Abdellah Taïa
Author of Salvation Army (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
About the Author
Image credit: By Håkan Lindquist - From the photographer., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27432011
Works by Abdellah Taïa
Le bastion des larmes 1 copy
Associated Works
Queer: A Collection of LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday (2021) — Contributor, some editions — 64 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1973
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Morocco
- Birthplace
- Salé, Morocco
- Places of residence
- Paris, France
- Map Location
- Morocco
Members
Reviews
Real Rating: 4.75* of five
The Publisher Says: A story in in praise of a woman, a fighter, a survivor from the award-winning French-Moroccan novelist known for humanizing North Africa’s otherwise marginalized characters—prostitutes and thieves, trans and gay people in a world where being LGBTQ+ can be a dangerous act.
Shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022.
Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new show more novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taïa’s last novel, A Country for Dying.
Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina, the novel takes place from 1954 to 1999—from French colonization to the death of King Hassan II. In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa. The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her. Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of history. To survive and to have a little space of her own.
Malika is Taïa’s M'Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I read Taïa's novels to feel the world as I experience it from a the experience of a true stranger...étranger, foreigner, other, Other, the French don't parse things down near as fine-tipped as Anglophones do...who, like me, believes queer desire runs the world.
Save it, apologists for the inversion of nature that is hetero identity, it's just unnatural or we wouldn't have so many bloody-minded religious and civil laws shoring it up. One doesn't prohibit what people don't like.
As I was saying before that irritated tangent: Taïa’s stories center queer desire, feature queer people, are about things we understand a little differently than hetero people do. It's like a warm blanket in a freezing, windy steppe that isn't for you, doesn't give a shit about your happiness or satisfaction unless it somehow comes up and gives "them" a frisson of what you're expected to endure your entire life in which case shut up and stop bothering "them". This is Taïa’s reality, andthus where his fiction lives. It's a whole lot worse in god-ridden spaces than it currently is in the US.
So how does this relate to a story about Malika, an aging mother of eight whose life is ending, but whose track record is not close to what she ever wanted it to be? Her tragic inflection points are all around collisions with Authority, a thing every QUILTBAGger is deeply, existentially familiar with. She fails to keep her first husband home from the war that kills him, despite it being fought for the same people who have colonized their country. She fails to convince her money-motivated daughter to eschew the colonialist inducement of cash for submission and become a mail in a wealthy French family's service. Lastly, her gay son chooses his identity over her idea of duty to their country after he is raped by men in their neighborhood who claim to hate homosexuals...yet exert their sexual rights as straight men by fucking him...Rape is a crime of power, an abuse of autonomy and self-ownership, not sex itself, of course. That's pretty well established as fact. But someone needs to explain to me, slowly and in simple words, how the sex act they're engaging in makes any sense in this framework, given male penetration requires a physiological state of excitement to a sexual object.
I don't get it. But I'm back on a tangent.
Malika wants her powerful will to be obeyed because she is Right. The problem is she's correct a lot of the time, but that's not enough for her...she must be Right, and that is uniformly fatal to successful imposition of one's will. In a long life of mixed emotional results, that central truth does not come clear for her. It's the human condition to live life backwards, learning more and more as the need for applicable knowledge diminishes. It's the reason to have elders in the family system, expandable to encompass every level of social organization...a thing Malika would've reveled in, but did herself out of by insisting she be seen as Right. The world needs us oldsters to give up our addiction to the powerful substance of Rightness, and accept they're doing it differently now so offer advice without judgment.
As if.
So we read stories. It helps us all make sense of each other, helps us see the humanity in people deeply and fundamentally not-U, in Mitford's 1955 formulation. I'd offer all five stars with a big smile if the story was longer, developing the parts I was most curious about...Malika's time under colonialism would be so fascinating to learn about!...but this récit isn't designed to do that, and as it is written, is a beautiful evovation of a complex woman's life as a second-class partially empowered participant in a wildly passionately tumultuous world.
Her contributions to that world's growth earn my four and three-quarter star rating for their telling here. show less
The Publisher Says: A story in in praise of a woman, a fighter, a survivor from the award-winning French-Moroccan novelist known for humanizing North Africa’s otherwise marginalized characters—prostitutes and thieves, trans and gay people in a world where being LGBTQ+ can be a dangerous act.
Shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022.
Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new show more novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taïa’s last novel, A Country for Dying.
Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina, the novel takes place from 1954 to 1999—from French colonization to the death of King Hassan II. In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa. The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her. Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of history. To survive and to have a little space of her own.
Malika is Taïa’s M'Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I read Taïa's novels to feel the world as I experience it from a the experience of a true stranger...étranger, foreigner, other, Other, the French don't parse things down near as fine-tipped as Anglophones do...who, like me, believes queer desire runs the world.
Save it, apologists for the inversion of nature that is hetero identity, it's just unnatural or we wouldn't have so many bloody-minded religious and civil laws shoring it up. One doesn't prohibit what people don't like.
As I was saying before that irritated tangent: Taïa’s stories center queer desire, feature queer people, are about things we understand a little differently than hetero people do. It's like a warm blanket in a freezing, windy steppe that isn't for you, doesn't give a shit about your happiness or satisfaction unless it somehow comes up and gives "them" a frisson of what you're expected to endure your entire life in which case shut up and stop bothering "them". This is Taïa’s reality, andthus where his fiction lives. It's a whole lot worse in god-ridden spaces than it currently is in the US.
So how does this relate to a story about Malika, an aging mother of eight whose life is ending, but whose track record is not close to what she ever wanted it to be? Her tragic inflection points are all around collisions with Authority, a thing every QUILTBAGger is deeply, existentially familiar with. She fails to keep her first husband home from the war that kills him, despite it being fought for the same people who have colonized their country. She fails to convince her money-motivated daughter to eschew the colonialist inducement of cash for submission and become a mail in a wealthy French family's service. Lastly, her gay son chooses his identity over her idea of duty to their country after he is raped by men in their neighborhood who claim to hate homosexuals...yet exert their sexual rights as straight men by fucking him...Rape is a crime of power, an abuse of autonomy and self-ownership, not sex itself, of course. That's pretty well established as fact. But someone needs to explain to me, slowly and in simple words, how the sex act they're engaging in makes any sense in this framework, given male penetration requires a physiological state of excitement to a sexual object.
I don't get it. But I'm back on a tangent.
Malika wants her powerful will to be obeyed because she is Right. The problem is she's correct a lot of the time, but that's not enough for her...she must be Right, and that is uniformly fatal to successful imposition of one's will. In a long life of mixed emotional results, that central truth does not come clear for her. It's the human condition to live life backwards, learning more and more as the need for applicable knowledge diminishes. It's the reason to have elders in the family system, expandable to encompass every level of social organization...a thing Malika would've reveled in, but did herself out of by insisting she be seen as Right. The world needs us oldsters to give up our addiction to the powerful substance of Rightness, and accept they're doing it differently now so offer advice without judgment.
As if.
So we read stories. It helps us all make sense of each other, helps us see the humanity in people deeply and fundamentally not-U, in Mitford's 1955 formulation. I'd offer all five stars with a big smile if the story was longer, developing the parts I was most curious about...Malika's time under colonialism would be so fascinating to learn about!...but this récit isn't designed to do that, and as it is written, is a beautiful evovation of a complex woman's life as a second-class partially empowered participant in a wildly passionately tumultuous world.
Her contributions to that world's growth earn my four and three-quarter star rating for their telling here. show less
The Publisher Says: Set in Salé, Morocco—the hometown Abdellah Taïa fled but to which he returns again and again in his acclaimed fiction and films—Infidels follows the life of Jallal, the son of a prostitute witch doctor—"a woman who knew men, humanity, better than anyone. In sex. Beyond sex." As a ten-year-old sidekick to his mother, Jallal spits in the face of her enemies both real and imagined.
The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of show more love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless—a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match—the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: Stellar, stellar read. I was sent to the online translation-dictionary at least 10 times, which is a good thing for me. It's a genuine pleasure to look at and hold, as you'd expect from a Seven Stories book. The story only makes the aesthetic pleasure better, as well-crafted as such a concentrated fiction can possibly be.
As with all of Taïa's writing, this is a spectacularly beautiful-sounding text.
You will never know how much the moment costs while you're in it, but that is the precise inflection point where a youth becomes a warrior.
It is Part III that seems to cause Muslims the most outrage, the betrayed hurt of being misunderstood from within; Taïa is one of their own! He sends young Jallal into such pain and loneliness that not even a god could endure; a mother murdered before her body dies and all for what? What justifies the torture of another soul? (Nothing, of course, but there's always a reason even when there can be no excuse.) And here is Mouad, a stranger, a Belgian whose heart heard the Prophet's call; he has parts of Jallal's mother that her son can't see or hear, so naturally he hates the man who usurped his child's place beside his mother.
