Between tradition and modernity. In Morocco there was a moment, right after independence, when it seemed that the country could make a leap forward. If in El país dels otres (Angle/Cabaret Voltaire), the novel with which Leïla Slimani won the Libretto prize, she told the story of her grandparents, in Mireu com ballem (Angle/Cabaret Voltaire) she develops it, but focuses on her parents’ generation, between Aïcha, a young woman who goes to study medicine in Alsace – and returns – and Mehdi, who will be part of the country’s elite until he falls from grace. In between, attempts at generational change.
It is the second part of the trilogy about his family, but Slimani takes the freedom he needs to enter the characters: “Imagination can help you understand reality and people, so I made up my parents, and from fiction and imagination I can sometimes have a certain sense of truth – says the author-. We can only try to write it with all the sincerity of our soul and heart, but it does not mean that it is true”.
Despite the fact that it narrates a turbulent era, what was most difficult for him was not to explain the repression of Hassan II: “Sometimes you ask the people who lived during this dictatorship and they tell you: ‘Oh, I was very happy, we used to dance’. And you don’t understand: how do they dance? It is also a book about happiness. When you are a writer it is too easy to judge and think how it is possible that people danced while there were those who died and suffered. It’s always the same. We all dance while others suffer”.
Sometimes it can be hypocrisy, but also a need to move forward: “Maybe our children will ask us how we could dance and have fun while the planet was dying or while the Ukrainians were dying. It is the story of the human condition. There is a lot of suffering, there are children who go hungry, there are terrible things and at the same time we love each other and we dance and sometimes we are obsessed with what dress I will wear tonight to be with the person I am in love with, and that is what is so touching and beautiful about human beings”.
But he doesn’t forget the repression, he explains: “I did a lot of research to understand how it worked in Morocco, but I wanted to show that despite the exotic vision that many people have of what dictatorship in an Arab country could be in the sixties, it was actually very similar to the situation of the Salazar regime or the Franco regime”.
Then, in the middle of the cold war, the world lived in two poles, but there were attempts to go further: “My father was a hippy and a Marxist and was very involved with the communists and all the fishing. He is the other side of this generation. They wanted to change the world, they were pan-Arabists, I was very inspired by the leaders of Africa who were looking for a third way between communism and capitalism, until this whole ideal failed”.
One of the subplots leads the reader to follow the hippies in Essauira: “The Moroccans were fascinated and shocked, because they seemed like addicted children who rejected the modernity they wanted. It is another facet of colonialism, because the aim of the book is to show that there was no revolution in Morocco. When the French left, the Moroccan bourgeoisie replaced the colonizers. The seventies were just the continuation of colonialism”. The generation of May 1968 “had many dreams and ideals, but they are the generation that in the eighties and nineties became so capitalist and destroyed the planet”.
“Perhaps my generation or that of my children will be the one that will really change the identity of Morocco. It takes many generations to decolonize spirits and bodies”, he concludes. We will have to see it in the third volume, or imagine it.
