A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories, 2020
A Country for Dying is more about atmosphere than plot. It is a brief, taut work that digs deep into the margins of society to demonstrate the many ways in which colonialism pollutes our notions of love and self. Over the course of three parts and six chapters, Abdellah Taïa introduces us to the inner lives of four immigrants in Paris, as they contend with their present realities, the pasts they are trying to flee, and the dreams they still hope to indulge.
Their stories read like monologues, and talk toward each other more than they ever intersect. In this they mimic the characters, who are largely confined to their individual apartments; even the city that holds them all is, in a way, isolating—a refuge that can never quite be home (as a Moroccan living in Paris, Taïa himself writes from a place of exile). Thus, while each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. A Country for Dying draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.
If there’s anything like a connective tissue between the stories, it is Zahira: a forty-year-old Moroccan sex worker who has moved to Paris to escape the trauma of her father’s suicide when she was a girl. She struggles with the guilt of having “abandoned” him when he fell ill and was confined to the second floor of their house. “I didn’t think my father was going to die,” she reflects, “[b]ut I accepted, just like everyone else, that I wouldn’t see him again . . . The weight of his heavy footsteps echoes in my ear.” Grief-stricken, Zahira struggles to rewrite his story and heal her pain. Much of the chapter devoted to it is written in the second person as she addresses her father directly, updating him on his family’s lives after his death; in practice, however, it feels like she is addressing the reader, telling us her story on her own terms, to great emotional effect.
There is a direct through line between Zahira’s trauma and her instinct to take care of Mojtaba, a gay Iranian exile, when she finds him collapsed on the street. Looking after him over Ramadan helps her cope with her father’s death: “He was also tender, sweet, melancholic. That was obvious immediately. Something in him was similar to me, familiar.” For a moment, the quiet intimacy that forms between them brings them the peace they so badly deserve. Their bond never ceases to feel fragile, though, and it is clear that it will not last.
Zahira’s caring instinct extends to fellow sex worker Zannouba, her friend and protégé. In the first part of the book, on the eve of her gender confirmation surgery, Zannouba is excited to recapture what she used to feel when her sisters dressed her up as a kid; she has long identified as female, and has come to Paris searching for the freedom to finally be herself. Her transition, however, doesn’t quite go as expected. After surgery, while still confident in her decision, she finds herself mourning Aziz, the man she was raised as. Like Zahira, she must come to terms with what she has lost:
I don’t regret anything that I’ve done. I wanted this operation. This disappearance, I’m the one who planned it, orchestrated it. Brought it to fruition. I thought of everything. But not of the essential: how to be a woman? I mean, beyond clothing and makeup, what is a woman?
The stark drop from Zannouba’s breathless pre-surgery exhilaration to her deep post-surgery depression is not about gender; rather, it sprouts from the realization that her longtime fantasies will never materialize. Womanhood will not give her the freedom she experienced as a child while dancing with her sisters; her life in Paris, much like Zahira’s, will not save her as she thought it would.
Taïa masterfully conveys both characters’ frustrations by equating their work to a performance of sorts—a(n) (dis)illusion. At several points throughout the story, they ponder the lives of different actresses; these lives represent the dreams they’ve been sold, which differ starkly from their reality. Zahira also reminisces about the glimpses of Paris she and her father used to catch on television—images meant to inspire but also crush. Like their fellow sex workers, the friends view acting as their ultimate craft: they watch Bollywood movies on repeat, fully aware of their artifice and all that goes into maintaining it, because “[b]eing a whore isn’t just taking your clothes off and opening your legs for men. You have to act out multiple roles, act them out perfectly in real life.”
Some parts can be especially hard to play. When Zannouba first arrives in Paris as Aziz, for instance, she works as a call girl servicing intellectual gay men who ask her to portray a racist fantasy: “I prostituted myself dressed as a moderately savage Arab boy from over there, Algeria. The clients liked that, liked for me to smell like my home country, the savagery of the village, as they liked to say.” Other times, the parts are forced upon the players, like when a fellow Moroccan sex worker is kidnapped by a soldier so that she may tend to the army occupying French Indochina (many of the troops, it appears, don’t like Asians). These crushing depictions serve an important political purpose in Taïa’s deft hands: they showcase how sexuality, too, can be colonized.
It feels almost meaningless to call books “timely” anymore, but the arrival of A Country for Dying during a period of widespread immigration, social distancing, and oppression of marginalized groups feels almost prescient. Its powerful lyricism, on the other hand—fully captured in Ramadan’s skillful translation—is positively timeless.
Photo credit: Abderrahim Annag
Alyea Canada is an assistant editor at Asymptote and editor at Melville House. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
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