Following her debut book, This Is Not Who We Are, novelist Sophie Buchaillard ruminates on the process of writing her latest novel, Assimilation – part fact, part fiction, very close to her heart, and entirely focused on issues of identity, migration and belonging.
As a novelist, you do not write in a vacuum. For me, the persistence of news on migration has felt – continues to feel – deeply personal. It is the dehumanising language and the insistence on distinguishing between travel and migration, as if the one were virtuous, whilst the other carried some dark undercurrent which leaves me wondering what world we are creating for our children.
Regardless of my dual citizenship, when people hear me speak, migrant is the first thing that comes to mind because of the accent. “Where are you from, really?”is a question I can never escape, a question that leads to another: where do I belong?
It is this question which led me to writing Assimilation. Sometimes, when you finish a book, you get a sense that you’re not quite done yet. In This Is Not Who We Are, my first novel, I had conjured up two female characters with contrasting experiences of migration: one as a refugee, the other as an economic migrant. By virtue of the contrast, and because my focus was the historical context of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, I felt I needed another space to explore the nuances of what it means to be a migrant, in a post 9/11 and post-Brexit context – and what migrating as a woman can sometimes entail.
As a reader, I had been struck by the relative absence of women from narratives of travel. They existed as companions or sidekicks, rarely as the main protagonist. For me, this always seemed strange because I grew up in quite the diasporic family. As a child, I listened to my mother, my grandmother, my aunties, painting vivid pictures of the lives they had lived in countries other than the France of my own childhood, sharing anecdotes embellished with every retelling.
Their stories were unlike any I had read, and it is this discrepancy between travel narratives we in Europe inherited from a handful of privileged white men, and the oral tradition of my childhood, which I wanted to explore further. To me, reframing the perspective meant challenging a few of the assumptions I’ve come across for most of my adult life.
As I observed the rapidly deteriorating treatment of migrants on my TV screen, I also wanted to retrace how the colonial era, the democratisation of travel in the 60s, the Twin Towers and – most recently for us in the UK – Brexit all contributed to this amalgamation between travel and safety, so that ‘migrant’ has become a catch-all to depict a homogeneous bogeyman used by unscrupulous politicians to play on people’s fears, for electoral point-scoring. What’s lost is the people and lives that exist behind the stereotypes – which fiction is so good at conjuring up in relatable ways that remind us of our own humanity.
So Assimilation is a hybrid novel, partly inspired by my own experience and anecdotes from my childhood, and partly a hopeful response to today’s hostile environment. It focuses on the experience of three generations of women and spans four continents. It weaves drug cartels, secrets and magic realism, and aims to bring you on a journey. Step in with an open mind and enjoy the trip.
Assimilation is published on Thurs 29 Feb via Honno Press.
A launch party takes place at Griffin Books, Penarth on Thurs 7 Mar; Sophie will host a reading/Q&A at Bardic Vintage Books, Llantwit Major on Sat 9 Mar.
Info: sophiebuchaillard.com
words SOPHIE BUCHAILLARD
