Moroccan-Belgian Mother and Daughter Turn Childhood Memories Into “Muslim and a Fan of Pork”

At seven, Galia has a small problem that looms large in her eyes: she loves the ham and cheese macaroni served in the school cafeteria, but she is not allowed to eat it. For this daughter of Moroccan immigrants, the first in her family to be born in Belgium, it is a real “tragedy.” A childhood frustration that, several decades later, became the starting point for a book with a rather unexpected title: “Muslim and a Fan of Pork.”

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The story takes place in the Flagey neighborhood of Brussels in the 1970s. Galia grows up between the habits of her Belgian classmates and those of her Moroccan family, with whom she tries to negotiate a few freedoms. There are plenty of memories, including those seemingly endless summer trips to Morocco in a car packed with luggage.

“We slept at motorway rest areas and cooked in the trunk. Restaurants or triangle sandwiches were not an option,” her daughter Farrah tells the Belgian newspaper Sudinfo. The scenes will bring back memories for many families who have made the long drives to Morocco.

A title that not everyone finds funny

Galia had already drawn on her childhood for a stand-up show with the same title. The anecdotes made the audience laugh, and her daughter, who had heard them since she was very young, encouraged her to take things further. The two began publishing their story chapter by chapter on Wattpad, adding fictional characters and situations, before self-publishing their book.

The response, however, was not the same everywhere. At the Wallonia Book Fair, the title mostly prompted curiosity and amusement. But when they appeared at the literary festival in Nancy in September, a video shared on social media sparked much more heated reactions.

“It was as if Islam had been thrown to the wolves,” Farrah says regretfully. In her view, some people stopped at the title without trying to understand the story. “I wanted people to remember it and for it to make them laugh,” she explains. She acknowledges, however, that such a provocative cover can put some readers off.

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Behind the humor, the book also tells of hardship, making do, and the contradictions of a child searching for her place. Galia wants to discover what her classmates eat, without provoking her parents. Eating ham in front of them, for example, is out of the question.

For Farrah, who put her mother’s memories into words, this story remains above all “an ode to freedom.” It is a way of telling, with humor and candor, the story of a Belgian-Moroccan childhood whose everyday tales rarely find a place in books.