Nations and nationality. Land and people. Well worth contemplating at any time, but more so in these anxious days as an unjust war continues on the European continent, as a sovereign country is invaded and by a more powerful aggressor declared to as such not exist; these tangled roots of conflict inextricably entwined in the historical paths of the new nation states that were formed in accordance with the treaties made at the end of World War I, only to be viciously torn asunder, to then re-form (and again …) in the post World War II years as the old colonial powers retreated further out of lands strewn wide and two distinctly different conceptions of freedom and governance faced off and redefined the geo-political order. During those years, conflicts burgeoned in all corners of the world, one such being that region in the north-west of the African continent called the Maghreb.
In the Country of Others is the first novel in a planned series from Leïla Slimani; set in Morocco and exploring the fraught relationship between the peoples of that country and the French colonial power, and framed between the years immediately following the Second World War and the splintered nationalistic allegiances and revolutionary fervor of the mid-1950s that were to lead to independence. I should say, though this novel is removed with the war that rages in the Ukraine as I write – geographically, culturally, historically, that conflict informs and casts a shadow over all my reading at the moment, Slimani’s book is a powerful literary rendering of just one of the many failures of reconciliation left over from the last century and in that sense is informative of the situation in the conglomerate of states that (re-) formed after the break up of the Soviet.
As in her previous works of fiction, Slimani develops her narrative from very real circumstances, but this time very close to home indeed, and in every way. Home, here, is not the Parisian suburbs and their contemporary, middle-class milieus but, rather, the post-war colonial Morocco and a family blended out of French and Moroccan, like that of Slimani’s, and, as they, enmeshed in a profound and sometimes violent struggle for personal and cultural identity.
Calling upon an array of analogy and metaphor, like that of the hybrid orange and lemon trees that bring forth the most bitter of fruit, and through some wonderfully realized descriptive passages and imagery – visual and sensual – of a landscape and its inhabitants, at once harsh and seductive, juxtaposed against a reality defined by extreme hardship and poverty and the indignities of subjection that bring forth not the best in man, Slimani tells her story of the Belhaj family; seeking to take root upon harsh ground that is sparse in the emotional nourishment needed to grow and flourish.
Slimani’s characters, and with them their very personal searches for freedom and meaning, converge in Meknès and on the Belhaj farm in the rugged hilly terrain beyond. Mathilde sought an escape from the rural Alsatian monotony and found one in the small, dark and beautiful man out of the Maghreb, and Amine saw in the young French woman – sturdy, blonde, vivacious – a just reward for services rendered to a land not his own. In the hills sufficiently remote from the stringent cultural norms of the medina, Amine will shed himself of the traumas of war and realize his father’s interrupted dream of a prosperous fruit farm and, at the same time, raise his family insulated from the gossip and politicking of the old town and the old ways. But, old ways are hard to shed and, for this uncommonly attractive pair, the passion that promised so much, is hard to sustain.
For Mouilala, Amine’s mother, her only freedom is to be found shrouded in rigid custom and widowhood, and the confines of house and terrace. Who are we to say freedom must know no boundaries. And for the lovely young sister Selma, it is in the pursuit of Western pleasures; not knowing that pleasure comes at a cost. For the angry, oft absent brother, Omar, held captive to an ideology and the tricolore, freedom will come only in its demise.
There is the baby, Selim (to be heard from later I expect), and then there is Aïcha. Oh, and what a girl she is! (I allow myself to imagine her as Slimani’s maman!) For the greater part of the novel she is about seven years old. We go to school with her on her first day; to a Catholic institution in the city, at the insistence of Mathilde. A disaster to be sure, but a heralding in of many colorful narrative strands to come. There is nobody like Aïcha; neither physically nor intellectually. She gives back as much as she gets from the pampered colonial daughters, and in Jesus she finds a friend. (And has the good sense to keep this to herself.) And in the nuns, allies; for it is – perhaps, surprisingly – clear to them that she is an exceptional little girl.
