Salvation Army

An autobiographical novel by turns naive and cunning, funny and moving, this most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Taia is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. Salvation Army is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of Taia's life with complete disclosure from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Sale, through a sexual awakening in Tangier charged by the young writer's attraction to his eldest brother, to a disappointing arrival in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood. In so doing, Salvation Army manages to burn through the author's first-person singularity to embody the complex melange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture.
Recently hailed by his native country's press as "the first Moroccan to have the courage to publicly assert his difference," Taia, through his calmly transgressive work, has "outed" himself as "the only gay man" in a country whose theocratic law still declares homosexuality a crime. The persistence of prejudices on all sides of the Mediterranean and Atlantic makes the translation of Taia's work both a literary and political event.

Abdellah Taia (b. 1973) is the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco. Though Moroccan, he has lived in Paris for the last eight years. He is the author of Mon Maroc and Le rouge du tarbouche, both translated into Dutch and Spanish. He also appeared in Remi Lange's 2004 film Tarik el Hob (released in English as The Road to Love).