A review by thatothernigeriangirl
A Palace in the Old Village by Linda Coverdale, Tahar Ben Jelloun

3.0

In A Palace in the Old Village, Mohammed, our main protagonist, is a Moroccan man who has lived most of his life working in France and this book is an account of his thoughts on immigration. Although the story doesn’t seem to rise or fall throughout the book, the storytelling was still very poetic —and I imagine even more so in French, it’s original language. In fact, it was largely why I got through the book.

I also enjoyed the individual theme se that Taher Ben Jelloun discussed through Mohammed; very early on in the book, we see the anti-blackness rampant within the Magreb communities in their homeland, still very alive within their immigrant population in a “diverse” France. TBJ used multiple POVs to engage this topic with Mohammed himself agreeing that had he not known one ‘African’ coworker, he probably wouldn’t marry his daughter to a black man — African was repeatedly used by the characters to describe Sub-Saharan Africans and I imagine that that’s a common usage in the Magreb communities.

A larger portion of the story dissected the identity crisis that accompanies building a family in a foreign land. Mohammed loved his country and tried to instil the same love, or a fraction of it, into his children so that he felt like “France stole his kids from him” when they eventually grew to make decisions that didn’t honor their parents’ traditions. I think this is one major fear of most immigrant parents.

This naturally broke Mohammed’s heart because he had lived and worked for his family. The loneliness amplified when he had to retire from work and for a man that has lived the same routine for many years, the realisation that he might not have lived his life to the fullest hit him really hard. This brought me to the conclusion that Mohammed has brought up his kids in the comfort that they would “honor their parents beyond all else” like he was taught growing up in Morocco but he forgot to factor in the shift that comes with migration.

I think the parent-child relationship is a very complex one and it is important for parents to remind themselves to live their lives to its fullest potential, while loving and wanting the best for their kids; so that they are not saddled with regrets nor are their children weighed down with obligations.