But it is Mouad who, indirectly, leads Jallal to Mathis-Mahmoud; leads him to a death that is Resurrection and completion.
Yes, the horror happens.
But God is beyond mere human hates and judgments. Mathis-Mahmoud and Jallal are, in a soliloquy of God's, united and blessed and made whole together.
The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of show more love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless—a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match—the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: Stellar, stellar read. I was sent to the online translation-dictionary at least 10 times, which is a good thing for me. It's a genuine pleasure to look at and hold, as you'd expect from a Seven Stories book. The story only makes the aesthetic pleasure better, as well-crafted as such a concentrated fiction can possibly be.
As with all of Taïa's writing, this is a spectacularly beautiful-sounding text.
War was declared from the very first note. This woman...was not afraid of repeating herself, of saying the same words over and over, fighting a solitary battle. The battle of love, of course.You whose love gave my life flavor, color
I'll never give you up, whatever happens
Whatever happens
And if a word was said in anger
And injured our hearts
We forget our sadness
And which of us spoke,
It's through the soul that we love
We'll always be together
All our lives, together
Whatever happens
I loved you
When I found you
Before my eyes a distant dream
Was in my eyes
Out of reach
The next moment it was in my hand
Who chooses to leave paradise?
Why destroy our own hopes
And spend the rest of our lives regretting
What happened?
You whose love gave my life flavor, color
I'll never give you up, whatever happens
Whatever happens
Never
Never
Give you up
Whatever happens.
It took our breath away.
The song lasted almost seven minutes. It was so powerful. And the voice...rang out from the heart of the war. War to the bitter end, the final breath. ...
"The man she's talking about in that song doesn't exist. No man can be worthy of such love and sacrifice."
You will never know how much the moment costs while you're in it, but that is the precise inflection point where a youth becomes a warrior.
It is Part III that seems to cause Muslims the most outrage, the betrayed hurt of being misunderstood from within; Taïa is one of their own! He sends young Jallal into such pain and loneliness that not even a god could endure; a mother murdered before her body dies and all for what? What justifies the torture of another soul? (Nothing, of course, but there's always a reason even when there can be no excuse.) And here is Mouad, a stranger, a Belgian whose heart heard the Prophet's call; he has parts of Jallal's mother that her son can't see or hear, so naturally he hates the man who usurped his child's place beside his mother.
But it is Mouad who, indirectly, leads Jallal to Mathis-Mahmoud; leads him to a death that is Resurrection and completion.
Yes, the horror happens.
But God is beyond mere human hates and judgments. Mathis-Mahmoud and Jallal are, in a soliloquy of God's, united and blessed and made whole together.
You see, I'm like you. In misfortune and in power. Divine and orphaned. I'm made of the same stuff as you. I'm in you. In every body. Every night. Every dream.show less
Don't cry, Jallal.
Take his hand, Mathis.
Go. Go. As brothers of the heart. There, behind that door, life has not even begun for you.
Go. On the way you'll pass a beautiful pomegranate tree. Pick two pomegranates. And later, before you go to sleep, take a moment to eat them.
Javier was there, in my body, in my skin, instead of me. I no longer knew what he wanted from me. I no longer knew what I wanted from him.
I wasn't myself anymore.
I had to find myself again. And to do that I let myself get lost on the streets of Cairo.
Taïa's short autobiographical novel takes you from growing up in Morocco, knowing he's interested in other boys who only want him back if they get to call him a girl, to life in exile in Paris, to movie shoots in Cairo (film, of course, is show more about shining through something to create an image that's both true and false), through near-death and near-rape experiences to heartbreaks and some sense of self-knowledge.
The prose is feverish, skittish, but still very self-assured. It's never a simple novel of Overcoming Homophobia or Surviving Racism, instead reading like a series of short breathless vignettes on the inextricable nature of infatuation, sex, fear, body, memory, culture. The fearful need of the fucker to feminize the fuckee, the need for absolute certainty of one's position in relation to others and oneself (the Biblical sense of "knowing" isn't just a linguistic gag). An extremely physical novel, as if the very existence of a gay African body were an important act of actively being oneself.
I turn the last page and wish there was more of it, that it didn't just stop. Then again, by the time it does, it's lobbed itself like a benevolent handgrenade at its reader, and doesn't offer a simple denouement. It continues being. show less
I wasn't myself anymore.
