Leïla Slimani

0:00BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

0:13Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading creative figures reveal the formative influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the French-Moroccan author Leila Slimani. She won critical acclaim and a reputation as an author of bold and brutal fiction with her first two novels. Adele is about a bourgeois Parisian wife and mother who lives a sexually promiscuous secret life. Lullaby, about a nanny who kills the children she's employed to care for, is currently being adapted as a drama series starring Nicole Kidman.

0:49Leila Slemani has also written the first two in a planned trilogy of novels based on her own family history and has published short stories and non-fiction. She's won France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, and in 2017 was appointed as President Macron's personal representative to Francophone countries. Leila Slemani, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. You were born in Rabat in Morocco in 1981. Your mother was a doctor, your father was an economist, a banker and a politician. Tell me about home life, upbringing, first of all. So I have two sisters and I was very, very close to my sisters.

1:30I have to say that we wouldn't go out a lot. We would spend a lot of time at home, probably because my mother was very anxious, always afraid that something could happen to us. Probably also because we were living in a very patriarchal country, in a time also of repression because it was the 80s in Morocco. So my mother was always worried that something could happen to us. So I spent most of my childhood and younger life with my sister watching movies and reading books and playing all together. So it was very nice, very quiet, but quite boring also. And what language were you speaking at home?

2:07Arabic and French. I would speak Arabic with my nanny, the woman who took care of me when I was a child, and French with my parents and with my grandmother, even if my grandmother would speak also German and Asshan. So it was very familiar to me to hear other languages at home. We'll come on to your grandmother in a moment because she was such a formative influence on you. Let me just ask about your father, because I know he was falsely convicted of a financial fraud. He was involved in some scandal when you were a child. Was that an incredibly traumatic time for you and your family? You know, I think that my mother was so proud and so dignified that at the time, I was only worried by being a good student and doing what my mother wanted me to do.

2:52So I didn't think at that time that it was traumatic. But now that I am 40, and I think about this time, because I'm writing about it in my in the third volume of the trilogy. Now, I think that I'm more conscious of how difficult it was and how we suffered. But while we were living it, I think it was so hard that it was impossible to think of how traumatic it was. Were you aware of the accusations that were levelled against him at the time? Or was it hidden from you? Yes, I was. Because my father, he lost his job when I was 13. So he was at home all the time. And he was sitting in the couch all day long and drinking and reading a lot of books.

3:32My My father was surrounded by books. And if you wanted to have a conversation with him, the only way was to read a book and then to come speak with him about a book. He wouldn't speak about anything else but books. So, yeah, I knew that he had a problem. I knew because of the newspaper at the time when I go to school, children and students would tell me, I read an article about your father. He's told this and he did that. But I never dare ask my father or my mother about it because, I don't know, maybe I was afraid of the answer or I was afraid of the pain I would provoke and I would cause by asking the question.

4:12So, you know, it was this kind of situation where you do as if there is no problem. So we would speak about the weather and the bluebirds and things like that. We would never speak about that. It's really weird. But I know that a lot of families know this situation that you have a big problem, but no one wants to talk about the big problem that is in front of everyone. But as you say, other children at school were talking about him because he was a well-known figure. He was a government minister. He was the minister for the economy at some point. Yeah, absolutely. And then when I left for France, when I was 20 years old, I was in Sciences Po and my mother called me and she said, I have something to tell you.

4:51Your father is in prison. And I thought it was like a joke. It was so he spent like 10 years at home and he was 60. It seemed absurd and impossible that they would decide to put him in prison after 10 years or 12 years at home. But that's what they did. And so I came back to Morocco. And I think that was the most violent part of the experiences when my father was actually in prison, when I came back home and he wasn't there. And I was like, my father is 61. What is he doing? It's in prison in Morocco in a little town called Salé, a very violent and very difficult prison. And he died just after because I think he couldn't support the situation.

