French-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani on feminism & freedom

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This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross. You probably won't recognize the name of my guest, novelist Layles Lee Money. So I'll start by telling you about her place in the literary world. She won France's highest literary award, The Gone Core Prize. She was the chair of the judges for the International Booker Prize. That's Britain's highest literary award for fiction written in the English language.

The International version is for fiction translated into English. When a manual Macron was the French president, he wanted to appoint Sliemannie Minister of Culture. She declined, but accepted the position as his representative to French speaking countries. Sliemannie is Moroccan, but completed her education in France where she continues to live. She's written a trilogy of novels inspired by three generations of her family.

Her father served as Morocco's Minister of Economics in the late 70s and became a bank president. Her mother was one of the first women doctors in Morocco. Her family is a doorway into larger issues of colonial and post-colonial Morocco, like government oppression, women's rights, the tensions between Muslims and Christians, and sexual criminalization. You risk imprisonment if you have sex and your single, gay or lesbian, or engage in adultery.

Sliemannie wrote a non-fiction book exploring the impact of that law on women's lives. And it figures into her new novel, too. The complete trilogy is now published in English in the U.S. The final volume her latest book is titled, "I'll Take the Fire." They list Limeni, "Welcome to Fresh Air."

I'm guessing that you wrote a trilogy based in part in your family because the generations of your family reveal so much about colonialism, race, gender, religion, sexuality, parenthood, siblings. Is that right? Yes, it is.

Of course.

And I think I decided to write this trilogy also because I've always had the feeling

“that literature was maybe the only way of doing justice to people like people from my family,”

people with mixed race, heritage and with a very complex identity because I found it very difficult for me to explain to others who I was. When I was in France and I was explaining that I was Moroccan, but also French, that I was raised in a very complex and multilingual family, people would not really understand my identity.

And it was the same in Morocco where people would look at me as very francophone or very Western. And I was always frustrated about that. And I wanted to do justice to them and I thought that the only way was to write a novel and to write a trilogy because I really needed also to understand where all this comes from. And for me all this comes from the relationship between my grandmother, who was French

and my grandfather, who was Moroccan. Yeah, your grandmother was from Alsace, which kind of transferred back and forth between French and German control. Yes, exactly, her childhood was not easy also, you know her father, he was born German and then he became French and then he was German again during the war.

“My grandmother, she would speak German and I think that at school she learned German and she learned French later.”

So for her also, identity was a very complex and difficult issue and I suppose that Alsacean, she was sometimes despised by other French because they would look at them at those

people like potential traders that were not always sure of their loyalty.

And that's a theme that has always obsessed me because when you are double, when you have two identities. People are always questioning your loyalty on which side are you, if there was a war with whom would you fight? So what insights has that given you into today's culture of tribalism and identity politics? I don't know how strong that is in France where you live part-time and now you live part-time and Portugal too. But it's yours strongly, you ask.

Yeah, you know, I think that all the characters and the novel, there are very

It's difficult for them to know their French or Moroccan, they mostly mourn non-believers.

Do they have to make a choice?

“Are they forced to hide what they think, what they are like for the character of Mia, who is hiding her sexuality?”

So they are facing very difficult choice and very difficult situation. But at the same time what I like with this characters is that they are all trying to find a certain sense of freedom of emancipation to be the only one to define their own identity, to invent themselves. So I think I'm not being just melancholic saying it's difficult to be double, but I'm also trying to convey something else is that yes, of course, it's difficult to know who you are and we must be very, very wary of all the people who are forcing us to choose aside.

You know, I think belonging, of course, can be very comforting, but it can also be dangerous. So this question of belonging, for me, is a very moral question, it's a, it's a cool question.

In the third novel of the trilogy, the parents believe in free speech and the rights of women, but they warn their daughters.

“That's not true here in Morocco, you have to be careful about what you say, don't reveal who's had sex outside of marriage.”

