The silence of the fathers is the fourth novel written by the French-Moroccan writer Rachid Benzine. This novel about the unspoken and the resentment between father and son against the backdrop of the immigration drama was named by critics as one of the most beautiful books of the fall 2023 literary season. A story full of humanity and hope.
Teacher, Islamologist and associated researcher at the Evangelical Institute of Theology for the Ricoeur Fund, Rachid Gasoline became known at the end of the 1990s as an essayist and most recently as a co-author with Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur for a thousand and one ways of being Jewish or Muslim. This book is a progressive and enlightened dialogue about our individual practices of religiosity, but also about the relationships between religions.
Benzine is also the author of four novels whose protagonists “ small characters »: a Moroccan immigrant mother, in love with Balzac and popular French songs, a Tunisian prostitute and mother… Her new novel with the protagonist, a Moroccan wretch of this earth, which develops in France of the thirty glorious years, is there none Exception to the rule. A tribute to the first generation of migrants, whose experiences are often “tiny” and “erased,” the work is part of the philosophy that is dear to the author: all life is worth telling.
« All life is a story, says the author. I write because there are stories that are invisible and excluded. Every life deserves a story. That’s why I write, because there are lives that we think are small, there are lives that are prevented. It is important that these stories can exist and have their place in our memory, because if you no longer have the memory of the little people, of those who went before you, there is a risk that they will be lost in the corridors of the world disappear. History and ghosting. »
Insurmountable distance
The novel focuses on a father-son duo. When his father landed in France in the post-war years, he worked hard to provide for his family. He was a miner in the coal mines of the northern basin, a laborer in a cement factory and a seasonal worker in garden centers in the south. The father’s sacrifices benefited the son, who became an internationally renowned classical pianist, but over the years the two grew apart. The misunderstandings, the unspoken, the silence have contributed to creating an insurmountable distance between the two.
The son who tells the story blames his taciturn father for his silence, which is the cause of their misunderstandings. This accusation is echoed in the first pages of the novel: “ My father never left the backstage area. He stands there without saying a word. When I try to hear him, to make his voice resonate in my memory, there is no sound, no inflection. Not even an expression. Not a word about the country, about Basmala – nothing… »
And Rachid Benzine added: “The silence of the fathers.” is the most intimate book I have ever written. We have a son who returns to bury his father, whom he has not seen for 22 years and who therefore himself has not spoken about his feelings, his fears and even the resentment he may have towards his father. And then this father himself, who didn’t tell his own life, his own story. And this story is told when, while moving the apartment, the son finds audio cassettes that his father sent to his grandfather, who remained in Morocco. And through these audio cassettes he will go in search of this father who will take him from the north to the south of France, where he will discover that these fathers who were silent were not so silent after all. »
Amine’s search
Rachid Benzine’s novel tells of a journey that takes the narrator through France, where he meets the men and women who knew his father while listening to the late father’s voice in audio cassettes. This search is also a fictional means of telling the story of the father’s life, made up of struggles, beliefs and cross-generational loyalties. The most beautiful pages of the book are the letters that the father addresses to his own father. They reveal his longing for the country he left at 19 to work in France and his dismay at the laws of his host country, where he encounters love and hate, generosity and pettiness that are not just bureaucratic. His life was a struggle.
Amine’s search will help bridge the gap that has arisen between father and son. The latter will eventually understand the meaning of his father’s silence. “ Silence is a response to the chaos of the world, a kind of challenge to life’s adventures », writes the author, quoting Walter Benjamin.
The silence of the fathers is a moving, poignant novel that is also characterized by social seriousness. The author’s whole art is to repeatedly lead the reader from the intimate to the social, from family secrets to historical secrets. The small story of Amine and his father takes place against the backdrop of the larger social history of immigration, as the author reminds us. “ Through this father I tell emphasizes Benzineabout 70 years of immigration into French society and that these immigrants also have special stories and adventures, stories that are not sufficiently told, that are not sufficiently known. »
This concern to embrace the universal is evident in the title of the book, which makes it clear to us from the outset that the author is less interested in recounting a father’s silence in the singular than in the singular The silence of the fathersFathers in the plural, all fathers, fathers from here and elsewhere.
The silence of the fathers, by Rachid Benzine. Éditions du Seuil, 172 pages, 17.50 euros.
