'Living with others is hard.' French writer Leïla Slimani on identity, roots and the feeling of not belonging anywhere

After publishing social science books such as In the garden of the beast, Sex and lies and the Prix Goncourt-winning novel A gentle hand French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani (39) grew to become an important voice in French literature in recent years. She was appointed ambassador of French language and culture by President Macron and by the American magazine Vanity Fair named the second most influential French person today.

With her new novel Mathilde the Frenchwoman keeps it closer to home. This first part of the trilogy The land of others is about her family history. After World War II, French Mathilde, based on Slimani's grandmother, falls in love with Amine, a Moroccan officer in the French army. Mathilde and Amine leave for Morocco and settle on his family farm in a small village near Rabat and have a daughter, Aïcha, and son Selim. Against the backdrop of Morocco's struggle for independence, Mathilde develops into a country doctor.

Outsider

What prompted you to write this personal and more traditional novel?

'My previous books were stories with a strong protagonist set in a city like Paris, in our present time. Cruel books too, and in a way clinical and cold. I wanted to show a different side of myself, more lyrical and loving. Above all, in writing this family history, I want to discover and understand who I am. Why I always feel like an outsider, a stranger. Why I am someone who does not belong anywhere. Who lives in other people's country. Where does that feeling come from? To understand that, I had to go back to my grandparents.'

What kind of woman was your grandmother?

'I am the granddaughter of a woman who was quite independent, very modern for her time. My grandmother - Mathilde in the book - had to find her place in a patriarchal and violent world, but also in her family and community. As a girl from Alsace, she did not belong to her husband's Moroccan community, she did not understand his religion nor his language. She had a harder life than I realised beforehand. But for my grandfather too, their situation must have been complicated. That taught me a lot about love. Love requires really trying to understand who the other person is. And it also means that in a relationship, in a way, you distance yourself, from who you are.'

Your grandmother moved from France to Morocco and moved between two cultures. You grew up in Morocco and moved to France to study. Do you recognise that tornness?

'An important difference between me and my grandmother is that she had a very strong identity. Even though she lived in Morocco, learned the language and loved the country and its people, she clearly felt Alsatian. I don't feel such a clear identity. Between her generation and mine, there has been all kinds of mixing between cultures. As a result, I never experienced the feeling of really belonging somewhere.'

How come? She took her French identity with her to Morocco. So for you that didn't work the same way, you didn't feel like a Moroccan taking this identity with her to France?

'That will become clear in part two of the trilogy, which is about my mother, my parents. They grew up in Morocco during colonisation. They were Moroccan, but they went to a French school, learnt the French language, French values, French history. So in their own country, they were taught the culture of another country. That produced a complex identity, which they in turn passed on to my sisters and me. My mother was Morocco's first gynaecologist, my father was a high-ranking civil servant. They were open-minded and non-religious and taught us that freedom, democracy and gender equality were important. I am grateful to them for that, but at the same time this also made us live in a little world of our own. My life was different from that of most Moroccan children. That sometimes made me angry, because I wanted to be like my Moroccan friends, with their religion and traditions and their Moroccan families.

So I guess my displaced feeling is more connected to my parents than to my grandparents. The third part is about my generation, with many immigrants, in France, the United States, England or elsewhere. About the issues of globalisation and immigration, and the loss of identity. In today's world, we consider it a good thing to travel a lot, to be a cosmopolitan. Roots are less important than they used to be. My grandparents were strongly attached to their land - literally. They had a farm; for them, land was very important. Whereas I feel I could live anywhere.'

How does that lack of roots affect your existence?

'When I was younger, I often felt lonely and could envy people who belong to a community or group. But on the other hand, being an outsider and being able to observe others and the world is actually an advantage for me as a writer. Now I actually like the feeling of being a stranger. It also gives freedom.'

Perhaps you belong to a group after all: generational peers with that same displaced feeling.

