IN MY MOTHER’S WORDS

Rachid Benzine

(Éditions du Seuil, 96 pages, 2019)

***Rights sold to Germany (Piper), Italy (Corbaccio),

Argentina (Edhasa), and Korea (Munjintree)***

***English translation sample available***

The narrator of Rachid Benzine’s poignant novel is the youngest of five brothers born to Moroccan parents. Being the only unmarried sibling in the family, the task of caring for their elderly mother naturally falls to him. He moves back into her small apartment, the apartment where he was born, and for the next fifteen years lovingly attends to her every need, lavishing on her the attention this humble and hardworking woman, widowed much too young, never received nor expected. As their days of cohabitation become numbered and his mother reaches the end of her life, the narrator is not only filled with profound gratitude toward her, but he also comes to appreciate fully the person he had failed to see. 

The son, who becomes a university professor of literature, discovered his vocation through the books his father brought home from his job in a printed material recycling center. His mother, for her part, develops a single-minded passion for Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin through an audiotape her son gifted her years ago. Now he patiently reads over and over the passages she knows by heart. She unfailingly corrects him if he misses a word—she, a woman born in a small Berber village who never learned to read or write, but who possesses the acute mnemonic ability of someone raised in an oral culture. Now separated from her world by his class and education, he assumes that she cannot possibly understand the subtleties and sensuality of Balzac’s text, disqualifying her knowledge and life experience. He eventually realizes that even though he has been a responsible son in taking care of her, he has never really showed interest in her. Evoking old memories, he comes to grasp the extent of his mother’s dignity and courage, retracing her painful experiences of social humiliation, as well as her acts of kindness and generosity of spirit, and even her endearing idiosyncrasies such as her fascination for variety shows.

In this tender tribute to an immigrant mother, Benzine explores the challenges of cultural integration, the torn loyalty of “transclass” children, social invisibility, filial love, and the power of literature. With simplicity and finesse, he distills the tangled experience of guilt, sadness, and gratefulness that we can feel when accompanying a parent in old age, and the sometimes belated awareness of the importance of the love that binds us to them.

Rachid Benzine is a Franco-Moroccan specialist of Islam, a political scientist, and researcher associated with the Ricœur Fund. His books, such as Les Nouveaux Penseurs de l’islam (Albin Michel, 2004), Le Coran expliqué aux jeunes (Le Seuil, 2013), and, with the rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, Des mille et une façons d’être juif ou musulman (Le Seuil, 2017), have met critical and popular success. Recently, he published Lettre à Nour (Points, 2019), which he has also adapted for the stage. In My Mother’s Words is his first novel.