Elsewhere I have written on Leïla Slimani, and will briefly do so again. Last night I read (as always in the German translation of Amelie Thoma with the title Der Duft der Blumen bei Nacht) Slimani’s slim ‘summing-up’ of her voluntary ‘locking-up’ – for one night only – in the Venetian Punta della Dogana; this being her contribution to her French publisher’s ongoing collection, “Ma nuit au musée”. Now, this, an idea that I initially found somewhat contrived – “Mickey Mouse” even, more suited to the ‘low’ culture of Disneyworld than the ‘high’ of the traditional European museum. Whereby that with vertical graduations of culture is relative and a matter of taste and circumstance: I remember, Orlando, circa. 1990, babe in arms, man at side; a memory as sunny and warm as the atmosphere in which it was created and lives still. Modest, perhaps, but nonetheless a highlight of this life.
Slimani herself is not absolutely convinced of the ‘higher’ purpose of the project nor of her qualification to speak on the contemporary art in the midst of which she will be stranded. But she is struggling with her novel and there is something about being alone, being ‘locked-up’, that is appealing enough to lead her to accept the proposal, reasoning her acquiescence as a consequence of her literary inheritance and ambitions; literary heroes – so many loners amongst them; her own unresolved conflict between an overwhelming desire for solitude and a peculiar restlessness. All this may well be so, but during her night of self-imposed confinement, other more personal motivations come to the fore.
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So it is that Slimani’s meditation on her own particular art of writing is embellished with those of others – for instance, Tolstoy, Woolf, Rushdie, Adnan – and, on this night, run parallel with her confrontation with forms of visual art that are not easy and are open to interpretation. And her interpretations can not be but reflective of her experience living between worlds; the Morocco of her childhood and the France of her adulthood, and always the Francophone which is her linguistic home and the Arabic which was never gifted her – but the essence of which is always there, somewhere.
When considering the 17th century building in which she now finds herself and the greater plight of Venice and the Notre Dame fire in Paris on the previous day, Slimani reflects upon the transient nature of cities and the structures that inhabit them. And she wonders where the life-enriching transcendent is to be found in an increasingly secular society, when religion and the sacred is abused, demolished? Always there in the poetic, in literature, she suggests. And whether with her own turn of phrase or extending upon those of others, her musings are thoughtful and clearly formulated – and very revealing of her writing life and the price paid for her obsession.
And personally revealing. Perhaps this was not Slimani’s intent, but somewhere through that night she is struck by the irony that she should choose this bizarre form of confinement for just one night, whilst years previously her father had been confined, imprisoned – no choice there, and unjustly so claims his daughter. And even when not actually deprived of their freedom, there was a generation of Moroccans like her parents who had been condemned to a life sentence anyway – a life in the shadow of colonialism, lives lived in a land claimed by others. Slimani writes with understanding and empathy of their plight – without reproach nor bitterness; only too aware of the later freedoms granted to her through circumstance.
We know Leïla Slimani returns to Paris, freed – for a time, at least – of the not so brutal, but also not trivial, shackles that freedom brings, and with the realization that in the whole scheme of things her burdens are governed by choice – and are to be endured or thrown asunder. She is fit again to write of those which are greater; borne by others in another place, another time. Tell another story. (The second of the trilogy, Regardez-nous danser, was published last year.)