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The sense of being torn between two cultures is central to Le\u00efla Slimani’s I\u2019ll Take the Fire. Photograph: Catherine H\u00e9lie\/Editions Gallimard <\/p>\n\u201cSuccess can make you stupid,\u201d the French-Moroccan writer Le\u00efla Slimani says. She is talking on Zoom from her home in Portugal \u2013 her English is impeccable \u2013 and the subject is the success she had with her controversial early novels. But we\u2019ll come back to those. <\/p>\n
The main topic for our conversation is Slimani\u2019s new novel, I\u2019ll Take the Fire. It\u2019s the third book in a trilogy based on the lives of her family. Her family is from Morocco, which was a French colony until 1956, and the books cover not just family history but the changes in Morocco and France over recent decades.<\/p>\n
The first two books in the trilogy, The Country of Others (2020) and Watch Us Dance (2022), covered Slimani\u2019s grandparents and her parents\u2019 generations. I\u2019ll Take the Fire brings the story up to date, with characters inspired by Slimani\u2019s mother and the author herself. The title \u2013 from a quote by the avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau: \u201cIf your house was burning down, what would you take with you?\u201d \u201cI\u2019d take the fire\u201d \u2013 reveals a certain headstrong quality, which is backed up by Slimani\u2019s responses in the interview.<\/p>\n
I ask Slimani whether it was easier to write about the times she herself lived through, compared to the earlier books, or more difficult?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was more difficult, much more difficult. I experienced a very deep depression when I was writing it. When I was writing the first and second one about colonialisation and the Sixties, even though these were things I\u2019d never experienced, I felt a lot of things were very close to me. But when I was writing about the Nineties, that I lived in, I felt, \u2018This time is dead\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sense of being torn between two cultures is central to Le\u00efla Slimani’s I\u2019ll Take the Fire. Photograph: Catherine H\u00e9lie\/Editions Gallimard <\/p>\n
Is this a protective mechanism, I wonder, because those times we remember feel much easier in retrospect than the times we now live in? \u201cI think it has to do with the way we used to imagine the future. My grandparents\u2019 generation had a certain way of imagining the future. My own parents were hippies, Marxists. And then my own generation. I think what made me sad is to see how much illusion we had about the future after the fall of the Berlin Wall.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believed so much in democracy, in progress. We believed that everything was going to be dealt with by capitalism and liberalism. And maybe we were very, very naive; now we see what is happening.\u201d<\/p>\n
There must also be a sense of release or relief when finishing a trilogy, though? \u201cThere was a sense of relief but also of pressure because what I wanted to say was quite complex and I wanted to write it with nuance. About identity, about immigration, about the desire to belong, and the fear of betraying the place you came from. And it\u2019s difficult to work with the idea of nuance and to live in a world where everything is so black and white. People push you to choose one side, and the more I was writing about this the more lonely I was feeling. I was also understanding that I will not find a satisfying answer to the question of identity. I will not find a side where I feel good and at peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
This sense of being torn between two cultures is central to the book, and to the experience of the character Mia \u2013 who seems closest to Slimani herself. Slimani moved from Morocco to France in her young adulthood just as Mia does. Because of Mia\u2019s middle-class upbringing, in the novel she is seen as a bourgeois French woman, but in France she\u2019s seen as an Arab. Is that what it was like for Slimani?<\/p>\n