French Moroccan Leïla Slimani shot to fame with her second novel, Chanson Douce (Lullaby), inspired by the murder of two small children in New York by their nanny. This was Slimani’s first novel to be translated into English, and despite its grim subject, won the Prix Goncourt and was translated into 18 languages. This is her fifth work, excellently translated again by the British writer Sam Taylor.
Readers could approach Watch Us Dance with some trepidation, particularly if they have not read The Country of Others, the first of the planned trilogy, and also because it has at its front a dramatis personae to assist with the populous cast. They may be reassured, however, that this second volume stands comfortably on its own and that the list of characters proves helpful.
The work is inspired by family history. Slimani’s grandmother, like Mathilde, was Alsatian, married a Moroccan and went to live with him in Morocco a decade before French rule was overthrown in 1955. Amine, inspired by Slimani’s grandfather, has done well from the return of the king to the throne. The revolution was relatively bloodless and the French did not leave. They maintained much of the control of commerce and trade.
Watch Us Dance opens with blonde Mathilde overseeing the beginning of the construction of her swimming pool, an enormous luxury in a water-poor country and a symbol of wealth. Amine disapproves of the pool, but now that he is a member of the bourgeoisie he sees it as a normal accoutrement. A hard-working and successful farmer, he is invited to the parties of the rich. He remarks, “Before I was the dirty Arab, the crouille, and now it’s all Monsieur Belhaj we would so like the pleasure of your company, blah blah blah.” Much of this socialising he does alone, where he gathers mistresses from the French population, starry-eyed women drawn to his dark good looks and wealth.
Slimani spreads her tale fairly evenly between two generations of the Belhaj clan. It is a chamber piece virtuoso, where no player rises much above the others. Close to the heart of the narration is scholarly Aïcha, Amine and Mathilde’s daughter, who is studying medicine in Paris. Daily she experiences racism, most particularly from her abusive landlady who invades her flat and opens her mail, clumsily resealing the envelopes. Studious and quiet, Aïcha achieves revenge on the landlady, demonstrating her hidden rage. When she moves out, she writes in faecal matter above the bed, “The African shits on you.”
In Paris to witness the May 1968 civil unrest, Aïcha perceives “an enormous party [that] was being readied all around her, an orgiastic celebration in which she could play no part … where had they found this fervour? Where did this wide-eyed idealism come from? And, most mysterious of all, why weren’t they afraid?” She recalls a favourite Arabic expression of her father’s: “When God wishes to punish an ant, he gives it wings.” Aïcha feels herself to be an ant, and has “no intention of flying anywhere”. She keeps her head down and becomes an obstetrician-gynaecologist.
Back in Morocco, she experiences more of the huge changes that came after 1968, although Slimani mostly explores this through Salim, Aïcha’s brother, who has fallen out of favour with his father and has been conducting a secret affair with his aunt, Amine’s troubled sister Selma. Salim perceives Morocco as “full of fathers who must be shown respect”. He notes he is never asked his name but who his father is. When he runs away, he falls in with a Danish hippy, who takes her with him to live among other young Europeans in Essaouira. There, he eats acid and smokes chillums of hashish while the hippies “toast the sexual revolution and universal copulation”. Many of them are young Americans escaping conscription to the Vietnam War and embarking on the new hippy trail to Ibiza, Syria and Nepal.
Aïcha, too, has friends who are hippies. A childhood friend has shacked up with a Frenchman in a beach hut where many young people converge, French and Arab. There are heated, passionate discussions about social change. Theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes is coming to teach in Rabat, which he did in reality, later writing about it in his essay Incidents, which contains explicit accounts of sexual encounters with boys and men. In the beach hut, young people argue angrily about the French influence on Moroccan culture: “In the cafes of Casablanca, young people read Le Monde and bet on horses racing in Paris.” They want to establish their own world view, their own dominant culture.
Slimani structures her novel elegantly, hanging the family saga on scaffolding of real events. Dates are woven in seamlessly – the 1955 revolution in Morocco, the 1968 Paris riots, the moon landing in 1969, the Vietnam War. The story brims with suspense – characters are often left hanging until we discover the outcome later through another character. The political situation in all decades is unstable – King Hassan II has many detractors, especially among the educated. One character remembers how in 1965 a coup was violently suppressed, and how Hassan declared, “There is no greater danger to the state than the so-called intellectual. It would be better for you to be illiterate.”
It is a rare pleasure when a novel opens up an entire world to the reader. Watch Us Dance is intricately constructed and intimately imbued with Slimani’s deep understanding and love for the country of her birth.
