Infidels

by Abdellah Taïa, Alison Strayer (Translator)

Set in Salé, Morocco—the hometown Abdellah Taïa fled but to which he returns again and again in his acclaimed fiction and films—Infidels follows the life of Jallal, the son of a prostitute witch doctor—"a woman who knew men, humanity, better than anyone. In sex. Beyond sex." As a ten-year-old sidekick to his mother, Jallal spits in the face of her enemies both real and imagined.

The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless—a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match—the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Morocco, Africa, Northern Africa, Literary Fiction

144 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2012

About the author

Abdellah Taïa is a Moroccan writer born in Salé in 1973. He grew up in a neighborhood called “Hay Salam” located between Salé and Rabat, where his father Mohammed works at the General Library of the capital. His mother M’Barka, an illiterate housewife, gives so much meaning to his days and accompanies his sleep with her nocturnal melodies. This son of a working-class district and second youngest of a household of ten children is the first Moroccan writer to publicly assume his homosexuality.

Abdellah Taïa has been living in Paris since 1999, where he obtained a doctorate in Letters at La Sorbonne University while managing to write 5 books. The last one, called “an Arabian melancholia”, was just published by “Seuil” on March 6th of 2008

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

ANOTHER review I can't think how I missed posting here for five years! Jeesh.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Stellar, stellar read. I was sent to the online translation-dictionary at least 10 times, which is a good thing for me. It's a genuine pleasure to look at and hold, as you'd expect from a Seven Stories book. The story only makes the aesthetic pleasure better, as well-crafted as such a concentrated fiction can possibly be.

As with all of Taïa's writing, this is a spectacularly beautiful-sounding text.

War was declared from the very first note. This woman...was not afraid of repeating herself, of saying the same words over and over, fighting a solitary battle. The battle of love, of course.

You whose love gave my life flavor, color
I'll never give you up, whatever happens
Whatever happens
And if a word was said in anger
And injured our hearts
We forget our sadness
And which of us spoke,
It's through the soul that we love
We'll always be together
All our lives, together
Whatever happens
I loved you
When I found you
Before my eyes a distant dream
Was in my eyes
Out of reach
The next moment it was in my hand
Who chooses to leave paradise?
Why destroy our own hopes
And spend the rest of our lives regretting
What happened?
You whose love gave my life flavor, color
I'll never give you up, whatever happens
Whatever happens
Never
Never
Give you up
Whatever happens.

It took our breath away.
The song lasted almost seven minutes. It was so powerful. And the voice...rang out from the heart of the war. War to the bitter end, the final breath. ...
"The man she's talking about in that song doesn't exist. No man can be worthy of such love and sacrifice."

You will never know how much the moment costs while you're in it, but that is the precise inflection point where a youth becomes a warrior.

It is Part III that seems to cause Muslims the most outrage, the betrayed hurt of being misunderstood from within; Taïa is one of their own! He sends young Jallal into such pain and loneliness that not even a god could endure; a mother murdered before her body dies and all for what? What justifies the torture of another soul? (Nothing, of course, but there's always a reason even when there can be no excuse.) And here is Mouad, a stranger, a Belgian whose heart heard the Prophet's call; he has parts of Jallal's mother that her son can't see or hear, so naturally he hates the man who usurped his child's place beside his mother.

But it is Mouad who, indirectly, leads Jallal to Mathis-Mahmoud; leads him to a death that is Resurrection and completion.

Yes, the horror happens.

But God is beyond mere human hates and judgments. Mathis-Mahmoud and Jallal are, in a soliloquy of God's, united and blessed and made whole together.

You see, I'm like you. In misfortune and in power. Divine and orphaned. I'm made of the same stuff as you. I'm in you. In every body. Every night. Every dream.
Don't cry, Jallal.
Take his hand, Mathis.
Go. Go. As brothers of the heart. There, behind that door, life has not even begun for you.
Go. On the way you'll pass a beautiful pomegranate tree. Pick two pomegranates. And later, before you go to sleep, take a moment to eat them.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one could force this fate to change. Divert, cancel, fight it or get around it.
*
“People don’t understand the earth. We don’t know how to be real anymore. You must never completely open up to others, my son, not even to people who love you. Resist. Resist. Never tell everything about yourself, your story, your heart. Never give yourself completely. Nobody deserves that honor. Do you understand?”
*
I understood the identification. It isn’t just blood that unites beings to one another. Souls meet, recognize each other and speak, even when gulfs, oceans lie between them.
*
And what could I do with my disappointed, bruised heart?