5:35It was too hard on him. He died of grief. I think. He died in prison. He died just after. He was very sick. And that's why they left him out of prison. And then he died. That's terrible. But then he was posthumously exonerated after his death. He cleared of all the charges. Like six years after he was found innocent. And we had like big excuses from the government. But what was at the same time funny and very sad is that when I won the Prix Goncourt, I remember that the day after on the radio in Morocco, they organized There's a big show about the Goncourt and they invited people who said they knew my father and people who completely abandoned us when there was the affair.

6:18But on the radio, they were all like, oh, he was so great. And I remember him and I used to spend a lot of time with him. And I always said that he was innocent, but it was completely false. It was a lie. So, yeah, you learn a lot about the human condition and hypocrisy and the way people act when you experience something like this. You know how to recognize your real friends and you know also not to wait too much from success or from your social position. You know that you can lose everything in one second. And so I learned a lot from this experience. He lost everything. You lost everything in effect.

6:56He died partly as a result of those accusations. Did that make you angry? Yes, very much. Very much. It made me very angry. And I think also that's why I decided to write. People always ask me, why do you write? And I think the first reason I decided to write is for revenge. I wanted to clear my name. I wanted people to be proud to have my name for my sister and my mother. I didn't want people to think prison when they hear the word Slimani, but to think books and to think Goncourt and to think success. So, yes, I was very, very angry. And for a long time, it was a goal and it was something really important for me.

7:41But I think that now, after 10 years of writing and the fact also that I'm aging, that I'm a mother myself, I understand also that you can't be angry all the time and that you have also not to forgive because I don't forgive, but to accept the situation. But if anger was a motivating factor to get you writing, did it also shape the writing stylistically, do you think? Of course, of course. Yes, I think so. But what is maybe ironic is that I was angry against the people who did that to my father, but I was maybe also angry against my father for not having the conversation we were supposed to have about all this.

8:21So I think that all this anger shaped my style. But that's also why I decided to deal with such violent themes like sexuality or a woman killing children. And especially my first book, Adèle. If my father was alive, I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to write such a book because it's a very provocative book. It's a book about sex, about the body. so I wrote it also to tell my father okay you died but I'm going to do something with the fact that you're not here I'm going to emancipate myself maybe it would have been impossible to be yeah to emancipate myself if he was still alive so I'm sad that he's dead but maybe it's very cruel to say this like that but in a way I'm also grateful that he's dead because it liberated you as a woman.

9:15And what you're saying is that the terrible irony is that if he had been alive, you wouldn't have written that book because you wouldn't have been allowed to express that. Exactly, exactly. And I think that a lot of women and a lot of writers or artists can understand that you live always with the feeling of the eyes of someone on you. And my father was a very important figure for me. What he thought about me, what he would say about my behavior, about my talent about anything was very important for me the way he judged me and the the fact that he wasn't here yeah it was at the same time very sad but liberating because I was my only judge the person who really really was important for me is not here anymore

10:01on this cultural life I asked my guest to discuss the formative influences and their experiences that have inspired their own creativity and your first choice for this program is your maternal grandmother who was from Alsace in France. Why have you chosen her? Oh, my grandmother, she was really a character. She was someone absolutely special. She came from Alsace in 1945. She fell in love with my grandfather, who was a soldier in the colonial army. And she decided to come to Morocco during colonization to marry an Arab. And I think that people now can't really measure how subversive and provocative it was for a woman at that time to decide to marry someone from Africa and to go with him in Africa.

10:48She learned Arabic, she learned Berber, and she was really, she was a free woman and she would say whatever she wanted. She was really tall, blonde, with green eyes, very different from me, and she was very strong and she had a real, real talent in telling stories. And my whole childhood, she told me stories about her childhood in Alsace, in Germany, about the war, about how she fell in love with my grandfather. And I remember that my parents, they would always tell her, don't tell this to the children. They are just children. They can't understand. And she would always say, of course, they can understand.

