One day I discovered I had this new ability to write, to construct texts. I put into that diary and into French my identity, my dreams, my silliness, my panic attacks, my tears, my cleverness, and my sexuality, without shame. So, in order to make that reality happen, at the University of Rabat I studied French literature and started to write a diary-a crazy diary where I wrote all that I wanted in French. To make it my own by putting into it all that I am, and the world that I come from. At the same time, I made another decision: to start learning French seriously, to master it. I was living with my family, who are really very poor, but I decided that one day I would go. I discovered that in Paris there’s a great school, La Fémis, where you could learn how to make movies. Since the age of thirteen my dream was to become a filmmaker and transform my Moroccan reality into images, with no words. I never prepared myself to write seriously by, for example, reading other books and imitating other writers. I never dreamt of joining the literary world. I didn’t become a writer because I wanted to be one. Georgia Phillips-Amos When did you first think to write? And why in French?Ībdellah Taïa I’ve published many novels now, but I still have difficulty calling myself a writer. Their days and their transgressions are beautiful, but in a merciless world they can also be terrifying. “I change realities,” the protagonist Jallal says, “really and truly enter fiction, cross the border, take on other colors.” Taïa’s characters are fugitives constantly in motion: they get close, they love they manipulate, they spit at each other’s feet. Echoing Taïa’s own exile, these books take place between Morocco and Europe, where on the streets and in bedrooms his stories collide in tenderness and violent urgency.īuilt in a series of rhythmic soliloquies, Infidels is a timely novel about Islamic fundamentalism, intimacy, betrayal, and panic.

Following his first two novels, Salvation Army and An Arab Melancholia, the forthcoming Infidelsis his third to be translated into English. He is also a political activist who, in 2006, became the first renowned Arab artist to come out publicly in Morocco, a country where homosexuality continues to be illegal.īorn in 1973, Taïa has lived in Paris since 1998 and writes books and films in French.

He is an artist intimate with vulnerability and he is unafraid. On one occasion Taïa cites as a turning point, grown men on the street yelled in the night to wake him, threatening rape, and though he lay sandwiched between his mother and seven siblings in a shared bed, no one sheltered him. He defied death and would have to keep doing it: as a lone effeminate youth in his neighborhood, he was a target of sexual violence every day. At twelve years old in Salé, Morocco, Abdellah Taïa touched a high-voltage generator and lay dead for an hour before surprising everyone and breathing again.

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