I first came to know of the Moroccan novelist Mhani Alaoui via Dreams of Maryam Tair, her genre-bending debut novel set during the 1981 Casablanca bread riots. Charmed by the unique way that Alaoui blended political resistance, historical inquiry, and the magic of fairy tales in her work, I reached out over email—and we soon developed a cross-country friendship based on these shared writerly interests.
So when I heard that Alaoui had published her third novel, The House on Butterfly Street, I dropped much of what else I was doing to read it. The House on Butterfly Street has been described by Booklist as a “reflective, social-issue-focused character study” about “how Morocco’s history feeds into the situations faced by [its] women.” Told with simplicity and grace, it follows the adventures of Nadine Alam, an upper-class Casablancan woman who one day receives a strange anonymous envelope. Inside is a newspaper clipping about a baby who has been born out of wedlock, beyond the protection of Morocco’s laws. Who is this unknown baby? And what does he have to do with Nadine’s carefully circumscribed world? As Nadine journeys to answer these questions, the city of Casablanca opens up to her in strange new ways, while her beliefs about her family, her history, and her personal complicity in upholding gendered and class-based injustice also unravel and transform.
Over a combination of email and Google Docs, Alaoui and I discussed writing about place and ancestry, the complex solidarity between women, and how magical thinking can fuel collective hope for a more just, more human world.
Shze-Hui Tjoa: To start off, how did you come to write The House on Butterfly Street? How did contemporary Moroccan sociopolitics shape this novel?
Mhani Alaoui: There are many stories and many characters in The House on Butterfly Street. But I think that what led me to this story, or to the way I structured it and imagined it, is the plight of children born out of wedlock in Morocco.
Children born to unmarried women in Morocco have no or very little rights—there is now an effort to remedy that, but the changes to this law aren’t well defined yet. The father is very rarely held accountable, and the mother bears the stigma, shame, and financial difficulties on her own. The result is a rapid descent into poverty and/or the abandonment of the child. It’s at the heart of this novel. Children didn’t choose where or when or to whom to be born—and the initial, founding fact of life and birth is one of chance. For me, that’s one of the great injustices: punishing a child for acts that preceded his/her coming into being in the world.
The standout image that “conjured” this story into script was that of mothers with their little kids at Casablanca street lights, asking for money or food. I thought that most certainly, many of these women had had their kids out of wedlock—and now they and their children were paying for it, and would be paying for it for the rest of their lives. Butterfly Street is an actual street in Casablanca that I drive through every morning to bring my kids to school. Parallel to this street is a well-known orphanage. After a certain age, if no family has “adopted” them (and adoption is another complicated issue in Morocco), the kids are let go. Some—mostly boys—end up in the streets, close to the orphanage they have spent their entire lives in. And these boys would end up hanging out on Butterfly Street.
In this novel and your other one I’ve read, Dreams of Maryam Tair, place is so vividly described. As an outsider who knew very little about Casablanca, I was amazed by how within a few chapters, I felt close to the generations who had shaped the city’s character over the years.
What research or preparatory processes do you engage in when you’re writing about place, history, or ancestry? And how do you keep your writing on these topics continuously engaging, where other writers might get bogged down by facts?
Ever since I was a little kid, my parents and grandparents would tell me stories of Casablanca and other cities in Morocco—or in the case of my mom and her parents, the Arab world—that they had lived in, that were part of their history and therefore my own. In all their stories, the other cities and places were always better than Casablanca. My grandparents grew up in another Moroccan city, Fes, and they felt like outsiders here, talking about their place of origin with longing, pride, and nostalgia. Though I don’t think they would ever have wanted to move back there as Fes is a “traditional” city and Casablanca a “modern” one. These oral histories are at the heart of my research and writing process—they are my act of remembrance.
I have an emotional, albeit skeptical, approach to place, history, and ancestry. I’m attached to Casablanca in ways my parents and grandparents claim they aren’t—though that is a vast subject in itself, spanning complex identities, immigration, colonization, and decolonization. And as I’m an anthropologist by training, the tools given by the discipline like lineage, structural relations, and constructed identities also help me tremendously in creating a sense of place. Though I’m always worried that the “dry, intellectual” aspect has spilled over and taken over the story.
Finally, I taught at the Casablanca Architecture School for many years. There, I was lucky enough to be able to see Casablanca through the eyes of architects and professors who both loved the city—its past and its possibilities—and raged against the urbanistic failures and segregations of the past fifty years. But this has informed The House on Butterfly Street more than it has Dreams of Maryam Tair.
In this novel, class and race disrupt simplistic notions of “sisterhood” between the women. For instance, I was intrigued by the protagonist Nadine’s relationship to Amber—an indentured housemaid who took care of her in childhood, but is in fact her blood relation through a heinous, historical act of rape. You write: “not once, not until this day, did she ever ask herself: does she love me back? Is she free to love? . . . Can she love a child who will one day give her orders . . . ?”
How did you land upon the web of complicated female relationships in this book? Also, did writing this novel change how you think about feminism and solidarity between the women in your home country?
