Fatima Daas innovates the genre
Published 04.30
“Play the Game” by Fatima Daas
It’s June and thousands of young people have run out of school. I remember it as the best day of my life. There was nothing I wanted more than to be free, which for me meant being able to write. It is the same longing, albeit under different conditions, that drives the teenager Kayden i Fatima Daas novel ”“Play the game”, translated by Evelina Ivarsson.
The novel takes place in a suburb of Paris where Kayden lives with his sister Shadi and their single mother. She has just started high school and is encouraged by teacher Madame Fontaine to continue writing and apply to a top school in the capital. Through the school years, an ambiguous relationship develops between the teacher and the student, a movement between care and desire. Just like in Daa’s debut novel “Lillflickan” (2022), translated by Johan Wollinyouth are shaped by sexuality and language.
The language is too the point where the translation falters. Ivarsson’s Swedish often captures the rhythmic scarcity, but where lyrics or spoken language are translated word for word, a gap arises. I want to feel that the novel takes place in a multicultural France, but at the same time the distance between the Swedish and the cultural framework must not be too great. It is a difficult balancing act that sometimes weakens the novel’s energy.
Still, “Play the Game” manages to remind me that while I can’t imagine anything worse than returning to high school, I’m obsessed with that place. Nineties youth culture shaped me through Francine Pascal’s “The Twins at Sweet Valley High” and TV series like Sabrina and Buffy. There, the school became a place of discipline and surveillance under the invisible forces of globalization, which often took the form of magic, aliens or monsters. A scene where contemporary power arrangements were played out in disguise.
Kayden’s school is not the school of American pop culture, but a French suburban school where language, religion and class are the main lines of conflict. Daas avoids making his characters symbols and instead allows the conflicts to arise in everyday situations between the characters. Like when the teacher Oussani is forced to point out to the principal that the rowdy students at the school are not suspicious persons to him, but children he has seen grow up.
About the classic the youth story revolves around love, friendship and sexuality, so Daas renews the genre by both linguistically and thematically showing how the migrant experience accommodates other issues. It exposes the boundaries of youth as a period of experimentation, where one must not make mistakes and dream about the future, as in the case of this spring’s merciless deportations of young people who have lived their whole lives in Sweden.
Because who really gets time to become who they are becoming, and what must be sacrificed?
In Kayden’s case, it is not only the future that is at stake, but the very possibility of writing out of the role assigned to her and formulating a life that is not already determined by others. Madame Fontaine’s attention looms as a possible way there, but the impossibility of the relationship at the same time becomes an obstacle. She sums up the tragedy well in her closing letter: “I clung to you as one clung to authority, to power, to the impossible, when one is a young slug in a world that is ready to destroy one.”
Burcu Sahin is a writer and critic.
NOVEL
» Play the game
Fatima Daas
Trans. Evelina Ivarsson
Verbal publisher
