Morocco - Dans le jardin de l'ogre et. al.

Country: Morocco
Books: Dans le jardin de l'ogre/Chanson douce/ Le diable est dans les details/ Le parfum des fleurs la nuit
Author: Leïla Slimani
Publication Year: 2014/2016/2017/2021
Genre: Fiction/Non-Fiction

Country: Morocco
Book: Last Chapter (الفصل الأخير)
Author: Leila Abouzeid, John Liechety (Translator)
Publication Year: 2010 (2000)
Genre: Fiction

Additional Material

Book: Hideous Kinky
Author: Esther Freud
Publication Year: 1992
Genre: Autobiographical Fiction

Morocco is one of those countries about which we know more than we think. Casablanca is known throughout the world thanks to the Humphrey Bogart film and to the countless parodies that have been made of it over the years. It is still the most populous city in the country with a population of 3.4 million.

Yet there are other Moroccan towns and cities that are almost as well known to the outside world. Rabat, the capital. Marrakesh, with its reputation for attracting hippy types through the writings of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Fez, the cultural capital of Morocco, site of the world’s oldest university, established in 859 by a Tunisian heiress. There is also the port town of Tangier that sits on the opposite side of the Strait of Gibraltar from the British outpost.

We know more of Morocco than we think. More than any other country in North Africa. Even in Egypt, the only cities most people know are Cairo, Alexandria and, maybe, Port Said. Few countries can match Egypt for sheer breadth of history of course. Though Morocco, has been doing quite well for the last millennium or so (file previous sentence under British understatement).

All in, I have read more books by Moroccan authors and about Morocco than any other country so far in this project (spoilers: India will easily eclipse this). Although all of these are quite short works. Nothing much over two hundred pages. It all adds up.

The first book about Morocco is not by a Moroccan at all, but English author, Ether Freud. Hideous Kinky is a semi autobiographical account of Freud’s childhood in the 1960s, when her mother took her and her older sister to live in Marrakesh.

The events of the novel take place when Freud’s alter-ego, Lucy, is between four and six years of age. Which give the lie to the idea that Loung Ung was too young to accurately recall the events of First They Killed My Father (see: Cambodia). Some of the details might be muddied (which is why Hideous Kinky is semi-autobiographical), but the larger details are solid.

Hideous Kinky of course is a rose tinted view of Marrakesh and Morocco for all sorts of reasons; it’s chronology sitting as it does in that No Man’s Land between the end of colonialism and the establishment of independent Arab states. Before the cynicism of the 70s. Before the coming of a whole new kind of authoritarian rule in North Africa.

Burroughs and his contemporaries tried to turn Morocco into a counterculture paradise, though how much of that was always a fantasy is hard to gauge. It was the 60s and a new wave of Orientalism was in progress, personified by the Beatles’ stays in India studying transcendental meditation. Lucy’s mother herself develops an interest in Sufism, though the families dwindling resources soon force them back to England. 

I throw Hideous Kinky into the mix here partly because it is interesting to read books about countries from authors who are neither native nor have any pre-existing connection to the land. Yet it is also illuminating to see these romanticised, even fetishised western notions of the so-called exotic east. Freud’s account has the same innocent childlike view as Ung’s of living through the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Which shines the light all the more brightly on her mother’s hippy notions of what she expects to find in Marrakesh and Morocco at large, and why those dreams will never be realised.

It’s a good book for all that (and because of all that). It is in some ways a North African version of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, complete with the Spiros character in the shape of Bilal. Though with fewer animals cluttering up the house. And unlike Durrell’s books, there is no return from rainy England to facilitate a number of sequels.

Leïla Slimani’s novels, on the other hand, move in the opposite direction. Born in Rabat, Slimani is of dual French/Moroccan nationality. She is both a journalist and a diplomat, serving as the personal representative of the French president to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (the international organisation of French speaking countries). She was arrested in Tunisia reporting on the Arab Spring in 2011. Many of these events are reflected in her fiction.

