Book cover: https://cassavarepublic.biz/product/men-dont-cry/
Men Don’t Cry
Faïza Guène
Cassava Republic Press
SKU: 698715-1-1-1-5
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Faïza Guène became a literary sensation in France at the age of nineteen with the publication of her first novel, Kiffe Kjffe demain (translated as Kiffe Kiffe tomorrow into English) in 2004.
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Faïza Guène became a literary sensation in France at the age of nineteen with the publication of her first novel, Kiffe Kjffe demain (translated as Kiffe Kiffe tomorrow into English) in 2004. (The text has been translated into multiple languages; the English version in fact lagging behind). Of course, this young author found less favour with the French intellectual establishment, but was acclaimed by the young as well as the first-generation post-immigration readers (ie more-or-less the "general readers"). The disdain of most members of the scholarly elite was likely a response to Guène’s down-to-earth and unashamed demotic style of writing: her unvarnished, ordinary-language narration as found also in Men don’t cry (published 2021). The irreverent humour that tinges much of the novel and the iconoclastic attitude to the holy cows of the pretentious, further endeared the author to her many readers. Men don’t cry is her fourth novel and the hilarious moments do not disguise the poignance of what is at heart a family tragedy, exploring the inevitable generational cultural split in that sector of society in which parental values and cultural preferences are all too often abandoned and disrespected by their offspring, who wish to "make it" in the setting of an economically and educationally extremely different setting than that in which their parents were raised and attained maturity.
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Men don’t cry is her fourth novel and the hilarious moments do not disguise the poignance of what is at heart a family tragedy, exploring the inevitable generational cultural split in that sector of society in which parental values and cultural preferences are all too often abandoned and disrespected by their offspring, who wish to "make it" in the setting of an economically and educationally extremely different setting than that in which their parents were raised and attained maturity.
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In the portrayed family, surnamed Chennoun, with Berber roots in Algeria, a devastating split of this kind occurs. The paterfamilias, referred to throughout affectionately (rather than satirically) as Big Baba, worked all his adult life as a cobbler and is reliant on his French-educated children to read to (and for) him, as he is formally illiterate. Whenever he requests his son Mourad (who is the narrator and focaliser throughout the text) to read, he asks him to do so “in a journalist’s voice” – something Mourad always reports, reflecting how endearing he finds his father’s little habits. (Guène dedicated this novel to her own father, and to a woman named Isabelle Seguin.) With six novels, a short story collection, and most recently a ‘young adult’ novel, Guène is a fairly productive and highly successful author, writing in French, but eagerly translated.
Despite having lived in the French coastal city of Nice for many years (where Mourad and his two sisters were born), the family is overjoyed when, as the narrative begins, Big Baba manages to install a satellite dish, allowing them access to Arabian-language broadcasts from North Africa as well as from Dubai, Yemen, Jordan, Qatar and so forth. The French programmes that had so delighted Dounia, the elder daughter, had frequently embarrassed or offended her siblings or parents – an early indication of the divergent cultural orientations that will in time cause a rift in the family. Amusingly, Mourad describes the change of atmosphere in their living room, after the installation of the TV dish, as “a touch more folkloric”. His is throughout, the position of the committed and affectionate observer of shifts in family life, as well as the open-eyed critic of what he acknowledges as problematic, tactless, or harsh, remarks and attitudes. Mourad loves every member of his family, but lucidly outlines their differences. They are all freely outspoken with passionate convictions, but of course, these often put them at odds with one another. The family home is anything but luxurious, and certainly in one of the poorer suburbs of the wealthy tourist city of Nice, but they live comfortably and the mother sees to their abundant meals. It is only much later when he gets his first teacher’s post, that Mourad will make the acquaintance of one of the notorious Parisian banlieues – the setting of Guène’s first novel and so vividly portrayed that it brought her instant fame. Of course, Guène herself grew up in such an area in Paris, but her writing is not limited to a single social tier or setting, and her unerring skill in spotting and naming the small details by which people reveal their basic nature is the mark of a talented novelist. Her writing is highly concise by means of her careful choice of such telling details.
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Of course, Guène herself grew up in such an area in Paris, but her writing is not limited to a single social tier or setting, and her unerring skill in spotting and naming the small details by which people reveal their basic nature is the mark of a talented novelist. Her writing is highly concise by means of her careful choice of such telling details.
