Memoirs are the new black. Like most trends, they are associated with the young and bankrolled by the old. Bypassing decades of wisdom and experience (boring!), we are guaranteed a raw slice of a trembling life. France’s current celebrity memoirist is Abdellah Taïa. Author of five books variously described as autobiographies, memoirs, autobiographical novels, etc., he is “Morocco’s first openly gay writer.” Taïa’s most recent book, Salvation Army, has just been translated into English.
Salvation Army is an endearing pastiche of the author’s life growing up in Salé, a small city in Morocco, ending with Taïa’s first experiences of European life as a scholarship student to Switzerland (where “every citizen is a policeman”). His older, Swiss lover, who had encouraged this emigration, never shows up. Straddling Morocco and Europe, childhood and independence, Taïa’s heartbreaking discovery is that “every single person pictured me in his own way.”
Writing in a sweet, introspective tone, his account begins in bed — the family bed. The way the eleven members of his family occupy their three-room apartment marks him for life: his father has a bedroom to himself, as does the revered eldest son. His mother sleeps in the common room on the floor with the rest of the children. She is called once a week to join her husband in a ritual that is audible to all.
Situated somewhere between the comforting bosom of his mother and his longing for his older brother, Taïa’s sense of self and sexuality exists in counterpoint to the larger-than-life figures around him. A precocious and lonely child, he experiences life “stretched out and in a state of suspension… Books, books, books and records.” His adoration of his brother, first filial then sexual, keeps him in a constant state of arousal. But maybe it’s just a family thing: “my family’s reality has a strong sexual quality, it is as if we have all been one another’s partners, we blended together ceaselessly, without guilt.”
This absence of guilt and guile rescues Salvation Army from being merely a diary. Taïa, in choosing to listen to the story of a stranger, realizes, “I had given him my full attention. There was nothing else I could do for him.” There is an appealing wisdom there.
Unfortunately, the translation retains none of the music of the original language. Translator Frank Stock’s mid-western flatness, incessant use of “really” and “totally,” and the absence of either Arabic or French contribute to the book’s pedestrian tone. In just one example, Taïa calls home to reassure his mother, “everything’s fine, mom, just fine.” Replacing “mom” with “Om” or “Omi” could have done much to underscore his close relationship to his mother and give the scene the emotional urgency it requires. Elsewhere, errors points to sloppy editing if not a loose grasp of language (using “evidently” when he really means “obviously”). What may well be a finely nuanced story in its original French is a thud-thumping brick in American English.
Leila Marshy lives and writes in Montreal and is the managing editor of carte-blanche.org. She swears she’s too young to write a memoir.
