Barely out of adolescence, the American Leila Mottley imposes herself with an ambitious first novel, which brilliantly mixes fiction and reality, romantic intrigue and a taste for words and metaphors. Essential title of the foreign literary season 2022, Walk the night recounts the descent into hell of a young black girl left to fend for herself and the brutalities of a predatory and ruthless world.
” My name is Leila Mottley. I am 20 years old and I am a writer. Walk the night is my first published novel and my third. I started it when I was 16 and 17 when I finished it. I wrote my very first novel when I was 14 and I was 15 when I wrote the second. Yes, I like to write. I maintain an almost instinctive link with words and language. I knew that I stuck with Walk the night a powerful material. I wrote it in one go. Then, there was a lot of rewriting work to put the words in tune with the vision that was running through my head. »
This is the American Leila Mottley. Appearing in French these days, his first novel Walk the night is a powerful, poignant and poetic book. Based on real events, the novel tells the story of Kiara, a black teenager living in an apartment building in East Oakland, California.
Kiara is 17 years old. Penniless, she walks the sidewalks of her city, offering her body to the first comer, in order to pay her rent and meet the needs of her loved ones. She becomes the sexual slave of a gang of rogue police officers whose corruption and brutality Leila Mottley stages in pages worthy of the best anthologies on social domination and sadomasochistic practices. The novel is inspired by a sex scandal that shook the city of Oakland a few years ago, involving its police institution.
Poet-performer
First-time novelist, barely older than her protagonist, Mottley describes American society and its chaos with astounding maturity. ” I think I fell in love with writing the moment I learned to write “, likes to repeat the young author. With a screenwriter and playwright father and a schoolteacher mother, writing comes naturally to the Mottleys. In the afterword of his novel, the author pays tribute to his parents for him ” for offering a house full of books and for teaching (him) the value of reading “.
Leila Mottley entered literature through poetry. She has been a poet-performer since a young age on the artistic scenes of her hometown. Her taste for words and metaphors earned her the designation, in 2018, at the age of 15, “Oakland Youth Poet Laureate”. She was also trying her hand at writing prose stories, when in 2015 the Oakland police case broke out, which inspired her to write her novel.
” When the scandal broke, remembers the novelist, the local Oakland media picked it up immediately and talked about it ad infinitum. It would have been hard to miss. I remember being struck by the media coverage of the Oakland affair, which ignored the tragedy that the victim had experienced and how she had been damaged physically and mentally by all that she had suffered. The journalistic treatment focused on the police. So when it was my turn to tell, I absolutely insisted that the story be presented from the victim’s point of view so that readers would feel like they were inside the victim’s head. character and that they can touch on this feeling of immense vulnerability that all black teenagers in this country experience. »
Black teen vulnerability
This vulnerability of black adolescence, particularly in the face of the police institution, Leila Mottley knew it closely, having grown up in an America poisoned by the racial question. This theme is at the heart of the story of exploitation and survival told by the novelist through the dramas that punctuate the very young life of her heroine.
On more than 400 pages, the novel recounts Kiara’s fights for survival. The teenager’s world has collapsed before the story even opens. Her family fractured by deaths and tragedies reminiscent of the merciless world of Greek tragedies, she is left to fend for herself in her rental apartment which she shares with her older brother. While the latter finds refuge in drugs and his dream of becoming a rap star, Kiara works to make ends meet, selling her body in the public square. Things get out of hand for her when she is arrested for soliciting by police involved in the trafficking of prostitutes. We know the rest, made up of cruel sexual games, abuse and exploitation.
” I’m just a fleshy piece of girl “Sings Kiara sometimes to give herself courage. It is this underground story of inner resistance that is the real strength of this novel, a resistance against white power and patriarchy rooted in history, as in the novels of Toni Morrison…
“The resistance of black women, explains Leila Mottley, dates back to the period of slavery and the colonial era when they were told that their duty was to ensure the safety of those around them above all else. Kiara does not passively accept the injunction of society which wants to reduce her to her role as the natural guardian of the men in her family, without worrying about the threats hanging over her. I wanted to show through this novel the vibrant and tormented inner life of black teenage girls today. »
We do not come out of these pages unscathed. The story of Kiara’s descent into hell, her revolts and her dramas, told in a mastered, clear and often lyrical language; haunt the reader for a long time. With this first novel, singular and promising, Leila Mottley imposes herself as a new voice of American black letters. To be continued.
Walk the night, by Leila Mottley. Translated from English by Pauline Louquin. Editions Albin Michel, 402 pages, 21.90 euros.