11:25They can understand everything. And she taught me that with a good story, you can manage anything. She would always say, if you know how to tell a story, you will find your way out of any situation. Because having this gift of telling a good story, of being able to convince an audience is something really, really valuable. She's a woman who never had the job. She never earned her own money. She was very dependent from my grandfather. And I think that as a woman, her life was very, very difficult because she was very dominated by my grandfather. But at the same time, stories and narration gave her a certain space, a free space where she was important.

12:09Was she always naturally telling stories or was story time, a particular time where she sat down with you and said, right, I've got something to say? No, all the time, you know, when we were having dinner, family dinner, and when we were sitting all together, she will always tell stories. She had a certain sense of anecdotes and she could invent the story at the same time she was telling it. She was really, really talented and so talented that one day I told her, you know, you have to come to school because I told all my friends about you and they don't believe me. And you have to come and we will give you one or two words and you will invent a story in front of us.

12:44And she did it. And I remember how my friends looked at her. And I think that I thought one day I want people to look at me the way they look at her. They were so fascinated. And it was quiet in the room. You couldn't hear anything but her voice. It was really beautiful. So you knew at that moment that's the sort of thing that you wanted to do. Did she encourage you? She encouraged me. She encouraged me to be a very free woman. She always told me you have to have a job and to earn your own money and never to depend on a man or on anyone. And she always told me, on the contrary of my parents, that I could do whatever I wanted.

13:22My parents wanted me to have a real job with, you know, a salary and all this. But my grandmother, she told me, if you want to be a dancer or an actress or a clown or a writer, let be it. You don't care. She was your storyteller. Did she also encourage you to identify with French culture? I mean, did you feel French growing up? You know, it was weird because in her room, in her bedroom, she had the picture of her parents. So my great, great grandfather, he has a uniform of the French army. and his wife who has a black dress and she's blonde with green eyes. And I remember that as a child, I would look at this picture.

14:00And for me, it was absolutely impossible that there were my great-great-grandfather because I'm brown, I have frizzy hair and I look very Arab. I look very African. So, yeah, it was really weird for me to feel French and to feel that I was from there. And also in the stories she was telling us about Alsace, Alsace was like not a real country, like a country of a movie or of a cartoon. It was not a real country for me. You've just published Watchers Dance, which is the second part of a trilogy following the story of an Alsatian woman who marries a young Moroccan soldier, moved to Morocco, starts a farm.

14:39How closely is that narrative following your own family history? Oh, it's quite close. I mean, in terms of events, of chronology and all this, it's quite close. But the rest, I don't know. I'm not sure my grandmother thought exactly what Mathilde is thinking in the book or Amine. In terms of personality, I'm not sure it's very close because when you begin to write a character, it's your character. And I put also a lot of myself in Mathilde and in Amine. Mathilde wanted to look dignified, but sometimes she would just turn around and start screaming that she had to get out of this place, that she'd made a mistake of her life and that she was a stranger here.

15:21She yelled that if her father knew the truth, he would beat up her bully of her husband. But her father didn't know the truth. The father lived far away. So Mathilde surrendered to her fate and took out her frustrations on little Aisha. When people ask me why I wanted to write this trilogy about my family, It's like because I want to continue a conversation that is finished because they are dead. I want to spend time with people I used to love. And those people, my grandmother, but also my father, they used to tell a lot of stories and a lot of lies also. My grandfather also, they were big liars, but not because they wanted to manipulate.

15:59It was not like mean lie, but maybe they had a lot of fantasy about themselves and about the life they wanted to have. And the life they really did have was not maybe as beautiful and as grandiose that the one they imagined. So, yeah, maybe in my book, I try to give them the life they wanted or to give them more lyrisme and more poetry, very much. Your grandfather was fighting with the French army and, in effect, liberated your grandmother from her Alsatian village. Again, there's a kind of irony there, isn't there? She was liberated, but then arrived into a totally different and more suppressing society, oppressing society in a way.

