'The country of others'

"She was very brave, she spoke Arabic and Berber. She was a funny woman, an independent woman who told us so many stories of her childhood."

When Leila Slimani speaks of her grandmother, there is notable affection in her voice. Her latest novel, The Country of Others, is inspired by the life of her grandmother, a blond, blue-eyed woman from France who came to live in Morocco after the Second World War to marry Slimani's grandfather. The result is a powerful, enlightening and oftentimes disturbing historical novel.

In the wake of World War II, Morocco was still occupied by the French. From the 1830s onwards, France had begun to establish its second colonial empire, which became one of the largest in history, occupying much of Northern Africa. Decolonization did not gather speed until the end of the Second World War.

A harsh life for women

That is also the moment where The Country of Others begins, Slimani's first historical novel. In 1947, a young couple moves to a farm outside of Meknes in Northern Morocco: Mathilde is a young woman from Alsace in France. She met her husband Amine when he fought in the Free French Forces to liberate France from Nazi occupation.

Leila Slimani describes life in Morocco at the time as difficult, especially for women. When the book first came out in France in 2020, she spoke to the DW about her grandmother and life in Morocco in the 1950s, emphasizing the injustice and harshness of colonial and patriarchal rule: "Of course there were people who were a little more open, of course there were instances of mutual respect, I do not want to deny that. But in the book, I wanted to look at the 'souffrance intime', the personal pain."

This is what distinguishes Leila Slimani's writing: in all of her novels, she shines a light on this 'souffrance intime,' the pain that can only be inflicted on those who one loves and on oneself. In her debut novel, Adèle, a nymphomaniac woman suffers from isolation in the French countryside. In her second novel, the psychological thriller Lullaby, a nanny murders two children she has been entrusted with. In The Country of Others, the young couple in Morocco will go on to despise, love, beat and threaten each other with death while raising their children amidst the violent outbreaks of the Moroccan independence movement. 

Revival of the European historical novel

The European historical novel has seen a revival over the last few years, with writers such Hilary Mantel exploring the cosmopolitanism of Tudor England in Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light. She is the first author to win the prestigious Booker Prize twice, both for Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. The German writer Daniel Kehlmann was recently shortlisted for the International Booker Prize with his historical novel Tyll, set in 17th century Europe during the Thirty Years War, for which Netflix has snapped up television rights.

Unlike Mantel or Kehlmann, Slimani focuses on the lives of women — and the men they pledge themselves to. Her unique ability resides in exposing the pain that comes with love, with motherhood, with war and life under colonial rule or the rule of the patriarchy, relentlessly, in all its ambivalence, without ever leaving the position of the interested, almost scientific observer.

As readers, we are not told what to feel, what to think. We are merely shown what history, what life in the past was made of — and what it is still made of today.

It is this quality that has made the French-Moroccon feminist writer a star on the French and international literary scene. Formerly a journalist at Jeune Afrique (Young Africa), Slimani became a freelance writer after being arrested while reporting on human rights abuses and the Arab spring in Tunesia in 2011.

Lullaby won her the Prix Goncourt, the most renowned literary prize in France. She has also written a book on women and their lives in Morocco called Sex and Lies: Sex Life in Morocco. Since 2017, she has served as the personal representative of French President Emmanuel Macron to promote the French language and culture.

Still, as she told DW in 2020, her heritage is questioned wherever she goes: "In Morocco, I am told that I am too French, too Western, that I do not represent my country. In France, sometimes people will tell me that I am not really French because I have roots in Morocco. So I understand, I know what it means to live in the country of others."

The Country of Others is the first in a trilogy of historical novels, chronicling the life of the family Belhajs from the Second World War to the 2000s. The English translation of the book by Sam Taylor has been published by Faber & Faber and is available from August 5, 2021, onwards.