A new section in which we periodically publish reviews of outstanding works of Mediterranean literature and authors from the countries of the Mediterranean basin. This fourth issue is devoted to the new novel by the Moroccan writer Abdelá Taia (Salé, 1973), who lives in France.
Technical specifications
The slow life
Abdellah Taia
Trad. Lydia Vázquez Jiménez
Cabaret Voltaire, 2020
282 pages
The scene left behind by the attack on the editorial office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the series of attacks in November 2015, with police, military and security guards everywhere, has transformed France in the following years into "a new war zone", in which jihadist terrorism is the enemy and the Arabs who inhabit it its potential fighters. This is the background to The slow lifeThe new novel by the Moroccan writer living in France Abdelá Taia (Salé, 1973), according to the description of one of his characters. It has just been published in Spanish by Cabaret Voltaire, which is also responsible for the translation into Spanish of three of his other nine novels -He who is worthy to be loved (2018); Infidels (2014) y My Morocco (2009, Cálamo Prize) - and which has been developing an important publishing work of North African authors, such as Rachid Boudjedra, Mohamed Mrabet, Mohamed Chukri or Tahar Ben Jelloun -of whom it has published ten works-.
At The slow lifeAbdelá Taia brings face to face two characters who are as utterly disparate as they are inevitably close to each other. Munir is a 40-year-old Moroccan who emigrated to Paris two decades ago. With a PhD in 18th century French literature from the Sorbonne, he lives in a two-room flat in the bourgeois 3rd arrondissement and is waiting to start teaching French at a high school in the Parisian suburbs after the summer. Madame Marty is a French octogenarian who lives in a tiny 14-square-metre attic just above Munir's flat. Hailing from a small village, she has sacrificed husband and son for her love of the City of Light.
Both, however, have skeletons in their wardrobes. Munir is a homosexual and has just lost his mother when he moves into the same building as the old woman, a flat he can afford, according to what he tells his colleagues, because he has negotiated the price with the father of a good friend. After three years of living in the same place, the flat remains practically unfurnished. The 2015 attacks and the recurrent jihadist attacks in subsequent years have turned Munir and all those like him into potential terrorists and, therefore, inhabitants on the fringes of the system. Madame Marty has been living in her tiny garret since the 1970s and harbours a heavy secret, a shame, "that past that France still pretends to have solved". Her older sister, Manon, prostituted herself for the German enemy during the occupation of Paris in the Second World War. After the war, in 1945, faced with the stigma of collaborationism, Manon is forced to leave France. Madame Marty knows what it is like to feel on the margins of society.
Lonely, the young man and the old woman also harbour a certain resentment towards France. Munir, because of what he sees as a new form of spiritual colonisation that has led to a loss of identity and, since the 2015 attacks, because he has been subjected to constant mistrust and scrutiny by the security forces. Marty, because French society has not been able to forgive his sister whom he never saw again. "My sister was excluded. Expelled. Cast out. Pushed to death. To another territory. The old woman needs to tell her secret to someone without being judged. Munir finds in the old woman a kind of mother and friend with whom he can unburden himself. The friendship grows stronger over the years, until, after a confrontation, the old woman calls the police because she is afraid of her neighbour. "I knew perfectly well that Madame Marty was not a racist. She wasn't. But, of course, it was 2017.(...) Everything had become possible. People in France were not the same". Munir's case is now "very serious". He is accused of being a member of an Islamist group that threatens the security of France...
The slow life is a profound reflection on the identity of the individual, of an individual estranged from his roots, who, as he enters middle age, wonders about the true nature of his being. Some of the recurring themes in Abdelá Taia's work emerge in this afflicted and taciturn novel. Childhood in a suburb of Rabat, in the city of Salé, and the socio-economic determinism that leads to despair: "I am nothing. Poor. Fifteen years old. That's all I will be all my life". Homosexuality, experienced as a constant attack by sex-starved heterosexual men who decide to take advantage of a small effeminate teenager. Homosexuality as the source of the tragedies of his life. But also, the wild awakening to romantic sex, with those scenes that Taia stops to describe so meticulously, erotic, slow, explicit, without complexes. The attraction of the former colony as a way of salvation to be freer, to rise socially, to live in the intellectual metropolis... And, after a few years, that unsettling feeling of emptiness, of the dissolution of personality, of the loss of references. "France, by dint of wanting to cultivate and civilise me, had emasculated me". (...) "Who is that? You? No. That's no longer you. You are no longer worthy of that beautiful name. Munir. You should be called Philippe or Baptiste". A sense of emptiness magnified by the reciprocal fear of French society of this "other" whom it mistrusts as potentially dangerous, and that of this "other" of his former neighbours. And, also, this nostalgia for the world of yesterday, "for the strong, violent, too violent sensations I felt when I was immersed in that world" and which probably has a lot to do with nostalgia for one's early youth... In the end, the search for that primal self, that original flame, that wilder side, by returning to the outskirts of Paris, where those French Arabs born there, whom France still considers as immigrants, live. "The periphery and its despised inhabitants, that was the hope". The promise of a life not so slow.
By Natalia Arce