YouSaid · the spoken record

Leïla Slimani

lines on the record: 41
first: 2021-08-13
most recent: 2021-08-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“the flower power and of course in the beginning of the 70s like in many countries the king has sent the second he decided to repress there was a big repression in Morocco and I want to show that the fact that people from the generation of my parents, they had a lot of disillusion. And also it is a book about becoming a bourgeois. My mother, as you saw in the first book because she inspired the character of Aisha, she's going to become a bourgeois and live in a house with a swimming pool. From a generation to another to become a bourgeois and to become the elite of a country, although their own parents sometimes were very dominated and were poor people, my other grandmother, she couldn't read or write. So I wanted to show the gap between those two generations.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Really mapped out. It's finished. Okay. One scene left. Yes, it's during the, it begins during the summer of 1969. And it's a very particular summer in Morocco because it's the hippie summer. All the hippies came in Morocco, in the Saura, and Jimi Andrix spent a week in Esawira. We don't really know what he did, but in the book, I try to imagine what he did and it involves a lot of sex and drugs and music. They had this ideal of anti-capitalism and anti-war and love for everyone.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but I think it affected my writing because what I wrote was probably more sad or melancholy or even darker than what I do usually. So you can imagine that it's terrible. But, you know, I'm someone who works a lot. I've always been working a lot. I need to work all the time. The truth is that it didn't change a lot in my day-to-day life because as a writer I wake up in the morning and I stay alone in my office and I write. So what I used to do before I did it after, the only difference is that I have my children now in the house and I can hear them shouting, but that's the only difference.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's harder. And, you know, when I had the concour and after one year, I said to my publisher, I have to do something that seems impossible to me. I have to do something that is very, very difficult for me. And the idea of writing a trilogy with a lot of characters in a different period of time, with characters that I was going to follow from.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course because I think that there is a difference between being a writer and being a famous writer and maybe there is a paradox or even an oxymoron. A writer shouldn't be famous. And I think that all the writers who became famous discovered that Steinbeck or Hemingway, they all say that's absolutely ridiculous. We should publish books without the names. We should stay always in the dark. We should always stay hidden. But now it's too late. Success is very dangerous. To be criticized, you have to have bad experiences and then you can go back to work. And I think that's all that matters.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Woman not be afraid of disappoint, not be afraid of being misunderstood, you can begin to write when you accept the idea that you will not be loved and you will not be understood. You can't write with the objective that people will adore you, worship you. You have to accept the idea that maybe no one will read you, no one will understand you, that maybe you will be attacked for things that you didn't even do or think, but it's something that you have to do for yourself. And you write for yourself. You write with your guts, with your freedom. So you can write whatever you want, even if people hate that, even if no one understands you. You have to be sincere and brave.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always knew that I was going to be a writer. I think that I was maybe six or seven when my mother one day at dinner she said Leila is going to be a writer and I always do what my mother says. So I was like, okay, I'm going to be a writer. And when I was a teenager, I was reading a lot of things about writers' life, Baudelaire and Denerval and Flaubert, and they all had a lot of passion and they used to take drugs and alcohol and they had Siphilis and I was like, wow, I want this life. I want to take drug and have Siphidis. So then I discovered that you'll be a writer, you have to write and you have to work. And it's not only about drugs and alcohol and love.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Muslim, but I don't want a woman with a vein to go with children outside, you know, when they go outside after school to despise women with a veil, to be very violent and racist through men who shows that they are religious. So for the principle, I'm very for the principle, but I'm also completely conscious of the fact that many people hide their Islamophobia behind what they call laicite.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private, and I do whatever I want, and outside I would not be judged in a court because of my religion or even in a religion that I don't believe in. So I'm completely for the principle of secularizer man. I think that living in a country like France for me, I consider it like a chance because I feel completely free. No one is asking me any question about my religion and my children go to school and we don't know about the religion of his friend and it's very good. But I think that in the past five or ten years there is a political and a bad political vision of this secularism and people are trying to mask and to hide Islamophobia behind this secularism.