Abdellah Taïa

Taïa was born in 1973 in Rabat, Morocco. According to The New York Times, Taïa "was born inside the public library of Rabat [...] where his dad worked as a janitor and where his family lived until he was 2." He grew up in Hay Salam, a neighborhood of Salé, a town near Rabat. His family was poor. He had nine siblings. He first came into contact with literature through his father's job at the library. Taïa was an effeminate boy who "always knew he was gay". Taïa's older brother, Abdelk'bir, was a cultural influence on Taïa, introducing him to the music of David Bowie, James Brown, and Queen, the films of David Cronenberg, Elia Kazan, and Ang Lee, and the books of Robert Louis Stevenson, Dostoevsky, and Tawfik al-Hakim. When he began college, he realized that my French was really poor. To master it, I decided to write my diary in French. For me that was the best way to be confronted with the language, to have a relationship with it without any mediation or intercession. My literary writing emerged from this relationship and that diary, which I kept for many years in Morocco. That's how I became a writer. His French skills "improved so much," thanks largely to his diary, "that he won a scholarship to study 18th-century French literature in Geneva." He went to Switzerland in 1998 and studied there for a semester. In 1999 he went to the Sorbonne, on another scholarship, to work on his doctoral thesis. In Paris "Taïa broke away from what he saw as the oppressive confines of his family and Moroccan society and began a process of self-actualization". ==Career==

Taïa's books deal with his life living in a homophobic society and have autobiographical background on the social experiences of the generation of Moroccans who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. Five of Taïa's novels have been published by Editions du Seuil in France. 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 My Morocco instead. 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." The book was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022. Essays and articles 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. Film 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. 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'')." Taïa has noted that he is coauthoring a play to be performed in Paris. ==Other professional activities==

In 2001, he appeared in a French gay film The Road to Love. He participated in October 2013 in the International Festival of Authors. He spoke at the Oslo Freedom Forum in May 2014. ==Views==

Homosexuality "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. 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. 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." 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." He said in 2012 that while the 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." 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. ===Islam and the Arab Spring=== 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." 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". 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." He has said that the "people who started the Arab Spring are young people, and the revolution was stolen from them by the Islamists." Other views Taïa is a fan of the films of Marilyn Monroe and of the directors Gus Van Sant, Douglas Sirk, and Tsai Ming-Liang. "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". ==Honors and awards==

Le jour du Roi was awarded the French Prix de Flore in 2010. ==Personal life==

In 2007, he publicly came out of the closet in an interview with the literary magazine TelQuel, which created controversy in Morocco. == Bibliography (selection) ==

• Mon Maroc. Séguier, 2000. English translation by Rachael Small: Another Morocco: Selected Stories, Semiotext(e), 2017. • Le rouge du tarbouche. Séguier, 2004. English translation by Rachael Small: Another Morocco: Selected Stories, Semiotext(e), 2017. • ''L'Armée du salut. Seuil, 2006. English translation by Frank Stock: Salvation Army'', Semiotext(e), 2009. • Maroc 1900–1960, un certain regard. Actes Sud, 2007 (with Frédéric Mitterrand). • Une mélancolie arabe. Seuil, 2008. English translation by Frank Stock: An Arab Melancholia, Semiotext(e), 2012. • Le jour du roi. Seuil, 2010. • Infidèles. Seuil, 2012. English translation by Alison Strayer: Infidels, Seven Stories Press, 2016. • Un pays pour mourir. Seuil, 2015. English translation by Emma Ramadan: A Country for Dying, Seven Stories Press, 2020 - won the 2021 PEN Translation Prize. • ''Celui qui est digne d'être aimé''. Seuil, 2017. • La Vie lente, roman, Seuil, 2019. • Vivre à ta lumière, roman, Seuil, 2022. • Le Bastion des larmes, roman, Julliard, 2024. == See also==