![]() ![]() Then again, he has also stated that he has two: his mother, M’Barka, and his aunt, Massauouda, neither of whom ever published a word. He has claimed to be free of any literary influences whatsoever. Taïa says that he never dreamed of being a writer. “Her screams and her strategies and her sorcery are there, in my phrases, in my style, in my way of bringing the evil things out.” “When I write, she is with me whether I like it or not,” Taïa told Georgia Phillips-Amos in Bomb magazine this spring. ![]() Taïa grew up, after all, sharing a bed with one younger brother, six sisters he dearly loved, and a mother he at once cherished and feared, M’Barka, his most important influence. It fights to free ground, not only for gay rights, but for the rights of women as well. Possessed.” His fiction works-it sweats-to count the uncounted in the community of his childhood. Taïa’s portrayal of his homeland is “a Morocco that is not perfect. There’s no American dream here, not to embrace or shake off. The Times profile headline ran as a triptych: “Muslim, Gay, and Making No Apologies.” Three years earlier, in Out Magazine, Taïa wrote an opinion piece under a nearly identical banner: “Muslim, Gay, and Free.” This list of identities is ponderous but not useless, and adding to it that Taïa is no pacifist, I fear that we avoid engaging with his work because it directly confronts prevailing beliefs about the world that many, if not a majority of, Americans hold close. ![]()
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