[Hussein Baher · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Deep inside me, words will always be Arabic. That’s the language inside me, there long before me. It sticks to my skin, goes far beyond me, speaks to me in spite of myself."

I was doing fine until that sudden twist of narrative towards the end where Islam was portrayed as a hallmark of terrorism.
It was cheap, illogical and downright the wrong wrong WRONG choice to take to drive the plot forward. This book could have been taken to a completely different path that is so much less problematic.

In short:
Annoying, hasty, incoherent, sloppy and jumbled writing. Basically, words vomit.
Pedophilia. Romanticized Pedophilia used as stepping stone for lgbt representation( ha! Not today MAPS)
Wrong reflecting image of Islam.

I am so disappointed with everything in this book.

[Naori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taia’s words have burrowed into my mind, one visceral, persistent lyric at a time. I know nothing to do with such a piece literary passion than to go sit on my porch with some tea and contemplate. Depending on how long this processing takes, tea may turn into wine. I believe it will take long enough for wine...

[Yigal Zur · Rating 2 out of 5]

i tried to read. but...it is a book, it is written but not really a story. there a few long monologs. a young gay maroccan, son of a hooker who meets a guy from Belgium who converted to Islam. and than i got confused. it is jumpy, i did not find it poetic even there where some nice parts. i did manage about 50%.

[Grace · Rating 1 out of 5]

Around the World Reading Challenge: MOROCCO
===
1.5 rounded down

Can't say I enjoyed this one at all. The sort of stream-of-consciousness writing style didn't work for me, particularly as the chapters jumped around to different POVs, which made all the character voices feeling the same. The time jumps were confusing and I just wasn't really sure what the point of. I wasn't enjoying the book, and then I got to the end and the ~twist~ came out of fucking nowhere and felt very bizarre and out of place, and tanked the entire thing. I picked it up because of the queer themes, and man, so I feel lied to on that score.

[Ceyrone · Rating 3 out of 5]

My final book of the year and this was a great one to end the year with. I am a huge fan of this author. Divided into parts and written from the perspectives of different family members. I love the authors writing style, having read other books by him. It’s powerful and raw, the poetry of language here is amazing. The one thing I didn’t enjoy was when a white character converted to Islam to carry out a suicide bombing, a suicide bombing can be carried out by anyone, one doesn’t need to convert to Islam to become one. That lost me a little.

"Deep inside me, words will always be Arabic. That’s the language inside me, there long before me. It sticks to my skin, goes far beyond me, speaks to me in spite of myself."

[diario_de_um_leitor_pjv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uma escrita poética sobre uma história de dor na busca da pertença e da identidade.

Uma mulher marroquina, prostituta e o seu filho. Do exílio é da fuga para o Cairo, a deslocação e a redescoberta no centro da Europa. O fim partilhado entre Medina e a morte mártir num acto terrorista.

Num tempo que simplifica o que na realidade é cheio de complexidade Abdelá Taia escreve um belíssimo texto que me prendeu e me fez reflectir.

Mais uma vez fica o apelo para a a necessidade da tradução e edição deste autor marroquino.

[Farhan Khalid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nobody will come. You know it. It’s too late. Or too early

