An interview with Abdellah Taïa - Asymptote. In 2007, Abdellah Taïa came out as a gay man via an interview with the Moroccan magazine Telquel.
It was a public proclamation that reverberated through all levels of Moroccan society: Morocco's biggest-selling newspaper denounced him, and many of the country's bloggers decried him, saying he should be stoned. The first Moroccan writer to live openly and unapologetically as a homosexual, Taïa has since been viewed as a literary ambassador for Morocco's "I" Generation, which has decidedly bucked self-censorship and begun the fight for individual freedoms in Morocco. Performing Language: An Interview with Abdellah Taia.
In late April, Abdellah Taïa arrives in New York City for the seventh annual PEN World Voices Festival. Two days before he is to sit down in conversation with Dale Peck for an interview hosted by PEN and the French Institute Alliance Française, we meet for tea on West Eighteenth Street to catch up. The last time I saw him, in Paris, it was late 2009 and he was living in a tiny Belleville apartment in the building in which Édith Piaf had been born. Recently he's moved into spacious lodgings in a more bourgeois neighborhood, and he isn't sure yet how to feel about this. Abdellah Taïa says hello to Crossing Border. In Conversation: Abdellah Taïa and Dale Peck. Podcast-directory.co.uk - your podcast directory with English video and audio podcasts.