The two novels under consideration, Dans le jardin de l'ogre (published as Adele in English) and Chanson douce (variously known as Lullaby or The Perfect Nanny in English) are contemporary novels that have the feel of something published in the decades either side of the Second World War. Like the pre-war novels of Satre and de Beauvoir, or 60s new wave French cinema. All of the accouterments of 21^st century life are there, the mobile phone being the most obvious (and ubiquitous). Yet there is something vintage about these books. Perhaps all literature set in Paris is equally timeless.

The subject material is likewise timeless. Dans le jardin de l'ogre is a novel about a woman (Adele) addicted to sex, seeking out liaisons (dangerous ones) even as her husband lies recovering in hospital following a motorcycle crash. This is where we see Slimani’s career mingled with those of Adele’s as she hooks up during press junkets to Africa and reports on the revolutions going on in that part of the world. Her father is indentified as Algerian.

Infidelity and promiscuity have been staples of French literature and Parisian set literature from Madame Bovary to Tropic of Cancer. Indeed, Dans le jardin de l'ogre calls back to Flaubert’s novel, not least by Adele’s husband being a surgeon as Emma Bovary’s is a doctor. Both men move to the country for what they believe to be in their wives' best interests.

The middle sections of the novel feel like a Goddard film or Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (which I only mention because Miles Davis’s soundtrack pairs well with the novel). The final acts are more like the denouement of those same pre-war novels, especially Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy. Or de Beauvoir’s L'Invitée (She Came to Stay, published during the war in 1943).

Chanson douce is Slimani’s second novel (although it was published first in English, before Adele). It uses flashback and individual accounts to retell the story of a nanny’s murder of her two wards. It is based on a real incident in Manhattan. The fictional nanny, Louise, is named after Louise Woodward, a British nanny to an American couple, who was convicted of murder of their son, but the charges were later reduced to involuntarily manslaughter and she was allowed to return to England. That is a whole thing in itself that we simply don’t have time to get into here.

Novels like this are always intriguing. The crime or central incident that is revealed in the opening sentences and which is presented as a fait accompli as the narrative cycles towards unavoidable catastrophe like water circling the drain. There is something distinctly Greek tragedy about the whole thing. The deterministic, pre-quantum world view in which none of us can escape the fate the gods have decided for us. The epitome of this type of novel is perhaps Donna Tartt’s, The Secret History, where the fact of Bunny’s murder by his fellow classics students is known in the very opening sentence.Or, like A Christmas Carol:

“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that.”

Slimani’s version is nuanced in its narrative. There are no Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian notions of good and evil. People rarely kill for such abstract reasons. People are complicated. People can snap in all kinds of unexpected reasons. The real life infanticide was apparently triggered by an argument over the nanny asking for more hours to feed her family. She was offered additional work cleaning the house. That was all it took. Senseless. But there is nothing which says life has to make sense. Nothing truthful at least.

Which isn’t to deal with such incidents in the abstract. I don’t have children and reading books like this only makes me more confident in my life choices. I can’t imagine what it must be like to go through something like this or to face the possibility of going through it on a daily basis, and not drive oneself insane. I admire anyone who has children it spite of the risks (while secretly thinking you’re all insane). I simply lack the mental fortitude for raising children. It is far from the only reason.

Chanson douce is a decent novel if you can face reading it in spite of the subject matter. A film has already been made in 2019 (sadly not in the style of French New Wave, but you can’t have everything). A TV version starring Nicole Kidman is reportedly in production.

Slimani followed up these books with Le pays des autres (The Country of Others) in 2020 and Regardez-nous danser (Look at Us Dance) in 2022, the first two books of a trilogy recounting Moroccan decolonisation in the 1950s. I will certainly be reading these books soon enough.

Of course the novels of Leïla Slimani under consideration have little to do with Morocco. I did therefore read a couple of collections of her collected journalism and essays, Le diable est dans les details (The Devil is in the Details) and Le parfum des fleurs la nuit (The Scent of the Flowers at Night). The former is a short collection of six pieces of journalism, which reflect Moroccan life and the events of the Arab spring.