Slimani allows all her characters’ viewpoints to come to the fore, but though it’s the voice of Mathilde that initially reverberates most, that sets the tone, that drives the narrative forward from the time of their arrival in Morocco in 1947, in the end it’s Aïcha’s way of seeing that lingers most. Once she lets us inside her precocious head, crowned with untamed locks, we see the people and the land, both near and dear, as a child would for sure – with love and anger, with envy and with confusion – but there is something more, an uncanny wisdom rooted in something more, something that makes her seem as old as the earth beneath her feet.
There is warmth and kindness in this novel, and humor. But, there are also episodes that reflect the most extreme conception of manhood and honor. I sometimes struggled to reconcile the Amine who was clearly in many ways besotted with Mathilde and often exhibited pride in her gifts and tenacity, with the enraged man who harangued her, spat upon her and beat her, and who married the pregnant teenage Selma off to his former subservient arms comrade now foreman, the aged and maddened by war(s), Mourad, so as to spare the disgrace of the family – or his own shame. But, infuriating from a contemporary Western perspective, are also the generations of women who reconcile themselves to their lot in life and love, deny their debasement, change the subject and move on. Or seemingly so. What is it that they do with their pain and anger? What will Mathilde and Selma do?
The last pages of the novel are a knock out. As the country verges towards mayhem, Amine and Mathilde and the children visit their friends – the magnificent Dragan, an affluent Hungarian doctor and his French wife Corinne – at their house on the sea. Mathilde boldly exhibits all her strength, swimming against the tide, her eyes fearlessly on the far boundaries where ocean meets the sky. Amine, though, is at a loss, flaying, fearful of showing weakness (he can’t swim), and so it is this little family of his that must rescue his clothes from the coming high waters. Returning to their farm, the family watches as in the distance the colonists houses burn. It is 1955 and an era nears its end. What the new will bring?
Gladly we may not have to wait too long for this question to be answered, for the second part Regardez-nous danser (“Look at us dance”) was recently published in France, and hopefully an English – or German, in which I read this first book – translation is therefore not far away. The Gallimard site has a short video which I embed here – to whet the appetite. The auto-translated English subtitles are a little peculiar, but one gets the gist! It seems we are to be flung into the sixties with all its promise and broken promises. I should mention, because it is a notion that I very much took from my reading of the first installment, Leïla Slimani explicitly remarks upon the idea of family as a microcosm in many respects of a country – imbued with its own language, political and social norms, inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies. Even readers like affirmation!
Of course, lots of good stuff around in English about the first book. For instance, a review and a longer magazine piece in The New York Times but they are subscription dependent, so here is an accessible review by Tessa Hadley in The Guardian.
Finally, corresponding to my reading of In the Country of Others, a book review, or rather a long essay in the LRB (Vol. 44 No. 3 · 10 February 2022) by Jeremy Harding came to my attention. Something I may normally have only skimmed through, suddenly held more than passing interest. And whilst the book in question (Tazmamart: Eighteen Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison by Aziz BineBine, trans. by Lulu Norman, pub. by Haus, 2021), is the experience of one man’s survival under the draconian conditions of the notorious (and “secret”!) prison, Tazmarmart, in the 1970s and beyond, it is an interesting bookmark to Slimani’s novel (and I expect probably even more so to the second part). Read together, it certainly makes plain that the independence that is on the horizon as Slimani’s novel ends in 1954, may very well have curtailed the Franco-Spanish hegemony in the region, but the years of colonial subjugation leaves a political vacuum that the returning Alawi dynasty struggles to fill without oppression, violence and corruption. The particular brand of parliamentary monarchy that was adopted, giving wide-ranging powers to the king, fails to stem inherent and new ethnic and religious conflicts, and the nation finds itself a pawn in Cold War power games and struggles to find it’s place in the simmering cesspool of regional conflicts of interest.