(The cover of An Arab Melancholia describes Taïa as “the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco.”) Both Taïas grew up in Salé, the coastal city that faces the Moroccan capital, Rabat, a city known for its “pirates. And the Taïa of the novel resembles the Taïa who has made himself known through public interviews, both in France and in Morocco, where he is something of a literary celebrity and countercultural icon. As in Salvation Army, the protagonist of this short book is a young man named Abdellah Taïa. Though both the French and American editions name An Arab Melancholia a “novel,” it reads like memoir. Here, Taïa gently lets his reader know that he is translating himself and his experience from the Moroccan Arabic of his youth to the French “script” of his writing. That space-that disjuncture-has long been a preoccupation of writers from the Maghreb, from the Moroccan novelist and critic Abdelkebir Khatibi ( Love in Two Languages) to the Algerian-born Jacques Derrida ( Monolingualism of the Other). The distance that remains is not unlike another gap that is impossible to erase, that of a Moroccan émigré translating himself and the conversations of those who have passed through his life into a French language already at a remove from Moroccan experience, even though familiar. French is more efficient-verbs imply their subjects-but the experience of reading these books in Stock’s English comes close to capturing the infectious cadence of Taïa’s chain of short sentences.
Frank Stock has translated both works from Taïa’s French originals, and renders the haunting rhythm of the author’s deceivingly simple prose. It is his second work to appear in English, following Salvation Army, which appeared in the US in 2009. That is where desire seems to lie, and where longing-and melancholia-is to be found in his writing.Īn Arab Melancholia is Taïa’s fourth book of fiction, published originally in Paris in 2008.
bringing out the apertures within and between words and thoughts, eliciting the unbridgeable gap between individuals.
At times, he uses the ellipsis suggestively. Abdellah Taïa writes short sentences, often without verbs.
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