Leïla Slimani recounts September 11 seen from Morocco

Interview
The famous Franco-Moroccan novelist brings the historical saga of “The Land of Others” to a close by recounting, in “I’ll Carry the Fire,” the decades she lived through. Here she evokes a hardening of Islam in the 1990s, and the terrorist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s.

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I chose to tell the major events from the intimate sphere, that is to say as we experienced them. Now I have heard quite ambiguous things about September 11. To understand them, we must remember that the 1980s and 1990s were years when Arab countries suffered. Many are dictatorships. There are big human rights problems. These are also countries which are undergoing structural adjustments which, at least for Morocco, are terrible. People there have a very negative vision of America: at that time, it was Satan, it was decadence; and then it is an America which humiliates the Arabs, which defends Israel.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is extremely present: to be Arab is to be pro-Palestinian, we talk about Palestine all the time. There isn’t a dinner where we don’t talk about it, including in the French-speaking community where I grew up, and even in the Moroccan Jewish community. In Morocco, there are Moroccan Jews who are among the hardest pro-Palestinians. It even crosses religious communities. And then my parents often…