Leila Slimani: "It takes a long time to decolonize bodies, minds, places"

There are writers capable of crossing space and time to offer us a mirror of our own lives, our changes, the twists that led us here.

And this is the case of Leila Slimani, an author who bears in her own flesh all the signs of our era: as a woman and as a Frenchwoman born in Rabat to a Moroccan father and a French-Algerian mother, she has known all the nuances of miscegenation and integration, but also the exclusion, the misgivings before the different.

And she has dug deep into all of this to sow a work, El país de los otros, whose second installment is now published in Spain.

Slimani (Rabat, 1981; winner of the Goncourt Prize in 2016) receives

in Lisbon, where she has settled in to live with her family in a different stage, sheltered by the calm and kindness that is breathed in Portugal after times difficult in France, where the aggressiveness that he experienced on the networks during the pandemic made him close his profiles and withdraw into his privacy.

Leila is ill, recently released from the emergency room with a bad cough and great discomfort, but the antibiotic and the will keep her up for this conversation in the Casa do Alentejo, a 17th-century palace with a powerful oriental aesthetic that seems to place us in her native Morocco.

Has it been more difficult to investigate the history of your family or that of Morocco?

The one from Morocco.

Because my family has inspired me, but I have invented a lot.

As soon as something is missing, I make it up.

I have family stories that they have told me, anecdotes that I don't know if they are true or false, that has not been complicated.

It has been more difficult to find out about the history of Morocco.

And what have you learned?

What has surprised you about the history of Morocco?

Everything in the background surprised me.

I knew that the Hassan II regime was one of very, very harsh repression.

But I have investigated torture very precisely, the events of 1965, and I was not aware of the level of violence and cruelty.

And, above all, how was it possible for my parents' generation to know that all that existed by their side and that they were happy at the same time.

Every time I asked them about their memories, his response was: "Oh, we were so happy!"

And that's what surprised me the most.

See how while they were dancing, partying, studying or discovering a form of freedom, at the same time they lived under a dictatorship.

Did they suffer that repression in the family?

There was some detainee, locked up for days blindfolded.

But not.

We have not suffered like other families.

It was known that this existed and that it was not necessary to speak, that it was necessary to be careful.

But no one was directly a victim.

After a first installment focused on the generation of his grandparents —a French woman married to a Moroccan—, this second part of the saga focuses on that of his parents.

People were wrong to think that decolonization consisted of a paper that said that we were no longer a colony.

It was much more complex than that.

Decolonization is a brutal phenomenon and it takes a very long time to decolonize bodies, minds, places.

Traces always remain in all areas, in the buildings or in the language.

And what do we do?

Do we reject it?

Do we do something with it to define a new identity?

It is an extremely difficult process and my generation is perhaps the first capable of approaching it without hatred, with the necessary perspective, without the anger and bitterness that previous generations had.

We speak French, we have neocolonial buildings, etc., but we are Moroccan and independent.

We're free.

And that is what I wanted to show, that all this takes a long time.

But do you agree with that feeling of disappointment?

Whoever aspired to a Marxist revolution will be disappointed, for example.

Or those who imagined a great traditionalist revolution, a return to Islam.

Those who thought that independence would bring freedom, education for all, less poverty and less inequality saw that it was too big or an idealistic dream.

Yes, there was disappointment of many people.

And there were also many who managed to profit.

She describes how her French grandmother suffered exclusion in Morocco.

And the Moroccan daughter of this one of hers suffered it in France.

Is racism universal?

Two-way?

It is universal, yes.

We are talking about a mixed couple that drags the conflict between the two cultures.

In the first book there is a more frontal, more brutal racism.

And in the second attempt to show the social shock.

In Morocco, a rich man can behave with exactly the same cruelty and contempt towards a poor man as a Frenchman towards a Moroccan.

Racism has several faces, but in the end what remains is the hatred of one another, the contempt for who we consider weaker.

In a way, the Moroccan elite behaved just as the French colonists had behaved towards the indigenous people.

I question all the logics of domination, whether of a racial, social or gender nature.

But at the same time there are mechanisms to fight for that to change, so that people become aware of their right to dignity, to respect, to be women, poor,

black or arab

That is why my work takes place over a long period of time, to show that there are universal and terrible things that we are up against.

But the world changes, despite everything.

Generation after generation, there is a desire to stand up and fight.

