Tag: In the Country of Others

Pas de deux

pub. Luchterhand (2022)

Le Pays des autres 2: Regardez-nous danser (read by me in German as Schaut, we wir tanzen, and available in English translation as Watch Us Dance) continues Leila Slimani’s family saga; a fictional dive into the colorful, often murky and treacherous depths of her own dynastic history, the first part of which I wrote enthusiastically about here and which ended with the beginning of the end of colonial rule in Morocco.

When the story continues, it is the summer of 1968 and more than a decade has passed since Morocco gained its independence from France (in 1956), but the country is struggling now under another – this time home-grown – brand of tyranny: defined through its authoritarian monarch, a brutal police and judicial system in cahoots with a corrupted elite and a patriarchal hegemony. It is to this Morocco that Aïcha, who so entranced with her intelligence and originality as a little girl, returns after some years studying medicine in Strasbourg. For one summer – and then perhaps a lifetime. One is tempted to say: she returns to the fold. But that is something for sheep, and an instinctive follower is this young woman not. Nor lost, nor castout. Rather it is to the bosom of her family in Meknès that she returns; their fortunes having risen in the ensuing years and now with a place amongst a burgeoning new marocaine bourgeoisie. The reader remains alert still to Aïcha’s contrariness: her self-possession and her selflessness; her wanting to please and her not giving a fig; her intellectual rationality and discipline and her emotional inner-life and flights into religious mysticism. One empathizes with Aïcha, with each dilemma she faces (and faces down) – her love of family, of friends and two nations; and the loyalties demanded and the conflicts that ensue – always knowing that the latest will be not the last.

And because she so fascinated me in In the Country of Others, I concentrate on Aïcha (and I suspect Slimani developed her character to be the focus – clearly inspired by her mother but also with a good dose of self one could think), others in the Belhaj family have central moments; both individually and in their interactions amongst each other. (The changing perspectives are – along with her blissfully short and elegant sentences – a defining quality of Slimani’s writing.) Aïcha’s parents, Amine and Mathilda, of course: the very personification of two nations in co-habitation; each with their own truth, intimately attached and profoundly detached, forgiving and unforgiving in equal measure. It is not always clear who is controlling whom. But there is a sort of love, that is frayed, tested, rarely acknowledged – and a lot of regret. The radical choices of Amine’s siblings, Omar and Selma, have only become more so since the first book. But this story here is one of more youthful years spent during a time of immense social and political upheaval, and so Aïcha’s path is very much juxtaposed against that of her younger brother Selim – restless, sexually awakened in ways unexpected. As Aïcha returns to the nest so does Selim take wing.

Aïcha pursues her career in obstetrics. Aïcha marries Mehdi – once, theoretically, a Marxist, now, practically speaking, beholden to the government. The book ends in 1971; the king has survived an assassination attempt, and Aïcha has brought her own child into the world.

Explicit in the title, dancing can be extended from the very reality of the clubs and bars of Casablanca and beyond where the young of Morocco gather to a metaphorical place; for it is a heady time of post-colonial uncertainty when power dynamics have changed and can be visualized as two parties skirting around each other, conscious of their position in any one moment, but unsure of their next step, and this reflected in the age-old story of when boy meets girl, of codes and signals, of swirling skirts and feigned youthful insouciance. Dualities abound in Leïla Slimani’s narrative, and this series could be well described as a pas de deux, whereby here there are no clear partitions; each blends into the next; from the entrée to the adagio and with some variations. I await with anticipation the continuation and culmination (coda) – presumably due from Gallimard this year or next.

Did I mention the translation? No, I did not. Translators should always be credited. I know enough to be quite confident that Amelie Thoma captures Slimani’s literary voice beautifully in German. (Of the English translation I cannot say, but Sam Taylor has creds so to speak!)

Whose country is it anyway?

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.

Excerpt for the opening of “In the Country of Others” by Leïla Slimani, pub. Penguin, 2021.

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.

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