If I were to put an image to the relationship between narrative and truth, it would be of a revolving door. Many people may pass through reality’s centrifugal motion, but each perspective is ultimately limited by one’s discrete entry and exit points, separated by impassable panels of glass. In each compartment resides an individualized interpretation of events, turning and turning, sometimes changing, sometimes contradicting, and what we receive from the outside is the dizzying momentum of many eyes, many voices, many experiences. In every instance of telling—which is always a retelling—narrative wields its techniques to make the past shine more brilliantly in the present, but what of the people who lived through the story, who spun in its procession? Are they there as characters, or as creators? Amid the innumerable refractions of our social reality, how much control do we have over how our lives are told?
Abdellah Taïa’s Living in Your Light is a radical experiment in the manipulation of truth, framed as an homage to his mother, M’Barka Allali Taïa, who passed away in 2010. Within this brief and evocative novel, poetically translated by Emma Ramadan, her voice is channeled in a starkly revealing first person, and she talks to us as Malika, pronouncing her innermost thoughts across three pivotal moments in her life. Each of these moments is given a separate chapter: we see her in the devoted and amorous marriage to her first husband before his death, the silent war she wages against a French woman who employs her daughter, and an encounter with a young male robber, who reminds her of her son. Though each of these episodes gives significant impressions of Malika’s life and personhood, they are also expansive in their reflection of Moroccan society, as well as its psychological extension into its most vulnerable citizens. Malika, as a working-class woman, a widow, and a colonial subject, is always straining against the limitations that are a fact of her position, but in her monologic delivery, these conditions are never indicated as changeable, but rather remain firm as natural law. Instead of defining her disempowerment as a miscarriage of justice that must be rectified, Malika never demands change from her world. She does not request rescue, reprieve, or reimbursement—and without a material agenda, then, the only reason to testify is to set the record straight. What insistently threads together Malika’s confessions is the need to be understood despite her amorphousness and volatility, to explain her decisions and mistakes and to take responsibility for who she is. This sense of freedom, unlike more infrastructural ideals of liberation or sovereignty, does not rely on being provided for: it only requires the assertion and recognition of one’s own autonomy. It is an absolutely individual, private triumph—but of course, someone did in fact give it to her: the person who wrote the book.
As Taïa stated in an interview: “If literature has any meaning, at some point the writer must ‘make his mother’s book.’ He must carry her in his literature as she carried him in her womb.” Under these terms, he is only “a body through which my mother passes to deliver her journey and her struggles,” negating his own participation in the novel’s creation; the text becomes a perpetuation of legacy, a repayment of debt, and a filial production that maximalizes writing’s resurrective potential. Unlike other writers who have delved into the ethics of commanding another’s voice (one thinks of Hélène Cixous’s “me the pen you without an answer”), Taïa never entertains the idea that his mother cannot actually speak. Her death was merely a shifting of forms: only in the aftermath of M’Barka’s life was she able to fully inhabit the manuscript, to take over the presence of her son. In Taïa’s view, he and Malika have simply become one, and language is the force that sustains them both, allowing for a cohabitation and sympathy that was impossible while they were both alive. Words themselves do not belong to any of us, and the anonymous facelessness of the page is itself disdainful of authorship. Taïa does not insist that his readers believe in Malika’s narration as some spiritual effect, but only that we understand language as a public staging of private possibilities—the same way we suspend disbelief during an actress’s delivery of her lines, or a historian’s evocation of something that happened centuries ago.
We are persistent in our search for origins. For Taïa, Malika’s story begins in eros and tragedy, providing not only the basis of her strength but her instinct for survival. At seventeen, the tender eyes of a man on her body allow her to envision an escape from the stifling hold of her father and stepmother: “Thwart destiny. Grab hold of hope, have proof of it.” As the writing shakes wide awake, the young Malika is a woman who possesses desire, who is controlled in her etiquette but wild in her erotic dreams, and the handsome Allal is an opportunity by which her most florid and exuberant longings are enlivened. They are quickly wed, but soon after, the new groom enlists to fight a French war in Indochina—for the sake of money, for the illusion of a way out—and his death in battle is inglorious, sacrificed for an imperial power that they both resent. Upon widowhood, Malika is quickly cast out of the home of her in-laws, who also claim the meager government compensation for soldiers’ families, and from there she can only take solace in Allal’s gay lover, Merzougue, who shares her newfound identity as an unmoored, unacknowledged casualty. By the end of the chapter, Malika’s vision of freedom is proven by the world to be a curse. Unbound from her duties as wife and daughter, she has nothing: “I am barely twenty years old, Allal. And already everything is over.”
For those familiar with Taïa’s corpus, these early scenes are already resonant with the themes of his previous (auto)fictions. As a gay man living in France, he has written prolifically on the potency of desire to dissolve the reductive binaries of purity and belonging, the complex oscillation between faith and resentment in how he regards his chosen home, his sorrow over criminalized queerness in his native Morocco. If we take at face value his conceptualization of literature as an intellectual continuation of one’s bloodline, then it is here—before Taïa is even conceived—that Malika plants the seeds for his future existence. With a homosexual husband whom she nonetheless loves wholly, with her own experiences of abandonment slowly mutating into cynicism, and with the unmistakable evidence that France sees the Moroccan body as nothing but cannon fodder, Malika as envisioned by Taïa is an archive from which he can cite his own understandings. Even after the novel moves on to events after his birth—Malika remarries and becomes a mother to seven children—the writer continually avoids characterizing himself as a son, instead weaving his enduring questions and reclamations through Malika’s evolution.
