Writing against the border: Utopia Babel by Leïla Slimani

The Nightmare as Method: Language, Guilt, and the Genealogy of Loss

The text was commissioned by France Culture at the initiative of Tiago Rodrigues, the director of the Avignon 2025 Festival, which that year honored the Arabic language as its guest. A first version was publicly recited by Leïla Slimani on July 8, 2025, in the courtyard of the Musée Calvet as part of this festival.

The text doesn't begin with a thesis, but with a bodily sensation. "I often have the same nightmare. A terrifying nightmare whose setting changes, but the fear doesn't subside." ¹ Slimani is standing in a courtroom, is supposed to speak, speaks in French – and is interrupted: “We are not in France here. Speak Arabic.” ² The paralysis follows immediately: “I search for my words. Nothing comes, and I understand that I have lost, that I will never be able to prove my innocence.” ³ The court is a metaphor for societal legitimacy. Whoever speaks the wrong language is guilty—not in a legal sense, but in an identity-based one. The innocence that cannot be proven is Moroccan affiliation, the legitimacy as a writer who writes in French about an Arabic-speaking world. The feeling of guilt is not a private neurosis, but rather the internalized structure of a postcolonial educational history.

Slimani immediately contrasts this nightmare with a childhood memory: as a small child, she greeted her Alsatian grandmother in childlike Arabic with "outside, outside, outside" ("el bela, el bela, el bela"). The grandmother is a paradoxical figure in the colonial tableau: she comes to the country as the wife of a Moroccan colonial veteran, but learns the language out of joy, curiosity, and desire. "She mastered it perfectly, without ever losing her Germanic accent. She loved it, played with it, and appreciated its poetry, its humor, and its malleability." ⁴ She provokes passersby with obscenities to elicit responses—to truly connect with the language. This is the exact opposite of the colonial paradigm Slimani describes in the same breath: most Europeans who had lived in Morocco for twenty or thirty years had never learned Arabic because “everyone spoke French.” ⁵.

Slimani's childhood world is multilingual and without hierarchy: Darija (Moroccan Arabic), Chleha (the Berber dialect of the farmworkers on his grandfather's farm), French, Spanish, German. Elias Canetti appears as the first intertextual reference – from The saved tongue"Languages ​​were often mentioned; seven or eight different ones were spoken in our city alone. Everyone listed the languages ​​they knew. That could save your life or the lives of others." ⁶ The parallel is precisely chosen: Canetti, a Sephardic Bulgarian, like Slimani, is a child of a world where multilingualism is a survival resource, not a curiosity. German is his grandmother's secret language – "her secret, her refuge, her own room." ⁷ —a language in which she becomes a different person, with different gestures, different intonations, a different laugh. Herein lies the core thesis of the essay: languages ​​are not means of communication, but identities, bodies, secrets. Whoever loses a language loses a version of themselves.

Paradise shatters upon entering the Lycée Descartes, which Slimani describes as "an enclave in which an elite, educated according to a foreign model and in a foreign language, reproduced itself and – completely detached from the country in which it lived – could rule without a guilty conscience." ⁸Classical Arabic is considered a "sacred language". ⁹ taught – and imprisoned precisely because of this sacralization: “We were repeatedly told that the Arabic language was sacred and that we could not do with it as we wished.” ¹⁰ A sacred language is a dead language for literature: one approaches it with reverence, not with the creative freedom that writing demands.

The father (role model for Mehdi in The country of othersHe is the tragic figure in this genealogy. As one of only three Moroccans, he attends the colonial school, silently endures the racist remarks of his mathematics teacher, and works with obsessive energy. His own writings, which Slimani quotes, articulate the dilemma: "This decision, as I realized much later, also gave me the image of a European, a Westerner." ¹¹ Slimani calls this "the first knot, the first wound, the first breaking point". ¹² – the first knot in a chain of historical losses that leads directly to their own silence.