"Why do I write? Maybe because it helps me give up all the lives I won't have," says Leila Slimani.Enrique Escandell

Does this hatred remain in Morocco and France?

In Europe more than in Morocco.

In Morocco there is racism towards those who come from sub-Saharan Africa.

But honestly, I wouldn't say it's a racist country.

It evolves quickly.

Europe, on the other hand, has a much more entrenched history of racism and I have the feeling that this is now coming back with force.

When I was growing up, if someone openly said they were racist, everyone would reject it.

Today there are a lot of people who declare themselves racist and who become adored and followed stars on social networks.

Our acceptance of racism has changed a lot across Europe in general.

And that is very hard.

Do you yourself feel in the country of others?

Both in Morocco and in France?

I would say yes because I don't feel I belong to anything.

But it is not a negative feeling, it is linked to my character, to my personality, to my profession as a writer, which makes me always look at things with a little distance, but also with a lot of love and admiration.

I live in the country of others because the others are very present in my life, in my mind and in my work.

I also perceive what may be snobbish and bourgeois in saying that.

From my position it is easy.

I can feel myself in the country of others and such, but there are so many people who really suffer from it.

People for whom immigration is a tear, who lose everything and who really live in the country of others.

So I have a bit of reluctance to put myself in that position.

I must also say that when I return to Morocco, I feel more and more that I am coming home.

And I've been away for 20 years.

And Paris or France, are they no longer your home?

[Thinks for a long time].

I don't know if Paris can be anyone's home.

Don't know.

It is too beautiful, too big, too hard.

It is a large uninhabitable house.

In the pandemic, hate lived on the networks.

Has it gotten harder to live there after that?

Before the pandemic, we all had a very, very fast pace and these two years of pause have made us think: but what is this?

Why do I waste so much energy?

Why this need to write one book after another, to continue creating?

Maybe it's my relationship with time that has changed, I want things to slow down.

I have worked for 10 hours every day for 20 years.

I've been like this since I was 18.

I don't know, I'm tired.

"People make love, young or old, Islamists or liberals, everyone," says the writer. Enrique Escandell

Why Lisbon?

Don't know.

C'est la vie!

For being halfway between Morocco and France?

Or for peace of mind?

Yeah, maybe to get a little closer to home.

I could give you many answers, I can invent them.

Many.

Because it's quieter, the people are friendly, the weather is nice, or because I can work.

But not.

In life, we often don't know why we do things, we just do them.

I only know that I am here.

Because?

No idea.

Nostalgia is perceived for a Morocco on the brink of disappearance.

Has the country of your childhood disappeared or remains?

That Morocco is still very present, although you have to imagine it.

When I was a child, it was a rural country, there was no electricity in the countryside and there were places where it was pitch black after six in the evening.

People lived by candlelight.

That has changed today, but many things have remained in culture, music and our relationship with nature.

We have a very strong relationship with the land.

And the monarchy?

Have you known how to coexist with democracy in Morocco?

I am a novelist, not a political scientist, I tell stories.

But I have the feeling that the country has evolved, the rights have evolved.

People are more aware of their freedoms and are more willing to defend them.

There is still a long way to go, especially in terms of sexual, women's, homosexual and minority rights.

But, in general, I don't think that democracy and monarchy are things that cannot go hand in hand.

Why would it be like this for Morocco if it is not for Swedes or Spaniards.

Break sexual taboos, enter the most difficult secrets.

Do you see sexual emancipation possible?

Yes, in fact, it exists.

People make love, young or old, Islamists or liberals, everyone.

The difficulty is in assuming it publicly and living it in the light.

That is more difficult.

But I think that Morocco, unlike other Arab countries, is undergoing a cultural transformation.

It is in the process of accepting a certain modernity with respect to other Arab countries.

When I see the relationship with Israel, the legalization of therapeutic cannabis or the team that has triumphed in the World Cup, made up of people who have dual nationality, who live between two countries and whose first reaction is to dance with their mothers on the field game... Morocco is also that.

It is the country that lives open to many other countries because there is not a Moroccan family that does not have a member living in Spain, France, Germany or wherever.

It is in the process of opening up, of discovering a modernity that people don't even suspect.

It's going to surprise people a lot.

You preferred to underline your identity as a woman and not as a Franco-Moroccan.

But her work leads her to this facet.

What is your identity?

Today I feel that it is neither one nor the other, both are insufficient.

