Straight from the Horse's Mouth by Meryem Alaoui, translated by Emma Ramadan
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth by Meryem Alaoui, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
I picked this book up on a lark from Tim’s in Northampton, having read some books from Other Press that I like, because Marjan Kamali’s blurb on the back cover mentioned female friendship (and I am teaching a year of classes on the literature of friendship), and because I’m a fan of Emma Ramadan’s translations. And my (somewhat informed) instincts were spot on because I wolfed this book down in two days! I want to call it a delightful book, which on first thought feels somewhat disrespectful, but on second thought feels correct. Straight from the Horse’s Mouth is a delightful book to read, and not only because Meryem Alaoui risked accusations of unliterariness to give readers a happy ending.
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth follows Jmiaa, a sex worker in Casablanca who meets a director, called Chadlia, but referred to as ‘Horse Mouth’ in most of the book, through a neighborhood connection, who hires her first to consult on and then to star in a film about a sex worker in Casablanca. Much of the book happens before this unlikely discovery, and focuses on the day-to-day experiences of Jmiaa, her fellow prostitutes, their clients, and the neighborhood figures. The majority of the novel happens in 2010 and 2011, with a brief epilogue set in 2018. Occasionally, Jmiaa recollects past events, like meeting and marrying Hamid, who traumatically initiates her into her current profession.
At this point, I should make clear that this novel is not a victim narrative. Jmiaa experiences fortunate and misfortunate events which seem consonant with her context as a prostitute in a working-class neighborhood. Jmiaa’s experiences dictate a certain pragmatism, so that’s how Alaoui represents them through her. Not things as they ought or ought not to be, according to some moral code, but things as Jmiaa experiences them.
The novel is written in the first-person and Jmiaa is an extremely engaging narrator. Matter-of-fact, tough, with some know-it-all tendencies. Funny and charming, too. Jmiaa won me over and had me taking her at word. Sometimes, and forgive the mild armchair psychologizing, the economic precarity of her life and the traumas she carries (which she tends to self-medicate with alcohol), cause a reckless streak to emerge in her.
I feel a certain hesitancy using the word trauma here. Not because I don’t think things like physical assault and marital rape are traumas, but because the word feels so wedded to my anglophone USian context with its social workers, poets, queer and trans folks, activists, and to being very online. The morning I finished reading Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, I also happened to read >>[WOMAN WAILING]: On the Problem of Representing Trauma as a Brown Woman Within the Institution of Poetry by Divya Victor. While reading, my attention snagged on the following:
FACT (confessional): I worry, all the time, that my work participates in the maintenance of whiteness’s comfort with itself—a comfort which easily assimilates the processes of learning and understanding “cultures” constructed to sustain and affirm its hegemonic position. I worry that I work, through the defaults of my historical and social positions, in Feel Good Incorporated without my consent. Because I participate within discourses and fields which have worked, overtime, to exclude women of color, I worry all the time that I’m going to write, forever and until I die, for the enlightenment, comfort, and spiritual rehabilitation of white people. Worse: That I will write and perform, for as long as I live, about the death of my kind, for white people who will survive. Put another way, I worry, like Prageeta Sharma has, that my lexicon and my body are bound up in “cheap signaling.”[2] Put yet another way (& to draw on Dawn Lundy Martin’s phrasing), I worry about populating a grave of “bodies that are unaware of their utilitarian bluntness in the symbolic order of race.” [3] I experience this worry as a fear: a fear of permanently orphaning of my future-self at the stoop of Poetry, capital P.
Granted, I am crossing the streams of discourse here: Divya Victor is talking about representing the self in poetry whereas Alaoui’s book is a novel, and thus Alaoui’s relationship is, at the very least, oblique and refracted through her characters (there is probably some of her in Jmiaa, some of her in Chadlia). That said, Victor’s critique of the white reader (me), reading and assimilating, holds. For me then, the question becomes how I read and how I represent my reading. From a position of comfort, no doubt. From a distance. A language away from French, itself a colonial legacy for its speakers in Morocco. Am I having an educational experience? Is the experience of a reader who is not having an educational experience accessible to me,
[Goodreads user Imane writes of the French edition:
I rarely ever read books set in Morocco. I also have never read a book set in Casablanca, my hometown.
Most of them are written in either French or Arabic and that’s just not my thing. I always prefer reading in English. The title of this book caught my attention though. If it weren’t for the title, I wouldn’t really have picked it up and it would’ve been a shame.
I really liked this book, despite it being in French. I also really liked how many expressions included were unique to moroccans. We hear and say those things almost everyday here but I never really notice how strange those expressions really are. Felt like being part of a special club!]
and why do I think of that experience as more authentic? Is the tightening gyre of inquiry around the absent presence of authenticity hegemonic, too? No doubt. No easy answers.
