Abdellah Taïa (; born 1973) is a Moroccan writer and filmmaker who writes in the French language and has been based in Paris since 1999. He has published nine novels, many of them heavily autobiographical. His books have been translated into Arabic and many European languages.
Described by Interview Magazine as a "literary transgressor and cultural paragon," Taïa claimed to be the first openly gay Arab writer in 2006, and, as of 2014, he claims to be the only openly homosexual Moroccan writer or filmmaker. His first movie, Salvation Army, is widely considered to have given Arab cinema "its first gay protagonist." Since his coming-out, according to one source, Taïa "has become an iconic figure in his homeland of Morocco and throughout the Arab world, and a beacon of hope in a country where homosexuality is illegal."
Early life and education 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 city 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 lived in Hay Salam from 1974 to 1998. He has described the experience:
As a young boy, he touched a high-voltage power generator and was unconscious and presumed dead for an hour. After he woke up he was labeled "the miracle boy". In 2010 he said: "I still have some of the electricity I got that day. I was somewhere during that 'dead time,' but where, I don't know. Perhaps the reason I write is because I want to know the answer to that question".
Taïa was an effeminate boy who "always knew he was gay". For most of his childhood, according to The New York Times, "he hid his sexuality as best he could, but his effeminate demeanor brought mockery and abuse, although it would later become a source of artistic inspiration." His family "probably always knew" he was gay, he later said, but they "never talked about it." When he was 11, a mob of men gathered outside his family's home and shouted for him to come out to be raped. "Everyone heard, not only my family but the whole neighbourhood," he later recalled. "What I saw clearly was that this is how society functions and that no one can protect you, not even your parents. That's when I realized I had to hide who I am".
He described this incident at length in a 2012 op-ed for The New York Times, titled "A Boy to Be Sacrificed":
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. He "spent his childhood watching Egyptian movies, detailing them in a scrapbook where he collected pictures of movie stars he admired, like Faten Hamama and Souad Hosni," according to The New York Times. "The freedom in Egyptian cinema, where women appeared without veils and alcohol was consumed openly, pervaded his living room and gave him hope." He has said that Egyptian films were "the only culture that we had access to in Morocco, as a poor family ... They taught us a lot about love, about society, about ourselves. And as a homosexual, they pretty much saved me, because they allowed me to escape to this whole other world." He has also said that "Egyptian movies saved me [...] There was already the idea of transgression through television happening in my house with my sisters. In my head, I connected that to homosexuality". At age thirteen, he "decided that one day [he] would go to Paris in order to be what [he] wanted to be: A director and filmmaker".
Taïa's parents "stressed education and sent five of their nine children to university." He studied French literature while living in Rabat, "his gaze set upon Paris and the possibilities that city represented to him, namely a career in film." Taïa said in 2010 that "It was clear to me that eventually I had to get to Paris, because this was the city of Isabelle Adjani [...] This was the city of Rimbaud and Marcel Proust [...] The target was to go there to be free as a homosexual, but at the same time to achieve these dreams—to write movies and books, and to dream big, if I may say that".
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. Two of his novels, Salvation Army (2009) and An Arab Melancholia (2012), have been published in English translation by Semiotext(e).
Mon Maroc (My Morocco) 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". 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.
Le Rouge du Tarbouche (The Red of the Fez) 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. 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".
Coming out 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." The resulting cover story in Tel Quel was headlined "Homosexuel, envers et contre tous" ("Homosexual, against all odds").
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.
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".
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.'
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".
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.'"
L'Armée du salut (Salvation Army) During the public outrage over his Tel Quel interview that Taïa wrote L'armée du Salut (Salvation Army), a "bildungsroman of his youthful dreams and indiscretions set in Rabat, Tangier, and Geneva".
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".
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". 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".
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."
Une mélancolie arabe (An Arab Melancholia) Une mélancolie arabe (An Arab Melancholia) is an "autobiographical novel of self-discovery [...] about an openly gay man who lives between cultures in Egypt and France".
Le jour de roi (The King's Day)