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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > About My Mother

About My Mother

Since she’s been ill, Lalla Fatma has become a frail little thing with a faltering memory.

Lalla Fatma thinks she’s in Fez in 1944, where she grew up, not in Tangier in 2000, where this story begins. She calls out to family members who are long dead and loses herself in the streets of her childhood, yearning for her first love and the city she left behind.

By her bedside, her son Tahar listens to long-hidden secrets and stories from her past: married while still playing with dolls and widowed for the first time at the age of sixteen. Guided by these fragments, Tahar vividly conjures his mother’s life in post-war Morocco, unravelling the story of a woman for whom resignation was the only way out.

Tender and compelling, About My Mother maps the beautiful, fragile and complex nature of human experience, while paying tribute to a remarkable woman and the bond between mother and son.

Author

Tahar Ben Jelloun

Tahar Ben Jelloun

Books

Leaving Tangier

A Palace in the Old Village

About My Mother

Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in Fez, Morocco in 1944. The year before Moroccan independence from France in 1956, his family moved to Tangier. He studied philosophy at the University of Rabat, and in 1966 was arrested alongside 94 other protestors for taking part in student demonstrations in Casablanca. He spent the following eighteen months in internment camps, here composing his first poetry. He occupied his mind with James Joyce’s Ulysses while in prison – a book smuggled in by his brother.

After his release, Ben Jalloun worked as a teacher of philosophy in Tetuan and Casablanca, before the government decreed that philosophy be taught only in classical Arabic. He sought exile in Paris in 1971, where he wrote for the magazine Souffles and studied for his doctorate in social psychology. His thesis on the sexual misery of North African immigrants in France was published in 1975 as The Highest Solitude. It was his first bestseller, though a prior novel, Harounda (1973) had already won him critical plaudits from Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes.

Ben Jalloun has written for a range of European newspapers, including France’s Le Monde, Italy’s La Repubblica and Spain’s El País. He is also the recipient of a number of literary accolades, including the Prix Goncourt for The Sacred Night (1987), and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light (2001).

Translator

Ros Schwartz

Ros Schwartz

Books

Kamal Jann

About My Mother

Stalin's Meteorologist

Translation as Transhumance

With over 60 titles to her name, Ros Schwartz has translated a wide range of Francophone fiction and non-fiction authors including Dominique Manotti (whose Lorraine Connection (Arcadia) won the 2008 International Dagger Award), and Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé, whose Kite (Seagull Books), was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in the USA. In 2010 she published a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (shortlisted for the Marsh children’s book award) and she is involved in translating a number of Maigret titles for Penguin Classics’ new Simenon edition.

Ros frequently publishes articles and gives workshops and talks on literary translation around the world. She is co-organiser of a 2014 translation summer school in association with City University, London. In 2009 she was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her services to literature.

Lulu Norman

Lulu Norman

Books

Horses of God

About My Mother

Lulu Norman is a writer, translator and editor who lives in London. She has translated Albert Cossery, Mahmoud Darwish, Tahar Ben Jelloun and the songs of Serge Gainsbourg. She has also written for national newspapers, the London Review of Books and other literary journals. Her translation of Mahi Binebine’s Welcome to Paradise (Granta, 2003) was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and she has been awarded a 2013 English PEN Award for outstanding writing in translation for this translation of Horses of God.

Published by

Saqi Books, 2016
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Since she’s been ill, Lalla Fatma has become a frail little thing with a faltering memory.

Lalla Fatma thinks she’s in Fez in 1944, where she grew up, not in Tangier in 2000, where this story begins. She calls out to family members who are long dead and loses herself in the streets of her childhood, yearning for her first love and the city she left behind.

By her bedside, her son Tahar listens to long-hidden secrets and stories from her past: married while still playing with dolls and widowed for the first time at the age of sixteen. Guided by these fragments, Tahar vividly conjures his mother’s life in post-war Morocco, unravelling the story of a woman for whom resignation was the only way out.

Tender and compelling, About My Mother maps the beautiful, fragile and complex nature of human experience, while paying tribute to a remarkable woman and the bond between mother and son.

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