Don't say who's had an abortion or who's gay or who isn't a good Muslim. Did you grow up with that contradiction in your family? Did your parents believe in free speech in the rights of women, but also warn you to be on your best behavior outside? Yeah, absolutely. I was raised like this. In my house, in the bubble of my, my family, we would say whatever we wanted to say. And my parents, they would even encourage us to be free and to read whatever we wanted to read, to watch any kind of movies. They would talk about equality between men and women. They were not believers and they would not follow the rules of Islam.

They would not do Ramadan or things like this. They would drink alcohol. So in the bubble of the house, we were very liberal, very free.

“But at the same time, as you said, they would always tell us, but outside, you have to shut up.”

Outside, you have to be afraid of the Islamis because maybe if you talk about drinking alcohol, they can become violent. So you have to hide everything you are, you have to hide everything you think. And to be really honest, when I was a teenager, I hated my parents for that. I just them very harshly because I thought that they were hypocrites. And I thought that they were cowards. And you know when I was writing the book, my own son is now 15 years old.

And I put myself in the shoes of my parents. And I thought, yeah, of course, if I was in the same situation, I think I would act the same. My mother was not a coward. She was a mother. So she was in a very difficult situation where claiming and defending what she thought and what she believed in, could have very, very dangerous consequences. So now I can understand. And now, of course, I can forgive her and forgive them for that.

As if to prove the point of the dangers of stepping out of line or the dangers of somebody seeking revenge against you because they didn't like you. Your father was imprisoned as is the father in the novel. Your father was exonerated years after he died. What was your father convicted of? Tell us a little bit of the story behind it. And because he had held a very high position in Morocco, my father was from France, the city in the center of Morocco. And his parents were illiterate.

They couldn't read or write. And they were very, they were quite poor. And my father was very, very brilliant. So he went to the colonial school where he learned French. And then he had the opportunity to become a function there, or a function there. I don't know how to say in, in a fairly, yeah, an official. And then he became a minister of finance at the age of 31. He was very, very young. And he became very powerful at a very young age. And then he was at the head of a

bank in Morocco. And in 1993, so I was 12 years old one day he came back home and never left again.

what the problem was. My mother would say, no, no, don't, don't worry. He, he will find a new job very, very soon. But he, he stayed home for like 14 years. And then we went to France. And when I was in France, and I was studying one day she called me and she said he was arrested and his in prison. So he was convicted for stealing money from the bank for a lot of, a lot of things. And he was found in a sense, 10 years after his death. But it's very mysterious. No one really knows what he was

“accused of. But I think also that his personality, the fact that he was speaking loud, the fact that”

sometimes he, he would in a party or in certain situation, he would let himself say what he really thought about the situation of Morocco or about women. And I think some people took advantage of this and told to the people in power that my father maybe was too loud and dangerous. In the novel, the mother is a kind of collegeist. In real life, your mother was among the first women doctors. But she was an auto-laringologist, basically like a high level earnose on throat

doctor. Exactly. What was she up against as one of the first women doctors? My mother was an excellent doctor. You know, when I go, it's very funny because when I go to Morocco

and I walk in in Rabat with her, she is the most famous of the, of the couple. And she's always

making fun of me saying, "Oh, you know, in France, people recognize you and your famous there, but here it's me. She's an old woman now, but you can see how much respect people have for her. Because my mother, she would take everyone, every patient, the one who could pay and the one who could not pay. My mother had a very high vision of medicine for her. It was really like a moral duty. I remember as a child, she could stay very, very late to take care of people. And every night,

she would come back and tell us, tell us about people, tell us about poverty, about injustice,

“and tell us also about the body, physicality. And I think that's why a body is so important in my”

work because at very young age, I understood that, of course, we are made of our mind, our voice, our values, and all this in our social class. But first, and at the end, we are just a body that is going to suffer and that is going to die. What did she teach you about women's equality? My mother first of all, she told us at a very young age, because I have two sisters, the first thing that she said, and that she repeated years after years after years, was that you

have to be independent financially, never depend on a man. So you have to study study study and you

have to find a job and make your own money and never have as a dream to marry someone who is rich

