Liberation: What was your first text, short story or novel, that you published, that you submitted to the reader?
Zineb Mekouar :My first novel, “La Poule et son Cumin”, talks about a friendship between two women, Kenza and Fatiha, and through them we follow a whole youth, fiery and thirsty for freedom. We find the themes of emancipation, of gender equality in Morocco but also the theme of the relationship to the figure of the foreigner in France. These are themes dear to my heart.
Liberation: So who are the authors who have influenced your way of looking at facts and writing about them?
I am a great admirer of many writers. I particularly like the books of Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize winner for literature, I like his way of freeing himself from borders and eras to write on the subjects he wants. I love Camus’s novels, his relationship to the Mediterranean way of being in the world, his definition of human dignity too. I am a great admirer of the carnal side of Marguerite Duras’s writing, of the rhythm she puts in her books… and I could tell you dozens of others!
Liberation: In order to write, should one have to impose some kind of ritual on oneself, submit to its constraints? Is it the same for all your novels?
To write, I don’t need anything except time and music. This allows me to put myself in my bubble, to cut myself off from the world for a moment to, perhaps, better be able to listen to all of human complexity.
Liberation: “Writing is the double pleasure of telling and telling oneself a story, and it is also the pleasure of writing, which is inexplicable” said Françoise SAGAN in an interview she gave to Le Magazine littéraire in June 1969.
That’s exactly right. I will answer you with another quote, this time from Marguerite Duras: “I can tell you what I want, I will never find out why we write and how we do not write. » It all depends on each person’s story, and the “necessary” side of writing in one’s life.
Liberation: For Proust, the written life is more intense than the lived life. What do you think ?
I think it is indescribable and mysterious, the relationship with writing, that is certain. I also think that it is the intensity of the emotions experienced that can make a book “alive”, that is to say, allow, through reading, the reader to be moved, touched in the heart.
Libé: The critic and writer Milan KUNDERA says that the novel is the place of ambiguity, the place where things are never definitively settled, the place of the absence of a Manichean morality. Could this apply to your novels?
I totally agree. Literature is the place par excellence where judgment does not exist. There is no “predefined morality”, good or bad, we have above all characters who try, as best they can, to live, with the great History which sometimes mixes with their intimate stories, with their emotions and their fragilities… it is the most beautiful, in literature, this absolute freedom to be able to dissect situations, moments, without judgment, and to live, in the light of art, in the skin of the characters.
As a reader, we can, by opening a book, travel wherever we want, at the time we want… and live a thousand lives. It is an extremely strong and precious power since it allows us to realize that the Other, the stranger, is only another ourselves. Literature makes us discover our own humanity.
Interview by Abdelkrim Mouhoub
