InvestigationStromae sings it. Blanche Gardin shows it. Authors dissect it and feminists claim it. Banished from conversation for a long time, will poo soon make its appearance at social dinners?
In his latest album that went gold in three days, Multitudereleased on March 4, the singer Stromae has a funny traveling companion, who follows him in several songs. “Waking up is easy/The poo is perfect, I don’t even have to wipe it off” (in Have a good day). “There’s my poo that ended badly / I’m going to have to scrub for an hour and a half” (in Bad day). Mocked on social networks for these recurring references to excrement, the Belgian reacted by explaining that, “at the time, [il] have[t] literally hands in”, a nod to his new condition as a dad and the related diaper changes. A few days earlier, the Portuguese PSG player Danilo Pereira had also aroused the hilarity of the Canal+ journalist who was interviewing him, and a tsunami of comments on social networks, declaring: “Yes, it feels good to have scored, especially after the poo I did”in reference to a defensive error.
Poo, of which each human being produces around 50 kilos a year, has long remained invisible. Taboo? Even the journalist who has to contact a researcher or an author who has written on the subject sees the embarrassment pointing the tip of her nose. Using the word “caca” in the subject line of the email is a spam blast. Feces? Too stuck. Microbiota? Too hypocritical. “I am at your disposal to talk about poo whenever you want”replied one of the people contacted, most naturally in the world.
“In almost all languages, there is a very brief word for poo, as if talking about it was already getting dirty. In general, it’s an almost childish word, perhaps to play it down, to trivialize it. In short, to say “caca” or “popo” would be to leave it in the universe of childhood, which would make it more acceptable”realized Caroline Balma-Chaminadour, whose The (Very Serious) Book of Poo was published in 2018. Éditions Jouvence was a little hesitant to use the word on the cover. “We knew it wouldn’t be easy for readers to checkout without blushing”remembers the editor, Charlène Guinoiseau-Ferré.
Far from the cracra
With us, it is the release in 2015 of the book of the young German Giulia Enders, The discreet charm of the gut (Actes Sud), translated into more than 40 languages, which was undoubtedly a turning point. In France, nearly 1.3 million copies have been sold. With its two pages of sketches of the seven categories of saddles, its young blonde and elegant author, its emerald green cover, we found ourselves catapulted far from the cracra associated until then with what we have in the belly. Derived from the book, the “Microbiota” exhibition, held at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, in Paris, until 2019, allowed to see and touch replicas of poops of different aspects, but especially to place them in a larger biological context. These strange forms then seemed to become more respectable, once considered as products of our “second brain”, the new rank to which the intestine had just been promoted.
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