Watch Us Dance

LoveReading Says

From the gifted author of Lullaby, Adèle, and The Country of Others, Leïla Slimani’s Watch Us Dance presents the kind of supremely accomplished writing that gets under your skin. The family of characters are ruggedly real and the story, set in Morocco in 1968, interweaves a tangle of timeless human predicaments, desires and frustrations with a fine sense of history.

Unusually for the time, Aicha and Selim have biracial parentage — their father is Moroccan, their mother French. While reflective, focussed, academic Aicha left Morocco to study medicine in Paris, her brother Selim is something of a rebellious-spirited drifter who ends up among the influx of European hippies to the region. 

The siblings also have vastly different relationships with their parents, and vastly different coming-of-age experiences, with Selim’s struggles and sexual awakenings brilliantly expressed, not least when he embarks on an illicit relationship. The author also sets his experiences within a broader context: “In this country, adolescence did not exist…This society hated all forms of ambiguity and it regarded these adults-in-progress with suspicion, confusing them with those frightening fauns of mythology”. All in all, “he had the feeling that he was not in the right place, that he had somehow been born in the wrong world”.

In contrast, the siblings’ father is deeply emotionally invested in Aicha. Ahead of her visiting her family from Paris we read that “through his daughter, through his child, he became someone else. She elevated him, she lifted him out of poverty and mediocrity”.

Exploring how it was to live through a new era of Moroccan history, coming-of-age angsts, and the need to find your way in an off-kilter world, no matter what your age, Watch Us Dance is wise, beautiful and emotionally resonant as it shines a light on hidden histories.

Joanne Owen

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