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course, I think that what I could answer is that when you are a woman living in a Muslim country where Islam is the religion of the state, you are supposed to be a Muslim, so you don't have the right to eat during Ramadan, you don't have the right to lose your virginity. You can go to prison because of adultery. You don't have the right to be a homosexual. If you divorce from a man and marry another man, you lose the custody of your child. So a lot of things. People tell you this is like this because this is because of Islam. Of course, when you live in a situation like that, you crave for secularism. I would love to live in a country where I have the right to choose my religion where religion is something”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I tried to use them because at the beginning I was like, okay, I will try to avoid any kind of folklore, any kind of orientalism. I hate that. But then I understood that it was impossible to avoid them completely, especially in the 40s and the 50s where a woman like Mathilde, of course, is influenced by that. And of course, when she arrives there, because, you know, I found pictures of my grandmother. And in the 50s, when she was in the Midena, you can see my grandmother so tall, so blonde. And behind her, people wearing, you know, the jailaba like at the beginning of the century. So it was impossible not to have this orientalist point of view. So I tried to use them and I tried to make something of them. But of course I wanted also the reader to see another Morocco, the Morocco that I know.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. I tried to have many point of views and you will see in the book that you change of narrators very often. Sometimes you are with someone and there's a shift and you are with someone else. And that's the whole point of the book, to say that where is the truth? Where is the reality? Everyone looks at the world in a certain way and thinks that it's the truth. It's the way the world is. I don't know how to say in English, to have to change all the time point of view and sometimes to feel himself uncomfortable. I don't know what I think. I don't know if I like her or not. I don't know if If I agree with her or not, and I think that at that time in those circumstances in this family, it was very difficult to really know what you think which side you're going to choose. So I wanted to be always moving.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say also that in France I was a little bit disappointed by the fact that a lot of people who made reviews about my book said it's a book about women, about the disillusion, all this, intimacy, all that, but not a political book. And I think that even if I'm a woman, I write political books. I think that a book like Lullaby is about politics. I think that a book like Adele, even if it's about a sex addict, it's politic. And a book like The Country of Others is a political book. But there is something in France, this idea that a woman who writes about history and with the main characters being women, it's not very political. It's intimate. It's something about women or that, but it's not political. And in the Anglo-Local countries, I think it's different. You are more stressed”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know some things are maybe missing, but something are added also for instance in France people are very uncomfortable when it comes to speak about race or also about colonization as I was saying and in the US or in Great Britain it's very much it's easier to speak about post-colonial studies or to speak about race or to speak about M ⁇ tis as in the book mixed race couple and I think that I learn also a lot of things from people interviewing me in the Anglophone countries and also the vision of the colonization was pretty different so it's very interesting to have the confrontation between the two point of view in terms of colonization so no I'm not afraid that on the contrary I'm very curious always to learn about that and I have to”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that in Morocco, you know, they were very proud that someone would write a trilogy about modern Morocco. You know, in Morocco, we read a lot of American books, British books, French books, and we watch movies coming also from the West, a lot of saga. And I think that we are a little bit frustrated to see a lot of stories with characters called Marie John and things like that, and that we would like sometimes that those characters would be called Mohammedo, Aisha, or Amin and to say that we have a history too, we make love and we have desire and we have ambition and we have a history. We are not just Muslim or just migrants or just people in little boxes like that. So I think they were happy, they were proud.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question I also want to know the answer to was there a tension, Leila, in your family from you writing about their personal history? How have they responded? No, I'm very lucky because they are all dead, so there was no tension. The only living people person is my mother and my mother is, you know, what she cares about is that I'm happy. And she told me, I'm going to read it.