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To the despair of his wife, who had wished to establish a classic formal French garden in their yard, Big Baba is a relentless collector of scrap metal and discarded machinery. Other family members have no idea how he manages to cart all the stuff to their home, but their yard now contains (inter alia) “corroded old washing machines, corrugated iron, park benches, road signs, a tennis umpire’s chair, a dozen typewriters, a restaurant sign, the headlights from a Citroën ZX, a giant freezer, and two wooden horses, worn out from their carousel life”. Interpreted symbolically, the saving of discarded things may signify his faint misgivings about being an ageing man, and his intended ‘rescue’ acts as a signal that he is still good for many functions, but more simply, Big Baba, as a retired cobbler, perhaps wishes to continue privately to fix up things that are broken, always insisting, in response to his wife’s irritated challenges, with the refrain: “You never know, it might come in handy, one day!”. His wife’s (equally predictable) response to this “ridiculous” justification, is always the following:
“No it won’t, it will NEVER come in handy! Not today, not tomorrow, not ever! People threw it away because it stopped being handy – it’s useless! My God! Why are you doing this to me? Bring me a glass of water! Quick! My heart! I’m having palpitations! A glass of water!”, following which, the mother would wince, clutch her chest and down the glass in one — her tragic actress turn [as Mourad describes this act].
The couple’s melodramatic arguments and particularly the mother’s prima donna performances are entertaining rather than signs of a troubled middle-aged marriage, for Big Baba and “Maman” are a devoted pair, as Mourad testifies. As a father with no formal education, ensuring his three children’s academic success means the world to Big Baba.
Family life proceeded happily, “Big Baba steering his little troop calmly, just as when he was at the wheel of his 1983 Renault 11 Turbo,” but unfortunately, things became more turbulent as Dounia (the eldest) reached adolescence, creating “the first hairpin bends” in their hitherto steady forward course. Mourad ascribes his sister’s changed behaviour and attitude to Dounia’s obsession with a girl in her class who (in Dounia’s eyes) represents everything she wishes to be (and have) but is not: she is slender whereas Dounia is plump, she wears fashionable clothes and she can take turns wearing a pair of skinny jeans with her equally skinny mother (whereas Dounia wears big, shapeless clothes to hide her figure and her mother is “generously proportioned”), the girl is allowed to attend “night-time concerts” and on her bedroom wall she has a poster of an American boy band, “black and bare-chested” and so on – not allowed in the Chennoun family! Dounia also wears glasses and has braces on her teeth. To make up for her self-perceived ‘deficiencies’, Dounia studies ferociously and is a top scorer, at least academically, at her school. But at home, observes Mourad, “Dounia was becoming insolent”. Maman, however, is never at a loss for words by means of which she contextualises the stream of her daughter’s complaints, reminding Dounia (as she has so frequently done, Dounia sneers in response) that:
“Your grandfather was a revolutionary who fought in the war to liberate his country. A brave and courageous man. We were ten children fed on dry bread, who walked barefoot without complaining. You only have to look at all the sacrifices he made to raise us. Do you think we fretted about whether he loved us?”
This is in response to Dounia’s – in Maman’s view, astonishing – criticism that in their family (as the novel’s title perhaps already hints) overt demonstrations of affection are absent. Maman shows her love in cooking her abundant, rich meals and dishing out ample servings, but to a teenage girl with weight issues, this of course appears to prove the very opposite! “The stand-offs became increasingly frequent”. Dounia has recourse to the loud noise of banging her (and her sister’s) bedroom door shut. Big Baba has a simple and practical solution: he takes the bedroom door off its hinges and hangs a curtain there instead, with the words “Now try slamming the curtain!”. Then Dounia’s friend’s parents get divorced and the poor girl attempts suicide. “Everyone in the neighbourhood felt sorry for her, with one notable exception”, writes Mourad. Maman even “flaunted her mocking smile in full view of Dounia,” since the friend’s plight is incontrovertible proof that her family is not so superior and perfect after all, thus further infuriating Dounia, of course. Soon after, she leaves school with excellent grades, enrols to read Law, and takes a part-time job as a waitress. “The transformation had begun,” states Mourad. Dounia slims down, exchanges her spectacles for contact lenses and gets the braces taken off her teeth. She even wears some make-up. Although Mourad realizes that Dounia’s first-time refusal to join her family on their traditional annual visit to their relatives in Algeria is the sign that “something [had] snapped in our family,” he remains close to his big sister. She’s about the only person who asks him about his opinions and besides, she has become a source of financial and other treats (like fashionable new sneakers that will hugely improve his standing at school, and an occasional visit to a movie theatre) that a young boy craves. She even takes him with her, one day, to the restaurant where she works. To the youngster from a conservative Muslim home, some of the things he witnesses there, however, are rather shocking. Not only are most of Dounia’s customers fashion-conscious young Frenchwomen who are her friends and fellow students who smoke and gossip unashamedly about men they date, but Dounia, too, has the occasional puff, and the girls are drinking white wine. Then he notices Dounia having a sip, and this is a bridge too far. On the bus on the way home, Mourad asks Dounia if she now eats pork; this, at least, is still a suggestion that shocks her, it seems. But the boy can’t resist the opportunity for blackmail represented by Dounia’s transgressions – he’ll keep quiet about her exploits, he agrees, but asks whether she can get him those shoes he ‘needs’ and she has no choice but to accept her little ten-year-old brother’s demand.
