“The Silence of the Fathers”: Rachid Benzine explores Morocco’s stoic immigrants in France

The book cranks up the volume on an hushed topic in French literature: silent fathers who have strained relationships with their children.

French-Moroccan author Rachid Benzine.

“The Silence of the Fathers”: Rachid Benzine explores Morocco’s stoic immigrants in France

Samir Qasimi

last update on 01 Nov 2023

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers. And how one remembers it in order to recount it."

Those words, by late author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, are an apt description of French-Moroccan writer Rachid Benzine’s new novel Silence of the Fathers.

On a broad level, the book delves into the suffering of thousands of Moroccan workers who contributed to the construction of Europe and its liberation from the ravages of the Second World War. It focuses particularly on France, which enlisted the help of its colonial subjects even after decolonisation, exploiting immigrants and their needs and dreams for a better and more humane life.

But on a more intimate level, it deals with broken family dynamics – and perception-altering discoveries.

Protagonist Amin, at the start of the novel, receives the news of his father’s death via a call from his sister. He hasn’t seen his father in over two decades – ever since he left his hometown to pursue a successful career as a pianist. Leaving home had granted Amin independence, but it also severed his already weak bond with his father.

After that, they only shared silence, where endless unresolved arguments lived.

At first, Amin seems indifferent to news of his father's death, as though he is a stranger. And perhaps he was. To him, his father was simply the man responsible for his existence. He could not mourn him like his brothers and sisters did: "Their grief is not my grief... For someone, there must be more feelings than pain and crying... Death cannot erase everything."

At the same time, he acknowledges that, over time, he stopped being able to parse his true feelings for the man who birthed him.

"We cannot go back. We can't. My relationship with my father, real or imagined, now exists only in my imagination. Soon, I will no longer be able to tell whether what I feel, and what I retain of it, is real or imagined,” he narrates.

The French-Moroccan writer explores the painful tendency of first-generation immigrants to go silent, putting an unbridgeable distance between themselves and their children.

Absence of colour

Benzine's first chapter is void of colour; it highlights a relationship that is vague, cold, and superficial, but nevertheless exists. It’s different from the portrait immortalised by philosopher Albert Camus in his novel The Stranger, regarding the relationship between a son and his mother.

However, Benzine is unable to break free from the prevailing narrative traditions established by the French-Moroccan, or even French, writers before him. There’s a stereotypical image of second and third-generation immigrants in France – and their complicated relationship with the first generation – that is hard to escape.

On a broad level, the book delves into the suffering of thousands of Moroccan workers who contributed to the construction of Europe and its liberation from the ravages of the Second World War. But on a more intimate level, it deals with broken family dynamics – and perception-altering discoveries.

Benzine doesn't reach the same depth as Algerian author Alice Zeniter, winner of the prestigious Goncourt and Le Monde literary awards for her novel The Art of Losing (2017).

In her book, Zeniter masterfully traces the family history of an Algerian tribal community from the 1930s to the present. She provides an accurate portrait of the father-son relationship among immigrants of North African origins in France, as well as France's relationship with its former colonial subjects. Overall, she presents a fascinating picture of contemporary French society.

Unlike Zeniter, however, Benzine is keen to go beyond the question of identity in his work. He would rather deal with the psychology of Moroccan immigrants and their children, as evidenced in his previous novel, Thus Spoke My Mother (2020).

The French press described Thus Spoke My Mother as "a sincere plea for a mother's love," marked by conflicting emotions that teetered between gratitude and contempt.

Gratitude towards parents who sacrificed everything for their children, yes. But contempt for their insistence on loving their homeland, which they had left out of need and poverty, and which left them with the burden of integrating into a new country that would save them from excess hardship.

"Thus Spoke My Mother" by Rachid Benzine.

Damning silence

Benzine, through his writing, condemns the silence that prevents an entire generation of Moroccan immigrants in France from reconciling with the generation before them.

Protagonist Amin is all too aware of this silence. The kind of charged non-communication that some parents use in order to protect their children from the harsh realities of life. The kind of loaded quiet that gives way to vast emotional chasms that are hard to bridge.

But everything turns on its head when Amin – who left home to escape his emotionally distant father, hoping the physical distance would stop him from completely hating the man – comes across a set of cassette tapes.

These tapes, carefully hidden under the bathroom sink, are home to voice recordings made by his father, which he had intended to send to his own father, back in Morocco. In them, his father's voice describes his experiences from the very first day he arrived in northern France as an immigrant.

In this foreign country, he worked in the coal mines, in the Aubervilliers and Besançon factories, as well as on vegetable farms and in several camps.

Amin discovers a different side to his father than the one he had known. On these tapes, he find a man who had never ceased to have hope, dreams, love, and struggle.

However, he hoped, loved, dreamt, and struggled in silence – regardless of the image that created in the eyes of others, and the eyes of his own children.

Amin discovers a different side to his father than the one he had known. On these tapes, he find a man who had never ceased to have hope, dreams, love, and struggle. However, he hoped, loved, dreamt, and struggled in silence.

Soon, Amin discovers his own "choice" to leave home wasn't a choice at all. If anything, he simply followed the path he was forced to take because his father chose silence.

Flowers in the wind

The tapes are a wake-up call for Amin, complicating his emotional and mental journey.

Benzine handles this tumultuous discovery with exceptional sensitivity, making it all too easy to emotionally identify with Amin, allowing readers to realise, just like him, that the silence he often assumed to spring from fear and helplessness, was, in fact, the silence of strength and power. Like the thunderous silence of flowers.

"I have always loved flowers, their colours, their scent. They also say something about God, about our life on this earth, and about its frivolity. About the silence of our lives in the vibrations of the world," he narrates.

"They sway in the wind, just as we tremble before the will of our parents. Some of them stay alive. Some of them die. And they all wither."

Unlike the mute flowers, however, Amin's father made a choice to be silent, thinking it was the right thing to do. His decision may have been misplaced, but he did it for the sake of love.

In these recordings, Amin's father appears as a man who believed he was sentenced to a life of pain, suffering, and tragedy, in order to make life easier for his children, who would not have to endure as he did.

Hungry to peel more layers of this mystery back, Amin seeks out his father's friends and acquaintances to gather testimonies. He tries, through talking to them, to bring his father's elusive features into sharper focus.

"I did not know him. Every time I tried to understand him and look at him from a different angle, he seemed to move away, as if he were on the other side of a coloured window. The closer we got to it, the more mysterious it became," he narrates.

"My father's image never disappeared, but it quickly became unclear. A distant image, inaccessible. Invisible, elusive. It seems to me that my father is looking at me through a blurry, silent window."

Benzine's novel is a carefully crafted and engaging work, which sheds light – and cranks up the volume – on a hushed period in French society, which struggled to find its way into French literature.

The author attempts to express the oft-ignored (and silent) suffering of an entire generation of Moroccan immigrant workers, using his poignant words – and Amin's heartfelt story – as a gateway toward justice, beauty and the truth.

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