Abdellah Taïa,
As you said in the beginning, I grew up in a poor family, like a really, really poor house, three rooms, 11 persons in 3 rooms, 1 room for the big brother, 1 room for my father, and the last room for 6 sisters, my mother, my little brother, and me. That was nine people. We were all in one teeny tiny room during maybe 18 years or something like that. Me, as a little boy hearing everything happening in the bodies of my sisters, it was too much promiscuity, too much body into another body, a voice into another voice. At that time, there was no internet, there was no social media—this was in 1980, 1982, 1983, 1985—the only thing we had is us in this thing called life and the people expressing, saying things, not necessarily to emancipate themselves, not necessarily in order to be free one day but just because we are human beings and when we are next to each other, something has to come out through the voice. So there was my mother screaming all day long, the six sisters explaining and trying to invent theories about the world, about love, and about sex. There was my little brother, he was the favorite of my mother, and it was me, the gay one. I would not say that I was rejected. They gave me the feeling that I was special but at the same time, they didn’t send me away, they didn’t reject me, I was there with them. I feel that the voices of my sisters, the voice of my mother—and this is not even a metaphor—they are literally all in me. When I write—and this is truly for me the definition of literature and writing because yes, you prepare a book, yes you structure it, and you spend many years preparing it but while doing the writing, literally, other things happen. For me, what happens every time is that the echoes of the voices inside of me, the other people that I just met by chance in the streets, that impose their voice on me in my books. Literature with only one voice, one dimension, would seem to me extremely poor. I know that what I am saying here is the opposite of what is being said today because there is encouragement to be an individual, to be free, to express yourself, and all that stuff. I am with that, of course, but I am at the same time aware that sometimes, that encouragement to be that individual feel just like, I don’t know, commercials on TV, “do this, buy this, go here,” it’s just something the media tells you to do and gives you the illusion that you are free but at the same time, you have only the illusion of the emancipation and you have only the illusion that you are you. I don’t think literature cannot be only about one you. In me, there are all these voices and there are certainly, for sure, Zahira, Aziz, and other people.
DN: Yeah. So Zahira and Zannouba, the two central prostitutes in the story, one way they view prostitution is as a form of acting and they watch a lot of Bollywood films watching the actresses in the films, and you yourself have these recurring homages to female film actresses from Soad Hosny to Marilyn Monroe to Isabelle Adjani and you’ve said that you wanted to, as I said in the intro, live under the same sky as Adjani. In your story Turning Thirty, you say that Isabelle Adjani, her singing voice has usurped or replaced the memory of your mother’s own voice, almost becoming your mother’s voice. In your novel Infidels, there’s this line, “I am the son of Marilyn Monroe.” In A Country for Dying, which has this amazing extended love letter to Adjani, you say, “Adjani doesn’t act. That is her great strength. She is incapable of acting. She is. She is. We know that. We understand it. We take her hand. We are with her. In her. The world will soon fall into a trance. The superseding of every limit.” Maybe, you’ve already answered this but would it be correct to say that you aren’t acting either, that you aren’t acting when you’re Zahira or when you’re Zannouba, like Adjani, you aren’t acting?
AT: If you have that feeling while you are reading my books, that would be a huge compliment to me because nothing can top this. If this is the feeling I gave you when you were reading my books, that for me, I don’t want anymore compliments about what I do in life. [laughter] But Isabelle Adjani, I was not introduced to her through someone who was obsessed with the history of cinema or something. My mother and my sister were watching the Moroccan TV and suddenly, her face appeared on the small screen in the 80s. We’re just a really poor family watching everything on one channel we had in Morocco and my mother said, “Oh, what’s happening to this girl?” My mother who knew nothing about Isabelle Adjani felt a connection with her. She didn’t know that Isabelle Adjani had an Algerian father. She didn’t know that in the way Isabelle Adjani inhabits the characters in movies, there is something coming from us. But she recognized that on the screen. She was not impressed with the fact that she is French. She was not impressed with the fact, “Oh, this is a chic French actress.” She saw in her face and in her eyes something that is like us. My mother was illiterate. My mother was coming from the countryside. She had no idea who Marilyn Monroe was or Catherine Deneuve or Meryl Streep or all these people. But in Isabelle Adjani, she saw something that is coming from our world, the possessed people. Later, I found out that Isabelle Adjani made one of her biggest roles. It was in a film called Possession by Andrzej Żuławski. In that film, there is a scene of a trans who is doing this dance of possessed people I used to watch and see in my poor Moroccan reality. The intuition of my mother making the connection between Isabelle Adjani and us was totally true and sincere.