Abdellah Taïa

Taïa has said that Mon Maroc (My Morocco) "is my story. The story of my Moroccan life that took place, over the course of 25 years, on the banks of the river Bou Regreg, in the two towns that are located at its mouth: Rabat and Salé, the first on the left bank, the other on the right bank."[19] Taïa wanted to name the book after Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, a film that "became mythical" for him when he saw it in Morocco. Lacking a French equivalent, he used for My Morocco instead.[15]

Taïa's second book, Le Rouge du Tarbouche (The Red of the Fez), is a collection of short stories. It marked the beginning of his open challenge to Morocco's antigay laws.[9] After a Moroccan TV channel sent a film crew to Paris to interview Taïa for a documentary on Moroccan artists living abroad, the coverage led to other media attention, making the book a bestseller. Taïa became "an unlikely literary darling in the country he'd fled."[15]

Taïa has explained what happened when Le rouge du Tarbouche came out in Morocco and he was interviewed by a reporter for the French-Arab journal Tel Quel: "She wanted to do a profile on me and was interested in speaking about the themes of homosexuality in my books. She wanted to know if I was willing to speak freely. We were in a coffee shop in Casablanca. I never imagined it would happen like that, but I understood that was the moment of truth: The truth about me, my books, and my position in the world. Although it was really scary and I knew that there would be many consequences, I had to do it. I owed it to that little boy who had dreams at thirteen. Now that I have the possibility to speak, I'm not going to stop."[13] The resulting cover story in Tel Quel was headlined "Homosexuel, envers et contre tous" (Homosexual, against all odds).[9]

He came out, he said in another interview, because

I never hide. I never put that aspect of my personality aside. I know so many gay intellectuals or writers who say, 'I am not going to talk about homosexuality because it doesn't interest people.' But for me this makes no sense. It would be like a heterosexual who doesn't present himself as a heterosexual. I never planned to come out.[13]

After Taïa came out publicly, "it took years to overcome the rifts" between him and his family, he told The New York Times in 2014. "They cried and screamed....I cried when they called me. But I won't apologize. Never."[14]

After he began talking in public about his homosexuality, he was widely condemned in Morocco.

The editor of Al Massae, Morocco's biggest-selling newspaper, wrote an editorial denouncing Taïa and attacking the use of public money to fund TV shows that featured him. Bloggers called for him to be stoned. Newspaper readers wrote to attack his credentials. 'They said I am a prostitute and not a Muslim anymore, that I should apologize for the shame I brought to my mother, to my religion, to my town, to my country. These attacks hurt, but worse was the silence of the Moroccan intellectuals. It just confirmed that they were dead people who live in another world–they don't talk about us, about the reality of Morocco.'[15]

Some members of the Moroccan press, however, were "really supportive", as were the French press and some of the Arabic press, he later recalled, but "Others were just attacking, attacking, attacking without stop."[13]

The scandal over Taïa's coming-out led to "a debate about gay rights and the oppression of the individual in Morocco, and to a greater extent, the entire Arab world." Still, as of 2014, he remains "the only Moroccan intellectual to 'come out.'"[13]

During the public outrage over his Tel Quel interview that Taïa wrote L'armee du Salut (Salvation Army), a "bildungsroman of his youthful dreams and indiscretions set in Rabat, Tangier, and Geneva."[9]

Taïa's English-language publisher, Semiotext(e), describes Salvation Army as "a coming-of-age novel that narrates the story of Taïa's life with complete disclosure—from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Salé, through an adolescence in Tangier charged by the young writer's attraction to his eldest brother, to his disappointing 'arrival' in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood—and in so doing manages to burn through the author's first-person singularity to embody the complex mélange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture, and move towards restituting their alterity."[10]

Salvation Army was described in Out Magazine as "a gay coming-of-age novel" whose "perspective–rooted in the claustrophobic world of a poor Moroccan neighborhood–lends it freshness rare in English literature." It was described by author David Ebershoff as one of the best gay books of 2009 and by Edmund White, who wrote the introduction to the American edition, as marked by "a simplicity that only intelligence and experience and wide reading can buy."[15] Variety called it "a bold coming out, unadorned by guilt or sensationalism and directly confronting Western expectations, at least in gay circles, of Arab youth as adornments rather than equal companions."[20]

Interview Magazine described Salvation Army as

a valuable contribution not only to queer fiction but to North African diaspora literature as well. A resident of Paris over the last decade, Taïa has joined the column of Moroccan expatriates–Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi, among others–who cast a telescopic eye over the thorny and often violent ideological interchange between postmodern Europe and postcolonial Africa. But Taïa's words are not scrawled with the bellicose politics of a partisan; rather, they are auguries of a familial world imbued with both magic and poverty; lilting and resolute; a prose of stark divinity and apostasy."[9]

Une mélancolie árabe (An Arab Melancholia) is an "autobiographical novel of self-discovery...about an openly gay man who lives between cultures in Egypt and France.[10]

His novel Le jour de roi (The King's Day), about King Hassan II, "was banned in Morocco." But after it received the 2010 Prix de Flore literary prize, "the ban was lifted. My books are now translated into Arabic and are available in Morocco, a sign that things are changing."[13]

Taïa responded to the 2007 death of two young brothers in a suicide attack on the U.S. consulate in Casablanca with a Le Monde editorial titled "We Have to Save Moroccan Youth." At his urging, several Moroccan artists and writers of his generation wrote follow-up essays to his editorial, which were published in 2009 as a book, edited by Taïa, titled Lettres à un jeune marocain (Letters to a Young Moroccan). Pierre Bergé, the partner of Yves Saint Laurent, "agreed to fund the printing and distribution of 90,000 copies of the book in French and Arabic."[15]

