Unearthed Secrets: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Double Life

"There is something heavier even than learning a shocking secret: it is to feel that something is being kept silent." This is the phrase with which Belgian journalist Yasmina El Messaoudi summarizes the intimate earthquake she experienced two years ago. After her father’s death, she discovered that he had led a double life, with another wife and a son in Morocco. In a confessional book, she traces the shockwave of this revelation and the long process of rebuilding her identity.

The news was brutally announced to her, by her family, upon her return from the funeral in Morocco. A secret that her Flemish mother had kept to herself for more than thirty years, since when, at the age of eight, little Yasmina had shown her a photo of her father with a veiled woman and a young boy. This belated discovery is not only a wound, it is a rewriting of her entire history. "I mainly mourned the loss of my past," she confides to Gva.be.

Beyond the anger, Yasmina El Messaoudi’s account is an exploration of the nuances of betrayal. Surprisingly, her compassion goes more to her father, a man she describes as caught between the love for his Belgian wife and the pressure of his own mother in Morocco, who hoped to keep him by encouraging him to start another family there. It is towards her mother that the feeling of rupture is deepest. Guarantor of the truth, it is she who chose silence, knowingly letting her children face an "enormous administrative, legal and emotional storm" after her death.

This revelation allowed the journalist to understand the "gray areas" of her childhood: the trips to Morocco that were always postponed, the mystery around certain phone calls, the unexplained money transfers. She explains how this family taboo has shaped her personality, pushing her to efface herself and always seek approval so as not to add tensions to a home she already felt fragile.

Today, the writing of this book is experienced as an act of liberation, a way to break the silence so as not to leave this secret "hanging like a curse." She has tried to make contact with her half-brother, unsuccessfully so far, aware of the gulf that separates them. "I am privileged, I live in Belgium, I had all the chances, and he did not," she analyzes.