What now interests me most as an identity is the intimate, who I am, my history, my feelings, my emotions, my past and my desires.

I'm Leila.

In the end, it is useless, artificial and irritating to see people spending so much energy and time all day to claim their claim here or there and believing that this is enough to know who they are.

It's not enough for me.

To say that I am a woman and that I am Moroccan, of course.

I am also French, but that is not enough.

Basically, it is from there that I want to write.

You left social networks after receiving a lot of hate and also love.

Because?

First, because they made me waste a lot of time.

I don't care about hate, it doesn't really affect you, there's nothing there but an exchange of something that doesn't exist.

On the other hand, I don't feel like being wanted there.

I don't feel like getting

giving me little hearts when I say something.

For a writer, it's not good.

We don't write to be loved, to be liked or to collect stupid comments like: “Oh, that's great, I adore you, that's cool, thank you”.

No, that doesn't interest me.

In fact, I don't want to know what people think of me, or what they think of what I think.

I don't want them to know where I am or with whom, or what I do.

It is impudent and lacks interest.

And I don't understand why they do it.

My life is mine and I don't want to show it.

Slimani, photographed at Casa do Alentejo, a 17th-century palace in Lisbon, where she moved from Paris.

"I don't know if Paris can be anyone's home. I don't know. It's too beautiful, too big, too hard," she says. Enrique Escandell

What matters most to you?

The truth or the imagination?

They are exactly the same.

We arrive at the truth by imagination.

If we could not imagine, we would never arrive at the truth.

Imagination is a process of discovery that allows us to arrive at the truth.

Nothing is true, there are no true stories, they always have a point of view.

I can tell a memory and my sister will tell it in another way, they will be two different stories.

Which of them is true?

We do not know.

The only truth is that of the heart and emotion.

It is not like that of a court.

Literature is not concerned with this truth, but with what we arrive at through the imagination.

His work reflects Morocco and France as two worlds without connection, without a thread of continuity.

Is that how you live it?

That's how I always feel.

Every time I go somewhere I get the impression that the other worlds don't exist.

That's why I don't really miss anything.

I don't have nostalgia when I get to another place, it's as if everything I left behind had disappeared, I had forgotten it.

And when I come back I'm happy to find it again.

There is no thread of continuity between anything at all.

His father was imprisoned and here he describes a character in prison.

Is it a tribute to his father?

My father was not a hero, but an ordinary man, and what I try to do is understand him.

He died when I was young, he was someone who did not give explanations.

So maybe writing about him is a way of answering questions that he didn't answer for me.

It's not a tribute, it's a kind of secret dialogue with him.

How do you work the characters?

Very instinctively.

I don't plan it, I don't make a structure.

I have a lot of small elements that come to me and that are imposed at the beginning.

And then I go around it until the character becomes coherent.

I start by working a lot on his body.

It is big or small?

Is he thin or fat?

He is cold?

Eat a lot?

Sleep well?

Do you have any disease?

That helps me a lot to start.

And once I have his body, I start imagining his character.

Why is she a writer?

oh!

It's the big question and I'm not sure I can answer it.

Why do I write?

Maybe because it helps me give up all the lives I won't have.

When I was younger, I wanted to have all the lives, all the feelings, all the possibilities, until I realized it was impossible.

So writing helps me to renounce and grieve for the things that I will never experience.

And the reading?

What does it give you?

It is the most wonderful thing in the world.

It is life, it gives me the feeling of not being alone and, at the same time, of being in the most wonderful of solitudes.

You are in dialogue with someone at the same time that you are in silence.

It reassures me, it excites me, it moves me.

For me, reading is like breathing, it is part of my life.

I couldn't do anything else.

I always have two or three books with me, no matter where.

It makes me well.

What writers have taught you the most?

I would say Toni Morrison.

All Russians: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky.

Faulkner, Marguerite Duras.

Also the poets: Anna Akhmatova, Louis Aragon, René Char.

Don't you miss journalism?

I would love to be many things: a journalist, a doctor, an adventurer, a housewife... but I can't do it all.

And I don't miss it.

But it was fine.

It was exciting.

Slimani is going to retire, she is exhausted.

From the effort of the interview and from an international promotion that she is barely starting when she has yet to muster all the energy to tackle the third and final installment, focused on her own generation.

An even greater challenge, without a doubt.

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