We’ve been waiting a very long time. It’s over. It’s over

God already accepts us as we are. He made us this way

In this condition. In this situation. We accept His decisions

Look at the sky for a long time. It’ll break open in the end. Explode

I’ll wait until the Angel comes to cleanse me, give me new life. A new name

Our past won’t exist here. We’ll write it the way we want to. Another story

This is reality. Moroccan reality. Hard. Bitter. Ruthless

Now my words are worth their weight in gold

Listen to me

My legacy, my light, my final memory. Listen. Listen

Time passed quickly, very quickly, too quickly

Let me look at you a moment

People don’t know anything about anything

I went to the mausoleum

I lay down by the tomb of the saint

A sense of peace came over me. I felt lighter. I travelled

I told him everything. That’s what he’s there for, our saint

I didn’t choose that fate. I found myself inside it

My knowledge. My songs. My rituals

Everything was going to be lost. Disappear forever

He saw the life in me still throbbing, untamed

I’m dying and I can still hear them

I’m leaving and his voice comes back to me, beautiful, pure, welcoming

Night isn't made for dreams

Night is for finding the truth at last. Deciding everything

Go to the places I've been. Continue my story

I gave myself to him, opened myself, body, heart and soul

Everything in me is his. Living. Dead

I sang a Berber song. A nocturnal lullaby

The future arrives quickly

You’ll be there, in that blank time

Love is a traveller on the River of No Return, swept on forever to be lost in the stormy sea

A song. A language we made our own

Through the long night we were going to rewrite everything

I watched television. That was where I learned to see things more clearly

The connections between people. Evil. Good. Masks. Languages. Illusions

We had to beware of other people, all people

You must never completely open up to others

Resist. Resist. Never tell everything about yourself, your story, your heart

Never give yourself completely. Nobody deserves that honour

A love that went beyond

Beyond her circumstances and reality

Constant refusal to exist in words that were said and said again

life is not only life, there’s something else

There is beauty. There are rules

Beyond appearances. Eternally wandering. Sad

Souls gaze at each other. They are one

The tree is not dead. I finally understood

I’ll die with her. We’ll fall together. We’ll rise again

Building a persona over many years is what I respect in artists

Strong commitment, all the way

Real conviction that goes beyond singing

Intelligence put toward a real cause

He likes what I like

He’s my memory and my forgetting

He’ll like what I tell him to like

He’ll be what I tell him to be

He comes from me. I'm his origins, his country, his future

War was declared from the very first note

She was not afraid of repeating herself, of saying the same words over and over, fighting a solitary battle

The battle of love, of course

You whose love gave my life flavour, colour I’ll never give you up, whatever happens

Whatever happens. Never. Never

Cairo possessed me. The crowds, twenty million, kept me company. Protected me

I learned solitude in Cairo

Solitude in the midst of an angry but remote, unfeeling humanity

Adolescence is a time of power

Every day is a tragedy. Every day is war

Peace does not exist. Will never exist in us

We were wrong. We’ll always, always be afraid

Draw closer to a heart. Listen to it. Follow its rhythm. Enter its mystery

Beyond the seventy thousand veils. Explode. Explode with love

Every day and every night a little more. I’ll scream. I’ll love

Lost souls. The jungle. Madness. Injustice everywhere, day and night

Everything disappearing, collapsing

Casablanca was a vale of grief

More than any other place in Morocco, the city was permeated by deep and incurable sorrow

That great big city of eight million people was empty. Completely. Totally

[Sara Touri El Mansouri · Rating 3 out of 5]

De entrada ya me llamó la atención la sinopsis y el hecho de haber leído con anterioridad a Taïa hizo que escogiera Infieles. Se lee casi del tirón. Mientras estás leyendo, te da la sensación de estar acompañando a Selima y Yalal. Sus historias están cargadas de dolor, tristeza, violencia y crueldad pero cada uno con sus principios, deseos y fuerza interior. Me ha gustado y recomiendo la lectura de Infieles.

[Kevin S · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book with a writing style different than anything I’ve read before. I don’t know if it’s the Arabic/french influence, but the entire book feels like poetry. Abdellah find a way to make stream of consciousness make sense in the most natural way. There’s barely a sense of chronology but instead of taking away understanding, it adds to the emotional depth of a life lived in confusion, in search for a clarity that seems to never arrive.

Jallal, his mom, and her mom seems to be all looking for love. Aren’t we all? But to this lineage love seems prohibited, denied, pulled away. In every generation they seems to turn to god at the end of life, in an incrementally extreme way culminating with Jallals, Jihad.