Roland Barthes emerges here as the second major intertextual axis. Barthes writes that a writer plays with his mother tongue, the “body of his mother.” ¹³to glorify, beautify, or dismember them. Slimani turns this around: "And what about my father's body?" ¹⁴ For her, the Arabic language is the body of the father – “this immobile body, this bound, imprisoned body, this dead body, this body of the language I do not speak.” ¹⁵ And Levinas adds: His father, in exile, always made sure to find a Hebrew teacher first, because language was "the first element of well-being." ¹⁶ was. This was not the case with Slimani's father: "With my father, this bond has broken. The thread of memory has snapped." ¹⁷ The funeral of his father – Slimani does not understand the prayers, cannot respond to the expressions of condolence in Arabic – intensifies the structural catastrophe into a personal shock.

Paris, the Arab woman, and the upside-down Babel: Identity in exile

The third section begins with an apparent paradox: “I had to settle in Paris at the age of eighteen to understand that I was an Arab.” ¹⁸ Slimani left Morocco as a Moroccan; in Paris, she becomes an Arab—through the gaze of the other. This is a cultural-theoretical insight of fundamental precision: identities are not only formed from within, but also constructed through reflection. Paris presents Slimani as a “visible minority.” ¹⁹, as a body that doesn't fit the norm. And in the books and films she knows and loves, "nobody looked like me." ²⁰France was initially a "place of fiction". ²¹ – a country she knew from literature, but experienced as foreign upon arrival: “I came to a country that was mine and at the same time foreign.” ²²

Returning to Morocco after years in Paris reveals the downside: Darija slips away from her, people laugh at her accent, she feels excommunicated. Slimani calls this a "reverse Babel." ²³"In the beginning there was the diversity of languages, the difference, the coexistence, but then, to quote the biblical text, 'one single language and the same words'." ²⁴ The biblical Babel myth is reversed: not the scattering of languages, but the convergence into a single one – French – is the trauma. “Unlike my grandmother […] I didn’t speak one more language, but one less.” ²⁵

Here, a socio-political analysis of language hierarchies unfolds. Slimani reflects on how her flawless command of French protected her from social exclusion: "I am convinced that my mastery of the language has largely protected me from exclusion, rejection, or even any form of condescension." ²⁶ The “Arabic accent” ²⁷ It's socially coded – the accent of the underprivileged, the film comedy "bougnoule." Slimani admits to having imitated this accent herself when she noticed it amused her classmates. This is a moment of unflinching self-criticism: she, too, participated in the very system of humiliation against which she now writes.

The cosmopolitan utopia of his parents—Moroccan and French, African and Western, monarchy and republic—appears in this section as a fragile and now historically lost ideal. His father dreamed of a bridge between Morocco and Spain, quoting King Hassan II: Morocco as a tree with roots in Africa and leaves in Europe. Slimani comments laconically: “How naive my father was, weeping with joy at the sight of the pictures of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989!” ²⁸ Today there are more than 75 border walls in the world; in 1989 there were six. "Where is the attack on the border now?" ²⁹ – the question is both rhetorical and painful.

The engagement with Francophonie, which Slimani assumed as ambassador in 2017, is explained in this section as a political gesture: against conservative monolingualism in Morocco as well as against the imperial, arrogant version of Francophonie that understands French as an instrument of domination. The reference to Aya Nakamura—whose potential appearance before the Institut de France provoked outrage from the right and far right because her French was deemed too African-influenced—serves as a concrete political anchor. Slimani responds with a linguistic-theoretical thesis: “Pure language does not exist; it is a political phantasm, a fiction. French breathes Arabic, Wolof, Haitian Creole; it is already Babel.” ³⁰ Tayeb Salih is quoted as saying, from Season of migration across the north"We now speak their language without guilt and without gratitude." ³¹ The appropriation of the colonial language is not an act of betrayal, but an act of self-empowerment.

The Arab world as a battleground: September 11, exoticization, and literature

The fourth section is the darkest of the essay. "The years that followed September 11, 2001, shattered my parents' utopia." ³² The terrorist attack turned Slimani and people like her into involuntary members of a clan: “We were Muslims, clinging to the past, incapable of reforming ourselves. Even our language was defiled.” ³³ The Arabic language becomes the language of threat. Slimani refers to Ingeborg Bachmann, who wrote about the German language corrupted by the Nazi novella: war "its reflection, its intrusion into language, its subsequent effect on life". ³⁴ The parallel is bold and precise: The Arabic language has undergone an analogous contamination through Islamist terrorism. "Say this phrase, Allahu Akbar, in any street in the Western world and see the terror it unleashes." ³⁵

The social analysis is made concrete through media and statistics. One study shows that in 2016, a French magazine featured Islam on its cover every week – always in the context of violence, barbarity, and hatred. Nabil Wakim's documentary "Mauvaise langue" (Bad Language) shows how Arabic, in the collective imagination, becomes the language of the poor, the marginalized, and the fanatical. And: "Arabic, the second most spoken language in France, is also the least taught." ³⁶ Arabic is de facto the second most spoken language in France, but it is treated as hostile. When Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem proposed improved Arabic instruction, she was accused of communalism and religious proselytizing.