Six years later, Dounia graduates as a lawyer and is called to the bar in Nice. When Dounia announces her success to the family, Maman wants to celebrate with a festive home dinner, yet cannot resist remarking: “I don’t see what all the fuss is about when, at your age, you’re still not married …!” This, to Dounia, is the bombshell that finally explodes her increasingly reluctant submission to her family’s mores. Not long after, in fact on September, 11 2001, of all inauspicious dates, Dounia packs a huge suitcase and leaves home in the car of (and driven by) “a hotshot young lawyer” – a Frenchman and (as Dounia will discover much later) a married man to boot. Big Baba, implored to do something, had attempted to use a threat (“If you leave this house, you’re never coming back!”) to intimidate Dounia into staying, but she defiantly overrode this, declaring that she had chosen Daniel over her family. Mina, the younger sister, the only one who is defiant, in turn tells their mother that Dounia’s desertion is nothing but “good riddance” (20). To the other Chennouns who are left behind, this is a cataclysmic event. Dounia becomes an unnameable person, but this is evidently because the pain of having lost a family member is so searing. “Nobody saw her again for nearly ten years”, adds Mourad. She was henceforth referred to as “That One”.
Subsequent to Dounia’s dramatic departure, Mourad and Mina grow closer. They had always shared certain things, such as their deep love and admiration for their Algerian paternal grandfather, an abstemious, kindly and devout man. When the much-loved old man (he was called Sidi Ahmed Chennoun) died in prayer at the age of 103, hundreds of people attended his funeral. Mina, who Mourad says, “has a soft spot for old people,” was helping out at the care home by playing Scrabble with the old folks. This later became her profession and the place where she met the man (Jalil, a healthcare assistant) who soon became her husband. The wedding itself and the traditional preambles were all observed by both Algerian and French-settled families. Big Baba in particular loved the engagement party, telling one amusing anecdote after another, kitted out in his tweed jacket and with the usual additions of a pair of spectacles with plastic lenses and several pens clipped to a breast pocket to give him the air of a learned man – the yearned-for status he was never able to achieve. To Mourad, “Mina became the new big sister.” She bore three children in such quick succession that the irrepressible Maman (whose own three were far more widely spaced) asked her (when Mina announced her third pregnancy): “But tell me, my daughter, what do you eat? Compost?” Despite marriage and motherhood, Mina obtained her healthcare qualifications, and went back to work when the children were a bit older, with her mother (delightedly, of course) taking care of them during Mina’s working hours. Life moves forward in the Chennoun household.
After an anxious wait, Mourad gets his results: he is now qualified to teach French Literature (he is an almost fanatic devourer of literary classics from the mainstream European cultures) at secondary school level. But Nice is an over-subscribed posting site for teachers, so his first appointment, which he is already nervous about, is in a poorer area of Paris – an intimidating prospect, horror stories of pupils’ violent misbehaviour being rife, and scouring the internet provides not a single decent but affordable option of accommodation for the bookish young man. Maman reminds him that he has a disreputable cousin named Miloud who has lived in Paris for some years, but Mourad is disinclined at the prospect of sharing digs with the flamboyant Miloud. The latter was forced to flee Algeria for having impregnated a young woman from a decent family, whose father got him sentenced to a few years in jail, shaming his entire family. He is a known ‘charm-boy’, in almost every way the opposite of the shy, repressed Mourad, quite definitely still a virgin, who seems destined for the life of lonely bachelorhood, perhaps doomed (his greatest fear!) to end up living with his controlling mother who will overfeed him to the point of obesity (he is already somewhat too fond of rich pastries, it seems). Mourad also imagines (given his knowledge that Miloud’s student visa for France has expired, and that he is thus an illegal immigrant) that whatever digs his cousin might be willing to share with him would in all likelihood be squalid and smelly – not an inviting prospect. But when no other option becomes available, he resigns himself to squatting with the brash Miloud – at least for a while. Mourad knows that “it was a source of sorrow for his mother that he was a loner” with no mob of friends he could invite to share the celebratory dinner his mother of course wishes to cook for him, for attaining his teaching certificate. He has, he says, “come to terms with it”, while suspecting that his mother has no idea of “the leading role she had played in the story of my social withdrawal,” since he believes that “nobody is solitary by nature” (29). He had, after all, had a good (Chinese) friend that his mother had approved of, but Raoul Wong’s family had unfortunately moved away.
