Review :: Le racisme expliqué à ma fille by Tahar Ben Jelloun ||
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.พ. 2025
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Le racisme expliqué à ma fille by Tahar Ben Jelloun
/ le-racisme-expliqu-ma-...
English edition translated by Carol Volk / 1294094.racism_explain...
Islam Explained by Tahar Ben Jelloun; translated by Franklin Philip
/ 856918.islam_explained
This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun; translated by Linda Coverdale
/ 175147.this_blinding_a...
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I'm not surprised he focused more on religion than race because that's the hot button topic in France when speaking about the French Meghrebin community.
Yeah I totally get that. And I should have expected it really. I think it held the book back a bit by not getting as nuanced as it could have because of that conflation though.
Unless I read the book( which I intend to) your perspective as a young, coloured American woman leaves me clueless.
Good for you at your tender age for examining all angles.
Having just read A Palace in the Old Village, I think I can see why he would link race and religion. In that novel he talks about prejudice and it seems like being Muslim and being brown are inextricably linked in the racism he experiences. What’s also interesting is when he talks about the racism of those from the Maghreb region and what he calls “Africans” or “black Africans”. The Blinding Absence of Light is one I would definitely like to read, I think it’s one of his most famous and with good reason,
I definitely understand that. I just felt like it was stunting the conversation a little by lumping things together.. And clearly these hatred are connected! I just wanted more nuance. But maybe this just wasn’t the place for it for several reasons: it is aimed at a child and the fact that the contraints of a different culture and language may view things differently which shapes the conversation different... I would like to read more on his type of viewpoint though. A Palace in the Old Village is going on my list of books to get to from this author!
I have this one on my shelves and wanted to read for this month as well! Though mine is an older version and doesn’t have the additional material at the end, so thank you for your input 🙌
I’m glad it was helpful! Let me know what your thoughts are about it whenever/if you get around to it!
Still sounds like an interesting read and will add it to my to-get-to-at-some-point-list. :)
How old is the daughter when he has these discussions with her? It would also be very interesting to see how you have these talks in different stages of a child's life.
I read the graphic novel Good Talk by Mira Jacob last year. In it she also has discussions with her son about racism in the US. I believe she talks about 9/11 and Obama. It had an added layer as the father is white and the son had questions about 'does Papa hate us because we are brown'. It doesn't dive very deep into subject matter, but still interesting.
I think she was ten in the original conversation and then in the added material 20 years later there was a short letter to her when she was obviously an adult. And I agree! Looking at how the conversation evolves is interesting to. This is why I felt unsure about the way certain aspects of the conversation were simplified. And, of course, different children have different maturity levels and so on so not ever ten year old will handle these topics the same way and I trust that parents can often feel out what makes sense in those discussions?
I might have to check that one out at some point too. I think it’s hard for these books to go as deep as we, as adults reading them, might want them to go, but have to remember it is directed at kids. That said, I thought Ta-Nehisi Coates’ *Between the World and Me* didn’t shy away from or attempt to simplify anything really.
My library has this one in both the original and the English translation, so this might be an interesting one to compare...
On the religious element, I obviously haven't read the book so I don't know how the author approaches it, but considering how religion is used to racialize, I can see why it could make sense to combine the two. I'll be curious to see how the book approaches it.
Religion and race are definitely intertwined much of the time: it is an intersectional thing for many people. But I think conflating the two robs us of a more nuanced conversation too. Thinking of where I am from (The Bahamas) for example, when we look at communities of Black people of different religions, you could have anti-Rastafarian sentiment, which is to do with religion, but are less likely for it to also be racist between two Black people. The distinction maybe less worth making when many people will see an Arab person and automatically think Muslim and the difference between the anti-religious vs racist sentiments is maybe inconsequential. It just felt like oversimplification on that area and didn’t quite work for me since it seems to fall in with assuming too much... I don’t know. Others may disagree.
@@nicoleisheretolearn Oh yeah, on a more global level absolutely! When it comes to French Arabs (or even more specifically French Maghrebins), I think it's an oversimplification that happens at a wide enough societal level that it would make sense to address as part of his/his daughter's reality, but I don't know how globally he talked about it in the book yet - I'm trying to parcel out my library holds - so he may have made it sound more globally applicable than it is.
And I'm just the neighbour peering over the fence at that dynamic, so I could be making assumptions that are off as well.🤷🏼♀️
@@RememberedReads Hahaha your assumptions are all fair! I would say he spoke generally in the book, but from a perspective that felt like he was thinking more regionally if you know what I mean? It was never explicitly said “we are talking about racism in *this* context” but that is probably where he was keeping the conversation in his mind.
I read this one a long time ago, and although I think there is value on it, I also definitely felt not fully satisfied by it...
Yeah, I can see why. And it is sometimes hard for me to balance my feelings about what the book was trying to do (and whether I feel like it was successful at its own goal) with what I wanted it to do; and whether my rating/review/feelings about it should be based on the former or the latter.. I don’t know lol
@@nicoleisheretolearn yes, it is a hard one. I tend to go with my feelings, while still saying why someone might like it, because otherwise I feel like I am not being honest, but at the same time I sometimes feel as well that I am not being fair to the book because it is not their fault that I had different expectations...
@@drawyourbook876 Exactly that! I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like I’m necessarily *that* consistent when rating things (which is why I rarely mention book ratings on BookTube) and I just hope people can get a feel for it from what I say about it. But it’s harder on Goodreads where there are star ratings (and I do think star ratings can be helpful). I often just don’t rate something if I’m *really* having difficulty deciding on a way to reconcile the way I feel with trying to be as objective/helpful to others as I can be. I guess there’s also the fact that, when I review stuff it is partly for me to have a record of my reading for myself and partly for others to get an idea of the book to see if it might interest them but those aims don’t always get along..😅
@@nicoleisheretolearn definetly! I also don’t rate books in my channel, I have them privately so that I can compile my favorites more easily but that is it