The writer, author of several successful works including Sweet Song who won the Prix Goncourt in 2016, tells how suicide bombings in the United States changed his life.
“On the day of September 11, 2001, I understood that my life was changing. I understood in the hours and days that followed that I was no longer a North African, no longer an Arab, but that I had become a Muslim“, confides Leïla Slimani.
The writer remembers that in parallel with the suicide attacks which marked the United States and the world, Islamism “was beginning to rise in Morocco” and that it “was going to destroy the lives of many people, that he was going to stain her with blood and also with shame.”
“It became difficult to be proud to come from this Arab-Muslim civilization which is also magnificent”, admits Leïla Slimani. This dramatic event was, for her, a moment of “terrible change and loss of many illusions”.
“The product of several successive stories”
“I often had to justify myself on one side or the other. I was also very sad to see in my country, and in the region where I come from, this Islamist hydra gaining more and more strength,” continues the bestselling author. “We, the progressives, we have found it more and more difficult to express ourselves, to defend our point of view, but also in the Western world to suffer more racism, more rejection, more incomprehension. It caused a lot of grief” she confesses.
Leïla Slimani says she is proud to be “the product of several successive stories”. “Coming from two worlds of different religions, I was almost forced, obliged to find my place. Without the Second World War, without colonization, without the uprisings and riots of the 70s in Morocco, I would not be here“.
“Stories of accidents have meant that my Alsatian grandmother met my soldier grandfatherwho was on the front; that my communist father, who then got involved in the system, ended up in prison,” Leïla Slimani also confided.
Finally, she adds: “It’s not a problem to come from two places, on the contrary, it’s very enriching, but it sometimes requires thinking against yourself, working and digging.” His next book, I will take away the firewill be released by Gallimard on January 23.
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