Mourad proceeds to relate the somewhat horrendous tale of how one possible friendship prospect had been ruined by his mother’s intervention. “One day, when I was in Year 11, Harry [a popular boy in his class] came to our home with his Super Nintendo to play Donkey King Country. Big Baba had given his permission”. Although Harry snootily points out the excessive amount of artificial flowers decorating the Chennoun home, and Mourad is pretty hopeless at playing the game, he has the time of his life at having been favoured by this visit. Until his mother stomps into his bedroom after they’ve only played for one hour, with the following announcement:
“Right! That’s enough of these games! Switch everything off! Harry, it’s time for you to go home. Mourad has his homework to do. You may have parents who can read French, who can help you revise for your exams, who can find you an internship, a job, a nice place to live, but Mourad will have to get ahead by the sweat of his own brow. He’s going to have to work twice as hard! Come on, unplug everything, now!”
After this rant, she berates Harry stingingly for not having taken off his shoes, as is customary in the Chennoun household; implying blatantly that, as relatively wealthy people, they either have a maid to clean up after them, or that they are simply lazy and the house dirty. Poor Harry is left “petrified” and Mourad, of course deeply mortified – his knees “trembling”. Harry, Mourad reports, “never spoke to me again”. Although he tries to stick to Big Baba’s creed that “Men Don’t Cry”, the 16-year-old boy cannot hide (when his Big Baba comes home) that something has gone badly wrong. His father soon has the story out of him and angrily berates Maman; warning her that she will through such behaviour drive another of their children out of the home. In response to which, she puts up one of her unfortunately highly convincing acts of being on the edge of a heart attack and the victim of blatant misinterpretation of her valid maternal concerns. This is, says Mourad, why he “never put up a fight” and “learnt to be alone”, resorting to the solace of reading.
As the one who now reads to Big Baba, Mourad is at home one evening when his father gives him a newspaper, folded open on a page where there is a report with Dounia’s photograph alongside. "In a journalist’s voice", as always, Mourad reads aloud what follows the headline, Daring to be Diverse […] Spotlight on Dounia Chennoun, Mayor Yves Peplinski’s trump card in his bid to attract new voters as he stands for re-election. This 36-year-old lawyer, born to Algerian immigrant parents, is as ambitious as she is determined. Following her involvement with the controversial feminist organisation ‘Speak Out, Sister!’ she is one to watch at the start of a promising political career.
Nice having been “right-wing since the stone age”, according to Mourad, and Mayor Peplinski “like an Africa-style president for the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region”, Dounia’s election is a sure thing, though finding her standing on the ticket of the conservative incumbent is most surprising; an “anti-climax.” While they now know where she lives, Mourad and Big Baba know to hide the report from Maman. But it is soon after this that Big Baba suffers what turns out to be a stroke; in medical parlance, a “cerebrovascular accident” or CVA, and has to be rushed to hospital. Big Baba, this vital person, is now ‘half a man,’ his entire right side paralysed: “a scary sight” in Mourad’s view, both shocked and profoundly compassionate. At least Big Baba’s sight is no longer blurred and he has recovered his powers of speech. A month after the stroke, despite the first-rate care he receives, there is little sign of improvement. “The heart had gone out of our home”, Mourad states. He has received his posting (for teaching) and it is in the unappealing east of Paris, in Montreuil. Still, the school is grandly called the Collège Gustave-Courbet. Family members, in the meantime, take turns visiting Big Baba. His father is always happy to see Mourad, but he always departs “on a low,” upset by Big Baba neither fighting to get better nor reconciled to his now weakened condition; bewildered by it despite repeated attempts to explain. “But why can’t I lift my leg?”, he asks over and over. To try and entertain him, Mourad plays simple card games with his effectively one-handed father, letting him win in view of this handicap, or reads to him “in a journalist’s voice” from Oliver Twist, the only vaguely decent book to be found in the hospital’s pathetic library. One afternoon, Big Baba tells Mourad (to whom it had of course occurred previously that she needs to be informed regarding their father’s condition) that he has to see Dounia before he dies. And it will of course fall to Mourad to get hold of this estranged member of their family and give her the sad news.
Locating Dounia is easy enough, but getting her to speak to him is another matter. She has a dragon of a secretary who makes it clear how unimpressed she is with a strange young man calling himself Dounia’s brother and expecting to see such an important person without an appointment. All he can do is to leave his phone number on a stick-it note with the snooty secretary with the banal request: Call me please. Mourad. Not that he is impressed with what Dounia has become; he is scornful of the organisation ‘Speak Out Sister!’ (or SOS) that she heads, seeing its members as women
“[…] always rallying in the name of sisterhood and the bigger cause, but their campaigns felt as phoney to me as Daniel with-the-hairy-wrists [with whom she had left her family ten years ago] wearing ski glasses on a summer’s day. The way I saw it [he says], they took advantage of other women’s suffering, promoting an image of ‘victimhood’ to suit their headline-grabbing purposes.”
To him, if Dounia is “becoming a symbol” it is of this kind of pretentious, exploitative hypocrisy. She is now a frequent contributor to public debates, speaking (to Mourad’s disapproval) “with breath-taking confidence and poise;” the latest “darling of the Paris elite” (55). As exploited as she is exploitative, in other words. This is a harsh interpretation, but the preceding portrayals explain Mourad’s rather bitter attitude to Dounia and her ilk.
