The book of the week. For her first novel, the Franco-Moroccan author imagined the course full of hopes and disappointments of a brilliant student of Oujda.
by Kidi Bebey
Critic. Can we claim today, in Morocco, to act on the course of her own existence when one is a young graduate woman but without work or husband? This is the substantive question posed by Najat or the survival, the first novel by the journalist and a Franco-Moroccan author Rania Berrada. Aged in his twenties, her heroine, Najat, begins a license in biology at the University of Oujda, his hometown.
From the middle class, the young woman is misunderstood from her family for whom a university career, was he brilliant, remains negligible in the face of the respectability that marriage and children give. Ryad, older brother of Najat and Relais of authority of his father Mocktar sums up the situation with these words: “A woman, it goes from her father’s house to that of her husband.” Without network in the professional world, Najat knows May she join the ranks of the thousands of unemployed graduates from her country. However, she clings to her studies while hoping to find a husband like her sisters, but a man who will take her to live in a big city, far from the narrow mentality and the gossip of Oujda.
Pragmatic, she lets herself be courted by Younès. Man is inconsistent but represents “his sesame, the opportunity she was waiting for to leave this city where half of women are teachers and the other at home (…). As for love, time will do the rest. Najat does not believe in the stories of Prince Charming. “When Younès finally discomfort, Najat seeks some time to take control of his own destiny. She targets studies in Germany, manages to invest in language courses thanks to the support of an uncle who hosts her in Rabat. But, at the time of registration, the uncle commits an administrative error which has the consequence of leaving the Najat project.
“Beware of happiness”
To tell this journey as a woman going from hopes to disappointments, looking for her journey between will and submission, Rania Berrada has chosen an apparently distant and factual writing. Like an entomologist, she observes Najat from all angles, from her appearance and her public behaviors to her desires and secret thoughts. She shows her trapped in a world that encloses her as under a glass capsule while she strives to break the invisible wall.
The space that would like to join Najat seems, however, at hand: it is the big cities of Morocco that she hopes less stifling than ujda, or even, a few hours by plane, one of the major European cities where it could enhance its scientific knowledge. Alas, too many obstacles are interposed: social conservatism, administrative procedures, bad luck, duplicity of men, always obliging him to give up his youthful dreams to stick to the only search for a social status which ensures its dignity. Najat comes to “wakes up [r] of happiness”.
We could fear that the accumulation of unfortunate events in the life of heroin makes the novel lose credibility. It is not, because the novelist, on the contrary, reveals with realism the depth of the current abyss between what society requires women and what many people think or feel. A situation that has reached many of them on their critical threshold.
In this eminently feminist, Rania Berrada’s novel justly expresses the secret overlap of millions of women, from the Maghreb to the rest of the African continent and still beyond around the world. This overcome of feeling offbeat, lonely, minor, in societies still shaped without sharing by men and for men.