In the first part of this essay, Alex Tan discussed Arab texts that anticipate their own reception in translation or as world literature, and how Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa—in For Bread Alone and Salvation Army—desacralise the languages of Classical Arabic and French respectively. Here, the discreet elements of these two “autobiographical” works are further analysed, in order to understand how a self can be written into existence amidst erasure, shame, and even the savagery of love.
“All of us already wanted to forget our past, forget last night,
forget the troubles that brought us here and couldn’t be shared no matter who asked.”
—Abdellah Taïa, Salvation Army (tr. Frank Stock)
“And So I Felt Ashamed”: An Affective Education
Caught in between Arabic and Western autobiographical conventions, the works of Mohamed Choukri and Abdellah Taïa narrate points of silence to enact the difficulty of speaking as oneself. Whereas the Arabic tradition is associated with a concealment of the shameful and a preference for collective voices, the Western takes pride in confessing the abject and centering the individual’s coming-of-age. In negotiating one’s place within the collective, the self-portraits in Choukri’s and Taïa’s work inevitably confronts a culture that, to secure deference to authority, forbids people from thinking as individuals.
Both texts are abundantly punctuated with moments of non-verbal expression amidst Moroccan society’s conspiracies of silence. In Salvation Army, the parents of Taïa’s narrator—also named Abdellah—have a “preferred language” of “sex”; here, the father’s silence conveys his desire. Less benignly, Choukri’s surrogate, Mohamed, in For Bread Alone ironises his father’s draconian assertions by addressing him “without speaking”: “O Khalifa of Allah on earth.” Left unelaborated, this phrase evokes the quiet imaginative gestures that the author performs as a mode of survival—as it is known only to himself. It mirrors the larger vocabulary of violence that saturates the book, such as when his father speaks “only in shouts and slaps,” a dialogue of abuse which forms their exclusive mode of interaction.
The narrator grows to be adept at reading signification into embodied cues, like those of Yasmina and an unknown young man whose “eyes tell me” he “wanted something”—the language remaining vague as if to re-enact the man’s reticence. A European woman, catching Mohamed “staring” at her handbag, similarly communicates with “her eyes.” They “seemed to be saying: Aren’t you ashamed? And so I felt ashamed.” The woman’s eloquent silence performs an affective education: Mohamed learns how a white person views someone of his class and race, and realises where and when he should feel shame. Yet in giving language to these moments, Choukri displaces the locus of shame from the personal to the systemic.
An education in shame, entwined with taboo, lies at the heart of both texts’ use of autobiographical conventions. Shame is wielded to school Mohamed and Abdellah in the thresholds of permissibility, yet both narrators continue to repeatedly transgress these boundaries, having received little to no formal moral instruction. For Mohamed, shame occurs after his attempted rape of a boy. It does not happen organically; the narrator feels “ashamed” seeing his aunt beg “pardon” from the boy’s mother. The adult figure’s manifest contrition, not some innate morality, indicates what he should not have done. Echoing this scene, Sallafa tells Mohamed when he tries to masturbate: “Haven’t you any shame at all?” Shame resurfaces as an emotion retrospectively comprehended as something he was meant to feel, in relation to his inappropriate exhibitions of sexual desire.
In contrast, Taïa’s work refrains from linking shame to sexuality, perhaps to destigmatise queerness. Abdellah says, once again elucidating the dependence of reality on fantasy, that the “strong sexual quality” of his “family’s reality” in his mind allowed them to “[blend] together ceaselessly, without guilt.” He also exalts the “holy” love of Matthias for Rafaël and the “intense poetic sexuality” of men in a public toilet “lovingly looking at cock.” Instead, Taïa locates shame in classed, racialised insecurities arising from poverty, and an inferiority complex cultivated by colonialism.
All these become acutely perceptible in a wealthier, whiter space like Geneva, where “every citizen is a policeman”—such as when a woman shouts at Samir, the Tunisian, and mortifies him for repeatedly pressing the pedestrian crosswalk button. When Abdellah “shamelessly expressed” to Jean “my desire to become an intellectual,” that very shamelessness represents his refusal of the social script dictating that he ought to be ashamed for not knowing his place. Broadly, Taïa’s oeuvre might be approached as a defiance of the societal imperative to feel ashamed for not knowing what he never had a chance to learn.