16:42Yes, absolutely. And for my grandfather also, it was very violent because he decided to go to the war and to fight for France, not only for France, but for the values of France, the values of Europe and against the Nazis. He was really, really convinced by that. But when he came back to Morocco, he discovered what happened during the war in Morocco because everything that they grew in Morocco during that time was sent in Europe for the war. And so there was a big, big famine between 1941 and 1943 in Morocco. And Moroccan people, they suffered a lot. And I think that for my grandfather, that was a big disappointment because he loved speaking French and he was a huge admirer of France.

17:26And then he discovered that this country that he was admiring so much was occupied by the Nazi, was collaborating with the Nazi, were giving the Jews of France to the Nazi. And I think that for my grandfather, that was a big, big trauma because he was... He felt betrayed. Yeah, he felt betrayed. He felt really betrayed. Was he a storyteller as well? Did you get a sense of what he had been up to? I mean, for instance, did you get a story from him about how he had met your grandmother? Yes, yes. He had a big scar on his belly. And I asked him, what is this scar? and he said to me, you know, I fought with a tiger in Germany and I killed the tiger.

18:04And I was like, wow, my grandfather, he killed a tiger in Germany. So, of course, I went to school and I told all my friends that my grandfather killed a tiger in Germany. And my friends told me, you're a liar. There are no tigers in Germany. So I went to see my grandmother and I said, why did you tell me a lie? And my grandmother said, but you don't care. that's why it's beautiful to tell stories. If you become a writer, you can put tigers in Germany. And so I think that's why I want to write because when you write, you can put tigers in Germany. Surely that was a metaphorical tiger, though, wasn't it?

18:38That was a German soldier. Yeah, but I think that he thought that I was a child so he couldn't explain to me the Nazis and the violence. And actually the scar came from the prisoner camp where he was and he escaped from the camp and he cut himself, his body. What made you decide to leave Morocco to study in Paris? It was not really a decision. You know, in the Moroccan bourgeoisie, it's something that is decided for you. You know that when you are going to be 17, you're going to leave the country for France mostly or Belgium or Canada. And you're going to study for some years there. And for the majority of my friends come back to Morocco, I didn't.

19:19But all my Moroccan friends, they can speak French, they can speak English, they read a lot of European literature and they know a lot about your countries. But the reverse is not true. Did you already know Paris well? Was it somewhere you were really longing to get to? No, I was really longing because I knew that I was going to be free. First, just as a teenager who wants to be free because I didn't want to ask my parents about can I go to this party or can I do this or that. and also as a Moroccan woman. I remember that when I arrived in Paris, the first day I went to the Quai du Seine and I looked at a couple kissing, like French kissing for a very long time and I was waiting for the police to come.

20:03I was sure that the police will come to arrest them. Because that is illegal on the streets of Morocco. Absolutely. And then I was with a friend and he told me, but no, of course it's not illegal. and I think that people are not conscious of how, yeah, not shocking but beautiful it can be for a girl like I was at that time. This idea that in public space you can, yeah, you can be in love and you can kiss and you can show your body if you want and you can wear whatever you want and no one is going to judge you or arrest you or put any pressure on you. So for me, it was really, really, it was wonderful to arrive in Paris, wonderful.

20:43Potential freedoms there lying in front of you. Did you also face racism? Yes, I did. And not only racism. In Paris, it's not so much racism. It was more like a certain despise. There is this idea that the immigrant should be happy to come to France. This is this very famous sentence of Nicolas Sarkozy. La France, tu l 'aimes ou tu la quitte. France, you like it or you live it. And there is this idea that you have to make a lot of effort. So you do it. Of course, you do it because you want to be part of this beautiful, beautiful scene that is Paris. But maybe after 10 years or 15 years, you ask yourself, but what did I lose doing this?

21:25You know, I integrate myself, but sometimes I feel that I disintegrate myself, that I lost also some things maybe of my culture, of my childhood, of my souvenir. And I think that French people are not conscious enough of how violent it is to always ask people to integrate, assimilate. It's always on one path. You have to walk towards them, but they never walk towards you. They don't care where you come from, because for them, at the end, you are French or you want to be French. You have to forget about where you come from. There's a scene in Watch Us Dance in which Mathilde's daughter is, in fact, she's in Alsace, not Paris.