As a former resident of San Francisco, I appreciated the brief but accurate portrayal of the area. I appreciated the little details, like how Jmiaa notices the sign for South San Francisco, “the Industrial City,” that one sees driving into the city from SFO. I was more deeply struck by this:
There’s only one thing I haven’t taken a photo of. But that’s for a reason. It’s the homeless people. Holy shit, this city is full of homeless people. It’s worse than Casa. I don’t know where the hell they all come from. Since Horse Mouth always takes the photos, I made a point of telling her from the beginning: “Take photos of me wherever you want, whenever you want, but no homeless people in my photos. This is America.”
This isn’t parsed for the reader’s benefit, but I interpret Jmiaa’s motivation as being that she wants her representation of America to fit with the movie version of America as it has been represented to her and her community back home in Casablanca.
This kind of representational slippage also applies to her. Chadlia, aka Horse Mouth, is from Morroco, but lives in the Netherlands. When they meet, Jmiaa observes, “Her speech is fluid. Unusual for emigrants. Normally it’s like their tongue is in physical therapy: it needs crutches to get to the end of a phrase.” Chadlia needs Jmiaa to get a more accurate sense of the life of an actual prostitute in Casablanca. Once Chadlia ends up hiring Jmiaa as her lead actress, Jmiaa needs Chadlia’s help (as well as that of sympathetic crew members) to learn the conventions of being in a film.
Jmiaa starts out by giving Chadlia what she thinks of as filmic; Jmiaa overcomes her disbelief that the role requires her not to act like an actress but like herself. The labour of naturalness!
Unfortunately, I am only able to speak the fidelity of the section of San Francisco with respect to lived experience (well, that and the qualities of this book as a text)—this is to say that I can’t speak to its representation of Casablanca as fellow reviewer Imane does above! The book comes with a glossary, presumably compiled by the translator, which covers many of the local references. For example:
Abdel Halim Hafez Egyptian singer, lutist, and actor of legendary renown in the 1950s and ‘60s. He has such an iconic status in the Arab world that he is typically referred to by just his given name.
In addition to people, we also locations, phrases, nicknames:
Maaizou “Little goat.” A familiar expression, halfway between mockery and affection, to refer to someone who is fairly puny but gifted with a special touch.
Not covered in the glossary are Jmiaa’s youyous, the ululations the weave throughout the narrative, erupting in the youyou to end all youyous near the end of the novel, when she takes the stage with Chadlia at the awards ceremony for their film. Chadlia finishes speaking, and then:
I think I’m supposed to say something. The audience is still applauding. They are standing.
I have to say something.
Fuck, I have to say something.
Fucking fuck fuck, I have to say something.
“Uh…Thank you.”
They’re still waiting. What on earth should I say to you?
“Uh…Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much,” I say into the microphone.
They’re still standing and they keep going. They don’t want to stop.
Something rises in me. I’m filling up. It moves through my feet like ants. And it accelerates. It climbs through my legs, it reaches my waist which swells beneath my belt. Now my chest. My chest fills with air. Air that sweeps through it like a tornado. I think it’s joy.
In a surge, it’s propelled to the sky. The air rises through my neck, it clears out my throat, it clarifies my voice, it penetrates my mouth, it awakens my tongue from its torpor, it spreads my lips. And, pure and clear and light as anything, arms open, it soars through my lips:
“You you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you!”
I think back to the epigraph of Divya Victor’s piece, which is part of an interview with a professional mourner. There’s something there about the position of the inarticulate wail. It exists between speech and non-speech. It can’t speak the unutterable (can anything?) but in some situations it gets closer than words (or we imagine it can). And it also crucially exists at the intersection of mourning and labour. It’s a representational labour, and in this there is a kinship with the kinds of labour Jmiaa is called to do, both within her work as a prostitute, and as an actor—complicated by the fact that within this work, she experiences authentic pains and pleasures. And even after the fact, the work of the actor isn’t done. The awards audience (and the readers of the novel) want something from her. And she answers with an ululation of delight.
The proximity of my reading experiences (of Victor’s piece and Alaoui’s novel) causes me to wonder into the differing valences between the wails of grief and the youyous of delight. Getting this novel in the first person, narrated by Jmiaa, I never really doubted that, despite attendant annoyances, becoming an actor was a positive transformation for Jmiaa. That said, the play of representational demands, including those of the awards audience, throws the authenticity of Jmiaa’s wails of happiness into question, or at least complicates them.
Emerging from readerly absorption into a space of criticality returns me to the title of the book: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth (La verité sort de la bouche du cheval), an idiom about authenticity and representation. This phrase is fascinating because it is already a remove from the event itself: it is not that I experienced it, but I heard it directly from the person who did, so we are already in the realm of representation (and necessarily error, distortion, exaggeration, etc.). We are getting the story straight from Jmiaa—that’s the story itself, right? Chadlia, aka Horse Mouth, as a filmmaker is in some ways a proxy for author, standing to remind us of the circuitous path through which experiences (or imagined experiences) must travel to reach readers and to resound with the ring of truth.