The Journal of North African Studies

ISSN: 1362-9387 (Print) 1743-9345 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fnas20

La vérité sort de la bouche du cheval

Naïma Hachad

To cite this article: Naïma Hachad (2019): La vérité sort de la bouche du cheval, The Journal of
North African Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2019.1589074

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2019.1589074

Published online: 05 Mar 2019.

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THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES

BOOK REVIEW

La vérité sort de la bouche du cheval, by Meryem Alaoui, Paris,

Gallimard, 2018, 272 pp., €21 (softcover), ISBN 978-2-07-277792-9

Tu sais, je crois qu’au début, elle a cru que c’était facile. Genre tu viens, tu fais ça
et tu passes à autre chose. La pauvre! Si c’était aussi simple, pourquoi il n’y a pas
plus de filles dans les rues? Pourquoi on a toutes autant d’affinités avec la bou-
teille? Pourquoi les filles s’adonnent aux joints? Pourquoi tout ça? C’est qu’il faut
des couilles pour pouvoir faire ce travail. Et tout le monde ne les a pas. (114)

The above passage is a representative sample of Jmiaa’s salty language and inci-
sive look on her situation and surroundings. In it, the thirty-four-year-old sex
worker and main character in Meryem Alaoui’s La vérité sort de la bouche du
cheval tells the reader about Halima, one of ‘the girls’ who shared a room with
her for a few weeks. In the form of a journal and using first-person narration,
Jmiaa deploys the same frank and candid tone to tell her daily routine for three
years, the events in her past that led her to alcoholism and prostitution, and
her opinions on everyone and everything. She directly addresses her reader
and embarks him/her into the depths of the colourful and noisy quartiers popu-
laires of Casablanca, well away from the clean business centres and touristy
parts of the city that are often advertised by city officials to promote a new
Morocco on the move. Through the lively descriptions of a rich selection of sec-
ondary characters, the reader hears about the disputes between neighbours
over the placement of trash bins, the rocky relationship between ‘the girls’ and
the police, and the numerous drunken parties and irrepressible laughter to
forget about the gloominess and misery of the life of a street sex worker in the
Moroccan metropolis.
The themes of the novel – women’s exploitation and vulnerability in a patriar-
chal society, violence, corruption, lack of opportunities for social mobility – are
rather commonplace and exhibit a continuity with Francophone literature by Mor-
occan women and men since the 1990s. The transcription of orality, as well as a
well-built main character, provides, however, a unique rhythm and energy that
set apart this debut novel by Alaoui. Indeed, though her condition shares many
features with other fictional Moroccan heroines, Jmiaa is also an outlier. While
she plainly exposes the brutality of life in disadvantaged urban Morocco, she
strongly refuses to depict herself as a victim. Instead of lamenting in the face of
the many challenges that life and men throw at her, she favours cursing, insulting,
and fighting (sometimes literally). Everyone’s fair game: her mother, who is happy
to receive monthly checks but seems to ignore everything about Jmiaa’s activities
in the big city; her lazy ex-husband, who forced her into prostitution to pay for his
drinking and drug habits; her brothers and their wives, who are annoying; her
sleazy and violent pimp, Houcine; her reliable but irritating friend, Samira; the
greedy grocer who inflates beer prices; the garage guard Hamid, who ‘sucks’
but makes a great tea companion; the filmmaker Chadlia, whom she renames
2 BOOK REVIEW

‘bouche de cheval’ (a horse’s mouth) because of a disproportionately large smile,

who means well but, like all Moroccans who live abroad, is a little crazy.
Jmiaa’s relationship to her body and sexuality is another aspect that dis-
tinguishes her from traditional Moroccan literary heroines. Whether when she dis-
cusses her desire and sexual pleasure through her relationship with her boyfriend
and later husband Hamid, or when she describes the tricks she uses to entice
potential clients and the subsequent mechanical interactions that follow, Jmiaa
employs the same openness. Doing so, she undermines the hypocrisy that charac-
terises official discussions and legal regulations of the body and sex in Morocco.
The novel’s depiction of Casablanca further makes La vérité sort de la bouche du
cheval – which received accolades in France upon its publication and was nomi-
nated for the 2018 Prix Goncourt – a part of a new and high-grade urban Franco-
phone literature originating from Morocco. Novels such as El Mostafa Bouignane’s
Des houris et des hommes (2011), Mohamed Nedali’s Triste jeunesse (2011), and
Naïma Lahbil Tagemouati’s La liste (2013) feature Fes, Marrakesh, and Casablanca,
and chronicle economic and social change in Morocco through the frame of the
city. Their agitated, depressed, and defiant characters are constantly struggling for
survival in Morocco’s increasingly violent urban centres. Exemplifying the growing
unease in Morocco’s youth and disadvantaged parts of the population, these char-
acters are depicted against the backdrop of a society in which corruption is slowly
corroding ideals, opportunities, and imaginaries. In Alaoui’s novel, this appears in
the way in which the main character naively and distantly comments on major
national and international politics and events, such as the king’s frequent and
flamboyant trips, the Arab uprisings, radicalism, and terrorism. Despite Jmiaa’s
sharpness, her approach to these issues reflects a society in which people,
rather than participating in meaningful societal and political projects, seem to
observe change and political action from a distance, in screens and pages they
neither control nor identify with.
La vérité sort de la bouche du cheval is also bold in its appropriation of the
Mexican telenovelas that its main character consumes avidly. The second part
of the novel takes an unexpected turn when Jmiaa travels to the United States
and, in the epilogue, to Mexico, leading to a happy ending that strongly contrasts
with the realism of the first part. This rather risky move can also be read as a
mockery of the soporific Turkish soap operas, with their poorly-dubbed dialogues
and unbelievable twists and turns, Moroccan television feeds Moroccans. With this
reversal, Alaoui keeps dialogue and plot momentum going in the second part of
her novel. This is not enough, however, to avoid some repetitiveness plus pas-
sages on filmmaking that verge on caricature. Literal translations of Moroccan col-
loquial expressions in darija to French are another element that, at times,
compromises the flow of the novel and its steady rhythm. Though it contributes
to the originality of the novel, infusing both academic and argotic French with a
Moroccan flavour, and therefore showing the diversity of Francophone literary
expression, Alaoui’s linguistic experiments are somewhat wanting in their
attempt to transcribe the complexities of Morocco’s oral culture. This said,
Alaoui’s novel, with its lacerating humour and Jmiaa’s uncompromising portrayal
 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES 3

of herself and those around her, remains a notable contribution to the renewal
and the flourishing of contemporary Moroccan Francophone literature.

Naïma Hachad
American University, Washington, DC, USA
hachad@american.edu
© 2019 Naïma Hachad
https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2019.1589074