Slimani counters this with a reminder: “Reread Léon l’Africain! Reread Naguib Mahfouz’s pages on Cairo or Hanan El-Cheikh’s on Beirut!” ³⁷ The Arab-Islamic civilization as a pluralistic, cosmopolitan, and open-minded world – represented by Amin Maalouf and Mahfouz, the Arab translators of Greek texts in the 8th century. Etymology as a political weapon: "Algebra, algorithm, zero, and digit are words of Arabic origin." ³⁸ In Lisbon, Slimani discovers the Arab traces of Europe: “al cantar” means bridge in Arabic – Alcântara; Morocco calls oranges “boultoukal” – Portugal. “Why does Europe have such great difficulty in recognizing this Arab-Muslim past? […] I will not stop repeating it: No, we are not your incorrigible foreigners.” ³⁹

The autobiographical anecdotes about life as a "Maghrebi writer" ⁴⁰ are a phenomenology of literary Orientalism. The reader, who tells of her “petite bonne” Malika: “You are kind, you, Madame, you never hit me.” ⁴¹ – and Slimani's quick-witted question: "How tall was she?" ⁴² The Swedish journalist who asks about rape statistics. The literary critic who always describes her books as "spicy" and "colorful." ⁴³ The inevitable critic who asks why she doesn't write in Arabic. These are all variations of the same gesture: reducing the author to her origins, excluding her from the universal canon. Against the "pigeonholing" ⁴⁴, which she is offered, Slimani quotes Rushdie: “The writers who count have never written ‘in the name of’, but rather against it.” ⁴⁵

The Art of Empathy: Literature Against the Border

In the fifth section, Slimani develops her theory of the novel. "I have always been fascinated by the question of perspectives, by the absolutely unique way in which everyone views the world." ⁴⁶ The novel is the medium of diverse perspectives – it forces the reader to inhabit an unfamiliar state of mind. She quotes a character from J'emporterai le feu"It was first in the books that I learned I loved people." ⁴⁷ —a sentence she describes as her own. The books—Tolstoy, Jack London, Pearl Buck—allow her, as a child in Rabat, to be Russian, Chinese, and American. Camus, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Discours de Suède," formulates the foundation of this poetics: "Art is not a solitary pleasure. It is a means of moving the greatest number of people by offering them a preferred image of shared sorrows and joys. Anyone who has chosen their destiny as an artist because they felt different learns that they will only nourish their art by acknowledging their similarity to everyone else." ⁴⁸

The reflection on translation is one of the theoretically dense passages. "If writing is a work of alterity—putting oneself in the other's skin, inventing voices that are foreign to oneself—then translation extends this gesture and this movement." ⁴⁹ The German translator writes to her: “You use the word ‘complice,’ and it makes me break out in a cold sweat. It’s so thankless to translate.” ⁵⁰ The familiar word becomes new, profound, and strange through the translation process. George Steiner (from After BabelThe following is cited: "Learning a foreign language means accepting that you won't feel completely at home in the language." ⁵¹ For Steiner, Babel is not a punishment, but a paradoxical blessing: linguistic diversity saves against the totalitarianism of a single language. Slimani extends this politically into the present: against populist linguistic barriers as well as against AI, which is trained in English corpora and promotes linguistic uniformity.

