Watch Us Dance is the middle novel of a trilogy based on the author’s family roots in revolutionary Morocco. Slimani had a French grandmother and a Morrocan grandfather. Her parents lived in Morroco and Leila herself, was born in Rabat and her family was progressive and French-speaking. She left for Paris for university and married a French banker. As a journalist and writer, she splits her time between France and Portugal today. The trilogy is based on her family and their mix of French and Morrocan culture.
I love it when books take me away to a time and place I am not familiar with. I did not read the first novel that details how the patriarch, Amine Belhaj, an interpreter in the French army, meets Mathilde immediately after World War II in France. They settled on a farm in interior Morocco and he became rich by exporting mandarins and other fruits to France. This second installment of the trilogy focuses on their daughter Aïcha Belhaj who becomes an OB-GYN doctor and son Selim, who runs away to the USA. It is a family saga so there big sections of the book devoted to Amine’s brother and sister and their families as well.
Families of mixed cultures and expatriate stories always interest me. My family is not a straightforward mix of cultures like Slimani’s story of Morroco and France, but I can relate to the tensions and benefits this mix can bring to family life. My family has a mix of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Australia, and Bolivia. You can also throw in our mix of ancestry (Spanish, Polish, German, indigenous South American) and our global nomad lifestyle (Venezuela, Serbia, Japan, Uzbekistan) that complicates things. I learned a lot about the history of Morroco from the book. The novel is set in 1950 – 1970 in Morrocco and the dictator/King Hassan II is an influential figure in the book. The book also features the hippie movement. North Africa became part of the “hippie trail” and Jimi Hendrix makes a cameo in the story. It is interesting that the free love and drug use of the hippie movement chose an Islamic country to visit.
The book was thoroughly readable as I finished it in a week. I didn’t need to have read the first novel to enjoy it. I don’t think I will read the third novel, although I am curious to see how the lives of Aïcha and Selim’s children turn out. I guess part of it as I have now lived through a couple of generations as a child and now parent, is the succession of generations, and what they do and where they live fascinates me. I don’t think my grandparents would have imagined their grandson living in Uzbekistan.
Leila Slimani came to international fame through her French language novel, Lullaby. It was published in English as “The Perfect Nanny” and is based on the real-life story of the Krim family’s nanny in New York.
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