NADIA MAHJOURI is a Moroccan Australian writer, counsellor, and group facilitator specialising in maternal mental health. Her professional background is in health policy, governance and academia, where her research focused on ethics and feminist philosophy.
Nadia and her husband live in Hobart/nipaluna with varying combinations of their family which includes three young adults, two school-aged children and a black labrador puppy called Russell Sprout.
She is the host of The Whole Truth: Motherhood and the Writing Life. In this podcast, Nadia interviews authors about how they manage to keep writing while living in the messy middle of family life, work and creativity.
1. Why do you tell stories?
What a great question! I think I tell stories because I can’t not! I tell stories like I breathe, unconsciously and continuously, simply to live. I tell stories to remember, to connect and to entertain, but I suspect its more than that - stories tell us who we are and what we care about. And, as the daughter of a librarian, I write them down because nothing is nicer than a book filled with stories!
2. Without talking about plot in any way, what would you say Half Truth is about?
Half Truth is about finding out who you are, particularly in that strange year after your first child is born. And its about how motherhood will change you, no matter who you are, and how other women can hold and heal us. And its about Morocco, and how the country responded to colonisation and independence. Oh and family. It’s a story about family.
3. I love the way you write childbirth—the book opens with it—and we witness several of your characters giving birth across the novel. What was it like to write the body onto the page? What did you learn about Moroccan birthing rituals while writing/researching this book?
Birthing is an extreme experience, and I wanted to write it from the perspective of the woman giving birth, instead of from those around her – which is how birth often appears in literature. I really enjoyed writing these scenes, feeling into the expansion and contraction of the body, into the blood and guts of it all! And I really enjoyed researching traditional birthing practices in Morocco – my favourite is not during the birth but after – a festival held a week or so postpartum in which the new mother is bathed, massaged and dressed up and the whole community comes to eat and drink and celebrate – this is a party to celebrate HER, not the baby!
4. What did you want to investigate about truth and truth-telling in writing this book as fiction (seeing as it draws on many facets of your own life)?
Truth in family stories is a strange thing – even when you think you know your family history, it’s likely that you only have a partial understanding. Even when its unintentional, families lie by omission, by forgetting or simply by just telling stories from one perspective. And sometimes, they just straight up lie because the truth is not pretty. In my story, like the character of Zahra, I will never have the truth of what happened to my father and why he never went back to Morocco. All I have are the stories of several unreliable narrators, and so, whilst I draw heavily on my life experience in Zahra’s journey, Khadija’s story is a fictional imagining of one of many possible ways that the story could have played out. And so I think I was trying to imagine a version of history that could join the dots – not so much to discover the truth, but to make a story of it all that made sense, perhaps so my narrative loving brain could let it go.
5. Tell us about the years of lead? Did you discover anything that surprised you while researching this political & social period?
The term ‘The Years of Lead’ refers to a period of state violence and repression of political activism from the 1960s to the 80’s in Morocco under King Hassan II. This state sanctioned violence led to a climate of fear in which protests were violently repressed, newspapers were closed and books banned. During this time, people fighting for democracy were arrested, tortured, executed imprisoned or ‘disappeared’ to underground desert prisons – some of which were shocking in their cruelty. In one, Tazmamart, political prisoners were kept in total darkness and isolation in underground cells too small to stand or sit upright for almost twenty years. This prison was only shut down in the early 90’s after international pressure was applied from human rights organisations and the US Government. Like many Australians, I know next to nothing about the political history of Morocco until I began researching this book, so I found it shocking to realise this had been happening in my lifetime, without having had any idea.
6. Khadija, the protagonist Zahra’s grandmother, is a fascinating character and must navigate silence and erasure when it comes to keeping her family together. How does Khadija’s sacrifice affect Zahra down the ancestral line?
Khadija is a traditional Amazigh woman, whose life unfolds alongside a period of great change for Morocco, both politically and culturally, as the country transitions to independence from the French, and like all of us, she must live within the constraints and conditions of her environment. But it was important to me that she was not a passive victim but an active agent in her own life, and so, any silences she keeps are choices she makes to protect those she loves the most. But of course, this choice has consequences for everyone around her and this includes for Zahra – most clearly being her estrangement from her culture and her extended family, and a climate of silence that permeates her childhood.
7. Do you see a connection between the injustice experienced by the Amazigh people of Morocco and Indigenous Australians? Is this something that you always knew you’d write into?
I wouldn’t want to create a false equivalence here – the histories of Morocco and Australia are vastly different, and the specificities of the injustices experienced by first nations people in both countries are similarly diverse. However, as an Australian Moroccan woman learning about my own Amazigh roots, I certainly recognised a similarity between Amazigh and Aboriginal Australian people’s efforts to keep indigenous language alive – in both countries, the languages of first nations people were not recognised, valued or used by the mainstream education and political systems for many years. In both instances, indigenous languages increasingly being recognised as the precious cultural resource that they are but yet they remain far from mainstream use.
8. What were you under the influence of (books, authors, ideas, art, or anything else) while writing this book?
As a debut author, I fear I wrote this book under the influence of every book I read during the drafting process – I know that in the early days of writing, I would read something and before I knew it, I was writing in their style – something I hope I have recovered from now I feel stronger in my own voice as a writer. My very favourite books, however, are always present in my writing style and they include anything and everything by Elif Shafak, and Khaleed Hosseini.
9. Which adjectives by readers and reviewers used to describe your writing, most please you?
A mentor once described my first few chapters as ‘feral’ – she reassured me she meant it in a good way, but it still makes me laugh! I do start with a childbirth scene so that does make sense!
But besides this, words like heartfelt, honest, vivid and evocative are all words that make me happy when I hear them used to describe my writing.
10. Tell us about your natural writing habitat.
I am naturally a messy person, so I am always writing on a desk strewn with coffee cups and scraps of paper. I like to be somewhere quiet and cozy, with a blasting heater and a view from a window – and if possible, I’d like not to see another human being for a couple of days – a pipe dream in my life given I have a husband and two little children, three adult ones, a grandchild and a crazy black labrador puppy!