — writing remained a constant practice.

In that sense, writing was not simply an aesthetic practice but an act of fidelity, to experience, to loss, and to truth itself. Yet as this fidelity deepened, it also demanded reflection: if fiction was the only adequate response to repression, then what kind of knowledge does fiction produce? How does it think? Thus, the necessity to write—Rilke’s “yes, I must”—gradually became an epistemological question: what does it mean to think through narrative form when truth itself has been silenced?

* Rainer Maria Rilke, Lettres à un jeune poète (édition complète, avec les lettres de Franz Xaver Kappus), ed. Frich Unglanh, trans. Sacha Zilberfarb (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2020), 11.