Humour and courage infuse debut author Meryem Alaoui’s Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, a brazen and lucid portrait of a sex worker who moves through her city of Casablanca with a scrupulous gaze and an aptitude for colourful description. As our Book Club selection for September 2020, the novel enchants with its surprising and exacting prose as equally as with its deft navigation of human experience and emotional spectrums, building a fully populated world that seems to have always been there, waiting for one to visit.
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Straight from the Horse’s Mouth by Meryem Alaoui, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Other Press, 2020
The title of Meryem Alaoui’s debut novel, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, suggests a direct, candid style—and that’s exactly what we get. Alaoui’s charming and at times profane protagonist, Jmiaa Bent Larbi, shares her harrowing story with unflinching clarity: after being pressured into an early marriage, Jmiaa and her new husband Hamid move to Casablanca, where their lusty honeymoon phase soon gives way to a much more sinister relationship. Hamid sees start-up capital in his young wife’s body and pimps her out to fund his get-rich-quick schemes. The only plot that ends up working out, however, is a passage to Spain, where he finds a new wife and a raft of financial troubles. Jmiaa tells us all about the turns her life takes from there, and Alaoui infuses the seemingly casual narration with careful observations of Moroccan life, tracing the fault lines where the country’s social classes collide.
In Casa, as Jmiaa calls the seaside city, she builds a life among a rich milieu: her fellow sex workers, who tease and joke and squabble like sisters; her young daughter, Samia, who Jmiaa fears will soon unravel the true nature of her work; and her mother, who must grapple with various aspects of her daughter’s unusual life. The women here aren’t sketches or stereotypes, but fully drawn characters with a complex set of motivations and relationships. The men vary in their own way. In one haunting passage, Jmiaa describes those who seek her services:
You straddle all of them. The loser, the frustrated guy, the lonely guy, the son of a whore, the one just passing through.
The one who blames the warmth of your hand for his weak, sterile joy.
And the one for whom no hole satisfies his hatred. Who is not appeased until he hears the ripping sound of a brown and bloody stain.
And the one who pumps his useless sweat into your stomach. He has been cursed never to eat his fill, so he bites your flesh. So that his teeth—today at least—serve some purpose. And in the wheeze of his sulfur breath, he spurts his bitterness onto your cheek and your tangled hair.
It’s no wonder, then, that Jmiaa often loses herself in television. Whether they’re set in Morocco or Mexico, the stories that unfold onscreen offer an escape from the familiar pattern of her days. Like Jmiaa’s drinking habits, her TV binges initially provoke concern, but as the novel progresses, those movies and shows unexpectedly offer a path to a different kind of escape. (At the risk of spoiling the plot, I won’t elaborate.)
Alaoui weaves a tapestry of nuanced observations of class in Casablanca: the characters’ social stations are evident in their clothes, their cultural references, the way they speak, and notions of status infuse Jmiaa’s descriptions of emigrants, part-time Moroccans who spent their formative years elsewhere. Language hints at the barriers between characters, and Jmiaa must juggle French and Arabic, Dutch and English:
The server has come with her pitcher to ask me if I want more coffee. I told her yes, thank you. That’s one of the first things I learned. That and thank you, thank you very much, no, how much for this, and okay. In French that’s “merci,” “merci beaucoup,” “non,” “combien pour cette chose,” and I’m sure you understood that okay means “d’accord.” It’s like in Arabic. The people are nice here. That’s why I learned all the phrases. So that I could talk to them too.
Award-winning translator Emma Ramadan must juggle this multiplicity as well, and she re-knits Alaoui’s intricacies finely into English, conveying Jmiaa’s fast and loose conversational style as vividly as if we were chatting with her outside the market ourselves.
Despite the omnipresence of men, both good and bad, sex and romance play a surprisingly minor role in the narrative; men influence but never define the main characters. Instead, they link the women in various ways, lending insight into the shifting relationships these women navigate with one another: a man introduces Jmiaa to a woman with the power to change her life, a man inspires jealousy between Jmiaa and a colleague, a man makes fraught Jmiaa’s relationship with her mother. Though these men are catalysts, the real story unfolds between women.
We meet the character on her own terms and interact with an individual, not a romanticized or fetishized sex worker. Jmiaa’s authenticity and forthright claim to her own experience propel the plot, and when she winds up in unfamiliar places, we never doubt her right to be there. Alaoui successfully brings to life a character of complex humanity, giving us a story that feels real—never flip or bleak alone, but a mix of the two that echoes a textured life.
In some ways, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth reads like a fairy tale, but Alaoui deftly dodges the easy choice to make Jmiaa a one-dimensional Cinderella. Her nuanced characterization and Ramadan’s colorful and vivid language invites the reader to look beyond assumptions about Morocco and sex work. Like many fairy tales, this story has a moral—but unlike most, Jmiaa’s verve and agency remind us at every turn that this is a story of her own making.
Allison Braden is a writer and Spanish translator. In addition to representing Argentina as an editor-at-large for Asymptote, she is a contributing editor to Charlotte Magazine and an editorial assistant for the academic journal Translation and Interpreting Studies. Her writing has appeared in Columbia Journalism Review, The Daily Beast, Asymptote, and Spanish and Portuguese Review, among others.
*****
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