Contemporary Morocco is the setting for Meryem Alaoui's lively debut novel about a sex worker with an indomitable spirit. In Straight from the Horse's Mouth, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Jmiaa introduces herself by saying, "To live, I use what I've got." And what she's got, beside her body, is moxie to spare. Jmiaa admonishes readers, "You only have one life. What's the point of filling it with nothing?"
She fills her life with television, drinking and, obviously, her work. Jmiaa relates her experiences as a sex worker with brutal honesty and a shrug, but she never sees herself as a victim. "You need balls to be able to do this work," she says proudly. She lives with Halima, another sex worker who frustrates Jmiaa with her defeatism. Halima was respectable before circumstances led her to Jmiaa's tiny, squalid apartment, and she seems to be wallowing in her fate, to Jmiaa's disapproving eye. "Her main problem is that she's not a capable woman.... How many people do you know who are so incompetent that they suffer a single, fatal fall?... I say that if it happens to you, it's because you're not looking in front of you and you're moving forward like a donkey."
Jmiaa is determined to keep her own eyes open for opportunities to move forward. So, when she's tapped to play a sex worker in an indie film being shot in her neighborhood, she jumps at it. "I'm tired of being alone and cycling through the problems tangled up in my head like the yarn in a ball of wool," she says. Unsurprisingly, her larger-than-life personality transfers to the big screen, and she experiences a life she was sure she was meant for all along.
Jmiaa isn't entirely likable. She pays scant attention to her preteen daughter, whom Jmiaa sends to live with her mother so that she has more freedom. She can fight like a feral cat if she needs to, yet her charisma never flags. This is a funny and profane book; joyful in its celebration of a life lived expansively and filled with the sights and sounds of Casablanca. It also introduces a confident female character comfortable with choices that may seem--to those more privileged--unsavory and unwise. Straight from the Horse's Mouth received critical acclaim when it was first published in France, and will be equally welcome in this ebullient English translation. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.
Shelf Talker: This novel of a year in the life of a brassy, clever Moroccan sex-worker is funny and profane, rich with the sights and sounds of Casablanca.