We are in Salé, a city located on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean very close to Rabat, the capital of Morocco. Youssef, who left to study in France, chose to stay there and live out his homosexuality in complete freedom. Returning to the historic district of Hay Salam to sell the share he inherited in a building which belonged to his mother, “an admitted dictator”, he dialogues before our eyes with his memories and with the shadows.
The ninth and last child of a modest Moroccan family, with six sisters and two brothers, Youssef was never like the others. Members of his family, the street, the neighborhood and society as a whole never stopped reminding him of this.
“We lived at ground level. Sat. Squatting. Lying down. Asleep. Hungry. Enraged. Bewitched. Possessed by jinns. Sick. Under the weight of mektoub », explains the narrator of Bastion of Tearsthe 10the novel by Moroccan Abdellah Taïa and December 2024 prize.
“They were young, wild and beautiful,” he told us, speaking of his sisters. “Real actresses”, fascinating and magnetic, “like in an Egyptian film”. Both heroines, belly dancers, students and prostitutes. They who never did anything to protect him, life has caught up with them all, changing them into mothers, wives, servants of their family and the immutable order of things.
But Youssef especially remembers Najib, an older boy from the neighborhood, also homosexual. And he too was raped, insulted, sold “in the souks, in the moussemsin marriages.” While everyone knew “the tragic soap opera” that was his life, spectators amused, entertained, accomplices.
Najib, her first love, left one day without a word to go live with a corrupt army colonel and drug trafficker, a prominent representative of a privileged caste who take everything for themselves and for their friends, “those which kill us all, every day and every night.”
He left without a glance behind him, but he knows that Youssef took his place when he left. In a sort of dreamlike dialogue, the two men will try to explain each other, putting today’s words on yesterday’s actions and feelings. “I don’t know where this assumed cruelty came from,” Najib said. I don’t know what I did to Allah to make Him abandon me and mistreat me to this extent. Allah never came to save me. »
Born in 1973 in Salé, as the uprooted protagonist of Bastion of TearsAbdellah Taïa puts his finger on the banal cruelty of family dynamics, a mirror of those which structure society. The author of King’s Day and of Slow life (Seuil, 2010 and 2019) forcefully denounces the hypocrisy of Moroccan society, displaying the high price that women and sexual minorities must pay in this Maghreb country, where “children belong to everyone. »
As in this unbearable scene of ordinary violence in a neighborhood hammam, where an old man attacks a little boy under the indifferent gaze of the others – but not of Youssef, who recognizes himself in him. “We are noticed from early childhood. Effeminate kids. The little ones. Little girls with boy names. Homosexuals. The queers. Those who don’t deserve to exist among us. We begin our planned destruction very early. »
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