“and who is going to take care of you. And the second thing is knowledge. My mother always said,”

the first weapon of a woman is knowledge. The more book you read, the freer you are. What did you see relating to women's rights in the world outside your home? Oh, horrible things, but even in my home, the first inequality that was absolutely horrible, and I suppose it has a link with my job is the de-in-equality of reading and writing. You know, a lot of women around me when I was young, they couldn't read or write. And in a way I had the feeling when I was six, seven years old

and I was beginning to write my name and to read books and I would see my grandmother and I would see my nanny and women around me who were in the dark and it was difficult for them to understand their

rights, it was difficult for them to travel. So the first inequality was... Yeah. And the second thing

was when I was a little bit older, when I was a teenager, I began to understand first that I didn't have exactly the same right as men because when I wanted to do something very often people would answer to me, no, it's not for women, it's for men. You want to go in a cafe and sit on a terrace, no, it's not for women. If you wear a certain skirt, if you smoke outside, if you dress in a

whore. So just having a body of a woman was giving at that time, I don't know the opportunity for

other people to judge you and I was very frustrated about that and then also I witnessed a lot of injustice. Friends of my mother, who would be repudiated by their husband, who would lost the

“custody of their children. The situation was very violent. I remember that my mother telling me,”

okay, if you go in front of a judge and you need someone for testimony, a woman would only value the health of a man. If you need two people to testify, you need two men or four women. So I was really outraged by that. That's me, I was only half of a man. So did you follow your parent's advice

and not speak out in public against the second class status or the no status of women? No, I always

spoke out and my parents were always very, very afraid that something would happen to me, but you know it's something that I always found very mysterious and something I'd like to write about the mystery of a freedom. Why, in a family, you have one, one person sometimes who is a rebel, someone who doesn't accept the norms who doesn't accept the rules and I was this kind of a young girl and when I was maybe seven or eight years old, I had a fight with my father. I did something

and he yelled at me and I answered him and he said, you don't answer your father and I said, it's my mouth and I say whatever I want in French, I said, Simabush. And then it was my

nickname for a very long time. My father used to call me Simabush because I was always speaking

out and it was impossible for me to shut up or to sign and when I was feeling something or when I was really, I had a very strong feeling of injustice and it was something that really destroyed me.

“And that's how I think I began to write because I was always telling my grandmother,”

it's so unfair, it's so unfair and one day she said, you know, yeah, it's unfair and life is unfair and you will see and you will understand. So maybe write about this and maybe you can resolve or you can try to correct this injustice through writing. One of the things you've written about through your fiction and through a nonfiction book is the issue of being sexually active in Morocco where sex outside of marriage is illegal and comes

along with a prison sentence. I mean, there's really serious consequences. So that means if you're single, if you're having sex outside of your marriage, if you're gay or lesbian, if the police discover you and you're not successful in paying them off or somebody kind of writes you out, you can go to jail. How long has that law been on the books? Sinic colonization actually it's a law that was written by the French when they arrived in Morocco.

Their idea was also to prevent any kind of sexuality between Arabs and French and Europeans.

“So there was really the desire to separate, to segregate the two population and that's why”

people would look down at my grandparents because it was very scandalous at that time for a white woman to have sexual intercourse with an Arab. So that's why they decided to apply those laws. But then when they left, Moroccan kept the law. But I think that now they use it more to dominate people and when I see the people, it's the poor people. I spoke with a lot of students, 17, 18 years old, who tell you life is difficult, we don't have a lot of money,

we don't have a lot of place to go to to have fun and we don't have a lot of perspectives in terms of job. But maybe the worst is that we can't even have a girlfriend. We can't go into street with a girlfriend and taking her hand and kissing her industry because we know that a cop is going to harass us and ask us for money and things like that. But when you are rich in Morocco, you can do whatever you want. You have the same kind of sexuality that you have in the West. You can find your way to have

abortion because you can pay. You can be homosexual and you can have relationship and big parties

the matter is really, is a social class matter. You don't have the same sexuality depending on

“being poor or being rich. Our men frequently punish theirs at mostly women.”