The later work is more abstract: A collection of pieces largely inspired by the Biennale Art Festival in Venice in 2019. Here we hear Slimani reflect on her Moroccan and North African heritage, but also what it is to be of dual heritage and not entirely accepted by either side. She is working on her Moroccan novel at the time and themes seep through from one work and into the other. Tangier as a virtual enclave of Europe (Europe of course has actual enclaves in North Africa). Europe as a fortress, resistant to refugees seeking to cross the Mediterranean for a better life. The friends she left behind in Rabat.

In many ways, this is the most interesting of Slimani’s books. You will have to excuse me. Writers are a self absorbed lot and writers writing about writing is like catnip to us. Being reassured that even more successful writers go through the same long, dark nighttimes of the soul. That they like the same novels. Auster. Camus. Chekov. But also that any similar writing we have composed over the years is not mere navel gazing and might be of interest to someone else (if only other writers). This is the book I will return to first. It is a book that even with my decidedly average French comprehension, is still short enough to be read in an hour or two.

Leïla Slimani

Finally we alight on a Moroccan writer writing about Moroccan life. Leila Abouzeid’s novel, Last Chapter, like Hideous Kinky, is semi-autobiographical. It also has obvious parallels with Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero (see; Egypt). Though Aisha’s fate is nowhere near as grim as that of Firdaus (though I guess this depends on your point of view).

Last Chapter is a good, old bildungsroman, charting Aisha’s childhood into womanhood as she navigates romance and her burgeoning sexuality against the backdrop of conservative North African values. She faces all of the usual sexism and barriers to career advancement women face in much of the world. It is perhaps no surprise that Abouzeid’s namesake left Morocco to study in France when she was 17.

Like Slimani’s novels, there is an old world feel to the contemporary set pieces (though the novel is set in late 20^th century). Belief in witchcraft, curses and sorcery persist amongst her peers. The ghost of colonialism is ever present, especially in a country that is perhaps closer to Europe than any other in Africa, both geographically and culturally speaking. All of this Aisha must steer around with increasing frustration at the barriers placed in her way.

Unlike Slimani, Abouzeid writes in Arabic rather than French. Which is a deliberate choice. It places her very deliberately in the culture of Maghreb, as the western half of Arabic North Africa is known. By writing in Arabic, Abouzeid’s writing both places her firmly to the south of the Strait of Gibraltar and as an Islamic writer.

For all that she is critical of the opportunities for women in the country, you can tell even by reading this short hundred and sixty page novel that Abouzeid is a proud Moroccan and a proud Muslim to boot. She was the first female Moroccan writer to be translated into English. Being translated in English shouldn’t be a marker of success: Especially for a writer who has avoided writing in the coloniser’s language (and yes, I know Arabic is also a colonial language – you get the point).

The point is, it’s not nothing. It’s a useful shorthand when writing for an English speaking audience. How big of a deal is Leila Abouzeid’ in Morocco? She was the first female Moroccan writer to be translated into English. She is to Moroccan women’s literature what Nawal El Saadawi is to Egyptian women’s literature. Or what Octavia E Butler is to African American women's science fiction. Do you see?

Like Iceland to the north (see: Iceland), Morocco straddles two continents and two worlds. It is closer to Europe than Calais is to Dover (less than half the distance in fact). You can stand on the rock of Gibraltar and see Morocco, You can take a high speed ferry and be in Tangier from Spain in under an hour. I have done these things.

There won’t be many places in this project that I can say I have visited in anything other than an abstract sense (at least partly because most of the counties I have been to are ones from which I have already read their authors), but I have been to Morocco. It was just a day trip. Most of the day spent in Meknes and a flying visit to Tangier. It was pleasant enough. I would like to return some day. This time without a minivan full of other European tourists.

For now, though, we have to live vicariously through the authors we read in this project. We have barely scratched the surface of Africa. 11 from 54 counties (and some, like Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda were countries I had already read). There is an awful lot of the continent still to see. Time to move on.

Leila Abouzeid