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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Book cover for Living in Your Light
Book cover for Living in Your Light

From the award-winning French-Moroccan novelist Abdellah Taïa, a story in in praise of a woman, a fighter, a survivor, his mother.

Shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2022.

Three moments in the life of Malika, a Moroccan countrywoman. From 1954 to 1999. From French colonization to the death of King Hassan II. 

It is her voice we hear in Abdellah Taïa’s stunning new novel, translated by Emma Ramadan, who won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation of Taia’s last novel, A Country for Dying.

Malika’s first husband was sent by the French to fight in Indochina.

In the 1960s, in Rabat, she does everything possible to prevent her daughter Khadija from becoming a maid in a rich French woman’s villa.

The day before the death of Hassan II, a young homosexual thief, Jaâfar, enters her home and wants to kill her.

Malika recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of History. To survive. To have a little space of her own.

Malika is Taïa’s mother: M'Barka Allali Taïa (1930-2010). This book is dedicated to her.

Book cover for Living in Your Light
Book cover for Living in Your Light

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“Every Abdellah Taia novel is written with a sense of urgency and immediacy. Here lives sensuousness and passion, a fusion of love and violence. Taia’s language arouses the reader’s senses. Reading Living in Your Light, I felt I was hearing a dangerous secret. Taia will seem to be whispering in your ear.”

“Abdellah Taïa writes with great tenderness and sympathy about the intricacies and complexities of his characters' private lives. He then creates high drama from social life and sexual life and the gap between who his protagonists are and what they most desire. He is at his most brilliant in Living in Your Light.”

“Taïa’s wonderfully ferocious and contradictory heroine Malika will make you weep and quail by turn. Her testament is a powerful antidote to the sentimentality and exoticism that so often distorts depictions of Arab womanhood.”

“Everything about Living in Your Light is unexpected. A Moroccan woman of the disappointed independence generation speaks of her struggle to keep power over her life, of what she knows of the suffering of the poor, and of women who are autonomous in a land where colonialism never went away. A poetic and fierce and original work.”

“An illiterate woman from the Moroccan countryside recounts her life in Taia’s hypnotic and masterful latest (after A Country for Dying). The novel opens in the 1950s with the narrator, 17-year-old Malika, falling in love with Allal, a man with a male lover named Merzougue. After Malika and Allal marry, he leaves with the French colonial army to fight in Indochina. She and Merzougue soon learn of his death in combat, and Taia stages a touching scene in which the pair pantomime the burial of Allal’s unrecovered body in the mausoleum where Allal and Merzougue used to meet to make love. In the novel’s second section, a 30-something Malika, now remarried, faces the possibility of a new loss: a white woman from France named Monique wants Malika’s oldest daughter Khadija to be her live-in maid. As Malika faces off against Monique, she confronts the ways in which, even after Morocco’s independence, the French are “still here, very much so.” The final section depicts an elderly Malika confronting a thief in her home, a young gay man from her neighborhood named Jaâfar, who wishes to be sent back to prison to reunite with his lover. Jaâfar was also friends with Ahmed, Malika’s gay son who cut off contact with her after he immigrated to Paris. With magnificent precision and gorgeous, understated lyricism, Taia homes in on three events in Malika’s life that, taken together, contain the historical sweep of her life and her country. This is unforgettable.”

Abdellah Taïa

In 1973, ABDELLAH TAÏA was born in the public library of Rabat in Morocco, where his father was the janitor and where his family lived until he was two years old. Acclaimed as both a novelist and filmmaker, he writes in French and has published eight books now widely translated, including Le jour de roi, which was awarded the prestigious French Prix de Flore in 2010. An adaptation of his novel L'Armée du salut was his first feature film, released in 2014, screened at major festivals around the world, and hailed by the New York Times as giving "the Arab world its first on-screen gay protagonist." Abdellah Taïa made history in 2006 by coming out in his country, where homosexuality is illegal. His commitment to the defense of homosexuals in Muslim countries has made him one of the most prominent Arab writers of his generation—both "a literary transgressor and cultural paragon," according to Interview magazine. Taia has lived in Paris since 1998.

Emma Ramadan

EMMA RAMADAN is an educator and literary translator of all genres from French, with a focus on undersung women novelists, experimental literature, and writers from the Arab world. She is the recipient of the 2021 PEN Translation Prize, the 2018 Albertine Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a PEN/Heim grant, and a Fulbright. Her translations include SphinxNot One Day, and In Concrete by Anne Garréta; A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa; Zabor, or the Psalms by Kamel Daoud; co-translations with Olivia Baes of The Easy Life and Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras; and Panics by Barbara Molinard. Her translations of Lamia Ziadé ’s Mon port de Beyrouth and Ma très grande mélancolie arabe are forthcoming from Pluto Press.