In 2013, the French writer Edouard Louis organized a symposium on autofiction at the École Normale Superieure, in Paris, where he was studying. The symposium was titled “Je vois écrit: Ecriture de soi et politique du récit” (“I Write You: Writing of the Self and the Politics of Narration”). The subject was of urgent interest to Louis: he was only months away from publishing his first novel, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (published in the United States, in 2017, as The End of Eddy), an autobiographical novel about growing up gay and poor in a conservative, working-class town in France. Among the day’s panelists was the writer Abdellah Taïa.  

Born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1973, Taïa moved to Paris in 1998; he published his first story collection in 2000 and another in 2004. Two years later, he came out as gay in the Moroccan daily TelQuel, making him the first openly homosexual Arab writer. In the aftermath, he wrote the bildungsroman L’Armée du salut (Salvation Army, 2009), an autobiographical novel whose publication in English was introduced by Edmund White. (He also directed a film adaption of the book in 2013.) Since then, he has published five other novels, including Le jour du Roi, which won the Prix de Flore in 2010.

Last year, Semiotext(e) published Another Morocco, a translated selection of stories from Taïa’s first two collections; Louis’s second novel, History of Violence, a best seller in France, was published last month in an English translation. In between these two events, Taïa and Louis, who have become friends, conducted a conversation over email—on recognizing similar concerns in one another’s work, resisting victimhood, and the effect of shame on writing. Our appreciation to Noura Wedell for her translation from the French.

—Nicole Rudick

TAÏA

How can I disappear from a world that doesn’t like me, a world that brutalizes and rapes me because I am a homosexual and an effeminate Moroccan adolescent? How can I die in the eyes of others but stay alive elsewhere, in some dream place, some true fiction, while I prepare my vengeance to come? Those two questions were my obsession when I was still in Morocco. How to flee the system in order to realize myself? How to hide in order to see better, to love better, to better transgress? But I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know where to learn how to protect myself. The world was very clearly dominated by the most powerful, by the most rich, by the dictators, the rapists, or by the parents who simply followed what they were told and sometimes killed their own children rather than give them guidance.

One day I understood the first thing I had to do in order to become a little strong, a little rebellious. I had to change my name. I had to stop being Abdellah Taïa. But in order to be what? To be whom? And where exactly? I chose this new name, Azzedine Matar. The first name was the name of one of my favorite Egyptian actors. As for the family name, in Arabic it means “rain.” The rain that washes and purifies, the rain that would allow me to be born again, that would allow me to resist. Since my adolescence, that’s been my name. Not my writer’s name but my secret name, my unsullied name, my name between the sky and me, between Allah and me. When I met you for the first time, Edouard, I felt immediate fraternity. Recognition. A tie that was so precise. A way of walking and trembling. It was during the symposium you organized at the École Normale Supérieure. The theme was “I Write You: Writing of the Self and Politics of Narration.” And when I discovered the title of your first book, The End of Eddy, I understood the nature of my feelings for you, of my intuition. You’d also thought about changing your name. To flee with a new name, to write anew, naked and more than naked … You are the first person to whom I’ve told this secret.  Read More