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Loading... "Musulman" roman (original 2005; edition 2015)by Zahia Rahmani (Author)
Work Information"Muslim" A Novel by Zahia Rahmani (2005)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Impulse purchase on vacation. I'd never heard of this book or this author, but I am a sucker for books by women in translation, especially when they are novellas. This is a haunting reflection on language, identity, immigration, and xenophobia. The narrator's father was banished from Algeria when she was a child and her family was forced to flee to France. In France, she struggles with her identity -- refuses to speak her native languages, pores over and dreams of Islamic and Berber origin stories and tries to make sense of it all -- of war, of prejudice, of fear. After years of insisting on speaking only French, she feels called back to her native tongue -- searching out Berber works and translating them into French. Rising anti-Muslim, anti-Arabic prejudice eventually drives her to leave France, and somehow she ends up detained in a camp. This isn't really a plot-driven novel. It weaves through her life in an abstract way -- drawing in dreams, folk tales, Islamic and Arabic history, etc. It's about nationality, identity defined from without and within. The way people and peoples misunderstand each other, sometimes deliberately. There is so much packed into this slim volume -- constantly unfolding. no reviews | add a review
"Muslim A Novel is a genre-bending, poetic reflection on what it means to be Muslim from one of France's leading writers. In this novel, the second in a trilogy, Rahmani's narrator contemplates the loss of her native language and her imprisonment and exile for being Muslim, woven together in an exploration of the political and personal relationship of language within the fraught history of Islam. Drawing inspiration from the oral histories of her native Berber language, the Koran, and French children's tales, Rahmani combines fiction and lyric essay in to tell an important story, both powerful and visionary, of identity, persecution, and violence."--Publisher's description. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)843.92Literature French French fiction Modern Period 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Winner of the 2020 Albertine Prize
Selected for Asymptote's February 2019 Book Club
The Publisher Says: "Muslim": A Novel is a genre-bending, poetic reflection on what it means to be Muslim from one of France's leading writers. In this novel, the second in a trilogy, Rahmani's narrator contemplates the loss of her native language and her imprisonment and exile for being Muslim, woven together in an exploration of the political and personal relationship of language within the fraught history of Islam. Drawing inspiration from the oral histories of her native Berber language, the Koran, and French children's tales, Rahmani combines fiction and lyric essay in to tell an important story, both powerful and visionary, of identity, persecution, and violence.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: One can call a cat a dog, but that won't make the creature bark or fetch a stick. This is not a novel. It is, in my pretty well-informed opinion, a récit. And, at under 150 pages, it isn't possessed of the scope a novel needs. Here's why that's important: Expectations get set when a person reads a title, and someone expecting a deep, immersive novel experience is going to leave this read disappointed.
Sad that this is the case. I would've chosen a different title, in fact; but the book's beauties are plentiful, call it what one may, and much here is to be savored.
Born in 1962, the author and the narrator of the book, whom we understand to be the author in heightened and fictionalized form, was the child of a Harki father:
and a Berber mother:
Her father's imprisonment until a daring escape in 1967 meant her childhood was spent as a doubly disadvantaged person: Berber language and culture was no more accepted in Algeria after independence than before, and her father's legacy of French co-operation was the cause of trouble. Her entire life, then, was delineated in hyphens...she was never Rahman, herself, and later Elohim, her invented self. She was Othered in an Algeria bent of Arabizing to belong to a larger Islamic community of "Pan-Arabism" and then in France by not being white, not looking like other little girls did.
And here, at this juncture, fiction diverges from fact as Rahman-the-character not Rahmani-the-writer is exiled by the French language...and so leaves France, the not-homeland of the body. This story having been written and published in France in 2005, it's sort of inevitable that the US invasions of Muslim lands like Iraq in Operation Desert Storm take a sort-of vague center stage. French intellectual that she is, the author sets a good deal of the, um, events (no real "action" in a récit) in a prison camp much like the camp her Harki father occupied after Algeria's independence.
It is at this point that quotidian reality departs the scene for good; what replaces it is Reality-Plus, the enhanced experience of poetry and fable and fairy tale. The mere fact of her existence becomes threatening to Them, the Powers That Be. She is not one thing, not that she ever was ever allowed to be only one thing (herself); she is Other, and takes the identity Elohim, that ambiguous plural Ugaritic word for the monophysite Jewish god as well as for the Children of El as well as for the Canaanite pantheon...she never shies away from complexity, Author Rahmani. And so I've never made any attempt to make it clear if any of the foregoing is fiction or autobiography.
Because it doesn't matter.
If you choose to read this book, and I hope you will, the reason to do so isn't to go from Point A to Point Q. You're not doing the Stations of the Cross, Catholics; not on Hajj, Muslims. You're making the pilgrimage through the countryside tending towards Santiago de Compostela or Mecca or Canterbury. You're there, in other words, for the voyage in, towards the destination, and not the destination itself.
Because, in the end, there is no destination, no Home, no place for us on this Earth, that we do not demand accept us, speak into being intentionally and unyieldingly.
In just under an hour and a half, you'll make the acquaintance of one who has done precisely that. ( )