No, it's mostly women, mostly women. Sometimes men are punished for homosexuality. Sometimes for adultery, but it's mostly women. Okay. I'm not shocked. Yeah. My guest is Laila Slimani. Her new novel, I'll take the fire, was just published in the US. It completes her trilogy of novels inspired by three generations of her Moroccan family. We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air. This week on sources and methods, something has shifted in Ukraine,

protests in the streets, a shake up in military leadership. The two people you were kind of watching as they ran the war in Ukraine are now both out of a job. Plus, how president Trump seems to be shifting when it comes to his tone on Russia. Listen this week to sources and methods the National Security Podcast from NPR. Have you ever been so upset that you can't even think straight? When we're distressed and in high anxiety, we tend to breathe from our chest, which is

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on your schedule. But with the NPR app, news, culture and podcasts are ready when you want them in your pocket. Download the NPR app today. This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with novelist Leila Slymanee. Her latest novel, I'll take the fire, completes her trilogy of books inspired by three generations of her Moroccan family's history. The books span the period of the fight for independence

from France to the post-colonial period and ends in the 2020s. Slymanee brings a dual perspective to her writing and her life. She's Moroccan, but her grandmother was white European, so Slymanee is biracial. Her family is a doorway into larger issues of colonial and post-colonial Morocco, like government oppression, women's rights, the tensions between Muslims and Christians, and sexual criminalization. You risk imprisonment if you have sex and your single,

gay or lesbian, or engage in adultery. So growing up where sex was tied to fear and danger,

“what impacted that have on your sense of sexuality? For me, I think I had a very dark vision of”

sexuality. I was always worried. I was incapable of abandoning myself to sexuality because from

the moment I became a woman, my mother always told me about sex in a way that she was telling me about danger, the danger of getting pregnant, the danger of going to jail, the danger of being raped, all the dangers. So for me being a woman was dangerous and I was always afraid. I was always thinking that someone was judging me, that I was not a good woman. I was not doing the right thing and I was thinking that for us women it was impossible to be innocent, that from

the beginning we were guilty guilty of something, but I couldn't understand and I couldn't know exactly what I was guilty of. Did those fears ever fade away? Yeah, they did, but the souvenir of all I faced and all I experienced because of those fears

“is still here. And I think that even in the West being a woman is difficult when I arrived in”

France at the age of 18, I had a lot of fantasies about Paris. I thought that it was the city of glamour and city of love and city of freedom where I could do whatever I wanted, but it was not as glamorous and easy as that because there was men following you in the subway and in the street

and my fantasy about this world where women were totally free was a fantasy and was not totally true. In the novel, the father urges Mia, the character who becomes a writer, to leave Morocco,

go to France and never come back. Did you get advice like that from your parents?

No, absolutely not. And I could say he says that because he's worried about her, not because he

“doesn't want to see her. He wants her to have freedom and he knows that that's the only way she's”

going to have it and wants her also not to feel obligated to come back. He wants her to be free. Yeah, exactly. I think that for Medi for the character. That's the father. Yeah, it's a extraordinary gesture of love. You know, I think that there's not a better proof of love than preferring the freedom of your child than your child to be with you. He, in a way, he sacrifices himself because he know he's not going to see her again and that she's going to live her own life,

but he wants her to be free. And my parents always wanted us to be free. So when we left, they

they didn't say don't come back because they were very attached to Morocco and I'm very attached to Morocco, but they said, now you go and invent yourself, do something of your life, be free and try to use this freedom in the best way you can. And I felt a sort of vertigo. It was not easy. And sometimes I was angry against my parents because I wanted them to tell me what to do and who to be and what was my identity, what I was supposed to to behave like. And my mother,

she would always say, no, we will not answer those questions. You have to find your own way in the world. So that's how I understood that freedom is the most beautiful thing in the world,