The relationship between religion (in the case of Morocco, Islam) and women’s rights is a question that has informed most of my studies and my time abroad. Saying that Islam is oppressive of women is taking it out of specific historical, cultural, socio-political, and economic processes. Very simply put: It is bent to the will and vested interests of those in power, or those who wish to maintain control of the narrative(s). One of the ideas that informed my novel is that Islam can be an excuse for the subjugation of women, as part and parcel of patriarchy.
I read two books while working on this novel that informed my writing of the intersectionality of women, race, and class: Black Morocco, by the US-based Moroccan historian Chouki El Hamel, and Dada Yacout by Neza El Fassi, a Casablanca-based author. The first text is a treatise on slavery in Morocco, the construction of Blackness as a “justification” for slavery, and how the hierarchies of power in Moroccan society from four hundred years ago still manifest today. The second text is a novel about a Dada—who, as you can see in my book, is the enslaved woman who acts as nanny to the children of those who have enslaved her. She tells her story to the children of her “masters”: how she was kidnapped from her home and village, sold over and over again, then resisted, rebelled, and grew old. One of these children grew up to be the storyteller who shares her Dada’s story to the world. It’s an act of love but also one that reveals the interplay and tension between having a voice and voicelessness. So, for me, Morocco’s history of slavery and subjugation of women are part of the same process of delimiting control, voice, and power.
Today, the institution of slavery is probably more responsible for the unequal rights of women in Morocco than Islam (though there’s also been a marked and lengthy history of women’s resistance against slavery that is bearing fruit). Slavery was abolished in 1920 by the French colonials, but its skeleton remained. And I think it has been pervasive throughout our society and households and marks our inequalities. It’s those remnants that I’m trying to describe in Nadine and Amber’s relationship. That doesn’t mean that sisterhood doesn’t exist alongside these oppressive institutions or what is left of them. Sisterhood doesn’t have to be linear or simple, but I think it is a form of resistance to patriarchy and control. It’s a shelter and also a mode of survival. Divide-and-rule is one of the most well-known tenets of colonialism, and also of patriarchy. Sisterhood can counter that division. But I don’t think you can think of women as one homogenous whole, and intersectionality is a useful tool in understanding all the power relations that run through a constructed “womanhood.”
To answer your final question about feminism and female solidarity: I think so. These questions run through the novel. There’s a consciousness of the need for solidarity and collective action (and not just between the women), but also of the difficulties that underlie our commitments to each other.
I love the strength of the children in this novel, how fiercely they persist through suffering. From the young girl Yasmina who resists her captivity in a forced marriage, to the baby Noor who survives being stoned in a cave.
Can you tell me more about the symbol of the child in your writing? Does childhood have a special relationship to defiance and resistance, for you?
Yes, definitely. I think of our societies as waging wars on children. Poverty, war, repressive political and educational systems: all are ways of keeping a majority of children away from “the spoils.” As a mom, I see that a great part of our educational system—in schools and at home—though of course there are more and more alternative models—is about creating compliance and acquiescence in children. But children are curious, rebellious, and creative, with a quasi-instinctive understanding of justice and injustice. We curb this curiosity, rebelliousness, and creativity in them (and therefore in ourselves) to better function as a family, an institution, a society—and in so doing, we also take advantage of their relative powerlessness and dependency on us. Children also have a great power that is denied them, that is often hidden from them: They are the future.
I’m so curious about how you intertwine magic and political realism! In one of this novel’s many unforgettable anecdotes, you briefly tell the story of how a sumptuous meal rises up from the floor—seemingly by magic—whenever an emperor pulls a gold chain. But then the view shifts, and we see that there are many cooks and kitchen aides hidden below ground, laboring night and day to produce this “magic at the flick of a hand.”
How are magic and politics related in your writing? Also, how do you judge what blend of fantasy and realism each one of your novels requires; do you feel like that blend has shifted over time?
The story of the sumptuous meal is actually a story by the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, whom I love. I think this story captures precisely what happens in relations of domination and control. The ones in power ask for seamlessness, for magic really, and the great toil to deliver this “magic” has to be hidden from view at all times. If I remember correctly, in her story, the cooks “down below” regularly die of exhaustion, but that’s never seen, nor does it matter.
In my first novel, Dreams of Maryam Tair, written during the Arab Spring, magic and politics are intertwined. Magic is in fact a resistance to politics. A hope against hopelessness. In The House on Butterfly Street, I think magic recedes into the relationships between people—into their ability to sacrifice for one another, and find beauty where there is none. I think about this question a great deal these days, especially in light of what is going on right now in the world. Much of the commentary on social media seems to me to be of a magical streak: hoping and wishing for an end to an unjust Occupation, but also an end to impunity, to injustice, to dehumanization. The comments are conjuring a better world, praying for peace and kindness, creating a collective consciousness between strangers who will perhaps never meet—and that is magical. Magic, magical realism, or magical thinking are the ultimate expression of powerlessness, but they are also holders of the possibility of a better, more just, world.
Magic has a deep place in my writing. Writing itself is a form of magic, it conjures ideas and worlds into being.
Shze-Hui Tjoa is the author of The Story Game: A Memoir (Tin House, 2024). She is the Nonfiction Editor of Sundog Lit, and has work in or upcoming in BOMB Magazine, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, The Millions, Poets & Writers, and Between the Covers podcast. Her writing has received support from global organizations including Green Olive Arts, Disquiet International, and AWP.
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