by Laila Lalami
There was a moment of silence and stillness, when even the wind seemed too afraid to blow through the trees. Youssef felt a bead of sweat travel down his spine, until it lodged itself in a hollow between his skin and the inside of his waistband. He felt it dissolve against the fabric, just as new beads were forming on his forehead, under his armpits, on the back of his neck, and between his toes. He was assaulted by these sensations and upset with his body for registering them at such a moment. He needed to think, but he could not focus under the glare of the sun and in the oppressive heat.
Instinct made him cross the street and run inside. He did not know what he wanted to do, but he knew he could not let Benaboud die, any more than he could let Amin kill. Coming in from the sun, he was momentarily blinded. He stood in place, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He took in the cool, air-conditioned air. He tried to find his bearings. The reception desk was on the right, the cashier was on the left, and there, past the lobby, was the café, Chez Momo. He walked through the lobby in quick steps, afraid one of his former co-workers might recognize him in spite of the jellaba and the veil.
The café smelled of steamed milk and cigarettes and cut flowers. At a table by the window, a handful of socialites smoked and spoke in loud voices. A couple whispered in a corner. Under the gilt-framed mirror, three men in casual clothes sipped coffee. A woman sat by herself, reading the newspaper. And at a table at the other end of the café, almost hidden from sight by a potted plant, sat Farid Benaboud. He was talking animatedly with an older man, a bald fellow who sat back in his chair, his legs spread far apart.
Scouring the café, Youssef saw no sign of Amin. Where had he gone?
A waiter brought an ice cream sundae for Benaboud and an espresso for his companion. Benaboud’s friend reached for the cup and knocked it over, the black liquid spilling on the table. Gasping audibly, he blotted the coffee with his napkin and steadied the cup. Benaboud offered his napkin, but his friend waved his hand and got up to go to the bathroom. Now alone, Benaboud slid his spoon into his ice cream, scooping out the cherry on top. This little man, who had spoken so forcefully and seriously about the country and its problems, seemed childlike now, completely lost in the simple pleasure of a goblet full of ice cream.
The door to the bathroom swung open again, and out came Amin. Without looking around him, he walked over to Benaboud’s table.
“Amin,” Youssef called.
At the sound of his name, Amin turned, but he did not show any sign of surprise at seeing a tall figure in a white jellaba and veil. It was as though this interruption was part of a script. He took two more steps and pulled out a knife.
“Wait!” Youssef yelled.
All the café’s patrons turned to look at Youssef. Amin stuck the knife in Benaboud’s neck, the sound of it so soft that no one heard it. Then the dark jet of gushing blood caught the attention of the woman reading the newspaper, and she screamed and pointed. Everyone turned to look. In the middle of the confusion, one of the three men at the table nearby pulled out a gun and shot Amin. Screams of terror erupted as blood and bits of brain spattered on the walls. People stampeded out of the café.
For a moment, Youssef remained in his spot, paralyzed by the horror. Then he ran out of the café, too, through the lobby, and out the double glass doors. Just as he appeared outside on the steps of the hotel, an officer tackled him and pushed him roughly against the wall. “Wait,” Youssef cried out. “You don’t understand.”
YOUSSEF SAT ON THE CURB for what seemed like days but what he would later learn was just two hours. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and beside him on the ground were the jellaba and the veil. An officer stood across from him, watching him. Youssef felt as though he were dreaming, as though he were still lying on his bed in the little house in Hay An Najat and he would wake at any moment. Yet there was no relief from the nightmare. “You have the wrong man,” he said for the hundredth time. “This is a big mistake.”
“No mistake,” the officer said.
“I had nothing to do with it.”
The officer chuckled. “You people always say that.”
“I came here to stop them from killing Benaboud,” Youssef said. His throat was parched and he felt his blood thumping in his ears.
“You can tell this to the Commissaire, although I wouldn’t advise it.” The officer laughed, as if the thought of Youssef’s convincing the police chief of his innocence was somehow irrepressibly funny. Now the officer stretched his hands above his head and cracked his knuckles. He had the look of a man satisfied with a good day’s work.
Another officer came by. “We’re getting close,” he told his colleague. “We can take him in as soon as the Commissaire gives the OK.”
It occurred suddenly to Youssef that his innocence was irrelevant. It served no purpose in the overall plot and, what was worse, it complicated matters for the police. This realization hit him with the full force of revelation. He could see clearly now that he had been a small actor in a big production directed by the state.
What terrified him was that he had not even been aware that he had played a role in the assassination of Farid Benaboud. Naively, he had believed he was acting like a concerned human being, maybe even a hero: he had tried to stop a murder. But now he had discovered that the part that had been reserved for him by the state was that of the failed terrorist, the one who gets caught, the one who makes the police look good because his arrest proves that the state tried to protect the inconvenient journalist.