“but it's also very difficult. You have to be able to sacrifice a lot of things and that's what”

his father is trying to teach her. What do you feel you had to sacrifice or risk you had to take or difficult decisions you had to make to be free? You know, I think I had to accept that

people would not like me. And it's something difficult for a woman, but it's something essential

accepting not to be likable. So in order to be free, I think you have to accept that and to accept being selfish, also sometimes. And a lot of women don't give themselves the right to be selfish, because we are very often raised with the idea that we should care for others. And you know, that's what Virginia Wolf wrote so brilliantly, the Angel of the House. The Angel of the House is the one who is always thinking about giving the good spots to her friends and giving the best

part of the chicken to the guests and taking the rest for her. So I don't want to be the Angel

“of the House. So that's I think the thing that I did to be free. Can you say more about what you”

think makes you selfish or unlikable? Being a writer makes me selfish, because I'm selfish with my time, I'm selfish with my space. And I think also that it's not a very likable things to say, but very often I'm waiting from people to adapt to my schedule and to adapt to my vision of things because my only goal and my obsession is writing a novel. And so I consider that my husband, my children, everyone should understand that and that they should all adapt to that. I know it's very selfish,

but it's how it is and it would be impossible for me to change that. Well let me reintroduce him. My guest is writer Layles Limani, her third book and her trilogy of books based on three generations of her family is called "I'll Take the Fire" and it's just been published in the U.S. in English. We'll be right back. This is fresh air. Of all the protests in the summer of 2020? For a moment there, it was Utopia. One took a unique turn.

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It's the kind of journalism democracy requires that we the public need to protect. Don't wait. Join the community of people who power this work before the month is out. Head to donate.npr.org. This is fresh air. Let's get back to my interview with Layles Limani. She's Moroccan, but spent much of her life in France. Her novel "I'll Take the Fire" concludes her trilogy of novels inspired by three generations of her family. It was just published in the US.

“When you first went to France to study there, what induced the most culture shock for you?”

Oh, I think it's going to sound a little bit harsh, but I think the lack of generosity of people how cold people were. When I said generosity, it's not material. It's generosity of their time, generosity of their smile, how cold people were, and how indifference. I was raised in a country where people are very friendly to each other, and there's a real real sense of solidarity. If someone arrives in a newcomer in a city, for sure, after one or two days, a lot of people will

invite this person to dinner and will take care of him or of her. When I arrived in France, I think that for weeks and weeks and weeks, I had all my meals alone, no one ever asked me even for a coffee. Or sometimes I would go for a coffee, and I remember it was the winter, and we were it was dark, and I was very cold. That was the first big real winter in my life, and I would have coffee with a Parisian girl, and then she would say, "Oh, I have to go home. My parents are waiting

for me for dinner." I was looking at her saying, "Oh my God, I would love so much to be in an apartment with parents cooking a real dinner, and I have to go back to my little room." It's something very bad that I bought at the supermarket, because I was incapable of cooking at that time. So,

“yeah, I think that was something that really shocked me when I arrived in France.”

One of the things you did when you got to France was read Simone Dubois, author of the second sex, feminist and existentialist, "How are you changed by her writing?" I mean, for me, it was a revolution, because as I was telling you before about my mother, telling me that knowledge was a weapon for women, that is exactly what Simone Dubois proved in her book in the second sex. She read everything, she read history, she read biology,

she read philosophy, trying to find in all those fields the reason why we accepted for so many, many centuries that women were weaker than men, and that we were in unequal, and I felt that she was giving me those weapons. She was giving me all I needed to fight against those who are arguing that it's like this, it's the decision of nature or the decision of God. And thanks

to Simone Dubois, I was feeling stronger, and I was feeling that I would always have an answer

against those who claim that it's because of God, because of nature. So I read it really with

“passion, and you know, I remember that when I went to borrow the book in a library, and I thought”

that it was a erotic book, because the name does him sex. The second sex, I thought it was erotic. So I arrived, and I was read, read, and sweating, and I asked for the second sex, and she gave it to me, and I came back home, and I began to read, and at the beginning, I was very disappointed. I was like, oh my God, I thought it was like erotic story, and then I continued, and I have to say that it's even better than erotic story, because it gives you the opportunity to be the master

of your own eroticism. So when somebody challenged your equality, or women's equality, in general, what kind of answer did you get from Simone de Beauvoir? You know, some historical examples, the fact, for instance, there's a long chapter about biology, and she argues against those who

say that the women are physiologically unequal and weaker to men. The truth is that it's absolutely

religion manipulated, also this idea of women being unequal, and that women should stay home,

and should make children, and should perpetuate the generation, and all this. So you have an answer for all types of attacks. Your mother of two children, I think they're 9 and 15, no? Yeah. Did you have any reservations about having children, because you put such an emphasis on freedom and flexibility, and being selfish in the sense that you need time to write, and that's a huge priority for you, and you don't care about being likable, because you want to do what it is

