For many years, we were really poor, we didn't have enough food and we fought with each other a lot. The tastes, the smells, the images, the ideas of fear and transgression are all coming from this house, this poor family that I love and hate at the same time. Life for me still revolves around these three rooms. One room for my father, the second for my older brother, Abdelkebir, who exerted a big influence on me, and the last one for the rest of the family: my mother, my six sisters, my little brother and me. The house where I lived there was very small, only three rooms for eleven people. Everything I want to put in my book is also coming from this world. He has described the experience: Įverything I have known about the world comes from this city and this neighborhood. Taïa lived in Hay Salam from 1974 to 1998. He first came into contact with literature through his father's job at the library. 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 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 ĭescribed by Interview Magazine as a 'literary transgressor and cultural paragon,' Taïa became the first openly gay Arab writer in 2006, and, as of 2014, he remains the only openly homosexual Moroccan writer or filmmaker. His books have been translated into Basque, Dutch, German, English, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish and Arabic. He has published eight novels, many of them heavily autobiographical. Abdellah Taïa ( Arabic: عبد الله الطايع born 1973) is a Moroccan writer and filmmaker who writes in the French language and has been based in Paris since 1998.

A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa