LIVING IN YOUR LIGHT, sad acknowledgment of power denied, flouted, repressed

LIVING IN YOUR LIGHT
ABDELLAH TAÏA (tr. Emma Ramadan)
Seven Stories Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 ebook edition, available for pre-order

Rating: 4.75* of five

One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!

The Publisher Says: A story in in praise of a woman, a fighter, a survivor from the award-winning French-Moroccan novelist known for humanizing North Africa’s otherwise marginalized characters—prostitutes and thieves, trans and gay people in a world where being LGBTQ+ can be a dangerous act.

Shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022.

Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taïa’s last novel, A Country for Dying.

Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina, the novel takes place from 1954 to 1999—from French colonization to the death of King Hassan II. In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa. The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her. Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of history. To survive and to have a little space of her own.

Malika is Taïa’s M'Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I read Taïa's novels to feel the world as I experience it from a the experience of a true stranger...étranger, foreigner, other, Other, the French don't parse things down near as fine-tipped as Anglophones do...who, like me, believes queer desire runs the world.

Save it, apologists for the inversion of nature that is hetero identity, it's just unnatural or we wouldn't have so many bloody-minded religious and civil laws shoring it up. One doesn't prohibit what people don't like.

As I was saying before that irritated tangent: Taïa’s stories center queer desire, feature queer people, are about things we understand a little differently than hetero people do. It's like a warm blanket in a freezing, windy steppe that isn't for you, doesn't give a shit about your happiness or satisfaction unless it somehow comes up and gives "them" a frisson of what you're expected to endure your entire life in which case shut up and stop bothering "them". This is Taïa’s reality, and thus where his fiction lives. It's a whole lot worse in god-ridden spaces than it currently is in the US.

So how does this relate to a story about Malika, an aging mother of eight whose life is ending, but whose track record is not close to what she ever wanted it to be? Her tragic inflection points are all around collisions with Authority, a thing every QUILTBAGger is deeply, existentially familiar with. She fails to keep her first husband home from the war that kills him, despite it being fought for the same people who have colonized their country. She fails to convince her money-motivated daughter to eschew the colonialist inducement of cash for submission and become a mail in a wealthy French family's service. Lastly, her gay son chooses his identity over her idea of duty to their country after he is raped by men in their neighborhood who claim to hate homosexuals...yet exert their sexual rights as straight men by fucking him...Rape is a crime of power, an abuse of autonomy and self-ownership, not sex itself, of course. That's pretty well established as fact. But someone needs to explain to me, slowly and in simple words, how the sex act they're engaging in makes any sense in this framework, given male penetration requires a physiological state of excitement to a sexual object.

I don't get it. But I'm back on a tangent.

Malika wants her powerful will to be obeyed because she is Right. The problem is she's correct a lot of the time, but that's not enough for her...she must be Right, and that is uniformly fatal to successful imposition of one's will. In a long life of mixed emotional results, that central truth does not come clear for her. It's the human condition to live life backwards, learning more and more as the need for applicable knowledge diminishes. It's the reason to have elders in the family system, expandable to encompass every level of social organization...a thing Malika would've reveled in, but did herself out of by insisting she be seen as Right. The world needs us oldsters to give up our addiction to the powerful substance of Rightness, and accept they're doing it differently now so offer advice without judgment.


As if.

So we read stories. It helps us all make sense of each other, helps us see the humanity in people deeply and fundamentally not-U, in Mitford's 1955 formulation. I'd offer all five stars with a big smile if the story was longer, developing the parts I was most curious about...Malika's time under colonialism would be so fascinating to learn about!...but this récit isn't designed to do that, and as it is written, is a beautiful evovation of a complex woman's life as a second-class partially empowered participant in a wildly passionately tumultuous world.

Her contributions to that world's growth earn my four and three-quarters star rating for their telling here.

INFIDELS, Author Abdellah Taïa's deeply felt & extremely unpopular among Muslims short novel

INFIDELS: A Novel
ABDELLAH TAÏA (tr. Alison L. Strayer)
Seven Stories Press
$23.95 hardcover, available now

25% OFF DIRECT PURCHASES OF #WITMONTH TITLES HERE: https://sevenstories.com/blogs/385-celebrate-women-in-translation-month-2025

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in Salé, Morocco—the hometown Abdellah Taïa fled but to which he returns again and again in his acclaimed fiction and films—Infidels follows the life of Jallal, the son of a prostitute witch doctor—"a woman who knew men, humanity, better than anyone. In sex. Beyond sex." As a ten-year-old sidekick to his mother, Jallal spits in the face of her enemies both real and imagined.

The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless—a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match—the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Stellar, stellar read. I was sent to the online translation-dictionary at least 10 times, which is a good thing for me. It's a genuine pleasure to look at and hold, as you'd expect from a Seven Stories book. The story only makes the aesthetic pleasure better, as well-crafted as such a concentrated fiction can possibly be.

As with all of Taïa's writing, this is a spectacularly beautiful-sounding text.

War was declared from the very first note. This woman...was not afraid of repeating herself, of saying the same words over and over, fighting a solitary battle. The battle of love, of course.

You whose love gave my life flavor, color
I'll never give you up, whatever happens
Whatever happens
And if a word was said in anger
And injured our hearts
We forget our sadness
And which of us spoke,
It's through the soul that we love
We'll always be together
All our lives, together
Whatever happens
I loved you
When I found you
Before my eyes a distant dream
Was in my eyes
Out of reach
The next moment it was in my hand
Who chooses to leave paradise?
Why destroy our own hopes
And spend the rest of our lives regretting
What happened?
You whose love gave my life flavor, color
I'll never give you up, whatever happens
Whatever happens
Never
Never
Give you up
Whatever happens.

It took our breath away.
The song lasted almost seven minutes. It was so powerful. And the voice...rang out from the heart of the war. War to the bitter end, the final breath. ...
"The man she's talking about in that song doesn't exist. No man can be worthy of such love and sacrifice."

You will never know how much the moment costs while you're in it, but that is the precise inflection point where a youth becomes a warrior.

It is Part III that seems to cause Muslims the most outrage, the betrayed hurt of being misunderstood from within; Taïa is one of their own! He sends young Jallal into such pain and loneliness that not even a god could endure; a mother murdered before her body dies and all for what? What justifies the torture of another soul? (Nothing, of course, but there's always a reason even when there can be no excuse.) And here is Mouad, a stranger, a Belgian whose heart heard the Prophet's call; he has parts of Jallal's mother that her son can't see or hear, so naturally he hates the man who usurped his child's place beside his mother.

But it is Mouad who, indirectly, leads Jallal to Mathis-Mahmoud; leads him to a death that is Resurrection and completion.

Yes, the horror happens.

But God is beyond mere human hates and judgments. Mathis-Mahmoud and Jallal are, in a soliloquy of God's, united and blessed and made whole together.

You see, I'm like you. In misfortune and in power. Divine and orphaned. I'm made of the same stuff as you. I'm in you. In every body. Every night. Every dream.
Don't cry, Jallal.
Take his hand, Mathis.
Go. Go. As brothers of the heart. There, behind that door, life has not even begun for you.
Go. On the way you'll pass a beautiful pomegranate tree. Pick two pomegranates. And later, before you go to sleep, take a moment to eat them.