Home » Comoros » Touhfat Mouhtare »Le feu du milieu (The Fire Within)

Touhfat Mouhtare :Le feu du milieu (The Fire Within) )

Our narrator is an eleven-year-old maid in the Comoros. Like many of her class, she has had a hard time of it. Many of these maids were the grandchildren of people who had been taken from some other unknown country and had become slaves. The girls had to start work at the age of five. Our heroine’s problems did not end there. Her mother, after she was born, tried to kill her, telling herthere is no god for people like us but she was rescued by a woman called Tamu who has brought her up. Tamu is very religious (Muslim) and expects her daughter to be so as well. Her father was allegedly a trader, but of course soon disappeared. She has been named.Hardie, after another trader who frequently visits the area.

We start the novel when she is out collecting wood for the Muharram meal, aMuslim feast day. She has been allotted a specific area to collect wood but finds that there is very little wood there because it seems that someone has been there before her. She is annoyed about this and claims that all her life people had been putting obstacles in her way.

Tamu claims to be very religiousbut she seems to be having a sexual relationship with a married religious leader, Fundi Ahmad, said to be a descendant of the prophet and proud of his Arab and Persian roots less of his African ancestry. Tamu and Ahmad expect Hardie to study the Quran and learn the sutras by heart. If she does not,there will be serious consequences.

When one of her fellow maids also finds wood has been cleared she decides to investigate and eventually finds the cause. It is a daughter of a master called.Halima. She has run away from her father, an important local leader, because he has planned a marriage for her with someone she does not wish to marry.Hardie gets to know her as she seeks her help to escape the marriage. Hardie had originally suspected, that the wood clearance might have been caused by a jinn and we learn that Hardie is very much into tales of that nature, both fantastical tales from the Quran as well as tales of jinns from her friends.

Hardie very much wants to help Halima but she also feel she has to obey Tamu and also Fundi Ahmad and feels, correctly, that she will be in serious trouble if she does not. Halima disappears and Hardie get on with her life. Though only still eleven years old she is rapidly reaching puberty but this causes her problems.

One of her friends starts working for Fundi Ahmad in particular his new wife. He already has two other wives. He complains to.Tamu, with whom he is also having a sexual relationship,that his wife does not respond to his approaches. Hardie is keen to see this new wife and her friend allows her to get into a small hiding place where she can see the new wife taking a bath. When the woman turns her face she sees that it is Halima. Halima will invite her to come, secretly, as neither wish Fundi Ahmad to know and she tells her story. She was essentially kidnapped and forced to marry a man called Fadili. Initially she does not speak to him and continues to wear a veil in his presence. However, eventually when he has a bad time at work, she is sympathetic and does speak to him and soon they fall in love with one another and have a generally happy relationship, though with no children. Fundi Ahmad wants to marry her and as he is more important than Fadili her father forces a divorce by devious means and she is married to Fundi Ahmad. Hardie Will continue to visit Halima but does so at night so Fundi Ahmad does not know.

Things get worsefor Hardie when Tamu disappears and is not found. Fundi Ahmad invites her to live with him on condition that she has no contact with Halima, whom he does not consider to be a good influence so they have to meet surreptitiously at night.

It is at this point that things really become a very bizarre. Both Halima and Fundi seemed to have some sort of mysterious powers and Hardie is dragged into some very strange scenarios. Just to give you a hint of a few of them at one point Hardie becomes a Spanish sea captain.(male) wittily . called Migue lCervantes with a deputy called Sancho, and she fights Barbary pirates, is captured and sent to a slave market in Algiers where she is bought by a woman who is, of course, Halima. That is by no means all as she seems to become a female tiger with cubs and assume other strange identities as do Halima and Fundi. All this, of course, is part of her search.for Tamu. Both Halima andFundi claim to be helping her while saying that the other one is not doing so.There seems to be also the need to find some missing dice which have Arabic characters on them which will help in the search for. Tamu. It is very complicated but at the same time very interesting to see where she might be off to next.

In addition to these adventures, we are reading more and more about Muslim rituals which they all get involved in. and also the racism and sexism that clearly exist in the Comoros at that time.

This novel essentially functions on two different planes. The first, of course is the everyday life of Hardie and those like her, who are little more than slaves.As mentioned, we see the racism, the sexism, and classism that they face in their daily life. At the same time they are expected to be good Muslims and follow Muslim conventions which means obedience to their masters and the supremacy of men. Mouhtare seems to be both critical of this while, to a certain degree, accepting it.

Of course the other plane is the fantastical adventures that she goes through with Halima and Fundi which are both challenging for the characters and for the reader, but nevertheless very interesting to read and quite original. You will get lost now and then when you read this book but ultimately it is a fascinating tale and quite out of the ordinary.

Publishing history

First published in 2022 by Le bruit du monde
First English translation in 2025 By Dedalus
Translated by Rachel McGill