'In a way, yes, and that's why I want to write about it, because more people will be able to identify with it. People walking around with the same questions: why don't I feel at home anywhere? Why don't I belong anywhere? After the publication of the first volume, I received many letters from people who said they recognise the story of my family and now better understand where they came from.'

What have you discovered about yourself by unravelling your family history?

'My publisher once pointed out to me that in my first novel, the word 'shame' appeared very often. He asked me why that was such an issue for me, but I didn't know the answer to that at the time. Why was I so often ashamed of myself, or afraid of the judgement of others? That came from my mother; from the girl who was poor, had come from a mixed marriage and was therefore of a mixed race, who was laughed at for her weird hair, for her weird parents. I inherited that trauma, that shame, from my mother. Now that I know where that came from, I have been able to put that down and put it behind me. And not only have I been liberated from it, so has my mother. We talked a lot about it, and I was able to show her that it was over. For a moment, our roles were reversed and I could tell her that I understood and recognised what she has been through and felt, and how difficult it has been. My mother is a humble woman with a great sense of dignity; she would never complain about anything. But in a way, I understood very well where she came from and what it meant to her. Because when she Mathilde read and had read about herself as a little girl, she said: 'I never told you this, yet you understood'. I really tried to put myself in that girl's shoes, that girl who felt so lost, who was proud of her parents and didn't understand why her skin colour and curly hair was such a thorny issue, why her parents were humiliated. For a child, it is devastating when his parents are humiliated, it has a very profound effect. I wanted to show that too.'

Have you experienced that yourself?

'Yes, I know what it is. Because of a political issue, my father lost his job when I was 13, he was not allowed to leave the house, had no passport. In a patriarchal country like Morocco, that was quite something. People no longer spoke to him. At 20, my father was thrown in jail over a political issue. When he was found innocent, he had already died. For a child, the humiliation of his parents is very drastic, and each child reacts differently to it. For example, a person may try to restore his parents' dignity by doing everything possible to succeed in life. For that reason, I think I also wanted to write about it: to give my mother a touch of pride and joy.'

You had powerful women as role models: your grandmother was a country doctor, your mother Morocco's first gynaecologist.

'True, and my father was also a feminist. Our parents told us to be ambitious and work hard. Study, study and study again. So that we could earn our own money and not depend on a husband. We could become whatever we wanted as long as we excelled. So if you wanted to be a clown: fine. But only the best clown in the world. They believed in us, and that gave a lot of confidence and strength. Of course, it also gave pressure, but a good kind of pressure. Teaching your children to seize opportunities is, I think, better than teaching them that it all doesn't matter and teaching them mediocrity.'

What can we learn from this story?

'That the world is complex and cannot be divided into good or bad, black or white or more such simple opposites. It is about trying to understand the other. Living with others is difficult, whether in a country, in a family or in a relationship. Sometimes you have to fight with each other, and above all you have to try to be tolerant, understanding, respectful and compassionate. You sometimes hear people say that cultures and nationalities should not mix, that we should preserve the purity of civilisations. Those who want you to believe in that are misrepresenting things. That is an ideology that is very dangerous. The world is complex, human beings are complex. Literature shows that complexity and shines light on it. Every monster also has good in it and every angel also has a dark side. If you want to know who someone is, you have to look mainly at what someone does. We are mainly defined by our actions, our values, what we believe in and fight for. What does the fact that my passport says I am Moroccan and French say about me? More important is whether you are brave or strong, that you are a mother and a lover.'

You have gained a lot of influence in recent years. What do you want to use it for?

'I used to not believe in role models. But I have come to realise that as a little girl, I never read books or watched films with main characters who looked like me. When I opened a magazine, there was never a woman in it whom I recognised myself. So maybe it is true that if a girl in Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia reads one of my books or opens a magazine and sees my face in it, she realises that if a woman with a face like mine, with this hair and skin colour, with this name, has made it this far, she too can become whatever she wants to be. That she is entitled to that.'