To contrast with the Parisian lifestyle to which Dounia now seems to aspire, Mourad takes readers back to rural Algeria, to childhood holiday activities when they left their home in Algiers to stay on their uncle Aziz’s farm. Wild fruits, clear night-time skies and adventures chasing small game are all in his recall as innocent delights of those visits. But some of the chafing misfits between Dounia and the rest of her family seem to have appeared even then in acts of bullying and rather nasty mischief against her little sister, who never seemed to put a foot wrong in their mother’s eyes – like throwing a huge frog in her face, and (at a family wedding) where the two sisters were meant to stand quietly, beautifully dressed and holding long candles, she deliberately set her sister’s hair on fire. These misdeeds are now recalled in Maman’s discussions to help ease the heartbreak of Dounia having walked out on the family.
Also very sad, to Mourad, is having to say goodbye to Big Baba (his condition still showing little evidence of significant recovery) who remains confined to his hospital bed as his youngest child sets off to take up his teaching post in Paris. His farewell words are exactly the same as those with which he had sent Mourad off on a school ski trip at 16: “Eat properly. Say your prayers. Don’t make too many friends. […] And telephone your mother”. Notably, what he stresses is that even when departed from the family home, he wants his children to maintain family connections and what one might call their ‘Algerian values.’ And Mourad loves his father especially for always having supported him if necessary, against his overbearing, controlling mother. He remembers how his father insisted to his mother: “You won’t be by his side forever to blow on his hot milk or cut up his steak!” – instructing her with suitably domestic images not to obstruct their son’s independent life. As Mourad says of his dad: “He keeps quiet, unless he’s making a pronouncement”. Now, Mourad nevertheless feels as if he is abandoning his father. His mother, by contrast, not only shows her love by packing his suitcase and providing far too much food for the short flight to Paris, thus rubbing in her need for her children to demonstrate their appreciation of her – not so different from Dounia!
Cousin Miloud is a surprise to Mourad when he meets him at the airport. Not only has his Algerian accent softened and his body is more toned, but he has a set of new teeth and – most significantly – drives Mourad in a “C-Class Merc, SportLine Saloon […] fresh from the showroom” to a huge, grandly furnished flat in the fashionable, wealthy 16th arrondissement of the city. The huge living room has a grand piano (unplayed) and comes with a sleek, perfectly accomplished Italian butler, Mario! All this is proudly shown off to Mourad, who knows Miloud can’t wait to be asked how he has come by all this (he certainly acts as if he is the owner!). Of course, he’s not. He has managed to charm and establish himself as the ‘toy boy’ lover of an extremely wealthy middle-aged Frenchwoman, Liliane, who smothers him in luxuries, submits to his every whim and delightedly indulges him. There is, of course, “something sleazy about their relationship”, but Miloud does not care a whit. Liliane is divorced and her only son lives in the States and never visits – content with a large monthly amount faithfully sent by his uncomplaining mother. Mina disapproves of Mourad’s living as a ‘freeloader’ to his even more parasitical cousin, but the delicious free meals and enormous, well-equipped library in the flat will make it hard for him to leave. She says Maman cries daily over Mourad’s photo. He has delayed calling her and promises to do so. And Big Baba is becoming more ‘difficult’ at the hospital.
Out of the blue, Dounia phones. When he informs her that Big Baba had a stroke “a few weeks back” and is bed-bound in hospital, Dounia is shocked and upset: “her voice quavered,” Mourad says, “betraying sadness, fear and guilt … A Molotov cocktail of emotions”. Given the atmosphere at home when she left, Dounia is even sceptical when Mourad tells her that their father has asked to see her. Their conversation becomes more strained, Dounia justifying her decamping –
“I couldn’t stay and follow the path of mediocrity they’d mapped out for me. I know I must look selfish in your eyes, but the truth is I didn’t just leave with a man. I left because of Maman. Pleasing her meant becoming the perfect daughter for her, doing the housework, […] accompanying her every year back to the Bled [i.e. their Algerian ‘home town’]. […] she’d have carried on fattening me up […] until she found me a nice devoted little husband […] But, deep down, she wanted to turn me into a fat, depressed old maid.”
Mourad remarks: “It’s crazy. Dounia and I share the same nightmares.” At the moment, Dounia tells him, she is in Paris for the imminent launch of her book: The Price of Freedom. Although Dounia says she is feeling “calm and serene these days” and is “forging ahead,” Mourad redefines “Dounia’s new life” as “involving shrinks and doing lunch” – in other words, superficial and insecure.