“you do, and largely that's writing. You have to give up a lot to become a parent.”

Yes, but to be really honest, I think that I was very naive, and when I had my son, I was absolutely not aware of how much time, and how much sacrifice, and all the thing that being a mother demands. But it's also something I wrote about a lot. The fact that women lie to women a lot, when I was young, everyone would tell me, "Oh, you know, being a mother." So it's natural,

and you will see it so easy, and you will know exactly what you do, and you will never feel alone again,

and there will be this unconditional love that you will feel, and that will make you so strong, and also my mother was so extraordinary, and she was so much of a mother, she was a wolf, she was a bear, she was taking care of us all the time, and I don't know, I was like, "Okay, maybe I have that in me, maybe I can be this kind of mother." But I was not, and it was very difficult for me. When I had my first child, I was very depressed, and I didn't have any time for me.

But I have to say that I was very lucky to have the husband that I have, who understood that immediately, and who, I mean, in my, in my couple and in my family, we are absolutely not in traditional role. I mean, I'm not a traditional mother, and he's not a traditional father. He takes care of the children a lot, and he's doing all the things that mother is supposed to do, even if I hate this idea. But he's the one taking care of the, of the food, of the doctor, of the pyjama, and all the things,

“and I'm the one who is very often locked in her office. But, you know, I think that children are”

very intelligent, and children can adapt. When you explain to them, when you respect them, and my, I respect my children very much, and they respect my work very much. So we have a very good relationship where they understand my selfishness, I think, that maybe even they forgive it, and I want to be a mother and the good mother, but I don't want to sacrifice my, my career,

and I don't want to sacrifice my passion, because this is the most important thing for me.

If we're just joining us, my guest is Layless Limani, her new novelist titled, "I'll take the fire. We'll be right back. This is fresh air." On Consider This, NPR's afternoon news podcast, we cover everything for politics to the

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NPR, we stand for your right to be curious, to make sense if the biggest story of the day and what it means for you. Follow Consider This, wherever you get your podcasts. This season of Planet Money Summer School, we go to China, one of the world's biggest economy. And what we learned is Americans are crazy. Chinese are crazy. These are two countries full of these crazy hustlers. The US and China are more alike than you might think.

On Planet Money Summer School, a strange lesson about success, how to handle the downsides of progress. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. Let's get back to my interview with Layless Limani. She's Moroccan, but spent much of her life in France. Her novel, I'll take the fire, concludes her trilogy of novels, inspired by three generations of her family. It was just published in the US.

One of your earlier novels is about Anani who murders the two children that she is in charge of. And it's inspired by a real story. You hired Anani to take care of your children

raise you. What was it like to be raised by Anani? Were you close? We were very close. We were

very close. She was like a second mother to me. And in Morocco, I would call her Mwima, which is

in Arabic, like second mother. I would spend more time with her than with my own mother,

“especially when I was very young. And at the same time, I think that at a very young age,”

I understood that her position was very difficult. Because I loved her like a mother, but she was not my mother. Everyone was telling her, "Oh, you belong to the family." But I knew that it was a lie that she was not the family. She was with us all the time. She was sharing our intimacy. But at the same time, she didn't have a husband. She didn't have children of her own because she was spent all her time taking care of us so she sacrificed her own life. And when I was six or seven years old,

I went to school. And I could read and write. And my Nani, she couldn't. And so there was a sort of gap that became bigger and bigger between me and her. Because I was still a child, but I knew more than her in many ways. And I could feel this injustice. And I could feel how the fact that she belonged to a lower social class. And that her job also was full of ambiguity. Because we loved

her. But she knew that she would never be exactly the same position as my mother. And that probably

one day, we would not take care of her or we would not give her the importance that she had when we were a child. And also, I investigate a lot for this book. And I interviewed a lot of Nani's so many of them who have their own children in their country, in Philippine, in Senegal, in Guinea. And who say I haven't seen my child for five years, for ten years. And while she's taking care of a child who is not her own, and who at one point would not even take care of her.