The threat to literature posed by authoritarian power is specifically named: 6.000 banned books in US schools by 2025, burned copies of Harry Potter, the index on which Tolstoy, Anne Frank, Morrison, Baldwin, Steinbeck, Orwell, and Lee are listed. Dror Mishanis Au ras du sol – an Israeli writer at war, who wonders whether he is allowed to write about Palestinians – illustrates the global dictate of silence: “Writers must know when to be silent.” ⁵² Slimani's answer is her own poetics: "Literature is the only art that is capable of immersing us so deeply in a consciousness, of letting us see life from the inside, and of showing us that people are never quite what they seem." ⁵³

Philip Roth – from a Libération interview in 2018 – provides the image of resignation: the 15.000 readers of today, 7.500 in ten years, finally “a few hundred, buried in the catacombs” ⁵⁴Slimani admits that this pessimism sometimes grips her. But she rejects it. Anna Akhmatova stands in front of the Leningrad prison where her son is incarcerated. A woman asks her: "And this, can you describe it?" ⁵⁵ Akhmatova replies: “Yes, I can.” ⁵⁶ This is Slimani's foundation: the willingness to describe the unspeakable. Literature as testimony, not as ornament.

The essay ends with a double self-definition. Following Mandelstam, she has built herself a “terre de mots”, a land of words: “My land, I invent it and enclose it in the novels as in a glass ball that I could shake, and there would be wind and there would be snow and summer days when the air would be so hot that one could do nothing.” ⁵⁷ The snow globe as a metaphor for the novel – a world that can be shaken to rearrange it. And the last sentence, a reformulation of Camus' ending into The Myth of Sisyphus"You have to imagine that we are living happily in Babel." ⁵⁸ What is a punishment in the biblical myth – the scattering of languages ​​– is declared a utopia: Babel is not the end of communication, but the beginning of a plural, polyphonic, infinitely rich human world.

Assaut contre la frontière ("Attack on the Border"): The short text makes transparent what the novels had always shown: that the question of the Arabic language is the central question of the trilogy. The country of others (“The Land of Others”) is; that Mehdi’s story is her father’s; that the “Land of Others” (“pays des autres”) refers to any country that remains foreign because its language remains foreign. The metaphor of “langue fantôme” (“phantom language”) – “like speaking of a phantom limb whose presence one still feels even though it has been amputated.” ⁵⁹ – explains why Arabic-speaking characters are written in French: Arabic is not absent, but present as a phantom, inscribed between the lines.

