In "Living in Your Light" (translated by Emma Ramadan and published by Seven Stories Press), Abdellah Taïa returns to one of the central figures in his work: his mother. Yet Malika is not presented as a symbol, victim, or historical allegory. Speaking in her own voice, she emerges as a woman shaped by poverty, colonialism, desire, imagination, and defiance. In this conversation, Taïa reflects on writing through his mother’s voice, the political dimensions of intimacy, queer life beyond dominant Western narratives, and the forms of freedom that survive outside of official recognition.

 

 

Isabelle Valtchanov: Malika never feels distant from the reader. Her voice feels immediate, intimate. How did you create that closeness?

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Abdellah Taïa: The story comes from reality, and from a place of truth. Not only my truth, but the truth I grew up in in Morocco, in the ’70s and ’80s, with my family — my big family. We were very poor. As the child number eight, I was lucky enough that my mother and my father did so many things just to give us food, to put us in school, and to give us tools to face society. Yes, they didn’t understand my homosexuality, but at the same time they did a lot of things for me, and everything I was able to achieve as a writer and filmmaker comes from this place, these voices, this truth, these very hard times — but at the same time, we were very close to each other.

 

We were eleven people living in a very small house. The voices of my sisters and the voice of my mother are still totally inside me; my body, my skin, my heart, my memories. I truly believe that the writing process is not only about one voice — the author’s voice — it’s about other voices inside the body of the person writing. Her voice is in me without effort. I don’t need to search for it. My voice comes from her voice. I don’t need to find the presence of her voice in me, or study her voice, or its history, or the intimacy between her and me. We were in a very small house, very close to each other; sometimes fighting, sometimes happy. Those years of poverty are a link between all of us.

 

​The voice of my mother, which you say touched you in this book, is in me. I wrote this novel with her voice, and I didn’t need to think about it intellectually. It’s all in me, all present. My voice comes from her voice. Now that she is dead, I can be the continuation of her voice in literature.

 

This happens through her voice. I would almost say through her own writing — as if it’s not even me writing the book.

 

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IV: When you were writing about Malika, did you see her as a personal character, or did her political dimension emerge naturally through her story?

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AT: No, of course I had to choose carefully the moments of her life that would say something about her, but at the same time about Morocco as a society. Morocco as a place that was colonized by the French, where many poor people — even now — are still suffering, and where women don’t have laws that help them. But at the same time, I didn’t want her to be a victim, and I didn’t want to write about her from a position of weakness. I wanted her to be the true mirror of my mother.

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She was always screaming. She was not afraid of the police; she was not afraid of my father. She was not afraid of rich people in Morocco — she was mocking them all the time. She is the opposite of the clichés and stereotypes we have about Arab and Muslim women.

 

I wanted her to be bigger than French colonialism, bigger than a Morocco owned by rich people. In all these chapters, you see her thinking, going outside, doing something. Maybe we don’t agree with everything she does, but it doesn’t matter. What matters to me is how we see a woman who is considered by so many people as weak, illiterate, dominated — when in fact she was not dominated. She did not feel weak. Yes, it’s a world of poverty, but every step she takes, every action she does, has a bigger meaning.

 

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IV: Malika means queen in Arabic. Is there a deeper significance to the name?

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AT: Yes — but queen not because she is going to be rich, or wear fancy clothes, or become an aristocrat. That is only a very small definition of queen. We were very, very poor, and yet she was the biggest queen in the world. She is not driven by a bourgeois dream. She is aware that the bourgeoisie is a place where life shrinks, where everything becomes small.

 

In fact, when you are placed in poverty, when you are poor, you face more struggles, and you have to become bigger. Poor people face everything directly — power, domination, survival. They have to think constantly just to remain standing. Poor people have to face everything. They have to think more. They face the consequences of domination — political domination, class domination, Western domination, French domination. They have to think nonstop. Nonstop. Nonstop. Just to stop the people in power from pushing them down again.

