Solid Foundations
Edem laid and displayed the foundations for his forthcoming novel based on a year he had spent long ago in Paris, often wandering along the Rue Auguste Comte, near the Luxembourg Gardens, where black people are something of a rarity. “It’s the story of an expatriate chestnut-seller in Paris,” Edem explains. “Chestnuts are his life, his status, his identity. One day, in the square in front of a museum, he meets a white girl – an art student who’s like a younger version of a woman he once loved. She suggests he should transform himself into a black who counts – change his destiny to become a black who succeeds rather than just a black.”
A few months later they met in Tangier, by the fireplace in the sitting room in a house on the mountainside, while, outside, the bricklayer repaired the garden steps. In his hands Ben Jelloun held Edem’s first 110 pages, annotated in his own writing. The rest was in his head. They forgot about the story and talked instead about the structure, construction and architecture of the novel. The Franco-Moroccan writer, an admirer of the great North- and South-American novelists, got Edem to read them, to see what made them tick and how they went about putting some order into their chaos. “You learn to write by reading powerful, difficult texts,” he maintains. Edem, for his part, remained marked by Romain Gary’s novels and by Camus’ The Outsider, which had left a strong impression when he’d read them as a boy at school with the nuns, in Africa. And, at secondary school, This Blinding Absence of Light, written by a certain Tahar Ben Jelloun, also left its mark.
Then they argued about the main character’s credibility in Edem’s novel-in-progress. At the start they were not listening to each other: one insisting that the character wasn’t believable, the other thinking it would be crazy to turn him into a Pakistani. After days and nights of discussion, what emerged was the same book, only different.
Every time Edem began to have doubts about his story, Ben Jelloun gave him a little shove: “Imagine you’re facing the representatives from Gallimard publishing house who’ll be in charge of selling your book to the booksellers: convince them!” Ben Jelloun would not have dreamed of directing Edem – he just wanted to support him.