The book has a homoeroticism in the foreground of it. Throughout the book I couldn’t stop wondering how much Jallal’s emptiness was driven by a need for love that he could never have.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 1 out of 5]

In addition to the really awful thematic choices Hussein’s review highlights, this book is a mess - as if someone scribbled random stuff in a notebook and decided to publish it.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2018, I bought this book to accompany me on a solo trip to Morocco. Being gay, I was excited to read a gay author who grew up in the culture I'd be experiencing for the first time. But, trying to read a book written from the point of view of an abused and abandoned child, while vacationing alone as a stranger in a strange land proved to be too much, so I put I put it down to focus all of my attention on the seaside of Essaouira, petting the cats, running from dogs, and trying to make the best decisions possible about which strangers to talk to and go home with. (Not like that, but it was a good trip.)

You should read this book if you care about sex workers and gay children, if you've ever been orphaned or adopted, if you love Marilyn Monroe, if you believe in religious ecstasy, or if you have ever hated a place so much it became a person upon whom you wanted to exact revenge. You might also like this book if movies have ever saved your life, if you've converted to Islam, learned Arabic, known Morocco well, or have an interest in the politics of the Morocco, including the occupation of the Western Sahara and the Sahrawi people.

You should not read this book if you will recoil from extensive depictions of spitting, political torture or sexual assault or if you don't enjoy the shifting and unpredictable experience of multiple narrators. Seriously, the word "spit' is used 12 times in the first two pages and the narrator is just getting warmed up! Take good care of yourself before and after you embark on Part 2 of Chapter 2. You'll hear from about 5 or 6 characters before all is said and done.

Highlights for me include the very poetic and tender description of a tree dying upon being felled and the comi-tragic depiction of Marilyn Monroe as an angel at the gates of heaven, which made this perhaps the gayest book I've ever read. I was also taken by the brief love affair at the end of the book between the narrator, now a young Moroccan living in Belgium and a young Belgian man, a convert to Islam who is dying of HIV or cancer or both. Taia captures the ecstasy and treachery of fast, young love between sexual outsiders, when our lives are already super-charged, or laid bare, depending on how you look at it, by trauma, sickness, and the sadism of the State.

[Bob Olsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of Jallal, a Moroccan suicide bomber, written in lyrical prose using the voices of several narrators besides Jallal, including his mother and grandmother, both prostitutes, his Belgian stepfather, and Marilyn Monroe.

[Damian Serbu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerfully written and raw. It transports you to the scene and reality of life. The poetry of the language here is amazing. There is a sadness mixed with longing, and a lesson on what moved people forward. I can't recommend this book enough to people.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had me with its powerful, poetical writing, its tragic history, its backdrop, right up until the last few chapters. Then it pulled a stunt that felt cheap and lazy. And it really dragged the whole thing down.

[Nadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagining the most human intimacy. To know ones beauty reflected back to them and realizing their own worth. A gracious story with openness, mystery, darkness and brilliance.

[Swampwench · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mother and son, son and mother, mother and god, son and man, mother and man, son and god

[michele · Rating 3 out of 5]

kinda torn about how i feel about this.

taïa possesses a very particular writing style that reminds me of my own at times but in the opposite way. all of his sentences are short and often straightforward, sometimes only phrases left grammatically incomplete. the frequency of periods and lack of commas really forced me to slow down, which irritated me at times because it was like every other sentence, but i came to appreciate it generally. his structure for storytelling confused me at first as well. first it's jallal when he's 10 and angry at the world (rightfully so), then saadia, then slima, and finally back to jallal in his 20s. in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense, but the experience of it takes a little getting used to. nevertheless, all three of the characters and the peeks we are afforded of their lives relay a sort of anger, melancholy, poignancy, and suffering that comes with the difficulties of their experiences due to their positions in life. but at the same time, you feel a sense of love, especially with these first two perspectives, as a young jallal and saadia sacrifice and rage at the expense of slima.

