A review of the transgressive novel Bianka by Ibtissam El Azami, followed by an interview of the protagonist, Katia – a world-in-world view behind the scenes!
Writing a review for my own debut novel, Bianka, feels like one of the strangest yet most natural experiences; after all, who better than me to talk about the themes and motivations behind writing it?
I’ve always had a natural ease with writing—a gift from my late father—and new ideas for novels come to me as naturally as breathing.
Once I have an idea, my heart decides whether to pursue it, and my brain simply follows; that is how I operate in every aspect of my life. For Bianka, the goal was to show just how small the step between loneliness and addiction really is, and how addiction and the refusal to mourn (or perhaps the inability to move on?) push us to live entirely outside the world of the living, existing solely inside our own heads.
I anchored the story in the bleak, dead-end town of Noyers-les-Roses, a place where hopes seem to go to die. Through my writing, I follow Katia, a not-so-distant version of myself, who is utterly paralyzed by the tragic death of her sister, Astrid. Even though my real-life sister is very much alive, I wanted Astrid’s death to express the deep schism that can exist between two personalities, even those of twins.
While her mother dissolves her trauma into daily glasses of water mixed with crushed Xanax and endures an abusive relationship with a man named Sylvain, I pushed Katia to choose a different, far more destructive path to cope.
Bianka is indeed autofiction, though heavily fictionalized past a certain point. I made her descent truly begin when she crosses paths with Baka, a marginalized homeless man who claims his chemical highs allow him to hear the voices of his dead loved ones. Driven by a visceral, obsessive need to hear Astrid’s voice again, I wrote Katia following him into an abandoned building to fully embrace “Bianka”—the personification of her addiction, a shadow from her hazy past in London and Rome.
To me, the core of Bianka lies in its unflinching look at the extreme boundaries of love and transaction. I refused to shy away from the gritty reality of my protagonist’s choices, and I wrote the book with one specific starting premise: “If you had said yes, imagine how your life would have turned out.”
To fund her transcendent hallucinations, Katia sells her body through a local pimp named Nioka, experiencing total dissociation in the backseats of cars. I took the narrative to terrifying heights of moral detachment, perfectly illustrated when I had Katia watch Baka fatally overdose right next to her, yet choose to do nothing but secure her own stash and wait for her sister’s ghost.
Throughout the book, I constantly blurred the line between drug-induced hallucinations and supernatural connection, culminating in a heartbreaking delusion centered around an August 8th appointment at a Parisian café, Le Grince, where Katia desperately waits for a dead woman to walk through the door.
Interview – 10 Questions with Katia from Bianka
For this review, I decided to do something different than what we usually see. I sat down to interview the protagonist of the novel, Katia. Or rather, I sat down to interview a fractured, unapologetic shadow of my own psyche. Here are the questions I asked her about her descent into the abyss.
Ibtissam (Author): Let’s start with Noyers-les-Roses. Astrid managed to escape to Paris to study art and surround herself with beauty. Why did you let the bleakness of this dead-end town swallow you whole instead of taking that train to join her when you still could?
Katia: I think I just rushed into things; I came back without knowing if I would ever be ready to return to Noyers-les-Roses. I could have joined her, but I didn’t feel capable of facing her happiness. I simply didn’t know how to do it—I didn’t have it in me to be happy the way she was. I was much more inclined to escape from country to country rather than actually heal from the deaths of the two people I had lost in my family.
Ibtissam: Your mother chose to drown her grief in crushed Xanax while accepting Sylvain’s daily abuse. You look at her with a lot of cynicism, yet you chose to destroy your own veins with “Bianka” while letting men use your body in parking lots. Do you think your methods of escaping reality are really that different?
Katia: It’s just that after a certain point, once I needed to use, I simply couldn’t stop myself anymore. Even so, I kept looking at her through the exact same lens. I witnessed her downfall so much that I completely forgot to catch my own.
Ibtissam: When you met Baka, he was a marginalized homeless man shooting up on the street. A “normal” person would have looked away. What was it about his specific madness that made you trust him as your guide to the underworld?
Katia: When I met Baka, I saw an aura around him. He seemed so tired, and that’s what struck me the most—this immense, crushing fatigue. And yet, we clicked instantly. We talked about really light things at first—music, fashion, the weather—and little by little, we moved on to deeper subjects. You know what they say about chemistry. I was alone, I just wanted to talk to someone, and I had already noticed him a few times around town. That day, my gut told me he was exactly the person I needed. And it was true: for the time he was around, he knew exactly what I needed, and he never judged me for it.
Ibtissam: You personify your addiction. You don’t just call it coke or drugs; you call it “Bianka”, an old acquaintance from your hazy past in Rome and London. Why did you need to give your destruction a human name?
Katia: Bianka is a name I pulled from Bianca—which means white in Italian. I really loved the time I spent there, but Rome is also the city where I truly discovered the substance. And like I said in the book, it became so much of what I wanted that it completely cut me off from the city, from my love for its beautiful buildings, so much so that it just didn’t feel like “home” anymore.
Ibtissam: Let’s talk about the most shocking moment in the book. Baka overdoses and dies right in front of you. He trembles, his eyes empty out, his skull hits the concrete. You don’t call for help. You just take his stash and leave. Do you feel any guilt for letting him die, or was he just a tool that had outlived its usefulness?
Katia: Baka was probably the person in the book who saw through me the best, but we all meet our end. I could have called someone, sure, but he was already gone. Sitting there next to him, I had the time to really reflect on what constitutes life and death, and I decided that whether he was there or not, it wouldn’t change what I set out to do. Which was to see Astrid again, and in a broader sense, to be free again—if I had ever truly been free to begin with.
Ibtissam: August 8th. Le Grince café, near Le Bon Marché. You traveled all the way to Paris, ordered her Viennese chocolate, and waited for a dead woman to walk through the door. Deep down, did you know it was a delusion, or did the chemicals make you truly believe death could be reversed?
Katia: Yeah, I really thought she would come. The last things we said to each other weren’t exactly nice, and I figured that the moment I was ready, she would be too. I don’t know if it was the chemicals or the hallucination that made me believe it, but I believed it with every fiber of my being.
Ibtissam: As your creator, I admit I put you through absolute hell. I pushed you into the darkest corners of naturalism and transgressive behavior. Do you resent me for using you as a laboratory to explore my own obsessions with grief and self-destruction?
Katia: No, it was a path I had to walk, and I thank you for it. My only regret is that I didn’t get to write my own book in the end. But I appreciate you doing it for me, and I’m glad I could inspire you.
Ibtissam: In the end, Katia… you gave up your sanity, your body, your future, and your morals just to hear Astrid’s voice for a few fleeting moments in a rotting building. Was the transaction worth it?
Katia: Even for just one second of seeing her, I would do it all again. Or I would probably just go drink that hot chocolate she invited me to so often.
Bianka is not just a story about drugs; rather, it is a story about profound sadness and absolute loneliness. Because ultimately, it is with Baka—even after he has passed away—that she seeks refuge, and even then, she refuses to accept her grief. It is my raw, cynical exploration of how far a fractured mind will go to refuse the finality of death. If you are brave enough to stare into the abyss, I invite you to read it.
If you are into transgressive and psychological novels, check out my other novels Elle and Tester.