One night, when Miloud and Liliane have had a fall-out triggered by Miloud’s class insecurities and his jealousy, he takes Mourad with him to a nightclub. As if Miloud’s “proletariat side” has “risen up again”, he takes Mourad on the Metro, rather than in Liliane’s fancy car. Mourad has never been in a nightclub and his blatant shyness with women makes Miloud enquire whether his cousin is, perhaps, “a pooftah”. Miloud loves the place they go to because it endlessly broadcasts raï [traditional Algerian] music. Mourad sticks to soft drinks, but Miloud soon gets hopelessly drunk and of course sentimental with it, so that when “Cheb Hasni’s cult track, Mazal souvenir andi” is played, he bursts into tears and goes on and on crying. A kindly “transvestite in a red wig” totters over to their table and, after scolding Miloud much like Big Baba might have done (“Stop crying! Pull yourself together! You’re a man, for fuck’s sake!”) gives him a hug and offers him a tissue before tottering back to his “table of girlfriends”. Guène’s ability to bring this kind of scene to vivid life is most amusing and enjoyable. The cousins only get back on “the first metro of the morning” and Mourad, ever the compassionate or critical observer (as the scene warrants), notices “a black woman, her forehead pressed against the glass, […] staring at her feet […] looking as worn as the beads on her rosary”. She has, in contrast with the cousins partying all night, been slaving at a cleaning job, as Mourad surmises. Hers is by far the other side of black Parisian existence …
Dounia, having heard that Mourad is also in Paris, has asked him in a short text message to meet her at a restaurant for lunch. He is extremely nervous beforehand, not only because it is so long since they met and her values are so different from his own, but because of his intense feelings of guilt that, by reopening communication with his older sister, he is betraying Maman and Mina. His mother had, typically, sensed that he was hiding something from her. Mourad confesses (as if it is shameful) to being “very emotional” at the sight of his big sister, but swallows his tears “because Big Baba” and the nightclub transvestite respectively declare it out of bounds or “disgusting” for men to weep. Dounia, too, has tears in her eyes. From her copious, expensive handbag, she takes out a copy of her book that she has, she says, inscribed for him. She wants him to read the inscription later, and (after perusing the book itself) to give her his “honest opinion” (109) on the text – something he full well knows he’ll never be able to do, for he expects that his true views would be far too unflattering and disapproving for Dounia to stomach – and he would not want to re-open the rift between them when they have only just moved some way towards reconciliation. When Dounia orders and consumes, of all things, steak tartare (unappetisingly, if accurately, described by Mourad as “raw chopped steak splattered with egg yolk and some condiments”), Mourad cannot help picturing how amazed or appalled his uncle Aziz, a sheep farmer back in Algeria, would be at the price of Dounia’s meal.
Much later, given Dounia’s very long stay in the ladies’ room afterwards, Mourad will work out that Dounia is in all probability bulimic and obsessed with suppressing her natural hunger in order to remain fashionably slim. The reader might in this regard contrast her with their paternal grandfather who had “lived to 103 on a diet of bread, honey, figs and olives” and had been a beautiful and a very healthy man right to his last day, as well as a cultured person who spoke both French and German along with his native Arabic. Dounia’s behaviour, by contrast, seems that of a fake who is trying to mimic European fashions of every kind. Dounia “freaked out” in Mourad’s assessment, when he told her that their younger sister was married and had three children – “I feel so uncomfortable with these pre-ordained paths. Why lead a monumentally dull life, walking in Maman’s footsteps?” is her condescending and prejudiced remark about a situation concerning which she has no first-hand knowledge. It is Mourad who reminds her that no one could ever “force Mina [who makes her own choices] to do anything”. For his part, Mourad feels (though he does not say this) that “if slamming the door in your parents’ faces and cutting off from your roots led to ‘enrichment’, we’d have known about it. […] For now, all I could see was that it led to cannibalism” – evidently thinking of that – in his view, repellent – steak tartare!. Inadvertently, when she refers to her own unmarried and childless state at 36, “a deep sadness entered her gaze” and Mourad felt pity for her. They hug in apparent affection, but it is as if he is embracing a stranger whose very smell is strange.
The next major development in the narrative is Mourad’s account of his introduction to teaching in a school “in the banlieue” as he characterises its Montreuil location. Underlining his emergence from the cocoon of wealthy luxury and pampering (by Mario the butler) in which he has been living, he has to take public transport, but he has carefully mapped and noted his route. But he is extremely nervous about assuming the teacher’s role for the first time: having to take Imodium to limit visits to the toilet, and needing the reassurance of having a bottle of it constantly at hand. At a course for new teachers held by the Department of Education a while earlier, one of the speakers had warned: “being a teacher is a form of bereavement […] It means saying goodbye to your passion for literature […] a loss of everything you’ve learned at university”. The headmaster and his deputy are equally laid-back in their words, casually dressed, assuring Mourad that the teachers are friendly and that he will find teaching enjoyable. The textbooks, they tell him, will only be provided on the first day of teaching. Mourad, of course, goes and buys his own copies in order to prepare for class. The other teachers all arrive later than him for the preparatory meeting. A slim, attractive woman gives him an encouraging smile. Her name is Hélène; she teaches English. He also meets the others, of course, most of them friendly, but one sullen older man exudes unpleasant vibes. Gérard is the other French teacher, and from the start, he “assumes the role of the threatened elder, keen to outsmart me” with little jabs, as Mourad observes. But the younger man is no pushover.