In 2009, when Morocco's interior ministry began to crack down on writing that challenged the country's "moral and religious values," Taïa published an open letter, "Homosexuality Explained to My Mother," in Tel Quel.[15][16]

Taïa wrote a piece for The Guardian in December 2010 about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who,

formerly the richest man in his country, was accused of tax fraud in 2003 and has been languishing in a Siberian prison for seven years. His crime? To have wanted for his country a true democracy, as well as genuine respect for human rights.... Since 2003, this intelligent, romantic, wonderful man is my only hero. He is far from perfect but his battle, which he refuses to give up on, touches me deeply. Russia and the world need him.[21]

Taïa directed a film adaptation of his book Salvation Army. It "gave the Arab world its first on-screen gay protagonist," according to The New York Times.[14] Taïa has said that Michael Powell's film Black Narcissus "directly influenced Salvation Army."[11] The film, a French-Moroccan-Swiss production, was shown at the Venice and Toronto film festivals in 2013.[20] It was screened in February 2014 at the National Film Festival in Tangier,[14] won the Grand Prix at the Angers Film Festival in France, and was shown at the New Directors Festival in New York in March 2014.[14] The reviewer for Variety stated that in the film "Taïa retains the bare bones but strips away warmth and insight, without any fresh perceptions that would compensate."[20] Another reviewer, however, called the film "disciplined and poetic," praising Taïa for managing "to regard his own story with relative objectivity" and concluding that the film "avoids the usual pitfalls of political cinema, precisely because Taïa is able to remain focused on particulars, the overwhelming feel of things."[22] A reviewer for the Atlantic wrote that at a Venice Film Festival "notable for the prevalence of works grappling with global and societal woes, perhaps no film has blended the personal and the political as strikingly as Abdellah Taïa's L'Armée du salut (Salvation Army)."[11]

"Before shooting," Taïa has noted, he submitted the screenplay of his film "in its original form to the authorities at the National Centre for Moroccan Cinema.... They approved the screenplay, and I hope they end up following through by allowing the film to be released."[11]

Taïa said in April 2014 that his next book was "a tale about old Moroccan prostitutes who at the end of their careers touring the world have landed in Paris."[14]

In fall 2015, Taïa visited the University of Pittsburgh as a visiting fellow in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program. While on campus, he recorded a podcast as part of the schools' Year of the Humanities.[23]

Taia has noted that he is coauthoring a play to be performed in Paris: https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2020/11/abdellah-taia/

"The problem with homosexuals," Taïa has said,

is that they are not accepted from the beginning. Where I come from, homosexuals allegedly do not exist, which is a horrible thing to live with and to accept. I had no other choice but to accept this non-existence. We could call this exile, meaning that your people, the ones who say they love you, that want to protect you, that want the best for you, and give you food—milk, honey, and so many other things—they deny you the most important thing, which is recognizing you as a human being.[13]

According to a 2014 New York Times profile, Taïa,

has patched up relations with most family members, though there are still awkward moments. His older brother, always cold and distant, remains estranged ... His mother died shortly after Mr. Taïa came out, and he now has a cordial relationship with his sisters. He has over 40 nieces and nephews who symbolize a new more open-minded generation of Moroccans – they often post messages of encouragement on his official Facebook page.[14]

Nonetheless, "he finds it hard to go home" because he can't talk to his siblings. "I am just a human being. They were ashamed of me. I always felt they were. I don't want them to be proud of me. And anyway, they're not."[14] He "can't live in Morocco," he says, because his "entire neighborhood wanted to rape me. A lot of people in Morocco are abused by a cousin or a neighbor but society doesn't protect them. There, rape is insignificant. There is nothing you can do."[14]

He said in 2012 that while Moroccan government and society have not changed dramatically in their views of homosexuality, one thing that has changed is that "when officials talk about human rights and the freedom of individuals, they also talk about homosexuals."[13] Also,

the Moroccan press has dramatically changed its view on homosexuality—for example, they defend me. They also give gay people in Morocco the chance to express themselves. There are young gay Moroccans who created a gay magazine in Arabic. And there's now an Arabic word for 'homosexual' that is not disrespectful: 'mithly.' It was created just six years ago, and is now used everywhere.[11]

According to a 2014 New York Times profile, Taïa "considers himself Muslim because he is very spiritual, and he believes that freedom has existed in Islam through those such as the Arab philosopher Averroes and the Iranian poet Rumi, and in works such as '1001 Nights.'" Taïa told the Times, "I don't want to dissociate myself from Islam....It is part of my identity. It is not because I am gay that I will reject it. We need to recover this freedom that has existed in Islam."[14] In 2013, Taïa told The Atlantic, "I consider myself culturally Muslim. I feel connected to the great writers and thinkers of Islamic civilization, the great philosophers, sociologists and poets. I believe firmly in secularism, and I think that Muslims would be better off liberating themselves from religion. Islam should have no role in government."[11]

He strongly supported the "February 20 movement" in Morocco that demanded democratic reforms. He wrote about this in the 2014 book "Arabs Are No Longer Afraid."[14] He has said that the "people who started the Arab Spring are young people, and the revolution was stolen from them by the Islamists."[1]

Taïa is a fan of the films of Marilyn Monroe and of the directors Gus Van Sant, Douglas Sirk, and Tsai Ming-Liang.[15]

"Books, like the film, do not solve anything," Taïa told The New York Times in 2014; "what I produce artistically does not help me in any way in my real life. Nothing is resolved. Everything is complex, complicated. I sincerely believe that there is only love to heal and soothe troubled souls."[14]