22:06but the landlady complains because her hair, her thick Arabic hair, has been blocking the drain. So it's not an overt racist declaration, but there's a sense of resentment against her lodger. Is that something that you were told by your grandmother or your mother, or is that something you experienced? Both, both. I experienced this many times. I remember when I arrived in Paris, I was living in what we call a foyer. It's a little house with many students, girls, students, and the landlord who was here, he was always always looking at what I was doing and I remember he was always telling me but didn't you learn this in Africa and I was like first why do you say Africa you can say Morocco and he would always always talk to me about my hair and my hair in the shower and the fact that there was too much hair in the shower and also the fact that people they always touch your hair and they want to know is it natural or not you know for people who don't know you have very very yeah exactly very natural curly hair and a lot of cliche, you know, in France, when you say I come from Morocco, people always answer, oh, yeah, my father was in Algeria in the 60s.

23:13But I'm like, I don't care. I'm just telling you that I come from Morocco. It has nothing to do with Algeria. But yeah, I think that they feel that they are in a dominant position and you have to accept this dominant position. But I feel that the new generation, the young generation is not going to accept that because we live in a world where it is possible to be multicultural and you don't betray your French identity by sometimes wanting to be Moroccan or wanting to show another identity. So I think, yeah, maybe the younger generation will correct that.

23:53Your next choice, Leda, is The News. Several of your books have been inspired by news stories, including the first two novels, Adele and Lullaby. In fact, you actually worked as a reporter for Jeune Afrique magazine and covered the Arab Spring uprisings in Morocco and Tunisia. Was that an exciting time for you personally or was it quite disturbing to witness those events? It was very exciting, very exciting. Frightening sometimes, but very exciting.

24:26The Arab Spring also was a very moving moment for us because I think that 10 years after September 11, we were quite traumatized, my generation. I was 20 years old when September 11 occurred. And I think that we were very humiliated as Arabs because all the news about Arab people were always bad news. And it was difficult at that time to say that you were an Arab, to say that you were a Muslim, because people would always look at you in a weird way. So when the Arab Spring happened, we were proud to show people that, of course, Arab people also want democracy. Also, they want to be free and that it's not something like conceptual to Arabs or essential to Arabs to live in a dictatorship or to be fanatics.

25:15It was your job to report on the events that you were seeing all around you. Did you at the time consider writing fiction about the Arab Spring? Yes, actually, I did. And my first novel, unpublished novel, was about this. And it was a very, very, very bad novel. But I sent it to a publisher in France. And he told me, you know how to write. You will probably become a writer, but it's not the good topic. You should write about something else. Write about something that really is about you, something really intimate. And I think he was right. Was there a decision to leave journalism then and to pursue fiction?

25:49And what prompted that? First of all, I became a mother. And it was very difficult to travel all the time when you have a baby at home. As a reporter, I was traveling like two weeks per month. So I was away from home all the time. And was it dangerous as well? Because, I mean, a lot of violence on the streets. Sometimes also it was dangerous, you know, in the border between Libya and Tunisia. Yeah, it's quite dangerous. So I decided at that point that I need to stop journalism for one year or two years and to try to write a book. And also I was afraid because I was always telling my friend, you know, one day I will write a novel.

26:27And I was afraid to become a 40-year-old or 50-year-old woman telling all my friends, you know, one day I will write a novel. Your first novel, Adele, was published in 2014 about a Parisian wife and mother who lives a sexually promiscuous, very secret life. Adele felt for the first time that mix of fear and longing, disgust and arousal. that dirty desire to know what was happening behind the doors of those seedy hotels, in the dim depths of those back alleys, in the seats of the Atlas Cinema, in the back rooms of sex shops whose pink and blue neon signs pierced the twilight. Never since that evening, not in the arms of men, nor during the walk she took years later on the same boulevard, has she rediscovered that magical feeling of actually touching the vile and the obscene.