Written by Leila Slimani, published in 2020, and subtitled War, War, War, this is the first volume of what will be a trilogy. It covers roughly a decade. It starts in 1944, when French Mathilde meets Moroccan Amine (who's fighting with the French army) in her home region, Alsace, and takes us through to 1955, and the height of the Moroccan struggle for independence, when the couple and their two children, having established themselves near Meknes (in north-central Morocco) on land purchased by Amine's father ("our land"), watch the property of neighbouring French settlers go up in flames.

There is an English version, entitled In the Country of Others (I'm not sure why we need the extra preposition). I read the original.

The novel draws its inspiration from Slimani's family history. Her grandmother, Anne Dhobb, also left Alsace because she married a Moroccan soldier, and they also had a fruit farm near Meknes (all this is recounted by Dhobb in a 2004 memoir).


Morocco, 1994

Essentially, this is a novel full of "others".

An "others" line runs right through the marriage of our central couple. Ethnicity: different; religion: different; expectations of life: different. They're not really at ease in either community in Morocco. The French look down almost as much on Mathilde as they do on Amine ("look at her; it's an Arab who got her pregnant"); the Moroccans are sceptical about Mathilde and the influence she is wielding; some feel Amine is "sleeping with the enemy".

Nicolas Carreau quotes Slimani: "Being a foreigner is always the decision of the other, something that is determined by the look of another. This is the reason there is always violence involved in being a foreigner. Of course, this can also be an internal feeling. But most of the time, it's a refusal by the other to integrate you."

Their daughter, Aisha, also finds her biracial heritage hard to handle. She is constantly the butt of jokes at school, and her seventh birthday party turns out to be a disaster when lots of the French kids won't come, and those who do come want to leave early, and mistake Amine for the family chauffeur...

At one point Amine experiments with grafting a lemon and an orange tree, and towards the end of the book, he compares their family to this mixture: "We're half lemon, half orange. We're not on either side." But the fruit of the tree has proved inedible... Eventually in such cases, we're told, one species would take precedence over the other; one way or another, the tree would finally give edible fruit again. I'm not sure how we're supposed to interpret this analogy. Surely it can't be an indictment of mixing? Maybe it's alerting us to the reality that eventually one cultural side of this couple will win out. Maybe it's an affirmation that the mixed fruit won't be consumed, and is therefore safe...

We also have a country split between French settlers (many of them have moved from Algeria, have the best lands, tend to disparage the Moroccans, and are increasingly seen as interlopers), and ethnic Moroccans who want their independence.

And, of course, that latter group is split between people like Omar, Amine's brother, who has disappeared to join the freedom-fighters, and people like Hadj Karim, whom Amine meets while searching for Omar. The old man says: "I am proud of all those sons who rise up against the occupier, who punish traitors, who fight to end an unjust occupation. But how many assassinations will it take? How many will be condemned to the firing squad before we see our cause triumphing?" Amine, after this meeting, feels like a coward who has hidden himself away on his farm. He was born among Moroccans, but far from feeling pride in his confreres, he has prioritized reassuring his Europeans contacts: "He had tried to convince them that he was different, that he was neither deceitful nor fatalistic nor lazy -- epithets the settlers like to use to talk about their Moroccans. He lived with the image the French had made of him riveted into his heart."

Morocco is likewise split between town-dwellers and country-dwellers (the former have little idea of the never-ending battle fought by the latter against the unyielding land, with its stones, its locusts, and its droughts).



Layered on top of all that, we have a society rigidly divided into male and female. When she first arrives, Mathilde stays with her mother-in-law in Meknes. Initially, she demurs. But she has no choice: "That's how things are done here," Amine tells her. Which turns out to be the beginning of a pattern: "This sentence, she would hear it often. At that precise moment, she understood that she was a stranger, a woman, a wife, a being at the mercy of others." She is horrified by practices that effectively put women on a level with slaves (letting the men eat first, for example, or seeing no point in sending daughters to school).

And if you're female, any of the male "others" can aggress you with impunity, it seems. Omar is violent towards his sister Selma as soon as she reaches puberty, punishing her before she even has the chance to do anything wrong. He can contemplate freeing the Moroccans from French control, but he cannot wrap his head around the concept of freeing women from male control.