As he mentions in an Asymptote interview, “writing is a primitive thing: something that is integral to my body and cannot be ignored”; writing, then, can tap into what transpires in the mind, prior to the intervention of learned social restraint.
The Identity Document: Law, Love, and Literacy
For Bread Alone and Salvation Army can be regarded as exemplars of the bildungsroman even as they subvert it in important ways. The scholar Joseph Slaughter argues that the bildungsroman’s standard plot socialises the individual into “learning for oneself what everyone else (including the reader) presumably already knows” by “elevating the particular” to the “universal”—but what are the horizons of the things that “everyone else presumably already knows”? What happens in a place where such things are not common knowledge?
The narration of Choukri and Taïa’s maturation amidst the lack of material sufficiency dramatises the limits of these generic universalisms. Those born into the margins will only find themselves further excluded by projections of supposed “common sense.” The circularity of these teleologies, in which one must know what everyone should know in order to be regarded as properly human, locks the subaltern in an endless non-existence.
It is no coincidence that Choukri and Taïa highlight the injustice of legal systems that disproportionately surveil their narrators for who they are perceived to be. Watching Abdellah walking with Jean in Salvation Army, the Moroccan police chastise him with “contempt” that it is “against the law in this country to bother tourists.” Without any knowledge, the police had already typed them—based on the optics of their racialisation—as prostitute and client. In the end, they are saved by Abdellah’s identity card, exposing the arbitrariness of citizenship, and of the identity document as a determinant of someone’s right to have rights (to quote Hannah Arendt).
Only when he goes to the eponymous Salvation Army does Abdellah experience, for the first time, what it feels like to be recognised as simply human, beyond identity categories. He finds it startling and refreshing for the precise reason that it doesn’t “care what you do in life”. The receptionist, without asking questions, “knew just what I was going through,” having addressed Abdellah’s need for shelter and food. The equivalent in For Bread Alone—a boy who “saved me from the police”—similarly remains nameless, but recurs in his memory as a figure of unprecedented humanness. These are moments of communion transcending language; a new valence of silence.
Unlike Abdellah, Mohamed lacks official “papers” in Tangier, which endangers him in collisions with the police and “hotels.” In the eyes of the law, he is a presupposed non-person, though his invisibility, paradoxically rendering him hyper-visible, intensifies his vulnerability to capture. Yet this is merely the juridical flip side of a familiar reality, as he witnesses his own fate mirrored in the grave of his murdered brother “invisible among all the others”—the graveyard a “world of silence.” Mohamed cannot even sign his own name, a fact stark in its literality as much as it symbolises his legal non-existence. Not daring to “ask them what was written,” he realises that “they can write whatever they want.”
His powerlessness finds a metaphysical parallel in the smuggler Kebdani’s demise, which another character, Kandoussi, laments as “the death written for him.” The passive voice, occluding the one who writes death, conjures a seemingly inescapable horizon of impoverishment which dooms one to fates of premature, unmemorialised death. In 1950s Morocco, where the book’s events are set, anti-colonial unrest only compounds this nexus of bodily susceptibility and legal risk. Scores of rioters are killed, some bodies washing up on the shore bearing “no marks”—disposable and dying nameless deaths.
These alignments between death, illiteracy, and writing underscore how that which appears divinely ordained might be a fig leaf for the machinations of humanly-orchestrated systems. Though the writing of a foretold death might feel as permanent as an engraved inscription, Choukri demystifies it as a construct of the law, literalised as an action performed on behalf of those who have been denied access to its protection. Exemplifying his vulnerability to legal, official, and metaphysical manipulation, illiteracy materialises in Mohamed’s consciousness as an impetus to learn to read and write.
Elsewhere, literacy has social dimensions. Others weaponise Mohamed’s illiteracy to ostracise him, as when Abdelmalek denies him the right to “talk about politics” when he “can’t even write [his] name.” In prison, Mohamed enviously says that his friend Zailachi is “lucky” to be literate, suggesting again that literacy is more a matter of good fortune than free will. By a stroke of luck, the moment of listening to the famous Tunisian writer Echebbi’s poetry is the turning point that stirs in Mohamed the desire to become literate against all odds, to precipitate his own entry into social visibility and audibility. Zailachi writes on the wall, and then recites to Mohamed: “If some day the people decide to live, fate must bend to that desire / There will be no more night when the chains have broken.”
