Language and Literature across Borders: An Interview with Abdellah Taїa

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the second
installment of the University of
Pittsburgh Humanities podcast,
a series devoted to exploring the
humanities, their intersections with
other disciplines, and their value
in the public world.
I'm Dan Kubis. My
guest today is Abdellah Taїa, a
Moroccan writer and filmmaker based
in Paris.
This might sound naive, but I do
think that the existence of a book--
the existence is something
that already could
make some changes happen.
That's what I think.
Otherwise, I will not be going
through this crazy process
of writing a book.
Since 1999, Taїa has written
a number of novels, stories, and
essays that have contributed to an
ongoing conversation between Arab
Muslims and the West.
Many of his works draw on his
experience growing up in the small
Moroccan village of Salé, including
living in a three-room house with
a single room for him, his mother,
his six sisters, and his younger
brother.
This is the room he says from which
his writing was born.
In 2006, Taїa openly
discussed his homosexuality for the
first time in an interview in the
French magazine Tel Quel. For
Taїa, coming out caused rifts
in his family that have yet to heal.
It also stirred up controversy in
Moroccan society, where
homosexuality remains illegal.
In other quarters, he was hailed as
a hero and as someone with the
courage to speak about his identity
in difficult circumstances.
Then, as now, Taїa sees
his achievement not only in terms of
personal freedom but also in terms
of the influence of his works on
broader social change in Morocco
and beyond.
In 2013, Abdellah Taїa
directed the film adaptation of one
of his early novels, Salvation Army.
This film gave the Arab World its
first onscreen gay protagonist.
For Taїa, the film was the
culmination of a lifelong dream to
be a filmmaker, a dream that started
with his watching Egyptian films
with his family in Morocco.
I began by asking him about this
dream and about the lengths to which
he has gone to pursue it throughout
his life.
Well, from the beginning, the
first desire was
in me to become a filmmaker.
So in order to realize
that dream, I thought I had to go
to Paris.
Because there is this famous
school-- famous cinema
school called La Fémis.
And one day, I realized that my
French is not good, so I had to
master it.
And I thought, "How I'm going to do
this? I am living in a poor
family, and no one's really mastered
French language around me." So
I thought that after high school,
I should study
French language and literature
in the University of Rabat,
the capital of Morocco.
And that's what I did.
But what happened is, when I arrived
at the University of Rabat, I
realized that it will be
harder than I
thought to master
French language.
So
I started to write a journal
and a kind of a diary in French
language.
I mean just to see what it is
to write in French language.
What does it taste
- French words?
And with the years,
I understood as well that I will
not be able to achieve the first
dream to become a filmmaker quickly.
Because I still-- at that time
I was still poor
and I thought, "Okay, I'm doing
French literature.
I should continue." And
I actually had become
very good student in Rabat.
And so I just continued
the process.
And after I graduated,
I started in
Rabat what
we call the [foreign], first
year of the doctoral session
to-- about
[foreign]. And that's how I got
a scholarship.
And they sent me to Geneva first
and then to Paris.
So I found myself
already and something that
I didn't expect that I would
like, which is to analyze.
To read, to
analyze, to imagine
what is literature,
what is the
process of writing.
So
to become a filmmaker
and even to become a writer,
I did achieve that by
studying in the university.
First in Morocco and then
Geneva and Paris.
I can say that I liked it very,
very much.
I liked the fact that we were
talking about talking
and spending so much time analyzing
writings and books -
things that are, for me,
life.
I never saw it as something
outside
of life. And that's what I loved
about that process.
So you've talked about the origins
of your work being the room that
you lived in with your family when
you were younger in Morocco.
And in particular, you talk about
the physical space that you shared
with your family at that time.
You also have
talked about the process of writing.
Your process of writing is something
physical in that you write with a
pen instead of writing on
a computer.
Can you talk about that a bit?
The sense of writing being something
that is physical rather than
intellectual for you?
Yeah, of course. Because to write is
to go back to something
where it all started.
And for me, it started in that
poor house in Morocco with my
family, my sisters, my
two brothers. We were really big
family and poor and big family.