Amin had received a simple role, a role that required no lines. He had killed Benaboud, out of anger, despair, resentment, a broken heart, a belief that his life was not worth living, or for another reason altogether. He was dead now, having traded his life for whatever the Party had promised him. It was Maati who had received the best part. He had fooled everyone. Youssef had considered Maati to be a simple man, someone who was not fit to be a confidant to his secrets, when in fact he had been trusted with far heavier secrets, and he had delivered them to the police. Appearances are deceiving, Youssef’s mother always said.
The Commissaire finally arrived on the scene and was immediately surrounded by aides who briefed him on the investigation. He listened, nodding a few times, and then his eyes came to rest upon Youssef. “This is him?” he asked.
“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.
SECRET SON
A Conversation with the Author
Questions for Discussion
A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR
Your first book-length work in English was a collection of short stories. Can you contrast the experience o
f 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 Nggí 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”?
For the first twenty years of my life, I lived in the same house, had the same circle of friends, and visited the same places. But afterward, things changed somewhat drastically; I went to college in London and in California, I traveled a lot because of my work, and I moved nine times in the last fifteen years. I think we now live in a world where such a life is wholly unremarkable, but you’re right, it does raise the question of what one might consider home. It isn’t something that I have fully resolved yet, but I hope that my life is in some way like the Qur’anic parable of the good word—a tree firmly rooted but with its branches in the sky.
Your blog (lailalalami.com/blog) provides interesting commentary on reading, writing, and political issues. How does blogging inform or complement your other writing? What do you hope readers gain from your blog?
I started blogging mostly because I wanted to have a space in which to record my thoughts about literature, culture, and politics. The ongoing, online conversation about books and literature helped introduce me to books I would not normally have come across on my own. So I would say that blogging has certainly informed my reading. I hope readers have that same experience—that they find books or articles that intrigue and interest them.
Given the outcome of Youssef’s story and the bleak outlook you paint for other young characters, particularly men, of his class, what kind of future do you see for your native country? Do you propose any solutions that could help derail the seemingly inevitable march toward violence and terrorism?
I am merely a writer, not a prophet. The future of Morocco is dependent on so many factors—geopolitical, economic, social, educational—that it would be hard, if not impossible, to predict. Despite the bleak outlook in the novel, I try to be optimistic about the future because, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Your first collection was entitled Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Is it foolhardy for characters like Youssef to hope for or dream of a different reality?
I wanted the title of that first book to capture the courage and willpower it takes to want to start a new life somewhere else, as well as the desperation and danger that underlie such a decision. Although they come from different cities in Morocco and although they are leaving the country for different reasons, my characters all share the dream of a better tomorrow. What intrigued me was the idea that they were risking their very lives for the sake of a better life. This is such a huge gamble. Of course it is not foolhardy to hope. Hope is what drives us everyday, but hope occasionally needs to be restrained by common sense.
Issues of journalistic integrity, investigation, and truth are central to your novel. As someone who has written a number of opinion pieces and essays for a variety of media, how would you characterize the state of journalistic
inquiry today in Morocco and in the United States?
One of my main concerns in Secret Son was the idea of truth, and how hard it is to get at it because of a variety of limitations: how facts are reported to us; how and when we perceive them; how our individual life experiences shape the way we interpret the facts; and how the facts themselves don’t necessarily add up to the truth. I think journalists, both in Morocco and in the United States, are a very diverse bunch. There are some good journalists and there are some bad ones. Some are dedicated to verifying facts and some are quite content with repeating whatever the government is telling them. It’s really impossible to generalize and compare all of the professionals in both countries.
You teach at the University of California, Riverside. How would you compare the young Americans you teach with Moroccan college students like Youssef? How do your students understand world events, particularly terrorism and extremism?
I would say that the students are very similar in their concerns: they are all worried about getting a good education, finding a job after graduation, enjoying their youth, etc. But of course there are vast differences in the way in which they interpret the world around them. If you ask them to read the same story or watch the same movie—Invisible Man, for instance, or Lawrence of Arabia—they might interpret the book or movie quite differently. This is because they have different agendas: they have been exposed to different literatures, different movies, different languages, different political realities. And they bring these different experiences to bear on their interpretations.
What are you working on now? What themes would you like to explore in forthcoming works?
I am working on a novel about a young professor—and that is all I can say about it right now.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What, if anything, did you know or believe about Morocco before reading Secret Son? How did reading this novel confirm or change any of your preexisting beliefs?