“We don’t feel safe in our homes. We don’t feel safe anywhere,” ran the recent log line of a well-reputed news source. The speaker of such a sentence, it can be easily assumed, could safely plug such an evocation of banishment and assault, without any extraneous clues, into countless injustices. Into the isolation of a refugee camp, for instance. Or into the stratifications of caste-, class-, or race-based political system. Into apartheid. The problem the Prix Goncourt–winning French writer Marie NDiaye poses in her book My Heart Hemmed In is: What if you know what the context is, but have no notion of placing it? What if you know about the nature of xenophobia and racism, but you don’t have the words? What if you just can’t—or don’t want to—name the problem?
That singular quandary could in and of itself make a character tick, and it is a major motivation for the reader of NDiaye’s narrative to proceed at a breakneck pace, grasping the pages tightly. It’s a book that can be read in one terrifying sitting: so compelling is the “What is happening?” problem posed for NDiaye’s protagonist, Nadia, and her husband, Ange, at the beginning that one cannot help but fall down the rabbit hole of surrealist, nightmarish scenarios that complicate the characters, tease out details and backstories, and even, early on, make the reader question the veracity of the narrator, Nadia, herself.
This is not, however, the singular, or even central, question posed by NDiaye, although it certainly seems like that’s what many reviewers have taken it to be. Caite Dolan-Leach writes in a blurb at the back of the book: “My Heart Hemmed In thoroughly consumes the reader with its lovely, spooky language… . Like Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, it generates both a sense of mounting unease and a pleasurable desire to learn just what, exactly, has gone so wrong.” Dolan-Leach is correct, of course, about the wonderfully “spooky language,” but she’s also wrong: “what has gone so wrong” is hardly difficult to discern. We meet Nadia and Ange, both respectable schoolteachers, at a moment in their lives when everyone around them has seemed to turn on them. The book begins with a chapter entitled “When did it start?” The very first sentence has Nadia wondering, “Now and then, at first, I think I catch people scowling in my direction. They can’t really mean me, can they?”
But of course they do. A passerby spits in Nadia’s face for having the audacity to smile at him. Ange is found brutally wounded, with a “gaping crater dug by some tool…something both broad and sharp…like a stout wood chisel or a gouge, which someone took the time to wiggle back and forth in Ange’s flesh after thrusting it deep inside.” A rotating cast of people who seem to know far more than Nadia or Ange—a pharmacist, an interloping and possibly devious neighbor, Ange’s daughters attending to his wound—each in turn express pity, disgust, and revulsion. Nadia and Ange have done this to themselves, their world seems to argue. It is as if Nadia and Ange have gone to bed in a perfectly normal world and woken up the next day in a fascist, dystopic Bordeaux that has stripped them of their dignity and made them outcasts where once they were welcomed. Their neighbors, save one, have disappeared. They are no longer wanted at their school, even urged to never come again. What story could this be other than a nightmare borne of the recent reemergence of the far right—one that brings to mind internment camps, deportations, ethnic cleansing—a nightmare about a racial animus that has again reared its ugly head unbeknownst to this middle-aged couple, convincing everyone they ever knew that they are different, that they are “other”?
That is unquestionably what is happening to Nadia—and by association, we learn, to Ange—but it is not the only thing. Nadia cannot bring herself to speak her predicament, but it is precisely the nature of a game she is relearning that drives the plot forward. “Haven’t you been following the news?” people keep asking Nadia. She replies that they “don’t have a TV.” It slowly dawns on Nadia how truly ignorant she has been, but what we learn of her is far more telling.
NDiaye’s melting pot of genres could only be contained within this hyperfamiliar contemporary nightmare. Like Schweblin or Murakami or Nabokov, but also not like Schweblin or Murakami or Nabokov or any other contemporary writer who deals in dreamscapes and alternate realities, NDiaye, herself of French and Senegalese ancestry, turns Nadia’s descent into paranoia into a story that is surreal, demonic, perhaps even supernatural—but perfectly plausibly so. Reviews I have read of My Heart Hemmed In speak of the mystery-that-must-not-be-named as something that the reviewers gradually learned—something that was perhaps even revealed at the very end. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tara Cheesman speaks of it as if it were something hidden: “Whereas the physical appearances of the other characters are described in detail, NDiaye teases out Nadia’s ethnicity. She doesn’t mention her skin color, her features, or her build. And yet we eventually come to understand that Nadia is probably North African.”