Selma is also at the vortex of another division. The society Slimani depicts is struggling to come to terms with the changes of the 1950s. Young people desperately want more freedom, and long to escape the tutelage of the old. They're sick of hearing about Verdun or Monte Cassino, sick of memories of famine and infant mortality. Selma, freed from the tyranny of Omar, now that he is off with the militants, hooks up with a young and irresponsible Frenchmen. Amine goes completely ape when he sees a picture of her and her young man in a photographer's window in town. Mathilde knew about the relationship, says it's innocent... But Amine says he'll never let Selma marry a Frenchman (glass houses, stones...) He hits Mathilde (not for the first time), threatens to kill the whole family, thinks of killing himself. Domestic violence is never far away: "Aicha knew these blue-faced women. She had seen them often, mothers with half-closed eyes, purple cheeks, mothers with split lips. At the time, she even thought that was why makeup was invented. To hide the blows of men."

Things are patched up between Amine and Mathilde. Perhaps she recognizes his confusion in face of all these duelling "others", or acknowledges the body-sapping courage with which he has hurled himself at the obdurate land all these years in an endeavour to make it fruitful and profitable -- or maybe she just has no choice.

For Selma it's different. Amine marries her off to Mourad, his former wartime aide-de-camp, who came to the farm some time before, and took up Amine's offer of a job. There are many reasons Mourad is an unsuitable match for this young woman. He has been physically and mentally damaged by the war, from which he cannot seem to detach himself. And he seems attracted to Amine. But he's available. And he can make Selma's pregnancy respectable.

Mathilde is terribly conflicted about all this. She asks Selma for forgiveness, but she also tries to justify herself: "She spoke of inner freedom, of the need to learn to be resigned, of the chimera of a grand passion that plunged girls into despair and failure: 'I was young too.' And she spoke in the future tense: 'One day you will understand. One day you will thank us.'" But as far as Selma is concerned, Mathilde has betrayed her. And later, Mathilde reproaches herself: "Had she become that kind of woman? One of those who push others to be reasonable, to give up, one of those who put respectability before happiness? Deep down, she thought, I wouldn't have been able to do anything. And she repeated it to herself, again and again, not to lament, but to convince herself of her helplessness, and alleviate her guilt." Powerlessness is part and parcel of living in the land of others.



So many "others"...

All the key characters are well rounded, but Mathilde is infinitely the most interesting. We are offered multiple points of view in the course of the narrative, but the eyes we see through most of the time are Mathilde's. We see her painful battle to adjust not only to a very different environment, but also to a husband who now seems very different too. Weighed down by responsibility and constant humiliation, but locked into the social expectations of his homeland, he is impatient with Mathilde's struggles. When she returns to France to see to things after her father's death, she contemplates not going back to Morocco. Her sister, Irene, tells her coldly: "You made a choice. You need to take responsibility for it. Life is hard for everyone, you know." She returns, deciding to accept her fate, and make something of it. And now that she has decided, and accepted that there is no turning back, she feels strong: "Strong from not being free." Which all sounds very Nietzschean... But the mental conflict doesn't entirely leave her. On her return, she greets her children, and "in the kisses she placed on their cheeks there was not only the strength of her love, but all the intensity of her regrets". And she thinks: "I hate myself for being chained like this. I hate myself for not preferring anything to you." Yet after Aicha's ill-fated birthday party, Mathilde has a photo taken of the children to send to Irene. She writes: "They are my happiness and my joy. They are my vengeance on those who humiliate us." She may not find things easy, but she is indomitable, resourceful, creative, and charitable.



We end with the climactic big fire. Aicha has her little outburst of hatred, perhaps remembering all she has suffered at the hands of people like these: "Let them burn. Let them leave. Let them die."

And there we close. A little abruptly, I felt, but then, there's another volume to come.

In the context of Amine's decision not to shoot himself, Tessa Hadley evokes an element that I also noticed, which is the recurrent motif of "swerving away from catastrophe". There are many things we brace ourselves for in the course of the story -- but they don't come to pass. Hadley says: "Slimani’s charged language, feeling for the fracture lines inside individuals and between them, and between different cultures, prepares us for the worst: which comes close, but never quite comes home... All these tensions converge in the person of Aisha... who is clever and solitary and anxious." Aisha, we suspect, will be the focal point of the next volume.

This is the first novel I've read by Leila Slimani, so I can only go by the opinion of others (such as Hadley) when they remark that it represents a marked change of style from her previous work.

I found the writing vivid, but a little "choppy", a little episodic. The short scenes are full of colour and animation, and feel very real, but they don't build that smoothly into the bigger narrative. I wonder if that is because the story is composed of those snippets of family memory that are handed down to us. We hear the selected details -- the authorized account, as it were -- time after time, but often the broader context is missing, because it is assumed the listener knows it. When we put these anecdotes together, then, they're more like a patchwork quilt than a single piece of weaving.

That's a minor quibble, though. I look forward to meeting these characters again.