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To tell stories about this period, as I said, with a certain sense of nuance and of complexity, and to say, okay, there were bad people, bad colonists, but also very simple individuals who just came there to work and have a farm and who had Moroccan friends or Moroccan lovers and who spent their whole life there. And I think it's very important to try to be complex and try also to give a certain place to ambiguity and to gray, as I said. Yeah, thank you, Leila. We have lots of questions. So let's turn to our audience to see what they have to say. I'm going to remind the audience too that, again, you can ask a question by clicking on the ask a question button under the video screen and remember to press send and your question will come to me and I'll try to get through as many of them as I can but there are quite a few so this is a question”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fascinating. And it's a very tense debate in some ways, but I think fiction has a role to play, actually, maybe in later. Absolutely. Yeah. Because, you know, I think that in literature, what is very important is that we are not here to judge. The point of my book is not to say there were good people, bad people, or just to say colonization is bad if it's just to say that I don't need to write a novel. But it's to try to...”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, in France, as you said, like in Britain or in Germany, we are speaking more and more about colonialism, but we are just at the beginning, I think. For instance, I was part of a very big documentary about colonization, the consequence of colonization that was shown on national TV in France. And I was surprised because there was not so much reaction as if people were like, okay, it was very bad. We did bad things, but it's not my fault. It was the grandparents that are dead now. Let's not talk about this kind of things. You can feel that people are very uncomfortable with that. And there is this idea that we should be proud of being French, why those people always want to say bad things about this country, and this country is providing so much things for them. And then they are ungrateful. So it's a very bad thing.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always find it a fascinating thought experiment for the descendants of the children of migrants to think about where would you be if that journey had not happened. It is a kind of astonishing thought experiment and it reminds you how precarious history is, how our fortunes are changed by WIM and both by WIM and by great political moments too of which you may not have much control. And as you were talking about this colonial history, I was thinking about how in Britain at the moment we're having, as I suspect in many countries, we're having a great reappraisal of the ways that we tell our national histories. And I wonder how much of this colonial history, the one that you're writing in your novel, is taught in France and how widely known it is”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question of immigration, Islamism, you can't understand that if you don't understand colonization. And I'm always surprised by that, by the fact that a lot of people don't want to look at this period of time, don't want to talk about it. And, of course, I'm still, I think, very much influenced by that. I wouldn't speak French if my country was not colonized. I wouldn't be so much influenced by the French culture, by all that. I wouldn't have studied in France. My destiny would have been completely different in a good and in a bad way probably. I don't know. Maybe I wouldn't have maybe today I would be in the house with a veil, no schools. I don't know. I can't imagine what it would have been. But what is absolutely sure is that colonization still has a lot of consequences today.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“must return in some form or be experienced differently by the next generation because it seems to me that seems to be a really important part of what you're trying to do with this book project. Absolutely. You know the trauma of colonization is big. It's huge. And I think that what I am, what I feel, my vision of the world, my work also is still very much influenced by the experience of colonization, even if it's not an experience that I've lived in my flesh, but it's the childhood of my mother and it's the life of my grandparents. And I'm always surprised when I go to presentation, especially in France, and people say, oh no, not again, colonization. It's far. We don't care anymore. It's in the past. We should forget about that. And I'm like, no, it's not really in the past. It's still the present, what we are today, the relationship between Morocco and France.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to ask you about what happened. I'm going to ask you about the rest of the trilogy in a moment, but I want to hold fire a little bit. But I want to ask about the next generation because I think I can see the direction in which this trilogy might go, perhaps a little bit like Chinoa Chabers, things fall apart about the way in which a colonial history travels or it haunts generations. There's a kind of transgenerational haunting. And at the end of the novel, the struggle for independence has become violent. And I share the daughter is watching it with fascination. And I wondered whether what your thoughts are as somebody who belongs to this multiple generation of immigrants, of mixed ethnicity, whether the violence of colonialism experienced by one generation”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to act as if I was what I'm not. And I'm completely aware of the fact that being a bourgeois, I know all the cod. I speak French, I speak English, I can travel, I have a passport. When I go in a hotel or in a restaurant, I know exactly how to behave. I'm not afraid. I'm not uncomfortable. And I don't want to be a hypocrite and to do as if I was. And I'm completely conscious that the class for me is the most important. It's even more important than race today, I think.