Ramadan has compared Taïa to Marguerite Duras—that same stripped intensity—and her translation cogently captures his bare-bones emotional tenor in clipped sentences reminiscent of Durasian power. Simplistic language represents a thorny challenge for the translator, as each word choice must be precise not only in its definition but also its rhythm, and the repetition that Taïa often applies can easily seem arbitrary or tiresome if there is not enough attention paid to language’s musicality, to the staccato of consonants and the weight of punctuation.
As the novel’s setting moves from the northern city of Beni Mellal to Rabat, the capital, Malika reflects:
every day I’m shocked. I thought the French left Morocco in 1956. But no. Not at all. They’re still here, very much so. They live in villas in the nice neighborhoods of Rabat: Hassan. Agdal. Les Orangers. They’re at home here. And even when they leave, they end up returning. They can’t forget about Morocco. They can’t live without Morocco. Nostalgia for Morocco, they say.
When a wealthy French woman takes a liking to Malika’s daughter Khadija and wants to hire her as a maid, Malika is infuriated by the idea that a past colonizer of her country has further invaded her home. She only tolerates the employment on the condition that Khadija becomes an undercover agent, gaining the woman’s trust and giving Malika the opportunity to cast an evil spell. But the longer Khadija is with Monique, the fonder they grow of each other, and ultimately, even the backstory of the bourgeois, beautiful French woman is eventually revealed as an unconditional bond to the nation they share: “Monique’s Moroccan past. Monique’s Moroccan legitimacy.”
Nostalgia. Legitimacy. Any expatriate is likely to have a confounding relationship with these two concepts, omnipresent reminders of distance and inextricable links to what has been lost. In An Arab Melancholia, Taïa expresses the feeling of being at once enamored with and betrayed by Morocco—the paradoxical state of exile that puts one in a constantly shifting proximity to tradition, self-actualization, universalism, and status. The bitterness Malika holds toward Monique is a distillation of Taïa’s own outlook on France: a reluctant but undeniable realization that only in the offices of the jailer can a prisoner compose their fantasy of freedom. The higher quality of life that the West represents to Morocco’s emigrants is always a brutal compromise, yet it is pursued because one knows that to be blurred is better than to be erased entirely.
By the end of Living in Your Light, Malika is a lonely, elderly woman who seeks company and conversation from anyone willing to stop by—including a violent young man who seeks to rob her. The thief, Jaâfar, has no agenda besides destruction; he, too, is gay, and only in prison did he experience the sexual fellowship that civil society renounces. Despite his aggression, Malika treats him with exceptional kindness, offering him food, begging him to stay a little longer. To him, she is able to say everything that she could never offer Ahmed, her own son, and when Jaâfar retorts with accusations of her prejudices and selfishness, claiming that her son was correct to leave after the endless cruelty she left him vulnerable to, Malika expounds on her regret, her helplessness, her limitations. She wants to see her son again, to relieve the inevitable wounds inflicted by familial difference. This gradual descent into desperation is where Taïa is most transparent about what this work means to him—beyond being an “opportunity” for M’Barka, beyond the grander purpose of literature filling the voids of history.
Describing the writer’s duty, Chinua Achebe wrote: “When white light hits glass . . . Either you have an image, which is faithful if somewhat unexciting, or you have a glorious spectrum which though beautiful is really a distortion . . . We can either look for the accurate though somewhat unexciting image or we can look for the glorious technicolor.” He spoke then of the need to resist the beautiful specter, of how the temptation to idealize is a digression from trustworthy representation—and this may be true when books are read for their cultural input and potential for social enlightenment, but there is surely a place for exquisite distortions, gesturing toward an imaginative world in which truth has no proprietorship, because everyone has the right to be understood. In that arena congregates a teeming crowd of romantics, utopian thinkers, translators, relativists, deconstructionists, abstractionists, and some of our most luminous, hopeful writers—who understand that our assembly of the past depends on what we find most bearable in the immediate now.
When Taïa first came out, he knew that he would face the rejection of his family, and until the end of her life, M’Barka never truly accepted him. In the painfully vulnerable “Homosexuality Explained to my Mother,” he extends a plea: “You are Morocco. My truth, my ‘I’; which, whether I like it or not, contains my homosexuality, my writing, both published and forthcoming, it is for you. It is important for me that you listen in turn. I need you to know that I am like you. Not in the same revolt as you, but like you all the same.” By embodying his mother’s voice and conforming her experiences to his own, Taïa is able to verify his truth of their relationship: that they were in fact the same, that they have been diminished and censured in the same battle, and it is because she survived that he writes. If our actions are only as real as their effects, then fiction is a method of control by which effects can be subverted or negated; and if the fact is that M’Barka never redeemed herself to her son, then Living in Your Light refutes that certainty with a simple emotional measure: but to me, you did. It may not last, and it may not put anything to rest, but it is now an enduring record of true reconciliation—indicating that it is possible, reachable, always within the scope of our trying.
Copyright © 2025 by Xiao Yue Shan. All rights reserved.