I had to find myself again. And to do that I let myself get lost on the streets of Cairo.
Taïa's short autobiographical novel takes you from growing up in Morocco, knowing he's interested in other boys who only want him back if they get to call him a girl, to life in exile in Paris, to movie shoots in Cairo (film, of course, is show more about shining through something to create an image that's both true and false), through near-death and near-rape experiences to heartbreaks and some sense of self-knowledge.
The prose is feverish, skittish, but still very self-assured. It's never a simple novel of Overcoming Homophobia or Surviving Racism, instead reading like a series of short breathless vignettes on the inextricable nature of infatuation, sex, fear, body, memory, culture. The fearful need of the fucker to feminize the fuckee, the need for absolute certainty of one's position in relation to others and oneself (the Biblical sense of "knowing" isn't just a linguistic gag). An extremely physical novel, as if the very existence of a gay African body were an important act of actively being oneself.
I turn the last page and wish there was more of it, that it didn't just stop. Then again, by the time it does, it's lobbed itself like a benevolent handgrenade at its reader, and doesn't offer a simple denouement. It continues being. show less
Zahira tells us about the death of her father in the family home in the Moroccan city of Salé, and about how she became a prostitute and moved to Paris; on the eve of surgery, her Algerian friend Aziz - another sex-worker - tells us about his experiences and why he feels he needs to become a woman; Mojtaba, an Iranian exile, writes to his mother to tell her that he's on the run from the Iranian secret services because of his role in student protests against the regime, and rather show more incautiously asks her to check up on the boyfriend he left behind; and we find out part of what happened to Zahira's aunt Zinab after she disappeared.
Taïa's style takes a bit of getting used to. His main characters in this book are angry, poorly educated people who speak French as a second language and use intonation and repetition to make their points, not sophisticated literary language. At first it feels a bit like being trapped next to a crazy person on the bus, but you soon get beyond that and start to see how Taïa is unpacking their complex personalities through the rant. It's all rather cleverer than it looks.
On the other hand, I'm not too sure that this really works as a novel. He picks up and drops his characters rather arbitrarily, and none of them finds any kind of closure within the text, not even implicitly. He's more interested in digging out the underlying problems that got them where they are than in telling us whether they stand a chance of arriving where they would like to be. And those problems are pretty much the ones we would expect: homophobia, oppression of women, colonialism, and racial prejudice between Arab and Black Moroccans. Obviously, having had first-hand experience, he's in a good position to tell us more about these issues than we could guess from our general knowledge, but there isn't space in this book for a huge amount of that sort of detail.
And I had one pretty big caveat: this is a book by a male writer in which two women talk in the first person about how being sex-workers has had a perversely empowering effect on their lives. I can understand how that could be, in the specific context of the book where the women wouldn't have had any control over their own lives if they'd stayed within the family, but all the same I think I would be more inclined to trust that sort of statement if it came from a female author.
So, having picked it up for the subject-matter, it turns out that it's the style I found more interesting... show less
Taïa's style takes a bit of getting used to. His main characters in this book are angry, poorly educated people who speak French as a second language and use intonation and repetition to make their points, not sophisticated literary language. At first it feels a bit like being trapped next to a crazy person on the bus, but you soon get beyond that and start to see how Taïa is unpacking their complex personalities through the rant. It's all rather cleverer than it looks.
On the other hand, I'm not too sure that this really works as a novel. He picks up and drops his characters rather arbitrarily, and none of them finds any kind of closure within the text, not even implicitly. He's more interested in digging out the underlying problems that got them where they are than in telling us whether they stand a chance of arriving where they would like to be. And those problems are pretty much the ones we would expect: homophobia, oppression of women, colonialism, and racial prejudice between Arab and Black Moroccans. Obviously, having had first-hand experience, he's in a good position to tell us more about these issues than we could guess from our general knowledge, but there isn't space in this book for a huge amount of that sort of detail.
And I had one pretty big caveat: this is a book by a male writer in which two women talk in the first person about how being sex-workers has had a perversely empowering effect on their lives. I can understand how that could be, in the specific context of the book where the women wouldn't have had any control over their own lives if they'd stayed within the family, but all the same I think I would be more inclined to trust that sort of statement if it came from a female author.
So, having picked it up for the subject-matter, it turns out that it's the style I found more interesting... show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 21
- Also by
- 4
- Members
- 600
- Popularity
- #41,874
- Rating
- 3.4
- Reviews
- 14
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- 81
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