A modest man; a man who made effort and sacrifice his reason for being, manages through work to reach an economic and social status that due to his origins did not correspond to him, since it is assumed that a man from the countryside and who fought in World War II World in the army of the colonizing country does not correspond to certain privileges. I am referring to Amín Belhach, one of the protagonists of “Look at us dancing”, the new novel by the Moroccan Leila Slimani (Rabat, 1981), published, as usual, by Cabaret Voltaire.
Slimani picks up her characters where she left them at the end of the previous novel, “The Country of Others”, the first episode of a trilogy (now presumably the writer is immersed in the latest installment) that aims to cover the history of Morocco since it achieved independence until more or less the present time through the lives of a family and its different generations. Family that is marked by a mixed marriage between a Moroccan and a French woman. That meeting, friction or harmony (it depends on the moment) will determine the nature of the story that the author of “Canción dulce” wants to tell us.
Slimani has said that with this fictional cycle he intends to give dignity to a period in the history of his country. Understanding that dignity as a verisimilitude that distances that story from Manichean positions. The writer herself was surprised that her compatriots reproached her for giving a negative vision of the country. The perplexity marked the reaction of the writer: “I do not work for the Tourist Office of Morocco”.
A writer so well gifted for ellipsis and rhythm once again opts for a more classical discourse, even more nineteenth-century, like a kind of contemporary Balzac.
It is worth dwelling on the option of Slimani, who based on a personal experience and the adventures of his own family, renounces autofiction and opts for pure and hard fiction. She is convinced that imagination can illuminate dark areas of history.
In the presentation in Madrid of “Miradnos bailar”, the author recalled how, as a child, when she asked her grandfather about a huge scar on her stomach, he replied that it had been done by a tiger in the jungle in Germany. The girl Leila, under the fascination of the story, went to school and told her classmates the story of the tiger. Her irony came when they assured her that there were no tigers in Germany. Somehow, Slimani recalls, this anecdote reflects a probable definition of fiction: making it possible for there to be tigers in Germany.
The “tigers” of “Watch us dance” are more subject to the rigor of the story because a real context is necessary to accentuate one of the purposes of the novel that condenses Boris Pasternak’s opening quote so well: “Times do not take into account what I am, they force what they want on me. Let me ignore the facts.”
But the facts are stubborn and do not like to be ignored.
Let’s go back to Amín Belhach: enjoying a comfortable situation, he reluctantly agrees to the request of Mathilde, his wife: to build a pool that serves as refreshment and recreation on the farm. This partly domestic and personal decision has a meaning that goes beyond the domestic, it affects the community’s perception of seeing someone who until recently was seen as one of their own as a bourgeois and nouveau riche. If, in addition, your country was a former colony, the disaffection is greater: as if you were getting dangerously close to the former condition of a colonist. And it is from the decision to build a swimming pool that one of the most relevant questions of the novel is raised, in my opinion: to what extent is social ascent compatible with the full preservation of a series of strong and defining identities? : ethnicity, gender, class…?
The bad conscience ends up becoming a shadow that accompanies the main characters and that is manifested especially in the figure of Amin, the patriarch:
“Amín had advanced, step by step, like a turtle, a dignified and hard-working animal. He had advanced towards an apparently modest objective – a house, a wife, some children – and he had not understood that said objective, once achieved, would change”.
“Look at us dancing” also supposes the delivery of the narrative witness to the generation that comes from behind; especially Aicha, the daughter who, after studying in France, becomes a doctor and in whom the fact of aspiring to be a free and independent woman is emphasized as a conflicting identity for a patriarchal environment.
The pool has just been built weeks before May 1968. The period of the novel goes from that significant date until 1973. Morocco, after gaining independence, was on its way to being a modern and liberated country, but an increasingly corrupt monarchy protects Hassan II in a frustrated attack to close ranks and subject the country to strict control and abuse of power.
Reading “Watch us dance” it is easy to realize Slimani’s skill and success; We are before a writer who, book by book, shows us that the best can always be expected from her.
The validity and opportunity of his gaze is reflected, for example, in statements such as those recently made by Walid Regragui, Morocco’s soccer coach: “I feel grateful to France, I was born, educated and rose socially in France. I played football in France but I don’t forget the story of my parents”.
watch us dance
Leila Slimani
Translation of Malika
embarek lopez
Cabaret Voltaire
448 pages, 23.95 euros