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course it's important for me because I've always been I'm an Arab, I'm a Moroccan, but I'm also a bourgeois. And I know that the fact that I'm a bourgeois makes me in a certain way less Arab. I can remember when I was a student in France one day I was speaking about the fact that I was Moroccan and that I had to endure racism. And a woman said to me, but you're not really an Arab, you're in Sanspo. And what she meant is that, okay, you belong to the bourgeois class. We don't consider you like a real Arab, an Arab is supposed to be poor. An Arab is supposed to live in the suburb, is supposed to be, the mother is supposed to be a nanny or a woman who cleaning woman. So I've always been very conscious of that, very aware of that, and that's why when people want to put me in the box of the victim or I say, no.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know, the dependence in all Africa, it was a story of men, of men with men deciding for the destiny of this country what we are going to do. It was a very patriarchal vision of the future of those societies. The idea that women could be in this story was not at all on the table. And I wanted to show that. It's very beautiful, of course, independence, but no one think about the woman in this story. Because they say, oh, we are going to give you schools and we are going to give you rights. But at the end of the day, when Morocco became independent, no rights, no school, nothing. Women were at home as at the beginning. So that's also something I wanted to show is that, okay, they believed in very beautiful values, but the values were only for men.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. And there's a passage in the book where Selma, the sister of Amin, is saying all the men in the street are screaming independence, freedom, and we women. We are screaming independence, freedom, but men won't listen to us. So there is also what I wanted to show is this parallel between the fact that men are giving a lot of importance to freedom and to independence. But when it comes to their sister, to their daughter, to their wife, they don't care about their independence and their emancipation. So, yeah, of course, I wanted to draw this parallel. It was very important for me.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to know that in the 40s in Morocco, the Nationalists, the people who were fighting at the beginning for independence, were people very much influenced by France and in general by the ideas of the West and especially the idea concerning women. And those men began to say that Moroccan women should go to school, that Moroccan women should go out from the houses and stop to wear a veil and traditional dresses, and that it was impossible to build a modern country without women. And for the first time in the history of Morgo, women are going to go to school, to university,”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that we've all experienced that when you go to another country and you leave there the first time that you feel, okay, now I understand people think that maybe I belong to this country. I speak the language well enough that people speak to me like a native and that's something you feel proud. It's even ridiculous, but you can feel very proud of that.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's very difficult. So this is a very modern woman and it's something that she has from my grandmother. I think that the more I made research about this period and the more I was surprised and amazed by my own grandmother because I understood how difficult it must have been for a woman in the 40s to decide to marry a Muslim man, an African, and to go with him. And what she probably enjoyed when she arrived in Morocco in terms of racism, in terms of poverty, of difficulty to learn the language, to learn the culture. And she decides at the moment she arrives to learn Arabic. She doesn't want to be just a French woman. just enjoying the good weather and the landscape of Morocco. She wants to belong.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She read Alexandra David Niels, she read a lot of novels and of books about foreign countries. And I think that she has a very mythologic vision of Africa and of Morocco. What I wanted to do with the character of Mathilde is to build a complex character. Sometimes she's very likable because she's, as you said, adventurous, she's very generous, she's brave. But at the same time, sometimes she's very annoying because she's frivolous, she's selfish, sometimes she acts like a child, and she can be racist even sometimes. She wants to seduce a lot. She wants to have parties sometimes, and she doesn't understand that her husband is fighting for the farm.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Absolutely, and when you say that sex is a part of this, it's very important to remember and Fanon talks a lot about this, that colonization was also a sexual enterprise when people decided, French people decided to penetrate the African continent. It's also a sexualized vision of the world. And when you see the old maps of Africa or Asia, it's always a woman with naked woman. And there was this idea that going to Africa or going to Asia was also for the white man a way to experience a different sex, different sexuality, very savage, something like that. And I think that Mathieu, she is influenced by that. She read Karen Blixen.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First I read a lot of books, of course of history about this period, and then I tried in the French National Library you have a lot of archives and you can find diaries, letters that were sent from Morocco to people in France telling about day-to-day lives in the farms, in the cities. And also, of course, I interviewed my own family.