 

So for me, a person capable of facing all these political entities is truly the real queen. Not a queen because she wants to be rich. No — that’s just bourgeois ambition, dominating others through money. So the word Malika, which means queen in Arabic, means that to me. She is already a queen. She doesn’t need to be rich to become one.

 

 

IV: In what ways do you feel colonial history continues to shape the emotional lives and relationships in the novel, even in subtle or indirect ways?

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AT: What I wanted to show more in this book is the mind of a Moroccan woman. A woman some people would not even see as modern because she is Arab, Muslim, and wears traditional clothes. Some people, when they see images like the image of my mother — that’s my real mother on the book cover — they will judge her. They will see a poor woman, dominated, not free, illiterate. When in fact, for me, my mother was more modern than many women in the West. She was inventive, fearless, not wanting to be the “good woman.”

 

It was never her dream to become a respected woman. That was not her goal. For me, that means she was already aware of the small places society gives women in order to accept and respect them. My mother did not want respect. For her, respect would only become another prison for women.

 

When she faces French colonialism, when she faces the French woman Monique, when she even faces the king — for me, of course it says that this woman is aware of what is happening politically and sociologically: colonialism, post-colonialism, all of that. I wanted us to see the world inside a woman’s head and heart — the way she thinks, the way she prepares herself, her imagination — without explaining it.

 

That is why it was very important that it is her speaking, not me, the son and the author, explaining the mother. There is no explanation in this book because we have direct access to the mechanism of this voice, this struggle, this insistence on imposing her own truth onto the world. She is aware of her own force. She does not need anyone’s approval, even mine as the writer-son.

 

Maybe her struggles seem small to some people. But in her life they are huge and important. She lives them with enormous force and commitment. And that commitment comes from her own thinking, not because somebody else told her what to do.

 

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IV: In the novel, love and violence are never fully separated from each other. Was that important to you?

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AT: The world is violent everywhere. I live in Paris — do you think it is calm? Racism, fascism are everywhere. People often assume violence exists only in the Global South, but that is a limited view. Of course that’s false. It is another prejudice, another limited way of thinking.

 

People living in these countries have rich lives. In many ways, they are richer than people in the West because they are dealing with real struggles with almost nothing. And yet from that place of nothing, they are capable of creating revolutions, on the scale of their own lives.

 

Because I come from Morocco, I always see my mother and poor people as rich. I don’t write about them as “poor people” that I will explain to the world: “Look how brave they are.” No. It has to be bigger than that, more sophisticated than that, more beautiful than that. Because the people and the characters already possess their own beauty. The book, and me as the writer, only have the responsibility to show that beauty according to their own standards — not according to Western criteria of emancipation and liberation.

 

The woman in the book — my mother — is already emancipated. The novel shows that all the time. She is already emancipated. The law may not recognize it, but that does not define her experience of freedom. She is free because she experiences herself as free.

 

 

IV: The novel is structured around sharp, revolutionary vignettes — like Malika constructing an imaginary grave for her husband. How did you select these specific turning points?

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AT: We don’t need characters to perform certain expected struggles in order to be accepted as free characters. It was very important for me to choose carefully the moments I wrote about. For instance, the first moment with the husband who died in Indochina. How does she face that? By inventing something beautiful: constructing an imaginary grave, magically bringing the body of her husband back from Indochina to Morocco. So she creates a revolution there. The French authorities and the Moroccan authorities will not listen to her, so she finds another way to give her husband rest and dignity.

 

And in the second chapter, when the French woman wants her most beautiful daughter to become only a maid for her — that is another form of slavery. So she has to teach this French woman, Monique, a lesson for daring to do that. But she imagines it on her own terms, in a place of rendezvous, in a time of rendezvous, connected to something larger and more beautiful than her own story. So the refusal — “I will not give you my daughter” — is expressed within something much bigger and more imaginative.

 

And in the final chapter, I wanted her to express her thoughts on homosexuality, and why she did not protect her own son from rape and violence. I wanted her to confess that she failed in that way. But at the same time, I wanted her to think about homosexuality according to her own understanding of struggle and resistance.