Then another bombshell hits Mourad and his family. Dounia is featured in a big spread on a whole page of a leading newspaper. Reported for all the world to read are Dounia’s descriptions of her supposedly “authoritarian, change-averse, illiterate father” and her mother, whom she describes as “reproducing, despite herself, an upbringing aimed at destroying any sort of self-realisation, incarcerating her emotions inside the rich sauces of the dishes she cooked, and the cakes she baked, forcing Dounia to eat every last morsel at mealtimes”. Mourad makes scornful jokes about the distortions and exaggerations in Dounia’s melodramatic, almost hateful portrayal of her parents; indeed, he feels “sad to read so many humiliating remarks about my family.” Thinking about Dounia’s book’s title, The Price of Freedom, Mourad remarks: “by my reckoning, the price she had paid was exorbitant. Plus, she hadn’t specified that this was a group tariff. We were all paying for her shitty freedom, and we’d been doing so for years”. Mourad’s voice grows noticeably stronger and more independent as the narrative proceeds; he stands on his own feet now, emotionally.
Mourad’s first teaching day arrives and the encounter with his students proves far less terrifying than he’d anticipated. They obligingly come into the room and sit down when he tells them to do so. “Holy shit! ‘I recall thinking [Mourad observes],’ they follow orders!”. The students mostly reply to his questions, but then some class buffoon gets them giggling and, when Mourad tells them to quiet down, they simply go on laughing. All is not lost. After a lull, the class proceeds as directed – Mourad even manages to squash a rumour that, because he arrived in Liliane’s fancy car and is discernibly “Arab”, he must deal in drugs, and turns it into an opportunity to teach the class about clichès (and implicitly about class and race prejudice). He even has a friendly chat with a shy but diligent student who returned alone to the class to collect her ventilator – she’s asthmatic. At home, Mourad is confronted with no fewer than 17 hysterical emails from his mother, with the news of Dounia’s interview having reached her. One surprising remark among the flood of self-righteous, reproachful ones is the following: “I wanted my children to be perfect! I expected too much of them!” which in her son’s view is her first-ever expression of “self-doubt.” This is the only one of her messages that he saves; keeping it on record. He notes that his mother had repeated “too much, too much” as if she were suffocating and comments: “It’s the excess of love I find frightening”. His kindliest reading of Dounia’s unpleasant newspaper effusions is that there, she was at last able “to tell the whole world what she couldn’t say to her own mother and father, despite their love and good intentions”, and that this incapacity or communication failure left her “a woman in her thirties with sorrowful eyes, reduced to skin and bones”. When he calls his mother, weeping in lamentation, she declares that for shame, she’ll never be able to show her face in the bled (ie back in Algeria) again, since the whole extended family knows about the scandalous report. Deciding that he needs to speak to Mina for a calmer response, he witnesses to her “serene” mood as she declares (about Dounia) “if she was in front of me, I’d lynch her!”.
Back in Paris, Mourad has discovered that Dounia’s mysterious dedication (of her book) to “Bernard T.” refers to the former minister of the interior, Bernard Tartois, a darling of the media and the man whom she is dating. He is a good-looking man (if only in comparison with other cabinet ministers), but of course, Mourad immediately focuses on the fact that he drools unattractively whenever he speaks. He calls this “his secretion problem”. Mourad has a wholly unillusioned interpretation of why Dounia claims that Bernard T. “‘makes [her] happy’”: he thinks such a relationship was appealing to her because it suits her ambitious nature and her fondness for using the media to her advantage, extending her ‘success story’ by means of this man. His harshest reading of her emerges when he pounces on the point that, far from having the ‘gutsiness’ he used to admire, Dounia is “the weakest out of all of us”: “the kind of submissive who thinks they’re a rebel, and who seeks out other submissives to rescue.” He accuses her (only in his own mind, though) of being a "spitter" like Tartois; spitting on her parents, on Muslims and Arabs, on marriage and traditions and finally on herself. He is most disgusted at her expression of gratitude (at the end of her, in his view, badly written, cliché-riddled book) to “the Republic [i.e. France] for inculcating herwith its values” and for having “nourished” her – in other words, disowning her parents and crediting the European country with having fulfilled a parental role in her life: the height of ingratitude to their family. “Despite the rift between the two of you,” he concludes, “Maman loves you more than the Republic, and all the Tartois apparatchiks it produces, ever will”. Would he say this to Dounia’s face?
