In the undergrowth of expectations: Marouane Bakhti
Photo: Facebook
When the lawyer Kimberlé Chreshaw shaped the concept of intersectionality in the late 1980s to illustrate the interweaving of various discrimination and power relationships, she probably thought of people like Marouane Bakhti. Because the young Frenchman knows racism as well as homophobia. In his novel debut “How to disappear from the world” he has now transferred his life story into the realm of autofiction in the tradition of compatriots such as Annie Ernaux or Édouard Louis.
Growing up as a child of a French woman and a Moroccan emigrated to France, he is confronted early with the various expectations of his fellow human beings: his father, for example, is trying to assimilation, he wants to lead the most inconspicuous life in French majority society as a migrant. But at the same time he is arrested by traditional gender ideas and repeatedly gives his queer son to understand what he believes to be a man. “My father became a monster of masculinity,” it says in one place.
Despite all the brutality, the book is also crossed by a fine tenderness that has hope.
The narrator recognizes early on that his life and the associated sovereignty of interpretation do not belong to him that he is rather a game ball in his social environment: “I’m looking for a young Arab,” writes a stranger in a dating app. “Our life is in France,” says his father to understand him. His therapist, to whom he has built up a relationship of trust after initial difficulties, lets him know: “You have to break out of your culture and all these rules” while his cousins laugh at him that he does not know how a real Muslim pray.
Bakhti succeeds over long distances in a breathtaking way to transform its inner tornness into a literary form. Like machine gun salvos, the concise sentences rattle in “How to disappear from the world” and the short paragraphs from which the book consists, so that it initially takes something to recognize a larger connection and immerse yourself in the depths of the novel. But a long breath is worth it.
Despite all described brutality and abyss, the book is also crossed by a fine tenderness, which has a vague idea that nothing in this world is notable or without alternative. T moving, for example, the description of how the narrator disguises “rags and bed sheets” at a young age and thus creates a new self, which appears retrospectively as “incredible, big moments of freedom”. The scene of the first encounter with S., his later partner, also touches: “In his way of directing the conversation, which my shyness does not allow me, I see that it is beautiful.”
It is good that the author does not succumb to temptation to dissolve the tornness between the various identities and expectations on one side and kitschy. So the fears and worries, but also the happiness of the protagonist through the intensive reading, finally become those of the readers.
Marouane Bakhti: “How to disappear from the world”, 148 pages, born, March, 20 €