So I would
say that I learned life
there.
And what is life?
The taste of life, the complications
of life, sex, revolution,
fights, all those
things. So, I mean, I didn't wait
until I read Marcel Proust or
Montaigne or Moliere to discover
what is the drama
happening in life.
What is the tragedy of life?
What is the invisible
happening while we are living
on this earth?
So all these things happened already
there.
So I don't think it would be fair
that now that I had the
ability and the possibility to write
and to be published, to
turn my back to those
first years where everything
happened in me.
I could tell you what I
love in Marcel Proust was I love
in [foreign], but that
would be only an intellectual way,
an intellectual aspect of
my life. And actually, what I
learned from literature
from my school years, although
the professors didn't give
us this link, is that,
as I told you earlier,
books, films, paintings
are not something happening outside
of our reality.
We can make the link.
I see that there are here a lot of
paintings of Vermeer.
I love Vermeer, but when I see
Vermeer, I don't see only Holland.
I see a lot of things
that are coming as well from
my
family, the rooms, and the
bodies of my sisters next
to me. Because we were
for many, many years, I spent--
I mean, my days and my nights with
my sisters next to me and sleeping
next to me and my mother dominating
us all the time.
Can you talk a little bit about the
importance of Egyptian cinema to you
as an artist - and that is as both
as a writer and a filmmaker?
So I discovered
cinema first on Moroccan TV
with Egyptian movies
and the American movie-- the
Western.
Friday, it was Egyptian film,
and Sunday, it was a Western.
So the images I was
discovering at the time impacted me
so much that
I think the way the cinema
works, the editing, the narratives,
the ellipsis - that are
a lot in the cinema - are
in my brain.
And they come out
when I write, because my way
of writing is very edited.
It's not linear.
Never.
It's always with the big
ellipsis and cuts.
Lots and lots.
So cinema
influences me a lot, a lot,
a lot more than literature.
The dream to become a filmmaker
helped me to become a writer
because I had to master French in
order to become a filmmaker in
Paris.
But literature and
film, for me, are the same
things. Meaning
it's all images.
First of
all, images.
I construct images.
I construct images even without
words.
I am obliged to use the words,
but it's first of all
and at the end images.
All about the images.
And also particular actresses also
have meant a lot to you.
I have in mind Isabelle Adjani
and also Marilyn Monroe.
You've spoken
of the importance that
their images have had in your
life.
I think it's because they were free
bodies.
To be an actor,
it takes, I think, a lot of courage.
I mean, even in America.
I mean, to be in the image and
to be in front of people and
to be able to
act, which means to be
much more alive than you
are in real life.
We are not all able to do that.
So some actresses have
that ability and miraculous
ability than others.
Marilyn Monroe, for sure,
had more than talent.
She had the grace
of giving life through
the way she acted on camera.
Isabelle Adjani, Soa Hosny, Nadia
Lutfi, Hind Rostom,
a lot of actresses, maybe
mostly actresses, because
I think they are much more brave
than actors - men actors.
Like women are much more brave
in reality than men.
And they were doing
crazy things and then [inaudible]
and yet very, very much
political.
So I identified
maybe as a gay men,
a little bit pushed away
in the corner.
So maybe I identified
with that.
The body of actresses.
A writer that's been very important
to you is the Moroccan author,
Mohamed Choukri.
Very much.
He's also someone who is very
important to the character in
Salvation Army.
That character, in fact, says that
Choukri introduced him to
literature.
Is that also true for you?
Yes. Mohamed Choukri is
maybe the only writer in the world
that I would say
he had some impact
on me as an individual
and as
a writer.
Because what Choukri has
done in Morocco, in
Moroccan society, in the Moroccan
literature, is something
huge. Because he brought
the language, the dirty
language, Arabic language of the
streets, and he put it
in the book, meaning that
he was more
naked than I
will ever be.
I mean, he was more than naked, more
than brave, more than courageous.
I talk about homosexuality
in my books, my homosexuality,
but I feel like that it's nothing
compared to the achievement
he has done
in his books. So, yes.