there are just so many congruent feelings tied up in taïa's story that i have difficulty trying to explicate them. i suppose i'll do this chronologically (organizational wise) then. i find myself entrenched in these three people's lives, aching for them. this fervent, righteous love jallal has for his mother despite/because of her occupation feels so real, so tactile in that way, that i wait for his spit to splatter onto the ground, onto a head. the strength yet desperation required to take on the occupation his grandmother had and to pass it down to his mother as a form of love, as a way of freeing her, makes me nod along, saying yes, maybe that is kindness. but i read her daughter's tribulations so soon after and i must ask, "how could it be?" the shame, the abuse, the danger she incurs because of her profession is so much. so very much. too much to handle. ask an adolescent jallal. ask a released slima. was it worth it? was that actually freedom? and then we have our grown up jallal, detached, abandoned, and adrift. of course he's drowning. he's utterly lonely. he's been alone for too long now and he doesn't know where to put his hands. and i feel for him. i wish there was a place for him in this world. he seemingly finds it only to be misguided yet seduced. what else does he have left to live for? what does this world owe him?

i constantly struggled throughout this novel and especially during slima's confinement. i am always wary of men writing women characters because i feel like so few men can actually ever understand the magnitude of the makeup of women's lives, their interiorities. how can they when most of them are trained to view women as some kind of object or auxiliary person, if human in their eyes, at all? taïa's voice himself comes through most obviously when he writes these women's stories. they don't feel like women's voices to me really. and it really didn't when she begins to relay her terrifying encounter with the interrogators. she didn't speak of r**e like i think a woman would. it sounded more like what a man thought a woman may feel during that. and that aspect of the novel was really hard for me to discount. to speak of women's trauma like this, i need it to feel real and i need it to feel respectful and understood. otherwise, what the fuck does this all mean? the trauma and abuse these women characters endured are simply the means that explain jallal's end? fuck that

so there, all of my ambivalence bare for you to see. it was also so interesting to consider the role marilyn monroe played in this story, especially at the end there. still unsure what to make of it but i will say that i'm thinking of this novel. this story. and that's all i can really ask for from a book.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book that is separated into parts, each one dealing with a generation of a family and/or the family as a whole. Taia's writing style took a little getting used to, but I really liked it by the end.

The parts deal with so many emotions. Jallal is the son of Slima, and his voice and experience ends up telling much of the story. The settings range from Morocco to Egypt to Belgium and back again. It's a really deep novel for being so short. It was not like anything I've read before & I recommend it.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful story centered on Jallal; a young boy, son of a prostitute in Morocco, who is devoted to his mother while fully aware of what she must do to keep them well. As he grows he befriends Mouad, a Belgian convert to Islam who rekindles the faith in Jallal. The reborn faith and its consequences bring the story to a too quick but beautiful conclusion. I've already got other works of Taia's on my To Read Shelf, and look forward to them.

[Zoe Wilkerson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is really really hard. The first few stories, when Jallal and then his mother are children in terrible situations, are not for the faint of heart. Honestly, it’s the final section with Jallal and Mahmoud which gets this story up to four stars. I enjoyed the discussion of radicalization and Marilyn’s role was very interesting.

[Sean Neun · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this book in English. I found it to be absolutely intriguing and the different points of view added a wonderful layer of authenticity.
I don’t think I have ever finished a book this quickly. It’s short to be fair but still.
Impressive work.

[Donald Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intense meditation on love, filling the void of emptiness and disrupting the empty void which passes for conventional society and religion. Beautiful essential connections are dreamed of and realised. Quite enchanting.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, uncomfortable, powerful work. religion, sex, love, bodies, loneliness and abandonment and connection and creation. can we all create our own afterlives based on what we believe in this life? maybe religion really is all our own.

[Giorgi Davidovi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read it in one go. The entire experience of reading was if I have was dreaming this story. The translation is phenomenal and I found Taïa's language so deep and poetic. If Gabriel garcía márquez and Gibran Khalil Gibran wrote a book together that would it.

[Achille Lcq]

B. Ret*illeau type book.

Les deux premières parties étaient correctes. J’aime le style de l’auteur. J’aime le cru du vécu des personnages.
Mais à partir du troisième chapitre ça devient juste un discours islamophobe très dérangeant. Je n’ai pas fini le bouquin.

[Dzura · Rating 4 out of 5]

this interesting novel keeps me reading to the end.

[Virgowriter (Brad Windhauser) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels under written. Had this been developed more fully, the interesting bread crumbs of story could have been more fully realized. Here, there a lot of characters thinking with few actual scenes.