In the classroom, Mourad has other struggles. His bête noire is the oldest pupil, Mehdi Mazouani, who is a young tough with whom many teachers have had trouble. His father seems to share this view of the boy and has reportedly sent him away for a spell to be ‘sorted out.’ In class, Mehdi is insolent, uncooperative and a disturbing presence. Mourad knows that he’d better sort out or at least address this problem as soon as possible, and calls the youngster to stay behind after class. It is initially an uphill battle; when Mourad insists that the boy should address him as “Sir,” he gets the following response: “Or what? You think I’m scared of you? Come outta my way, man, like it’s not so deep”. When a threat of being sent to the headmaster makes little impression, Mourad realises that he should try another approach. If Mehdi agrees to no longer being blatantly disruptive and recalcitrant, or as Mourad puts it, can “behave calmly”, he says, he won’t ask too much of him. The boy actually agrees to this – presumably he appreciates being spoken to in a reasonable, respectful tone and not simply subjected to a barrage of rebukes and threats. One up to Mourad! He also socializes with the other teachers and is invited (along with a number of other colleagues) to a social evening at the home of Hélène – the attractive English teacher. He’s rather awkward there, in that he arrives too early and removes his shoes as his mother had taught him, whereas no one else does. He is fairly quiet, but the evening passes pleasantly enough. It ends with Hélène making a pass at him, which embarrasses him with his inability to respond suavely, but he also blames her for “scaring a celibate young man” with her ‘sudden’ invitation – a thinly disguised appeal for sex.
Dounia has been trying to get in touch with Mourad. They are, after all, set to fly to Algeria together when the school holiday starts, so that Mourad can (inter alia) accompany his nervous big sister on a first visit to, and reunion with, the ailing Big Baba, still in hospital. She sends him an invitation to a dinner at the Swedish embassy. Mourad is convinced that Dounia’s invitation conceals an ‘ulterior motive’ – she wants him to meet and be impressed by Bernard Tartuffe. He decides nevertheless to join her, borrowing expensive clothes from Miloud to suit the occasion. At the gathering, mostly of “top brass”, Tartois is holding forth about France’s ‘immigration issues,’ pronouncing like a typical politician the vague generalisation: “Let’s be absolutely clear about this, we are currently experiencing an unprecedented crisis of identity!”
What slips out (and Mourad pounces on) is that he’s referring to the Muslim minority – and Mourad eloquently and adeptly exposes Tartois’s prejudices and narrow-mindedness. But after this encounter (with a few others supporting his position) Mourad notices that Dounia is “sulking”. Insisting he join her outside, she accuses her brother revealingly of having been “disrespectful”. To himself, he thinks that what he detests about “men like Tartois is their sleazy generosity” and their “latent racism”. He cannot say this to Dounia after she has confessed that, after a botched abortion, she is sterile, but that Tartois still “supports” and “takes care of her”.
At the school, it is Parents’ Day and Mourad gets to meet the troublesome Mehdi’s father, and as he vaguely suspected, finds out that the boy’s father treats him contemptuously and recently beat him up. He wants to take him out of school to work (at 15), but Mourad is able to explain that the boy will have to remain in school for at least another year. Maybe he can help him get better marks, the good teacher that Mourad is becoming, seems to believe – and he is willing to try. He is about to engage in a more important emotionally and morally educational venture: he wants Dounia and their family reunited. As he takes her into Big Baba’s hospital room (they have flown to Algiers in the meantime), he sees that “Dounia is trembling all over and her cheeks covered in […] tears.” When Big Baba sees her, “his expression was one of joy and incomprehension,” Mourad states, and then “he began to cry” without “emotional reserve, releasing his innermost feelings and breaking with his own commandment: Men Don’t Cry“. Of course, Dounia is equally moved and overcome as they embrace for a long hug. But (maybe to hide the feelings that are almost too intense for their elderly father) he then resumes the fight he has with his ‘roommate’ who, being Hindu, has a small statue of the elephant god Ganesh. The commotion brings the hospital staff running! In the final chapter, the narrative shifts to Big Baba’s funeral. Dounia (in Algerian and Muslim garb) is with them.
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Mourad says: “From now on, we have got to start again from zero” before recalling Big Baba’s caution against naïve optimism, since “not even the Arabs who invented it” can begin all over “from zero” as if there is no history with which to come to terms. As they will be obliged to do, as a family. These wise words also conclude Guène’s appealing narrative: humane yet deeply perceptive.
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Mourad says: “From now on, we have got to start again from zero” before recalling Big Baba’s caution against naïve optimism, since “not even the Arabs who invented it” can begin all over “from zero” as if there is no history with which to come to terms. As they will be obliged to do, as a family. These wise words also conclude Guène’s appealing narrative: humane yet deeply perceptive.