I think I'm not the only one in
Morocco to say that
I feel like I'm his son,
but not in a way that I-- a
dominating father.
I feel like he's
a cool dad.
He's a cool. And his literary
gesture was so
brave and so
real that impacted
so many people, even
the ones that
don't read.
So it's not like I
read the book-- one of his books,
and I say, "I'm going to do like
him." No, it was not like that.
His impact to our
lives, especially in the eighties,
was beyond literature.
And that's something, again, I like.
When literature is not
fixed only in the borders
or the frontiers of literature.
So, given the very strong connection
that you have to the Arabic language
to Choukri to Morocco,
I wonder if you can talk a little
bit about your decision to write in
French rather than in your native
language?
Well, it is strange
that someone like me writes
in French, which is
definitely not my language and not
the language of the people I'm
coming from.
Because the poor people,
they don't really master French
language in Morocco.
So that's my first
impression of French, that it's a
language that is not
for us. That's what they said.
It's not for poor people.
It's a language for the elite, for
the rich people, for the
political people in Morocco.
So for many
years, it was like
a kind of promise I
made to myself and to my
father that I will never
learn that language.
I will never master it.
But what happens again is the
cinema. It's
the desire to be a filmmaker and
the discovery of this
school of cinema in Paris.
That changed a little bit-- that
pushed me to not respect
my promise-- my promises
to my father.
So I
studied French language, although
I had the feeling that it's
not my language.
And until now, I
cannot say that I am totally
comfortable in language.
I cannot say
that it's a language that will
stay in me forever.
For instance, I feel
like if I stopped-- if
I am like living in Argentina
and starting to learn Spanish,
I think French will go away.
That's just
a feeling.
But a true feeling that it
means that when I write, I had to
deal with all this
mixed and complex
feelings I have for French
language.
So I don't know if I
would be able to
have the same interesting
and complex relationship
with Arabic and to write in Arabic.
Arabic it's something that dominates
me and knows me better than
I know myself. In French,
with French language,
I know that I can fight.
I can have a battle.
I can do things.
I can fight for something.
So in a way, Mohamed
Choukri
didn't influence me in
this.
He was a big model
for all of us.
But
if I was his,
I mean, his true son, I would
have written in Arabic.
One thing I'm interested in is many
of the writers who
I know of who write autobiographical
fiction, they feel a need to
draw a distinction between their
characters and their lives.
I wonder if you feel the same
distinction about some of the
autobiographical works that you've
written.
No. I don't feel the need
to separate myself
from what I do in
books-- the people I put
in books.
For me, they have to be real.
They have already to exist
in objectively, physically,
in the reality, in our reality
on Earth.
And I have to be in connection
with them.
I have had experiences
with them through them.
Otherwise, I will never be able
to-- I don't feel
the need to
have some literary
posture just to say this is a
book you don't-- as
I told you, what I'm really
interested in is to break the
barriers between
the written words and
the feelings, the things happening
in real life before the words.
I don't want to be
outside of life
when I write.
And I don't want when
I read a book to feel like this book
has nothing to do with life-- my
life, in a way.
So even when I write
about other people, like for
my two last books,
they are fictional.
But not fictional
in the way that I don't know them
or have nothing to do with them.
A lot of characteristics
of them are coming from me.
Even when they are bad and
even when they are monstrous. The
army.
And that was I want to give
to the readers.
This separation of borders.
I recently saw an interview, for
example, where you were referred to
as a memoirist.
And some novelists might object to
this label, but
it doesn't seem like this is
something that matters as much to
you. Is that right?
No, because I am not very much
theoretical.
I mean, I studied French language
and French literature, but the
theories of French and France
are not for me.
And I don't want to bring
some theories and to put them in my
reality in order to have some
explanation-- through the
explanation, whatever.
I don't know. Or rational or
a rational explanation.
I don't think reality-- I don't
think books or art
is here to explain or
to know.
It's just there.
And I don't think
when I write that I am a gay writer,
or I'm doing a gay book or gay
literature or Maghreb literature.
