With The country of others: War, war, war (Gallimard, 2020), the first part of a trilogy largely inspired by her own family history, Leïla Slimani took us to Morocco, somewhere between the intimate and the political.
From 1944 to 1954, just before the independence of the Moroccan kingdom in March 1956, this saga began with the Moroccan nationalist awakening and the struggles behind the scenes against the French colonial power, the slow emancipation of women, the tensions between modernity and traditions.
In watch us dance, volume II, we find the family of Amine and Mathilde in the postcolonial Morocco of the 1960s. Having left to study medicine in France, Aïcha, their daughter, will, during a summer visit to Morocco, meet of Mehdi, a young economics teacher nicknamed “Karl Marx”. Characters who are partly inspired by the figure of the Franco-Moroccan novelist’s own parents, born in Rabat in 1981, Prix Goncourt with Song gentle in 2016.
A political and sensual novel crossed by the wind of the time, while in Meknes and Casablanca we could also feel the upheavals of May 68. Alcohol, drugs and love are mixed there. We come across hippies in Essaouira, women in bikinis on the beaches, and even the silhouette of Roland Barthes, who taught at the University of Rabat in 1969 and 1970.
“I don’t think I realized how much, at that time and for my parents’ generation, people were extremely porous to everything that was happening in the rest of the world”, says Leïla Slimani from Lisbon , where she moved in June 2021 with her two children and her husband (“Because I wanted to”, she will say quite simply).
“The ’68 revolution, the hippie movement, anti-imperialism… Maybe I had the feeling that my parents were a little outside of it all, she continues, and I realized that, not at all, they were completely engaged in all these reflections and questions about identity. »
A betrayed generation
The novelist thus revives, in watch us dance, the emancipation movement, both private and intellectual, which shook part of Moroccan society. An enthusiasm curbed by the aborted coup of July 1971, a turning point in the modern history of Morocco, which has tensed the last thirty years of the reign of Hassan II. “Years of lead” marked by violent repression against democratic activists and political opponents.
Could we speak of a betrayed generation? As much by its own ideals and its recklessness as by the Moroccan monarchy which encouraged them? “Totally, believes the novelist. The great dreams of independence have been betrayed. And my generation was able to look sometimes very harshly at our parents, telling them, in a way, you betrayed your ideals and you betrayed us because what you bequeathed to us is not not live up to what you profess. »
“What they were asked to do, basically, was to live their life, to enjoy themselves, but not to get too involved, not to get too close to power. Basically, they have very little power, very little freedom. They live in something quite illusory”, she will also say, speaking of her characters.
Her first novel, In the garden of the ogre (Gallimard, 2014), painted a crude portrait of a woman enslaved by her libido, while raising the question of maternal love. A motif that is recurring in his work, even in the background, including in watch us dancewhere several female characters face this sometimes draconian reality.
The truth of the body
For the novelist, intimacy, the body and sensuality occupy a decisive place. “For me, the greatest truth is perhaps that of the body,” says Leïla Slimani. It is that which starts from sensations. That of the flesh, of the incarnation. For me, being alive is first of all that. First of all, it’s breathing, eating, watching, feeling the wind on your skin. This really carnal aspect of existence, it is absolutely essential for me. When I start working on a character, I always work first and foremost on his body. What did he look like ? Is he big or small? Does he eat a lot or not? Is it strong or fragile? And her view of the world actually derives from the body that I’m going to build for her. It’s very, very important to me. »
The more she writes, the more the writer understands to what extent it is a real obsession for her. “Maybe because I myself am obsessed with the idea of having a body. I may have left there to write. »
An obsession that draws part of its origin from motherhood, she also judges. In her eyes, the emotions that are provoked by motherhood are exciting, full of contradictions, extremely deep. “There is immense tenderness, sometimes there is detestation, sometimes even indifference. But motherhood is also physical. It’s carrying another being inside your own body, it’s also caring for someone else’s body. It intersects with so many areas of life…”
Being a mother is a “feeling so overwhelming”, she adds, that the subject seems inexhaustible to her. “Sometimes I think to myself that I would probably have been a totally different novelist if I hadn’t been a mother. That, without discovering the violence of this feeling—and when I say violence, it’s not necessarily negative—perhaps I wouldn’t even have become a writer. »