“Yes, sir,” one of his assistants replied, pointing. “His name is Youssef El Mekki.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the Hedgebrook Foundation for providing me with space in the spring of 2005 in which to work on this novel; to Oregon Literary Arts for financial support in 2006; to the Fulbright Commission for funding my stay in Casablanca in 2007. I am also thankful to the Multnomah County Library and the libraries of the University of California at Riverside.
The neighborhoods of Hay An Najat and Qubbet Jjmel are fictional, as are the Star Cinema, the Grand Hotel, and the publications run by Hatim Lahlou and Farid Benaboud. In transliterating Moroccan Arabic expressions I have tried to be as phonetically correct as possible without resorting to diacritical marks. For proper names, however, I have used standard Moroccan spelling.
I am indebted to Antonia Fusco, Kathy Pories, Brunson Hoole, Rachel Careau, Michael Taeckens, Courtney Wilson, Craig Popelars, Kendra Poster, Ina Stein, Elisabeth Scharlatt, and the entire team at Algonquin for their work on behalf of this book. Many thanks to my amazing agent, Ellen Levine, who believed in it from the beginning.
I thank my parents and siblings for their patience and continued indulgence with me. Thank you to my daughter, Sophie, who came to me at the same time as this book and brings me the kind of joy it cannot. As always, my thanks to Alexander Yera, my husband, my partner, my best friend, my first and last reader.
A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR
Your first book-length work in English was a collection of short stories. Can you contrast the experience of writing a full-length novel to that of writing shorter works? What challenges and rewards are offered by each form?
Before the publication of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I had already written a couple of novels, which have, fortunately for readers, remained unpublished. So Secret Son was really just a return to a form I had known and loved for most of my life. For me, writing a short story is a bit like getting to know a significant part of a character’s life, while the novel is like living that character’s life for a few years. A short story is very intense, like a brief but powerful commitment. A novel is more moderate, but also a very rewarding undertaking.
As far as the writing process is concerned, what struck me with this novel was that the revision process was very different. For instance, with Hope, I was able to pull out one story and revise it, or even replace it with a new one, without having this affect the shape of the entire book. But with Secret Son, any changes to one inevitably meant changes somewhere else in the novel, so the revision process was much more labor-intensive.
Can you comment a little about your decision to write in English rather than in one of your native languages? Why did you make this choice? What challenges are involved?
I grew up speaking both Moroccan Arabic and French, but my earliest exposure to books came through French because I received, to my long-lasting despair, a semicolonial education. Nearly all of the children’s literature that I was exposed to as a child was in French, so when I started writing fiction, it was in that language. While I could read and write Arabic competently enough, I found it very hard to write fictional narrative in Arabic. I should say that my use of French in fiction isn’t at all that unusual for a Moroccan writer of my generation (witness, for instance, the work of Fouad Laroui, Abdellah Taïa, or Driss Ksikes).
However, once I left Morocco to study abroad, I started to question the bilingualism with which I had grown up. In my country, French and Arabic did not always have a harmonious relationship; rather, they were often in competition in the public sphere. I started to feel really uncomfortable with the idea of writing fiction using the colonial tongue. At the same time, I had been working on my dissertation at the University of Southern California, and I had to write in English every day. That was how the idea of writing fiction in English came about. Ideally, I would have written in my native language, but since I could not, it seemed that English was my only other option. And between writing in English and not writing at all, I made the choice of writing.
Writing in English about Moroccan characters comes with certain challenges. For instance, I tend to excise idiomatic expressions (common phrases like “she went to bat on this project” or “he kicked the bucket”) from my writing because they are so culturally specific. I include words from Moroccan Arabic that are hard to translate in simple ways. For example, it is easier to use the word tagine than to say something like “a stew of meat and vegetables cooked in a clay pot.”
What do you hope English-speaking audiences will take away from your novel?
As a novelist, I try to tell the most engaging, the most complex, and the most truthful story I can. So my hope is that audiences are engaged and immersed in the story, and that they see a truth, however small it may seem, about the human heart.
Many American readers are unfamiliar with African literature, either in translation or written in English. What other African novelists or short story writers would you recommend?
The work of J. M. Coetzee always hits me with the full force of revelation. Readers who have not had the pleasure of reading him yet might begin with Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K., and Disgrace. I would also recommend Distant View of a Minaret by Alifa Rifaat; Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih; For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri; Year of the Elephant by Leila Abouzeid; A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe; In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif; This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun; Weep Not, Child and The River Between by Ng
gí wa Thiong’o; Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade by Assia Djebar; The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye; and Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz.
Secret Son makes references to Moroccan social, political, and historical contexts with which most Americans might be unfamiliar. What resources would you recommend for your American readers who want to understand contemporary Morocco?
I think one might begin by reading Morocco’s poets, short story writers, and novelists, though unfortunately many of them are not translated in English. However, readers might be able to find translations of Driss Chraïbi, Leila Abouzeid, Abdellatif Laâbi, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mohamed Berrada, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Mohamed Choukri, and Bensalem Himmich. I would also suggest reading the work of the feminist and sociologist Fatima Mernissi, the historian Abdallah Laroui, and the anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi.
You’ve lived in the United States for the past several years and also spent time in London. One of your characters, Amal, experiences great conflicts about the choice between living in the United States and returning to Morocco. How has this choice played out in your own life? Where do you consider “home”?