I'm just trying to
build something that is
real and true.
Totally, totally true.
If some other people want to
put their theories on my
books, that's something else
that I don't want to know
about.
Because I don't care about to being
a writer.
If I don't-- I don't
want to
have a prestige or something.
I mean, I write books.
That's it.
So in the second chapter of
Salvation Army, the character--
the Abdellah character in that
book, he
starts writing as a way of
understanding what's happening to
him while he's on vacation with his
older brother. He's writing, in
other words, as a way of-- a method
of understanding his experience.
I wonder if you look at writing in a
similar way as
a means to understanding experience.
Because when I was studying French
language in Rabat, in Geneva,
I mean, I had read all these
French theories, [foreign], all
these things. But I
always thought that I should forget
about them because otherwise,
I would be colonized
again.
And
it will push me to
see my
reality and
what is the experience of life
in a way that is not mine.
And that thing will only please
some people, some Western
people.
They have already their own
ideas on people like me coming from
Morocco, from Muslim
country, etc.
And that's something that I don't
want to-- I don't want to give
that-- to be the
image they are expecting me to
be or to say
what they are expecting me to say.
Even when I talk about
homosexuality, I
don't want to be the
victim they are expecting me to
be. Because, of course, when you are
gay, it's hard, it's
tough, etc.
But I always try
to put it in the big picture,
not only the suffering
picture, because when you are
gay, you
are not only gay.
You have other things
that is happening in your life,
in your body.
So again,
question of frontiers and borders.
One other thing I was interested
about is in interviews, you have
talked about your generation in
Morocco being the "I" generation.
And you've also talked about this
in the focus on the "I"
or on the individual as a sort of
betrayal.
And particularly in your case, this
is something that involves
expressing your sexuality.
I wonder if you can talk about that
sense of kind of focusing in the
"I" as a kind of betrayal.
Yeah, I think I wrote this text
The Generation of the
"I", I
think, in maybe 2007 or something
like that in French.
And I think since then, I
changed a little bit my opinions
about from that text.
Of course, the
"I" is very important in a
society like Moroccan society, but
that doesn't mean that this "I"
is-- of course, he has to betray
some people,
but it's only the people we betray.
We don't betray
what is really important
going on between and
deeply between us.
And that
thing is not recognized by
the society when someone stands
up and say, "I am different.
I
want this, and I want this." He
is socially and politically
pushed to be a traitor.
But being a traitor doesn't mean
that you turn your back to
what is in common between
your illiterate
mother and you.
Again, it's not because I
can write and publish that
my "I"
is more important than the "I" of
my mother.
That's the
nuance that now I can bring to that
text. Because in that text,
I was maybe more self-conscious,
more egoist than
maybe I am-- maybe I am less
egoist today or I have
other perspectives.
So my "I"
is the "I" of my mother, is the
"I" of my sisters.
When I speak with and
about my "I", I speak about them
as well.
Because I really believe that
literature, the
arts in general, it's not only
made for the cultivated people.
Otherwise, that would make no sense.
I mean, if you are speaking only to
the people who already can
understand everything without
me, without my help,
that's what the need of the
literature is.
So your books are available in
Morocco now, but many years ago,
they probably would not have been.
Do you see this change as a positive
thing for the country?
Well, because of my background,
because of my origins, I mean, poor,
gay, Muslim,
and speaking and writing in French.
So that puts me not
in the right place they are
expecting me to be.
So I
am just very happy that my books
are available there.
It's already really huge.
It's important
for gay people
first.
It's important for my
generation. And
it's important that
someone, I mean, coming
from poor people to be able
to write, to be published in France,
to be translated into English in
America.
I mean, I'm not
proud of anything, but I am
conscious of the importance
of those
presences.
I mean, I know that my books are not
bestsellers like, I don't know,
other writers,
but still,
it's something that I am very
happy with.
I mean, I
totally-- I would totally understand
if a young
Moroccan man finds
out about me and started to read
about me and read my books that
he
or she will see
himself in what I do.
Especially that I don't-- in
the way I write, it's
not typically
classical.