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely it's like you're living on an island I've always had the feeling that my family tried to build a little island and that we were like a whole bunch of Robinson Cruz living all together on our island. Sometimes you feel lonely, sometimes you feel uncomfortable because you have the feeling that maybe you should get involved and you should belong to the rest of the world and you should fight with the others and that maybe you are selfish living on your island. But sometimes it's so wonderful to live in this island and to have those bounds that are only bonds of love and affection and emotion. Sometimes it's very beautiful and sometimes you can feel very lonely.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am the child of colonist and colonized, I am the child of dominant and dominated of the goods and the bads. I don't have a side. I can't choose a side. It's impossible. And the only side that I choose is freedom, freedom to be myself, freedom to invent myself, to be a free individual. And I don't want one culture against one another. I think that you are not your culture. Your culture is what you make of it. And I choose to be in a culture that respects people, that gives importance to the dignity of every individual. So this question of betrayal is very, very important in my life because I've always felt that I was not a good French. I was not a good Arab. I'm not good at anything. So yeah, I'm a traitor and a happy traitor.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, and it's very interesting that you're using this word betrayal because it's something that I've always failed as a Moroccan woman who used to speak French in my family. I come from a bourgeois background and in my family we were francophone and very often in Morocco people would say that I'm a traitor, a traitor to my culture, to my religion because also I'm a free woman and I drink and I smoke and I do whatever I want to do. A very strange mixture between my grandfather and my grandmother.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very much, yeah, I was very much influenced by Fanon and I read it all the time when I was writing the book. And he was very, very important for me. And also what he says about humiliation and about domination, he says that when you humiliate someone, he's going to humiliate himself, someone else, and that the colonists, when he humiliates the Arab or the African, this bed is going himself to humiliate someone. And very often this someone is a woman because when he comes home at the end, the only person that he can dominate is his wife or his children. So it's also a lot about this question of domination, the fact that you always have to dominate someone.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, you have to imagine that at the end of the war, because the books begin in 1945, the dislocation is global. The world is completely dislocated by what just happened because of the horror and the cruelty of the war, because of the fact also that people like my grandfather, soldiers coming from Morocco, Algeria, they went to France for the first time and they fought for France. And then when they come back to their own country, they are treated again like native, like indigenous, with a lot of racism. And I think that everything is turned around. All the rules, all the way people were looking at the world, everything has changed. So I wanted to draw a parallel between the life of this family and the life of the two countries, Morocco and France. Women are looking for emancipation. And at the same time, in this family, people”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was like, wow, a tiger in the forest in Germany. And when I came back to school, I said to all my friends, you know, my grandfather, he fought with a tiger in Germany. And of course everyone made fun of me saying there is no tiger in Germany. And I was not angry at him. I was like, wow, he has this great power. He can tell a story and everyone believes in this story. So I can't tell you if it's fiction or if it's the truth, but it's what I've believed in for many, many years. And for me, it's the truth.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I know is that she told me great stories. So I don't know if what I'm telling you today in my book is fiction or reality. And the truth is I don't really care. What I care about is to tell you that I was fascinated by those stories and I hope that my reader will be too. I was looking at my grandmother and telling myself she's not a real human being. She's a character. She's the character of a novel. She's the character of a movie. And, you know, my grandfather also, he was fascinating. One day he couldn't swim, but one day he was with his swimming suit next to the swimming pool and he had a scar on his belly. And I said, what is this scar? And it was nothing. He had just a surgery, apadisectomy, or something very banal. And I asked him, what is this? And he said, you know, one day I fought with a tiger in a forest in Germany.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you say yes, it's very fictional even if it's inspired by my grandparents. I was very lucky as a child because I spent a lot of time with my grandparents in the farm they used to have in McNess, in the center of Morocco. And my grandmother was a great storyteller. She was really fascinating. And I remember when we were children with my sisters, it was very, very hot in my grandmother's farm during the summer, and we couldn't sleep. And that's maybe why I write so dark and so cruel stories. But I was fascinated by her. And I would always ask her, tell me about your own childhood. Well, it was to be in Alazaz and tell me when you arrived in Morocco. And I'm not sure that my grandmother told me the truth.”
2021-08-13 · Intelligence Squared · The Country of Others, with Leïla Slimani and Shahidha Bari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source