Abdellah Taia Quotes

Any gay person understands at some point that he or she has to disappear, to become invisible. That's very difficult. You somehow have to kill yourself. This is asked of people who haven't got the tools to understand that it's all a social construction, and that they shouldn't inferiorize themselves. This is asked of little kids. But I still live in the same outcome.

My family spent many years sleeping side by side in the same room. It's important for me to not separate myself from them or to say that I've suffered more than they have because I'm gay. We all suffered from the same political rejection, and from poverty. When you're starving with eleven other people in the same room, you become connected to them forever. We were all hungry at the same time.

People think that I only write about homosexuality, but that's not true.

I started to write because of my dream to become a filmmaker. I got to know about a film school in Paris and it was my goal to get there. To do that I knew I had to learn French. In order to practice I started to write journals in French. The effort I made to master what I regarded a bad thing - a language owned by the rich Moroccans - brought me the ability to write.

Writing and making films aren't different things to me. Or maybe it has become so, now. Making film is a very long process and you have to be physically strong. The literary work is more mystical, because it's only the writer, and connected to something inside.

Everyone hasn't got the power to free oneself and go away to another place or country... No one is capable of freeing oneself from society.

So many people and institutions are against homosexuals that, as a homosexual, you can't waste your time by trying to convince them that you're a good person.

I hate to express political ideas directly in a book. I don't want my books to be seen as an expression of this or that political idea. At the same time I want to show a kind of rebellion and transgression, something further.

Many Europeans think that all Moroccans speak French, but no. I had to make an effort to learn it when I studied French literature at the university in Rabat.