It doesn't
respect the traditions.
So we're just
again being
naked whether they like it or not.
You've talked in the past about your
desire to renew Islam,
but also you talked about the
fact that you feel that the sources
of this renewal are already present.
And I wonder if you can talk about
that a little bit.
I mean, I was born in a Muslim
country. I was raised there.
I lived 25 years there.
So Islam is
not these cliches--
the savage people.
The
West think they are.
So
for me, it's culture,
feeling, smells, experiences,
transgressions, so, so many things.
I cannot just
erase that
from my body and from my memory,
saying, "I am not Muslim anymore."
To say I am not Muslim anymore means
that I don't exist, that I am dead.
Of course, there are problems within
Muslim people with
a lot of issues to work on today.
That's something else.
I'm talking about how
Islam as
a social structure-- as a
cultural structure
have penetrated me, if I
might say, and my body and
the way they are in my imagination.
That means
that when I write, when I speak,
those structures are here.
So how could I say
I'm not Muslim anymore?
It means no--
it has no sense to me.
I know that Islam--
they say Islam condemned
homosexuality, etc.,
but the contradictions are
everywhere.
So why only to stop
on this one?
It's up to me to make
my own mixture
if I might say. So
it's not that I want to defend Islam
and to say this is a good religion,
nonviolent religion, etc.
It's not my purpose.
My purpose is
I am coming from that country.
And the contradictions, the idea of
freedom, the idea of culture is
coming as well from
this thing called Islam.
So you see the possibility for
change in the complications in
everyday lives of the people.
Is that right?
Of course. Because at the end,
what stops a revolution to happen
is the political people.
It's how these politics, they want
to get to stay in power
and to stop the change to happen.
So
I know from inside that
the changes-- the little changes
are already there.
I don't know if there will be a big
revolution that will change
the face of the whole Muslim
countries, but little changes
are already there.
And these complications that you're
talking about in these complexities. This
is what you want your
work to connect to?
Absolutely.
It's a movement, something
happening. I mean, it's not because
you are poor that you
live in a poor wage.
The poor are somehow rich if
I might say.
They deal with reality.
They become clever.
They do things.
They don't live in the images of
what we have about poor people.
So when I write,
I don't give
poor images on poor people.
It's impossible.
I
have always avoid all this, again,
what is expected
from someone like me.
And that doesn't mean that I
allow as well myself to be much more
free than my family
is expecting me to be.
And then exposing these
complications and the kind of the
lives, these everyday lives of
people the way that you're talking
about.
Is this something you feel like that
can contribute to change?
I know that in the West,
maybe people don't believe that
literature will make the change
anymore.
But maybe I might be naive.
But from the country where I am
coming from and
the history we had,
this might sound naive, but I
do think that the existence of a
book-- the existence
is something that already
could make some changes
happen.
That's what I think.
Otherwise, I will not be going
through this crazy process
of writing a book.
That's it for this installment of
the University of Pittsburgh
Humanities podcast.
Our guest was Abdellah Taїa, whose
film Salvation Army was released in
2013.
We would like to thank the
University of Pittsburgh's Office of
the Provost for their support for
the Year of the Humanities.
Our next podcast will feature
Margaret Homans, Professor of
English and Women's, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies at Yale
University.
For more information on the Year of
the Humanities and to see our
upcoming events, visit our website
at www.humanities.pitt.edu.

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Title
Language and Literature across Borders: An Interview with Abdellah Taїa
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Taïa, Abdellah, 1973- (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
December 3, 2015
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0002
Description
An interview with Abdellah Taïa, a Moroccan author and filmmaker who created the Arab world's first on-screen gay protagonist in his 2013 film "Salvation Army." The interview, conducted as part of Pitt's Year of the Humanities in the University, addresses Taïa's life and work, and the impact it has had on a broader public.
Extent
31 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Motion picture producers and directors
Gays in motion pictures
Taïa, Abdellah, 1973-
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
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Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

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Language and Literature across Borders: An Interview with Abdellah Taїa

In collections