Born in Lebanon in 1977 in the heart of a war that was to cause the exodus of more than a million of his compatriots, Dimitri Nasrallah was barely taller than three apples when he had to leave all his bearings, in the company of his family, to find refuge in Kuwait, Greece and Dubai, to finally settle in Montreal in 1988. Isolated, in the grip of grief and loneliness, the writer resented his mother for a long time who, forced to work twice as hard to offer them shelter, food and dignity, often left him to himself with his dark thoughts.
It was only as he got older that he became aware of the scale of sacrifices, obstacles, bereavements and the many invisible barriers and discriminations his mother had to face, to open the way for him to a better life. .
In his new novel, HotlineDimitri Nasrallah pays homage to the woman who gave him life, but also to all the women who have been able, with perseverance and resistance, to find in exile the strength to lay new foundations, to reinvent the contours of a life , to transform strangeness into comfort, thus widening the field of possibilities for their children.
In 1986, at the onset of winter, Muna Heddad sets down her suitcases in Montreal with her eight-year-old son Omar, in a cramped apartment that bears the ghosts and smells of the souls in exile who preceded them. They flee Lebanon, in the grip of a civil war which has already stolen a husband, a father. Hoping at first to be able to resume her job as a French teacher, Muna must quickly resign herself to finding a job in which her accent, the color of her skin and her cultural differences will not arouse mistrust.
Recruited to do telephone sales by a dietetic meal box company, the young mother discovered a talent for gaining the trust of customers and encouraging their confidences, as well as their adherence to the program. As strangers reveal their greatest secrets to her, Muna must deal with invisibility, isolation, the ghosts of her past, as well as a lonely and infinitely sad child. With the help of a group of recent immigrant women, she will rediscover the strength of mutual aid, friendship and ambition, finding the impetus to create new landmarks and begin this new stage of her life.
In a fine exercise in writing, the protagonist’s language is transformed at the pace of her journey, a tangle of Arabic and French in a mixture of impulse, doubt and convictions that Daniel Grenier’s translation renders marvelously well.
A breath of humanity
Hotline is a story of resilience spared from clichés, Dimitri Nasrallah having the intelligence to transform ready-made recipes into traps of prejudice. The author approaches, through a judicious collision with the genre of self help, the immense sacrifices that rooting imposes, the one that many would consider “perfect”. Muna’s story ends well, of course, but this happy ending does not come without the transformation of a few dreams into illusions, and a painful identity reconstruction.
Dimitri Nasrallah is not cynical, however, and never lets his critical point of view on systemic inequalities obliterate the part of humanity and kindness, the outstretched hands on both sides, which allow a young woman to find her place, her voice, her inner peace. A story that reminds us that hope is rooted in small things.