Abdellah Taïa: Le Rouge du Tarbouche (2004)

Abdellah Taïa's Le Rouge du tarbouche (literally 'The Red of the Fez') is a collection of short, largely autobiographical stories set in Barbès in north Paris and in the author's native Morocco. Many of them are strangely haunting, having an almost surreal quality.

'Massaouda et le serpent' is about Taïa's aunt Massaouda, for whom it was torture to get up and sit down, but was a comical spectacle for the family as she was playing and exaggerating her ills. He ironises: 'Almost paralysed and still very active', and calls her 'deliciously talkative'. At the end of the month, when everyone is broke and the fridge is bare, she lifts up her djellaba and tells her nephew to bring Saïd the fishmonger '[S]o he can fuck me. [...] I'll open my legs for him for five dirhams! Anyway, it won't be the first time.' She was a great laugh, and it was especially funny as she didn't realise that Saïd was gay. She prepared Taïa and his brother – who were both young at the time – for the future, for life. She never married and was tri-colored: the blue of her tatoos, red hair, and yellow clothes. Some said she was mad, some that she was from another world.

In 'De Jenih à Genet' the author speaks of his mother's cousin Malika in Larache, but especially of her son Ali, with whom he seemed to be in love – certainly fascinated by. It's Ali who takes him to the grave of 'Saint Jehih' and whose exoticism increases when he speaks a strange language: French. But 'Saint Jehih' is in reality Jean Genet, called 'Saint Genet' in Sartre's book about him: Mohamed Al-Katrani lived in Larache and died in a car crash, and Genet insisted on being buried near him. Ali is moved to tears and hugs Taïa, and this is the last time they will meet.

'Le Maître' – partly concerning studying Maupassant's Bel-Ami and his character Georges Duroy – establishes Taïa's enchantment with the world of books as it does with his fascination for mustaches: George's 'confirmed his virility and revealed his beauty', and we remember the man with the mustache in 'Invitations' with whom Taïa shared his complimentary cinema ticket to see Angel Heart, a man who invites him to tea in a café after as a kind of return for the favor, and has something to say but daren't say it, perhaps Taïa is too young. The short story is also about Taïa's teacher, M. Kilito, who also has a mustache, who writes an autobiographical third person narrated book titled La Querelle des images, in which the protagonist is called Abdallah, and thus Kilito unwittingly becomes Taïa's authorial mentor.

'Voyeur à la rue de Clignacourt' describes the early days of Taïa in Paris, in an appartment in the 18th arrondissement, seriously interested in cinema, and the story starts with a mention of Hitchcock's Rear Window, moving to the narrator as a voyeur, watching out of the window the people who live in the building he's in, taking photos of them, imagining names for them, imagining their lives. He concludes that we can't live entirely alone, that we need people in some way, that even if we are in exile we need the Other, as he has exiled himself from his family but found another special 'family' with which he communicates in silence through his window.

Specific references to homosexuality appear in 'Une nuit avec Amr', in which Amr describes his Egyptian family's reaction to his 'femininity' hounding him and eventually confessing to them that he likes men: he leaves his family to their prejudices.

The title of the book comes from a short story of the same title when Taïa is meeting Alain near the Barbès-Rochechouart métro, and in order to be recognised by him he's wearing a fez. An old man – a Moroccan Arab – asks him if his fez is a from Fès or Marrakech. Taïa tells him it was bought in Rabat, whereupon the man tells him it's just a cheap industrial red made in Casablanca. When the narrator shrugs him off, he vows he'll never grow old, as old people like the rude man only destroy others' dreams. When Taïa briefly returns home after two years he discovers the eternal cliché – that you can't go home again: he must return to Paris in hopes of fulfilling his dreams.

Tahar Ben Jelloun: La Nuit sacrée |The Sacred Night (1987)

Ben Jelloun's La Nuit sacrée won the prix Goncourt in its year of publication, and is the sequel to L'Enfant du sable (The Sand Child) (1985). Both books take place in Morocco, and in the earlier novel the businessman father of the family seeks a family heir, which in this patriarchal society means that it must be a son. However, his wife gives birth to an eighth daughter. Deprived of a maculine descendant and facing humiliation and the future disinheritance of his immediate family in favor of that of his obnoxious elder brother, the father decides effectively to deprive his daughter Zahra of her female identity by concealing her gender from everyone and bringing her up as a son – Ahmed.

La Nuit sacrée continues the story on the father's deathbed, when he reveals Zahra's true sexual identity to her, the night before her twentieth birthday.* As one life ends, so one begins, and her father's death is not one of mourning for Zahra but 'A Very Beautiful Day', as she goes into the world to discover her identity as a woman.

Throughout the novel it is not always entirely clear what is real and what not, as some narrative sequences mix with dream elements, stories, and magic, although the feminist message is always clear.

When she begins her journey she taken by a cavalier to a perfumed garden peopled by children, and later continues through a wood where she undergoes a slightly ambiguous rape, and from there she goes to a hammam (Moorish or Turkish baths) whose attendant L'Assise (or The Seated One) has her stay at her home for some months, where she looks after her blind brother, the Consul.

Eventually Zahra begins a sexual relationship with the Consul, which is a revelation to her, and she comes to love the blind man. She realizes this can't last, and soon L'Assise (jealous and bitter) seeks out Zahar's uncle, who is furious at her deceit and accuses her of stealing his family's inheritance. Zahra thinks nothing of shooting him dead, but she is imprisoned. While in prison, her resentful sisters find her and subject her to clitoridectomy and infibulation.

Among other things, La Nuit sacrée is a dreamlike, poetic coming-of-age novel that is also a love story, a horror story, and feminist tract. And like L'Enfant du sable, it's been translated into English.

*This takes place on the 27th night of the month of Ramadan, or Lailatul Qadr', 'The Night of Destiny' ('La Nuit du destin') as the chapter is entitled, in fact it's the sacred night of the book's title.