Leïla Slimani, a writer locked up for a night

Tuesday books - Lauriane Pipoz

In her latest book, Moroccan author Leïla Slimani immerses herself in introspection during the unusual experience of sleeping in a museum. Her essay recounts the emotions she felt, and serves as the basis for a dive into her memories.

Locked up in a museum? That's the experience Leïla Slimani tried, and the basis of her latest book, The scent of flowers at night. On a terrace, her editor suggested that she spend the night «at the Punta Dogana, a mythical Venetian monument transformed into a museum of contemporary art». She accepts; not for «the prospect of sleeping close to works of art», but for the simple experience of being locked in. A situation she cherishes as a writer.

«What pushed me to accept [the proposal] was the idea of being locked up. That no one could reach me and that the outside world was inaccessible to me. To be alone in a place I couldn't get out of, where no one could get in. No doubt this is a novelist's fantasy.»

This confinement soon leads to introspection. The Moroccan author indulges in digressions, becoming the sole subject of the story. Of course, by recounting the activity she cannot dissociate from herself: writing. In this way, she gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the writer's craft, which is so much the stuff of dreams. But it's more an art of living: you have to be disciplined, know how to fight off distractions when you've got a subject on your mind, and know how to say no to invitations so as not to interfere with your creativity. An art, a passion, but one that can almost seem painful under her pen.

«When you're writing, there are times when chatter attacks you, when the exercise of conversation proves unbearable. Perhaps because it contains everything you dread: the clichés, the commonplaces, the ready-made phrases you say but don't mean. Proverbs and established expressions can be extremely violent in those moments of writing when you're trying to capture the ambiguous, the blurred, the gray.»

Leïla Slimani also makes confessions linked to her own history, such as the accusations against her father (who spent a year in prison), her adolescence and, above all, the dualities that drive her. Her nationality: having grown up in an Arab country in a French-speaking family, she reveals that she always feels as if she's living in someone else's country. The will to be confined: she longs to be in captivity and at the same time wants to escape it, «to conquer the outside».

«Now, alone and barefoot in this museum, I wonder why I wanted to be locked up here so badly. How can the feminist, the activist, the writer I aspire to be, fantasize about four walls and a locked door [...] To have peace is a selfish fantasy.»

«Writing is playing with silence».»

The art of writing is measured in «what you don't say». From the anecdotes the author declaims and the personalities or artists she quotes, the reader can guess the emotions that ran through her when she spent the night in this museum. Because, in the end, we know very little about this privileged moment: the works serve only as a pretext, a starting point for recalling memories and reflecting on her own life.

In this book, Leïla Slimani reveals nostalgia and takes a critical, sometimes harsh, look at her own life, offering keys to her other works. Her words, as when she speaks of the death of her father, which in a way enabled her to emancipate herself, are sometimes violent, but never exaggerated: they contain a certain modesty. However, she makes no secret of her taste for lies. In this book, what's true and what's false? It doesn't matter; the words ring true to whoever wants to hear them.

«I want to leave questions unanswered, because it's in these gaps, in these black holes, that I find the material that suits my soul. It's there that I weave my web, that I invent spaces for freedom and for lies, which are, in my eyes, one and the same thing. [...] Many people think that writing is reporting. That to talk about oneself is to recount what one has seen, what I know nothing about but which nevertheless obsesses me. To recount those events that I didn't witness but that are nonetheless part of my life.»

«My aunt, at over sixty, didn't dare smoke in front of her brother. Because, as we all know, women who smoke have no virtue. My parents wanted us to be free, independent women, capable of expressing choices and opinions. But neither they nor we could be indifferent to the context in which we were growing up and to the «invisible laws» that governed public space. So they urged us to be cautious, to be discreet when we crossed the benevolent walls of the house.»

Write to the author: lauriane.pipoz@leregardlibre.com

Header image: Leïla Slimani at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Germany, 2017 © Heike Huslage-Koch / Wikimedia CC 4.0

Leïla Slimani
The scent of flowers at night
Editions Stock
2021
151 pages

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