History of a book. “Watch us dancing” is the second volume of the “country of others”, the trilogy on the history of Morocco and a family. Leïla Slimani had the idea in 2016, in the whirlwind of the goncourt.
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To carry out its trilogy the country of others, Leïla Slimani has settled in another country. In June 2021, the Franco-Moroccan writer, her husband and two children left France for Portugal.
The expatriation in Lisbon will last until the novelist has completed the third volume, far from the mix of distractions and obligations that constitutes the Parisian life for a personality so solicited: “I need to be Completely in my bubble, “explains, from passage to Paris, the one who has given himself two years to write the final opus. A delay that it has set itself both tasted for the “deadlines”, kept from its years of journalist (with young Africa), and for envy, being itself female of romantic sagas – whether signed By the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) or by Italian Elena Ferrante -, that reunion between readers and characters take place at regular intervals. The volume 2 of the fresco, look at us dancing, seems a little less than two years after the first, the war, war, war.
Hippie movement
The general project was born in “the endless tourbillon” which followed the Goncourt award attributed to Sweet song (Gallimard, 2016) and the translation of the latter around the world.
The evenings where, locked up in a hotel room, a bit tired of repeating “the same things” on his second novel and on herself, Leïla Slimani started writing scenes “who [him] came from childhood “, and stories delivered by his family – on the arrival of his maternal grandmother in Morocco, after his marriage with a spahi encountered in Alsace, for example. Is thus mounted the desire for a roman-river intermingling the history of Morocco in the destiny of characters freely inspired by its grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles … The volume 1 court of 1944 to 1954, stopping before the Decolonization of the country, declared in 1956. To document, Leila Slimani interviewed members of his family, historians, sociologists, and read “enormously”.
The second volume opens in April 1968 and ends in the winter of 1974. The research of the lattice included many exchanges with witnesses and actors at the time, such as the writer (and sworn. Goncourt) Tahar Ben Jelloun. To these men and women, Leïla Slimani asks in particular details “on what is the order of prosaic, and whose novel has so much: the name of the nightclubs, the appearance of the streets …”. It is inspected on specific topics, such as the place taken on the map of the hippie movement by Morocco, especially the village of Diabet, near Essaouira. She plunges into the newspapers (so those reporting on the passage of Roland Barthes as a professor at the University of Rabat, in 1969-1970), looks at the television newspapers and retransmissions of the royal processions as well as the “very long” Press conferences of King Hassan II (1929-1999).
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