It is a cliche that no one struggles with an overabundance of paternal love—that children are more likely to lack it than to have it in excess. In Baba, the debut novel of Tunisian-Italian writer Mohamed Maalel, young Ahmed is confronted with both lack and excess at once—with a loving father whose repeated expressions of care can never amend the traumatic betrayal this excerpt describes. Clarissa Botsford’s translation is haunting, expertly capturing a child’s tilt-a-whirl emotional life and dawning awareness of adult complexities, his simultaneous craving for love and his harsh refusal to forgive. In Botsford’s words, “The narrative microcosm in Baba powerfully embodies the new dynamics of a multicultural, colorful, and contradictory world, giving life to a story about the search for a blended identity amid religion, tradition, and queerness.” Read on!
A Boy Becomes A Man
When I was six, my father made me a man. Back then, I was convinced I could be anything I wanted. First, I wanted to be a superhero, then a fairy, and later a policeman. I watched the kids’ shows on TV. At six, I fell in love for the first time with Céline Dion, with Lara Croft, and with a cow in the yogurt commercials called Fruttolo. At six, I admired my cousins’ Barbies from afar, imagining what it would feel like to hold something with a figure like my mother’s. When I was six I was a child, with all the typical imperfections of children. When I was six I experienced intense pain. I tried to give it some kind of ironic significance over the years, but pain can only be ironic when it’s not your own. The pain is set against a Tunisian backdrop.
We were traveling with the usual food parcels for my father’s family. Outside, the high temperatures made the car windows scorching hot. My father was listening to the Koran on the radio, which made the air even more sultry tense. My ears received the unintelligible sounds as an annoying hum. During the whole the car ride, he insisted my brother memorize them. He couldn’t do it; he lowered his eyes when my father reminded him how immoral his life as an unbeliever was. He didn’t bother me. Instead, he’d ask me to choose a song on the radio. “You listen nice music Ahmouda, not like your brother’s haram junk,” he’d say.