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IV: Queer identities feel completely natural inside the world of the novel. Could you talk a little about that choice and what it meant to you?

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AT: I wanted it to be natural because right now we are dominated by Western visions of homosexuality. According to those narratives, in order to be accepted and recognized as a free homosexual person, you have to follow the dominant Western narrative. That overshadows other ways of being homosexual in the world.

 

I wanted this book — especially through a mother born in the 1930s — to offer another vision, another way of understanding homosexuality, another way of accepting a homosexual person, connected to the struggles of her own time, not mine. I did not want to impose my own views of homosexuality onto her.

 

My mother’s views were themselves mostly shaped by the West, so what I wanted to say is that beauty exists elsewhere too. Gay beauty, gay solidarity — these things exist in other places. Just because we don’t know about them does not mean they don’t exist. Even in places of desperation, when you are a gay person, there are moments of miracle that happen. I wanted her to be connected to that as well.

 

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IV: Do you think Malika truly understands herself, or is she also shaped by forces she cannot fully see or name?

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AT: Well, for me, I only knew my mother. I didn’t know her parents. I have no idea about the world she lived in before us — the grandparents, the uncles, the countryside where she grew up. I only knew my mother, carrying all those influences inside her. So of course she is shaped by older memories of Morocco, memories from before French colonialism, and that remained inside her. For me that is very important.

 

Yes, there was French colonialism, but it did not erase those older memories, those other ways of living and fighting and finding space for yourself. And I think writing in general is a process of discovering traces of lost memory — things you didn’t even know existed inside you, until suddenly they appear in the writing.

 

Malika was born in 1930. Of course she carries memories of worlds I know nothing about. That is why I decided not to explain her. I wanted to let her voice give us glimpses of all those worlds that existed before her, during her childhood, inside her imagination. If I tried to explain her, it would only limit her. Even her contradictions, her chaos, the way she moves from one direction to another while still remaining focused — that chaos and focus belong to her own way of thinking, not mine.

 

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IV: As someone reading the novel in translation, I became curious about language itself. Do you feel certain emotions or relationships in the novel are especially tied to French as a literary language?

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AT: First of all, I grew up in a Moroccan family speaking Arabic, so I grew up inside Arabic. My first memories of the world are in Arabic. My French is not really French — it is French shaped by Arabic, my first language. So what you read in English actually carries a lot of Arabic inside it. Yes, it is written in French, but the way the phrases are constructed is deeply influenced by Moroccan Arabic.

 

My mother was nonstop speaking, thinking, fighting, screaming, preparing herself to face the world — to face enemies, to face the police. She was always thinking in front of us. And she was not ashamed. That was something enormous. She was not ashamed if people said, “Oh, your clothes are bad,” or “There are holes in your clothes.” She did not care about respect, whether it came from other people or from society. She lived inside her own world.

 

At the same time, everything she did was to save us from poverty — to build the house, to escape the limited place society wanted to keep her in. That is the definition of my mother. I respect her enormously because everything she did was not for herself, but for others. And yet through all those struggles, she revealed who she was.

 

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IV: Her voice feels deeply lived-in — almost carried in the body rather than invented. Did writing her ever feel separate from remembering her?

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AT: I think what you just said is true because I lived it with her. My six sisters, my mother — when I was a little boy, during many years, that was the greatest literature already inside me. That is what made me a writer. The ability to stay close to the truth of a voice, to the reality of a voice — not just to ideas about things, but to stay with the real truth and write that truth directly. That way of writing comes from them. Because I saw how they lived, and honestly, even as a gay person, they influenced me deeply. I just wanted to imitate my mother. My mother was fearless, shameless, and she never told all her truths to everyone. She chose carefully who deserved the truth. She was always suspicious, always observing. So in many ways, I simply imitated her as a gay person.

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So maybe, in a way, she was gay too. (laughs)​​​​​​​​​​

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