So having all these feelings about the class implications of having Nani, when you became apparent and you needed to hire Nani in order to do your work. What were some of the ethical things as well as practical things that you took into consideration or tortured yourself

about while you were trying to find the right Nani for you? First of all, I never thought that she

was going to do my work. Because if I thought that it would mean that I thought that as a mother, I have to stay with my children and that she's taking my work. For me, she was not taking my

“work. She was having a job that I respect and that is very important. And I would have a lot of”

consideration for that. And I will give her the salary that she deserved for that. But I'd never thought that she was doing my job. My job is to write. I take care of my children, but I have a job like many, many women. So first of all, I have always tried to not accept this guilt that people want you to feel that, oh my God, you're not doing your job as a mother and instead of that, you're going out to do a job. No. For me, it was not like that. You started off as a journalist

and you were arrested while covering the Arab Spring and Tunisia for the publication June Afrique, which translates to young Africa. So what exactly got you jailed? I was with a photographer in the city of Kasarin, which is at the frontier between Nigeria and Tunisia. And we work a very early to take pictures in, I think, an abandoned factory and in the suburbs of the of the city. And what they wanted were the pictures. And the photographer would not give them to the cops. So

they kept us for hours and trying to convince the photographer to give the pictures. But then, you know, it was not very worried because I had a lot of trust towards my magazine, Jan Afrique, which is very well known in Tunisia. So I called, I had the right to call one person

“and I called immediately in Paris and I said, okay, we are in this situation. You have to find”

a way to take us out of this. So we waited a few hours and then it was it was solved and we gave

was going to be. Before you knew that you would be released in a few hours. Were you terrified

about being separated from your child? I'm not knowing for how long that went last.

“I'm trying to remember. No, I think that I was very angry. I was angry against the people who”

arrested us and I was, no, I was furious. I was not, I was not very worried. I knew that I was, it was going to be okay. But I was really, really full of anger and I was yelling and I was telling them that it was a shame and things like that. So no, I was very much focused on my

anger, I think. Is the arrest or being detained in Tunisia? Partly reason why you became a novelist

and didn't stay a journalist? No, I don't think so. No, no, no, because I think I loved being good journalists. But I was frustrated when it came to language and to the possibility to write exactly what I want to write. When you are a journalist they tell you that you have to write a nautical with this particular angle and you don't confuse as much words as you want. There's a sort of lens to the article and I wanted more freedom and also I love fiction. I love fiction very

much and what is beautiful about fiction is that you can write about things that you don't know and you can write about things that you didn't see that you didn't experience. That's the beauty of imagination and that's exactly what you can't do when you're a journalist. You're supposed

“to say the truth. That's the goal of your job and I think that I wanted to write about a different”

kind of truth, the truth of emotion, the truth of our human condition. Well, Laila Slimani, I want to thank you so much for talking with us. It's been really interesting and I really appreciate your conversation and your writing. So thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Laila Slimani's new novel is called "I'll Take the Fire." Tomorrow on fresh air guns, over 40,000 people a year die from gunshots in the US and if the leading cause of death for

children, yet as recent Supreme Court decision show, we're getting fewer laws regulating guns, not more. We'll speak with New York Times report a Mike McIntyre about why this is. His new book is called "Rickershade," guns, greed, and the American way of violence. Join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh airs executive producer Sam Brigger, our technical director in

engineer, as Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanishewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Philis Myers and Reboot Anato Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thia Chaliner, Susan Yacundi, Anna Balman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Sevy Nespere. Roberta Shorock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley, I'm Terry Groes.

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