Author Writes Her Identity Into Existence
PARIS — Fatima Daas was used to not reading about people like her. Her debut novel was a chance to remedy this.
Based on her own life, “The Last One” follows a young, lesbian Muslim woman in a tough Paris suburb who struggles with conflicting identities.
“I grew up with the idea, whether in films or in books, that I did not exist,” Ms. Daas, 26, said. “I didn’t exist as a young lesbian, Muslim woman, with an immigrant background,” she added. “So the question I have asked myself a lot is, ‘How do we shape ourselves when we have absolutely no representation?’ ”
In France, identity politics are * often seen as a threat to social cohesion. So Ms. Daas’s book was an unlikely hit when it came out here last year. Critics praised the novel’s powerful lyricism, and for breaking taboos around gender, sexuality and religion. “The Last One” won best
debut novel in the 2020 Les Inrockuptibles Literary Prize, organized by the French cultural magazine, and has been translated into eight languages.
“Fatima Daas” is a pseudonym, and it is also the name of the novel’s main character. Ms. Daas declined to give her real name, partly because she did not want to involve her family, she said.
The narrative is punctuated with flashbacks to the main character’s childhood and adolescence. The youngest of three sisters in a Muslim family from Algeria, and the only one born in France, Fatima struggles to fit in at school and has romantic relationships with women, though she considers homosexuality a sin. She battles feelings of shame, but refuses to give up any part of herself.
Ms. Daas said her novel was “a way of saying that it’s possible, I can be this if I want to. And if I want to say that I am a lesbian and a Muslim, I have the right, the capacity, the freedom to do so.”
Salima Amari of the Centre for Political and Sociological Research in Paris, said the novel was powerful because it exposed contradictions that many struggled with. “A woman
who defines herself clearly as lesbian and a Muslim, who writes, and therefore who has a voice, exists,” Ms. Amari said. “This brings a very rare voice to the French landscape.”
Perhaps the most significant taboo Ms. Daas addresses is internalized homophobia. The main character describes herself as “a sinner” and feels ashamed of herself.
In a radio interview two weeks after
Fatima Daas in a Paris suburb. The name is a pseudonym, shared with her novel’s main character.
publication, in September 2020, Ms. Daas was asked if she believed that being a lesbian made her a sinner. She said yes. “I am searching for
complexity,” she added. Criticism followed on social media, with L.G.B.T. people accusing her of encouraging homophobia. Ms. Daas said the question was “a way to move the conversation away from my work and instead talk about the subject of Islam. There has been this obsession with Islam and homosexuality.”
Publishing a hit novel, she said, had not eased her feelings of shame.
“I don’t think literature can save people, but it can be liberating,” she said. “That’s what this book has given me.”