This seems, perhaps, a little obvious and also beside the point. Through the narrative, Nadia gradually descends into a sort of purgatorial state of paranoia, but the devil is not in the details of her ethnicity, for those are never in question. What is instead in question is why it has taken Nadia so long to understand what it means to be a “person like her.”
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Nadia visits a police station to meet her son’s ex-lover Lanton—a man of whom she wonders, “Didn’t I discreetly prefer Lanton’s company to my son’s, and of those two, wasn’t it Lanton I couldn’t imagine never seeing again?”—and she has to summon a deep courage to see the crowd (gathered, one guesses, for reasons having to do with their ethnicity) at the station “straight on…[and] realize we’re alike, they and I.” What does this tell us about Nadia? What does all this tell us about a woman who has left an ex-husband whose tastes and manners she disliked; who escaped a family living in the Les Aubiers projects and never returned to her parents; who wished to never be recognized by anyone she used to know ever again; a woman who had unquestionably bourgeois desires and didn’t rest until they were fulfilled in respectable Bordeaux with respectable Ange, whose estranged son’s daughter has a name she cannot bring herself to pronounce? “What sort of lesson is being forced on me by that intolerable name ‘Souhar’?” Nadia asks about the daughter of a son she can never forgive for having “perpetuated the indignity of our bloodline.”
It tells us, perhaps, too much for comfort. Nadia is an unreliable narrator, if that isn’t already clear, her self-awareness coming in trickles and then bursts. When a man from the police station whispers to her “Betrayer!” she refuses to believe it. Nadia is, perhaps, as a blog review has written about her, “so self-centred that she truly can’t see beyond the narrow reality she has constructed around herself.”
And yet, unlike most unreliable narrators, there is a kernel of Nadia’s soul so painfully familiar to the immigrant reader that any reading of her comes with an instinctive desire to protect her—to protect ourselves. For Nadia, who committed the crime of aspiring to the cultured, to the elite, there must come a reckoning. And the reckoning comes with ordeals often too brutal to read. Her paranoia is accompanied by a progressive weight gain that repulses everyone, for which she is constantly chided. The punishment for her ignorance is swift and unrelenting. As she searches for her way back home or her way out, she finds herself lost, turned away by the city:
And my heart is cornered, surrounded by the baying pack, and it’s hammering on the wall of my chest, wishing it could break out of its cramped cage, my poor aging heart, my poor trembling heart. I was born right here in Bordeaux, in Les Aubiers neighborhood; I’ve spent my whole life in this city, and I love it with a fraternal tenderness, like a human soul mate. But now I find Bordeaux slipping away from me, enigmatically shunning my friendship, its streets seeming to change their look and direction (is it only the fog? I ask myself), its citizens grown hostile over the past few months (and I’d gotten used to that, and it had, over time, become bearable), seeming no longer to hate me, exactly, but to be stalking me.
There has been much talk of NDiaye’s remarkable gifts, but if there is one that must be highlighted above all it is her ability to shovel in to the deepest fears of immigrants in the West—particularly women—to examine them as objectively as possible and then find a space to exonerate them. Indeed, My Heart Hemmed In, through its unpretentious translation, comes off as a triumph of introspection so profound and yet so brutal that the reading of the protagonist as an unlikable female character with whom one cannot empathize rankles. Nadia is a deeply flawed character, of that there can be no doubt, but what human being deserves this?
That, finally, is the question NDiaye finds worth asking. Her inquiry into a woman filled with self-loathing rooted in her identity is so familiar that it ultimately forces us to ask ourselves: Can we find it in our hearts to forgive others, even ourselves, for attempting to assimilate into elite, Western society?
There comes a point in My Heart Hemmed In where an aloof woman—a gynecologist—with whom Nadia finds her son living, suspects Nadia is pregnant, inspects her, and asks furiously: “Who did you make this with, mama? What have you done with your life?” The book’s final turn is Nadia returning to the Les Aubiers projects of her childhood; possibly the happiest of endings for the unhappiest of stories.
Could NDiaye be telling us that, after all that we do, we must ultimately return home? Unlikely. Thankfully, there are too many unanswered counterfactuals in Nadia’s life for there to be a lesson in her horror. That sanctimony, NDiaye spares us.
March 2018
This review was published in Issue 61:2.