[Interview to be found in the winter issue of têtu·, on sale at your newsstand or by subscription.] Our Personality of the Year 2025 is the same age as têtu·, i.e., only 30 years old. And yet, five years after her striking entry into literature, Fatima Daas already exerts influence far beyond her readership, with a film adaptation of her first novel, The Little Last One, which caused a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival.
Photographie : Marguerite Bornhauser pour têtu·
“My name is Fatima.” This leitmotif from Fatima Daas’s first novel, The Little Last One, has come a long way since its publication in 2020. Adapted for cinema by Hafsia Herzi, the film earned its lead actress, Nadia Melliti, the Best Actress Award at the latest Cannes Film Festival. And this, with the rarely depicted story of a young lesbian torn between her sexual identity and her Muslim faith. In her second novel, Play the Game, released this summer, the writer probes, through the journey of a top student at a high school in a priority-education network, the promises of meritocracy. Our Personality of the Year 2025 has things to say, and has established in the literary landscape a singular queer voice.
- Your autobiographical first novel, The Little Last One, has found a second life with its cinema adaptation by Hafsia Herzi. What is it like to see yourself represented on screen?
Fatima Daas : At first, I was very detached from Hafsia’s project. I didn’t want to intrude, and I was aware that it would be something entirely different from my book, an independent work. I was very comfortable with that idea. When I saw the rushes of Nadia Melliti’s audition, it was perturbing, because she had something very similar to the character. Her silences, her way of observing people, of looking at them, of remaining silent when she is surrounded, everything matched! It’s not me, for sure, but it is unsettling to see this character I wrote come to life, and who in turn was me without being totally me. The loop was closed.
- Did you accept the idea that the film would be different from the novel? Have you remained just as detached from the result?
The story of the novel is dense, and cinema is short. It was therefore a matter of making choices, deciding which slice of life to show or not. I experienced the dead end that was created around travels to Algeria as a small mourning, but the most important thing is that it holds politically. For that, I had total trust in Hafsia. She is, like me, a child of immigrants who has a postcolonial view. We maintain family-like relations to family, to Islam, to working-class neighborhoods. So I knew the adaptation would not betray the original work.
- The subject of the narrative touches inflammable themes in the current political debate. How did you handle that?
I naively thought that they would highlight the literary quality of my work, but I was often invited for the wrong reasons. People tried to fit me into a box, to place a discourse in my mouth. For example, they expected me to say that my family had kicked me out or that I had to put Islam aside… But that is not my story. And I am not a theologian. I have no lessons to give anyone, and I am not here to respond to controversies about religion. They urge me to free myself, but that remains a vision that follows a colonial continuum. People always have trouble accepting that one can fit into several intersecting and sometimes contradictory boxes.
- After this first success, were you treated as someone who had “played the game” to succeed, the question that threads through your second novel?
In a sense. When someone like me finishes a Master’s in Creative Writing [from the University of Paris 8, ndlr], people want to hear me thank “the Republic’s school” for saving me. They want me to deliver that discourse, except I don’t have a magical anecdote. No one spotted me to say “write!” In Play the Game, I wanted to restore what school truly is: a contested space for teenagers, far from the smooth and simplistic narrative of the “I have good results, so I succeed”.
- In Play the Game, you drop the “I” from The Little Last One. Is this new book less inspired by your life?
I have scattered in each of the characters touches of who I could have been, of what I could have felt at certain moments of my life. For Kayden, it’s quite evident: the difficulty of expressing oneself, a troubled relationship to speech, and the need for a physical relationship to writing to anchor oneself in reality. She also experiences the questions about sexuality that I could have had at that age. I also recognize a lot in Djenna, in whom one finds a fury that simmered in me during adolescence, that period when one feels misunderstood and where even when you try to explain what is going on inside you, it always feels like you’re speaking into the void. With Samy, I think it would be the romantic side—he falls in love every four minutes… That reminds me of periods when I could not accept being loved and I preferred to turn to someone who was not good for me.
- In this novel, you critique the idea of meritocracy in the school system. Don’t you believe that “where there’s a will, there’s a way”?
There is a whole system pushing us to believe it. It’s all the more true because adolescence makes you want to reassure yourself, to tell yourself that willpower is enough to succeed. And we are particularly sensitive to this kind of promise when we come from a working-class neighborhood, because we want to get out and it is tempting to believe that we were chosen. But very quickly, this game proves to be a trap. You are led to believe you will be recognized for your work, but in reality you are reminded that you’re there because “they” chose you. And then they expect you to be grateful for the hand that was extended. The system wants you to stay docile.
- So how do you proceed, if the dice are loaded? Do you renounce social success to avoid betraying yourself?
I don’t have a definitive answer to this dilemma. The place of the collective is a first lead. The circle of friends formed by these teens is solid; it is not merely the sum of “angry” personalities. Each personality brings its own set of political tools to foster awareness. They are vigilant, watching over one another. It is about saying: “Things that aren’t normal are happening. You’ll see it in the end. I don’t want you to fall.” It is a manifestation of peer love. The book is like that: a gang of friends where nothing “extraordinary” happens, but where there is a tenderness that lends humanity its noble letters. One of the keys is to return to the sources to assert who you are, to keep speaking as you speak, to love what others judge as worthless. To allow oneself, in short, self-esteem.
- And you, how did you stop playing the role of the model student?
School worked for me because I did well in the subjects I liked, but it wasn’t without fault. I had good results, but I had lots of trouble with the educational system. I was dismissed several times. I also tried programs supposedly made for me, like a literary preparatory class where I stayed one month, before heading straight back to the faculty of letters. Sometimes you have to take a step to trigger the epiphany that makes you flee. I grew up in Clichy-sous-Bois with people who looked like me. The prep school was a social shock: the resistance started there.
- What do the lesbian desire and the ambiguity of the teacher/student relationship bring to the narrative?
It’s central. How to fall in love within a power dynamic? What happens when the first object of desire for a teenager is her teacher, a woman from another class? This first love is very loaded and obstructed. It is tempting to fall into the trope of the beautiful impossible love story that we’re served in classic works, like Loving Annabelle, which I discovered while writing this book. But if you discover love through the prism of power, your definition of what love is becomes marked. Hence the importance of Soraya’s return, a Kayden classmate from primary school, who offers something other than the injunction to “play the game.” It is the possibility of love between equals.
- Given the rarity of your profile in the literary world, do you feel a heightened responsibility to representation?
There is a form of duty: when your voice is broadcast, you must carry it through to the end. I did not drop The Little Last One into the wild once I had written it. I knew I had to talk about it, to accompany it. But when I spoke about the book, I felt clearly that as a woman, lesbian, person of color, Muslim, I was becoming the spokesperson for all Muslim lesbian women, even though our journeys would all be different. My opinion on the question of “sin,” for example, will not be the same as many others. So I will inevitably disappoint certain expectations. Therefore, I do not seek to represent everyone, even if I am aware of the reach of my commitment.
