This is the first novel in a semi-autobiographical trilogy inspired by your family’s story. What do you feel fiction allows you to explore that a nonfiction autobiographical retelling wouldn’t?
In nonfiction, one undertakes to tell the truth, i.e. to render reality, to verify the established facts. People who have existed or still exist have their lives laid out in a book. I don’t like that and, as Toni Morrison said so well, I believe that people own their lives and that we cannot dispose of them. I’m not interested in factual truth—I didn’t want to feel constrained by that. What interests me is Literature, i.e. the possibility of delving deeply into the soul of each character. I want to achieve a certain truth in the evocation of feelings, in the description of a landscape or an emotion. Imagination is the strongest, most powerful human capability. It allows everything: you can move in time, in space, create worlds. That’s what I look for when I write, and when I read, too.
What part of the story is autobiographical?
In the Country of Others is centered around a couple, Amine and Mathilde, and they are inspired by my actual grandparents. He is Moroccan; she is French. He is small, silent, swarthy; she is tall, blond, adventurous. They marry in 1945 and move to a Morocco under French colonization, marked by racism and the rejection of interracial marriages. My grandmother met my grandfather when he, a Moroccan soldier, was stationed in Alsace, where she was from. They fell in love and she did move with him to Morocco. It was very unusual for a French woman to do this: a white woman marrying a Moroccan man, then moving to Morocco.
The tension between love and violence shapes each character in the novel, and at times, it feels as if one cannot exist without the other. What do you think these unforgiving yet highly realistic characterizations reveal about humankind?
Indeed, I believe that our lives are marked by this tension between attraction to others and repulsion. We are attracted to others; we want to love them and be loved by them. But, the older we get, the more we realize that there will always be a distance between us and others. A part of us remains inaccessible to them and solitude is unavoidable. And then, others constrain us, weigh us down, lock us up. How can we be free with others? And at the same time, what would be the point of living if others did not exist?
In the Country of Others is such a powerful title. At first thought, it refers to Mathilde’s decision to leave her native Alsace forever and move to Morocco with Amine, but the further you get into the novel, it becomes a larger comment on the power dynamic between colonizer and colonized and women living in the world of men. Can you discuss this a bit more?
In essence, we all live in the country of others—it’s part of the human condition. Our whole life will be marked by this dialogue between ourselves and others. How can we find our place without losing ourselves? “The country of others” is, first of all, a definition of colonization. When your country is colonized, you no longer live “at home” but in the country of others. The others are, generally speaking, the powerful, the dominant, those who dictate the law. Women live in the country of others and the others are men. They are the ones who tell them what they are allowed to do, how they should speak, dress, behave. All the dominated feel that they are living in the country of others, that they are subject to the law of the strongest. At the same time, there is also a brighter vision of the country of others. This is the country I live in as a writer. I would like to understand the others, to know them. A whole lifetime is not long enough for me to be able to write everything I would like to.
The lémange tree is a distinct metaphor for Amine and Mathilde’s union and the family they create, one that’s both beautiful and deeply sad. Can you elaborate?
This lémange tree is a metaphor for the Belhaj family and, more generally, for all mixed-race families. Aicha, the mixed-race child, has difficulty finding her place in society. And her father, who is a farmer, is going to make a cross between a lemon tree and an orange tree. He explains to her that it is a bit like her: she is half lemon and half orange. This tree is a bit worrying, a bit “monstrous.” On the book’s cover, we can see that this strange fruit is not right—the orange color is dripping. How can you be two things at once? Are you obliged to choose one side over the other? We don’t really know what it is and the fruit it produces is very bitter. Crossbreeding can enrich and, at the same time, be painful because instead of belonging to two separate things, you belong to nothing at all. And it is always others who decide for you what you are and lock you into boxes.
In the final pages, Aicha joins her parents while looking in the distance as Moroccan liberation fighters burn down colonists’ houses. It’s a contrasted moment of intimacy between them as they watch violence unfold. What do you think this moment represents for Aicha?
Aicha is still a child and I don’t think she’s capable of political opinion, but what I like about this little girl is that she is both very wise, very observant and at the same time capable of extreme violence. At the end of the book, she feels a kind of satisfaction in seeing that those who humiliated her father, those who made fun of her, are losing. She doesn’t really understand what this conflict means, and her reaction is like a child who has been humiliated and sees the possibility of regaining her dignity.
LEILA SLIMANI is the author of the award-winning, #1 internationally bestselling The Perfect Nanny, one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year, and is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. Her new novel, IN THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS, draws on her own family's inspiring story for this story about race, resilience, and women's empowerment. The first novel in a planned trilogy, IN THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS was named a Best Book of the Summer by Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, Observer, and Parade