1. "Je fais souvent le même cauchemar. Un cauchemar terrifiant, dont le décor change sans que la peur, elle, s'atténue.">>>
2. "On n'est pas en France ici. Parle en arabe.">>>
3. "Je cherche mes mots. Rien ne vient et je comprends alors que j'ai perdu, que je ne pourrai jamais prouver mon innocence.">>>
4. "Elle la maîtrisait à la perfection, without jamais perdre pourtant son accent Germanique. Elle l'aimait, en jouait, en appréciait la poésie, l'humour et la plasticité.">>>
5. “to the world parlait français”>>>
6. "Il était souvent question de langues, on en parlait sept ou huit différentes rien que dans notre ville. Chacun faisait le compte des langues qu'il connaissait. Cela pouvait vous sauver la vie ou sauver la vie d'autres gens.">>>
7. “Son secret, son refuge, sa chambre à elle”>>>
8. “Enclave où an élite élevée à la mode étrangère, in a language étrangère, se reproduisait et, totalement dissociée du pays où elle vivait, pourrait dominer sans mauvaise conscience”>>>
9. “sacral language”>>>
10. “nous répétaient que la langue arabe était sacrée et que nous ne pouvions pas en faire ce que nous voulions.”>>>
11. “Ce choix m'a aussi, je l'ai découvert bien plus tard, donné l'image d'un European, d'un Occidental.”>>>
12. “le premier noeud, la première blessure, le premier déchirement”>>>
13. “corps de sa mère”>>>
14. “Et le corps de mon père alors?”>>>
15. “ce corps immobile, ce corps entravé, emprisonné, ce corps mort, ce corps de la langue que je ne parle pas.”>>>
16. “The first element of comfort”>>>
17. "Avec mon père, ce lien s'est brisé. Le fil de la mémoire s'est rompu.">>>
18. “The fall that I installed in Paris, the dix-huit ans, pour comprendre que j'étais une Arabe.”>>>
19. "visible minority">>>
20. “personne ne me ressemblait”>>>
21. “lieu de fiction”>>>
22. “J'arrivais dans un pays qui était le mien tout en étant étranger.”>>>
23. "Babel inversée">>>
24. “At the beginning, the plurality of languages, the difference, the coexistence can be found, for reference to the text in the biblique, 'un its language and the same words'.”>>>
25. “Contrairement à ma grand-mère […] je n'ai pas parlé une langue de plus mais une de moins.”>>>
26. “Je suis convaincue que maîtrise de la langue m'a en grande partie protégée de l'exclusion, you rejet ou même simplement d'une forme de condescendance.”>>>
27. "accent arabe">>>
28. “Comme il était naïf, mon père qui pleurait de joie devant les images de la demolition du mur de Berlin en 1989!”>>>
29. “Où est-il, à présent, l'assaut contre la frontière?”>>>
30. "La langue pure n'existe pas, elle est un fantasme politique, une fiction. Le français respire l'arabe, le wolof, l'haïtien, il est déjà Babel.">>>
31. “Nous parlons maintenant leur langue sans culpabilité ni reconnaissance.”>>>
32. “Les années qui ont suivi le 11 September 2001 ont fait voler en éclat l'utopia de mes parents.”>>>
33. "Nous étions des musulmans, English dans le passé, incapables de nous réformer. Notre langue même était salie.">>>
34. “son reflet, sa penetration dans la langue, son effet d'après coup sur la vie.”>>>
35. “This phrase, Allah akbar, prononcez-la dans n'importe quelle rue du monde occidental et regardez la terreur qu'elle provoque.”>>>
36. “l'arabe, qui est la deuxième langue la plus parlée de France, est also la moins enseignée”>>>
37. "Relisez Léon l'Africain! Relisez les pages de Naguib Mahfouz sur Le Caire ou de Hanan El-Cheikh sur Beyrouth!">>>
38. “Algèbre, algorithme, zero or chiffre sont des mots d'origine arabe.”>>>
39. "Pourquoi l'Europe at-elle tant de mal à valoriser ce passé Arabo-Musulman? [...] Je ne cesse de le marteler: non, nous ne sommes pas vos irréductibles étrangers.">>>
40. “écrivain maghrébin”>>>
41. “vous êtes gentille, vous, Madame, vous ne m'avez jamais battue”>>>
42. “Elle mesurait combien?”>>>
43. “épicés”, “colorés”>>>
44. “boîtes”>>>
45. “les écrivains qui comptent n'ont jamais écrit 'au nom de' mais plutôt contre.”>>>
46. “J'ai all été fascinée par la question des points de vue, par la façon absolute singulière dont chacun regarde le monde.”>>>
47. “C'est d'abord dans les livres que j'ai aimé les gens”>>>
48. "L'art n'est pas une réjouissance solitaire. Il est un moyen d'émouvoir le plus grand nombre d'hommes en leur offerrant une image privilégiée des souffrances et des joies communes. Celui qui a choisi son destin d'artiste parce qu'il se sentait différent apprend qu'il ne nourrira son art qu'en avouant sa ressemblance avec all.">>>
49. “Si l'écriture est un travail d'altérité – se mettre dans la peau de l'autre, inventer des voix étrangères à soi –, la traduction prolonge ce geste et ce déplacement.”>>>
50. "Tu utilises le mot complice et il me fait venir des sueurs froides. Il est si ingrat à traduire.">>>
51. “Apprendre une langue étrangère c'est accepter de ne pas être tout à fait chez soi dans le langage.”>>>
52. “Les écrivains doivent savoir se taire.”>>>
53. “La littérature est le seul art capable de nous immerger à ce point dans une conscience, de nous faire voir la vie de l'intérieur et, ainsi, de nous révéler que les gens ne sont jamais tout à fait ce qu'on croit qu'ils sont.”>>>
54. “One centaine, enfouis dans les catacombs”>>>
55. “Et ça, tu peux le décrire?”>>>
56. “Oui, je le peux.”>>>
57. “Mon pays, je l'invente et je l'enferme dans les romans comme dans une boule de verre que je pourrais remuer et il y aurait le vent et il y aurait la neige et des jours d'été où l'air serait si chaud qu'on ne pourrait rien faire.”>>>
58. “Il faut imaginer qu'à Babel nous vivons heureux.”>>>
59. “Comme on parle d'un membre fantôme dont on sent encore la presence bien qu'il ait été amputé”>>>