The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
From riots in Paris to a near-coup in Rabat
Leïla Slimani’s new novel offers rich drama at home and abroad
WATCH US DANCE by Leïla Slimani 336pp, Faber, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£16.99, ebook £9.99
It’s 1968, and Aïcha Belhaj is studying medicine in Strasbourg. Her mother, Mathilde, is Alsatian; during the Second World War, she fell in love with Amine Belhaj, and left her northern home for a remote Moroccan farm. They raised a hardworking daughter who has thrown herself into her studies, returned to France, and is now – as Leïla Slimani writes in her new novel, Watch Us Dance – “baffled” by the spring uprisings that have sent Europe into turmoil.
“Where did this wide-eyed idealism come from?” Aïcha wonders about what she observes – “an orgiastic celebration in which she could play no part”. She will keep her focus, no matter what: “She thought of an Arabic expression that her father often used: ‘When God wishes to punish an ant, he gives it wings.’ Aïcha was an ant, hardworking and obedient. And she had no intention of flying anywhere.”
Aïcha and her determination serve as a kind of anchor for this sprawling, enjoyable book, the second volume in a planned trilogy. The first book, The Country of Others, introduced readers to Mathilde and Amine; in its final pages, a young Aïcha looked on with her parents as Moroccan liberation fighters burnt down colonists’ houses. Prior to its publication, however, Slimani was known for taut and stylish contemporary thrillers, most notably the bestselling Lullaby, about the murder of two young children by their nanny. The French original, Chanson douce, won France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt: Slimani was the first Moroccan woman to win it, and she is now French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture.
Slimani’s project draws on her own family’s story – Mathilde and Amine are based on her grandparents – and integrates the personal with a wider consideration of French colonial experience. Watch Us Dance is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time of both development and turmoil in Morocco, of increased freedom and drastic repression. There are no lectures here, however: Slimani knows that it is the novelist’s role to provide experience and sensation, rather than didactic exposition. In the summer of 1971, rebel military leaders attempted to overthrow King Hassan II of Morocco; we share Aïcha’s confusion as she hears the news. “Aïcha thought of the portrait of Hassan II in her father’s office… She could not imagine her country without a king. Were they really going to become one of those states run by soldiers?”
The answer is no: the coup will be suppressed, and the reader feels the same astonishment as Amine and Mathilde as they watch, horrified, the televised execution of the rebels. “The traitor stares at the camera, as if praying or asking for something. His shirt is open, revealing his vest beneath. Amine tries to understand what the condemned man is saying but the image is too blurry for him to lipread.”
It’s a mark of Slimani’s control that this in medias res approach opens up her characters’ confusion without ever confusing the reader. Instead, we are immersed in the richness of their varied lives. This is a novel that resists summation, for it attempts, and largely succeeds, to show that even within a single family the Moroccan/French experience can’t be set within neat boundaries. And it’s enlivened with richly descriptive writing that never romanticises its subject matter. When Sabah, Aïcha’s young cousin, gets her first period, she is shocked by the experience: “She had never imagined it would look like that, like this nightmarish ooze, this viscous matter that gave her the impression she was rotting from the inside.” Slimani centres every aspect of women’s experience in the fast-changing, complex world she depicts. Women are brutally oppressed in Slimani’s Morocco; they also go to medical school and become physicians, as Aïcha does.
You don’t have to have read The Country of Others to appreciate Watch Us Dance: Slimani provides a cast list that fills in the characters’ pasts. That said, the experience of this novel is only enhanced by an encounter with its predecessor. We end here with a birth that takes the tale towards the next generation, Slimani’s own childhood – and into the final volume of this rich account of how a family’s life entwines with history.