Leila Mottley | On the sidewalks of East Oakland

Leila Mottley was 17 when she started writing the story of a black teenager who has to sell her body to survive, in a poor neighborhood in the United States. Two years later, Walk the night has already been translated into 13 languages, she is the youngest author to be on the list of the prestigious Booker Prize and the New York Times listed her as one of the 10 most talented young African-American authors. Maintenance.

Laila Maalouf
The Press

Leila Mottley always knew that writing would be a part of her life, no matter what career she chose. At age 6, she was composing poetry; at 14, she had two novels to her credit, even if these remained in her drawers, and she is currently working on a new story, she confides on the phone, joined at her home in Oakland, in California.

Thus at the age when she was writing Walk the nighther first title to be published, her character Kiara wandered desperately through the seedy streets of her neighborhood in East Oakland.

In fact, this novel was born from a true story. In 2015, a scandal involving a large number of police officers and a young prostitute made headlines in the San Francisco area. Leila Mottley, then a young teenager, follows the case closely.

Her heroine, however, has nothing to do with the real victim, who is white. “I wanted to write this story from the perspective of a black teenager to show the vulnerability and the lack of protection of black girls”, says Leila Mottley who, in addition to having done a lot of research on the question, has gone so far to have his manuscript proofread by a young woman who has lived the experience of the street.

The violence of a neighborhood

Walk the night is the poignant story of a life that seems to have no way out. Kiara lives in one of those neighborhoods that everyone prefers to avoid. A neighborhood that could look like so many others, like that of Liberty City which comes to life in Barry Jenkins’ film Moonlightand whose alleys, basketball courts and grand boulevards we discover intimately in the novel…

Over the pages, we even come to imagine the adaptation to the big screen which could be inspired by it, despite the gap caused by a too frank translation of the dialogues.

Despite her own worries, Kiara, who has lived alone with her older brother since she was 15, takes care of her neighbour’s son, abandoned by a mother addicted to crack. “In a way, she wants to mother him and mother herself through him because she’s still a child; so she tries to capture those childhood moments with him,” says Leila Mottley.

When, one evening, a man offers Kiara money in exchange for her body, she sees the only way out. She begins to walk the streets until the day the police arrest her; but instead of arresting her, they will use her. Repeat.

“Start Conversations”

In telling the story of this young woman, the novelist explains that she sought to give a voice to all these black women who were victims of police violence – and sexual violence, moreover – but doubly invisible, in her opinion, having been sidelined by movements like Black Lives Matter, which have focused on male victims.

But what she wants, above all, is to paint a face on this underprivileged fraction of Oakland and its youth. “These black communities have a lot more to show than what the media represents. I love Oakland, but growing up, all I ever heard of my city was a demonizing description of it being put on the list of the most violent cities with the highest crime rates; I find that’s a very narrow way of looking at a city that’s multidimensional and vibrant. »

“We definitely have a lot of work still to do, but I hope the book can start conversations around the issue of sexual violence, and perhaps bring about tangible change by creating ways to denounce this kind of crime,” hopes Leila Mottley.

Walk the night

Leila Mottley

Translated from English by Pauline Loquin

Albin Michael
401 pages