In my country

Muhammed Limmigri, who worked in the same factory for forty years as an exemplary worker, an exemplary family man, and an exemplary Muslim in France, where he immigrated in the 1960s, decides to leave France with the start of his retirement, which he believes will disrupt the monotonous life he has lived until then. Clinging tightly to his traditions, which he sheltered in like a protective shell, and to his dream of building a big house for his family in the village where he was born, Muhammad left the country where he had always felt foreign for forty years and returned to his homeland. He sits on the porch of his house, which resembles an "overloaded truck," on an old leather sofa he bought at a flea market and waits for his children. However, what awaits him is something completely different.

Moroccan-born literary writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, who won France's most important literary award, Goncourt, with his novel Holy Night in 1987, gives the floor to one of the thousands of migrant workers who go to Europe to work with In My Country. It tells the dilemmas of an immigrant who is torn between his own culture and the values of the society he lives in, in the magical language of Eastern tales. It mirrors the French and Arab societies that are experiencing pains of change through the expectations of different generations of a family. With a simple, striking narrative, it shows how the boundaries of being an outsider and a stranger can expand, and makes the reader share the desperate wait of a man who has never been able to take control of his own life.