An Arab Melancholia

Abdellah Taïa

I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity....-- An Arab Melancholia. Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running after his dream to become a movie director. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. This autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures, creating a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.