Book Review: “In the Country of Others,” by Leïla Slimani

IN THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS

By Leila Slimani

Translated by Sam Taylor

In Leila Slimani’s third novel — after “Adèle” and “The Perfect Nanny,” which won France’s Prix Goncourt in 2016 — Amine, a Muslim Moroccan lance corporal fighting for France in World War II, meets a Frenchwoman named Mathilde when his regiment is stationed in her tiny village near Mulhouse, in Alsace. Charmed by his looks and uniform, she becomes his guide and protector. Love blossoms and they marry, moving to Morocco to begin a new life on Amine’s farm.

Classic war fiction depicts the struggle for identity and territory amid violence, courage and sacrifice. “In the Country of Others” shifts the spotlight away from men and their fragilities. In the first installment of a planned trilogy loosely based on the lives of Slimani’s grandparents, the character of Mathilde lays bare women’s intimate, lacerating experience of war and its consequent trauma.

[ Read our profile of Slimani. ]

In one of the novel’s defining moments, when Mathilde has just arrived in Morocco in 1947, Amine tells her they’ll live temporarily with his mother, Mouilala. Mathilde scoffs at what she considers a “ridiculous” proposition, until Amine says coldly: “That’s how things are here.” There is a recurrent theme in the novel of one person evoking tradition to wield power over another. “She was to hear this phrase many times,” Slimani writes of Mathilde’s reaction. “It was at that precise instant that she understood she was a foreigner, a woman, a wife, a being at the mercy of others.”

In systems of oppression, the person invested with more power (here, the native, the one on home soil) has the responsibility of showing the less powerful person her place — and the subjugated person has the duty of knowing it. It is a double bind of hierarchy and shame that gets cast over Amine and Mathilde’s marriage.

When, years later, it is Mathilde’s turn to ask Amine’s baby sister, Selma, to acquiesce to a conventional, loveless life she doesn’t want, Mathilde subsequently wonders how she’s become that kind of woman: “the kind that encourages others to be reasonable, to give up, to choose respectability over happiness.” Is this change in Mathilde a sign of assimilation, a survival instinct, a resigned submission? Or is Mathilde staking her right to the Moroccan home she has adopted, exercising the entitlement that comes from learning a foreign way of life? As Fatima Mernissi, the Moroccan feminist scholar, once said: “There is only one way to relate to the stranger, you can shoot him, or try to dominate him by understanding his own culture, and this is the only way to win.”

Early on, Mathilde decides to fast for her first Ramadan, and “her husband was grateful for this show of respect for their rites.” But gradually, she feels she’s “becoming a shadow, a nameless, genderless, ageless being,” and, referring to their daughter, rebukes Amine: “Don’t tell me that you intend to raise Aïcha as a submissive woman!” She is quick to point out that the Moroccan nationalists themselves “make a direct link between the desire for independence and the need for women’s emancipation.” After all, she reminds him, his daughter was named in tribute to Lalla Aïcha, the sultan’s daughter, a fiery women’s rights activist.

The fragmentary nature of the novel, like refracted light, allows us multiple points of entry into the characters’ lives. In her early letters home to Irène — her “authoritarian sister who had always treated her like a child and often taken pleasure in publicly humiliating her” — Mathilde hides her estrangement and alienation, inventing adventures and exoticism to become the heroine of her own story. At the hairdresser, her interracial relationship suffers merciless public ridicule (“The white woman and the darkie. The giantess and the dwarf”). Publicly, Amine exudes pride in having been willing to die for France, but, alone, he “would shut himself away in silence and brood over his cowardice, his betrayal of his people.” A white French wife four inches taller than he is only deepens his shame. Aïcha, a mixed-race misfit, is also isolated, bullied by her peers. The war heightens her anxieties, and she finds solace in the Christian prayers she learns at her French school.

For all their domestic strife, Amine and Mathilde have a genuine bond when it comes to the nationalist uprising around them: the attacks on French colonizers’ farms, the formation of white defense organizations in response. “They both belonged to a camp that didn’t exist,” Slimani writes of their shared response to violence, their “compassion for both the killers and the killed.”

Mathilde’s journey in “In the Country of Others” is a rite of passage as much through language and motherhood as through war. In Sam Taylor’s seamless, poetic translation, Slimani masterfully captures these nuanced shifts: the French that scales back to Mathilde’s Alsatian dialect when she’s in the throes of delirious illness; the Arabic that she first learns in Mouilala’s kitchen and later uses to perfection, bargaining with fruit-sellers and framing perfect curses; the Berber that she picks up as a healer for local women, who “forgot that Mathilde was their mistress and a foreigner, and in Berber they shared with her their most intimate memories.”

Slimani writes motherhood like no one else, and Mathilde’s subtle ambivalence toward that role is no exception. “In Alsace she had put away her own childhood; she’d tied it up, silenced it and shoved it to the back of a drawer,” Slimani writes. With Mathilde’s children, “in the kisses that she planted on their cheeks there was not only the strength of her love but the burning intensity of her regrets. She loved them all the more because of all the things she’d given up for them: happiness, passion, freedom.”

In a novel about sex and power, we cannot fail to notice how Mathilde and Mouilala, subordinate citizens though they may be, still mistreat the enslaved women in their homes. Mathilde tries to teach her teenage maid, Tamo, “what she called good manners, but she had no patience with the girl.” Whenever Mouilala’s other son Omar goes missing for days, Mouilala hears the front door open and “would blame poor Yasmine, then end up weeping in the slave’s arms despite the repulsion she felt for her black skin.” Nor can we ignore the fact that Omar’s nationalist activity is as cloaked in secrecy as Selma’s sexuality; but where the girl is punished for transgression, the man becomes the hero.

Slimani — a minister for French language and literature under President Macron — handles Mathilde’s evolution elegantly: The wife is no victim, using Amine’s own cultural history to dominate him on his own turf, on his own terms. Back in Alsace during the war, while men gathered in bunkers, a young Mathilde would lie in bed and pleasure herself, for “coming was the only way she could calm her fear, control it, gain some sort of power over the war.” But as a grown woman in Morocco, facing the definite risk of being targeted for her French origins, Mathilde learns from Amine how to handle a grenade. “She listened with the concentration of a soldier, ready to do anything to protect her territory.” And yet, Slimani reveals Mathilde’s self-doubt to show that she is no oppressor, either. The woman, the stranger in the country of others, has finally not just found, but made her place.