Between tradition and modernity. In Morocco there was a moment, just after independence, when it seemed that the country could take a leap forward. If in El país de los otros (Cabaret Voltaire / Angle), the novel with which Leïla Slimani won the Llibreter prize, she explained the story of her grandparents, in Watch us dance (Cabaret Voltaire / Angle) she develops it, but focuses on the generation of her parents, between Aicha, a young woman who goes to study medicine in Alsace –and returns– and Mehdi, who will be part of the country's elite until he falls in disgrace. In between, the attempts at change of a generation.
It is the second part of the trilogy about her family, but Slimani takes the freedom she needs to get into the characters: "Imagination can help you understand reality and people, so I invented my parents, and from fiction and imagination I can sometimes have a certain sense of truth," says the author. We can only try to write it with all the sincerity of the soul and heart, but it does not mean that it is true.
Although she narrates a turbulent time, what was most difficult for her was not explaining Hasan II's repression: "Sometimes you ask people who lived during this dictatorship and they tell you: 'Oh, I was very happy, we danced.' And you don't understand: how do they dance? It is also a book about happiness. When you're a writer it's too easy to judge and think how could people dance while people were dying and suffering. It's always the same. We all dance while others suffer.”
Sometimes it can be hypocrisy, but also the need to get ahead: “Maybe our children will ask us how we could dance and have fun while the planet died or while the Ukrainians died. It is the story of the human condition. There is a lot of suffering, children who are hungry, there are terrible things and at the same time we love each other and dance and sometimes we are obsessed with what dress I will wear tonight to meet the person I am in love with, and that is what is so moving and beautiful about human beings”.
But he does not forget the repression: "I did a lot of research to understand how it worked in Morocco, but I wanted to show that, despite the exotic vision that many people have of what a dictatorship could be like in an Arab country in the sixties, in reality it was very similar to the situation of the Salazar or Franco regime."
So, in the midst of the Cold War, the world lived at two poles, but there were attempts to go further: “My father was a hippy and a Marxist and was very involved with the communists and all fishing. He is the other face of this generation. They wanted to change the world, they were pan-Arabists, he was very inspired by the leaders of Africa who were looking for a third way between communism and capitalism, until all that ideal failed ”.
One of the subplots leads the reader to follow the hippies to Essaouira: “The Moroccans were fascinated and shocked, because they seemed to them spoiled children who rejected the modernity they wanted. It is another face of colonialism, because the objective of the book is to show that there was no revolution in Morocco. When the French left, the Moroccan bourgeoisie replaced the colonizers. The seventies were just the continuity of colonialism.” The generation of May '68 "had many dreams and ideals, but in the eighties and nineties they became capitalists and destroyed the planet."
“Perhaps my generation or that of my children will be the one that will really change the identity of Morocco. Many generations are needed to decolonize spirits and bodies, ”she concludes. We will have to see it in the third volume, or imagine it.