Writing himself into existence is hardly separable from “the desire to live”, to which even “fate must bend.” This applies, meta-textually, to the material object we read, framed as a “social document.” For Choukri, such a document can “protest against oppressive exploitation” and “attempt to set things right.” Writing in the form of document(ary) must refashion fate and compensate, however inadequately, for the legal existence which Mohamed lacks in the life he retells.
In Salvation Army, impenetrable figures of authority, rather than the law, dominate Abdellah’s consciousness—though carceral images are mobilised. Religion appears not as theology but in secularised idiom, where humans are objects of reverence. The taciturn Abdelkébir, when he chooses to speak, is worshipped as a “prophet (a poet) who announces a new holy verse”; he is also the one who “helped me form sentences”—a primal pedagogical role similar to the one Zailachi performs when he writes the letter alif on the wall for Mohamed in For Bread Alone. Besides Abdellah’s brother, the gay filmmaker Pasolini acts as “priest-imam” to “bless” Abdellah’s relationship with the Swiss man Jean.
As embodiments of the literacy and culture which Abdellah fetishises and desires to emulate, Abdelkébir and Jean function simultaneously as an elevation of the human and a desacralisation of the divine. Albeit not as indifferent or violent as Choukri’s godly figures, Taïa’s deities have the insidious ability to annul Abdellah’s very right to be, and in this sense approximate the powers of law. Holding his elder brother Abdelkébir’s hand, Abdellah feels so consumed by love that “I don’t exist for myself anymore” just as Jean’s rancorous silence reduces him to “an abyss, a nonexistent person.”
Taïa rewrites Choukri’s emphasis on law into a relational idiom, portraying familial, romantic, and sexual love as akin to documents upon which one can develop an unhealthy reliance for the authentication of one’s identity—especially when this love is made the object of fetishistic investment and seen as the agent of one’s salvation.
The Story Begins: At the Limits of (World) Literature
“The questions come easily, but I am not sure of the answers to any one of them.
I thought the meaning of life was in living it.”
—Mohamed Choukri, For Bread Alone (tr. Paul Bowles)
Before salvation, the narrators must reckon with the boundaries of generic form, where things are not identical to themselves and form does not correspond to meaning. Initially, this manifests in For Bread Alone as Mohamed’s encounter with a djinn, which leads him to fall gravely ill. Stripped of autonomy and subject to God’s all-encompassing might, Mohamed needs an exorcist’s intervention to “return to [his] normal self”. Imagining a dialogue with his aunt, Mohamed says, “I like everything that’s wrong (. . .) I don’t understand myself.” The non-identity of Mohamed to himself—in his own eyes—irrupts within as a unrestrainable force.
In Salvation Army, another shift in identity is experienced as betrayal—all the more disenchanting for the preceding deification. When Abdelkébir marries, he “became someone else” whom “I no longer recognised,” and an eruption of jealousy causes Jean to become “another Jean.” Western culture itself is undermined as a sham, “nothing at all like the place I read about”; a shared “love of books” with Jean fails to impart common “values” or “doubts.” The treachery of the secular (in Taïa), equalling the treachery of the sacred (in Choukri), is successively exposed to dismantle the narrators’ corresponding faiths.
Another locus of fragmentation comes about through the world’s gaze, brought to bear on the marginalised. Abdellah in Salvation Army is commodified in Geneva as “nothing more than a prostitute” that “anybody could buy.” Devastatingly, this is how the narrator becomes “aware of this new aspect of myself, a reality beyond my understanding,” marking the point where the perceptions of others—along axes of identity like race and class—are incorporated as part of oneself.
The task of autobiography, then, takes shape against all that seeks to reduce Choukri and Taïa’s narrators to nothing more than their social identity, representing the vehicle through which selfhood can emerge as an inarticulate becoming, only gestured towards but not materialised. Abdellah’s return to Europe, in Salvation Army, heralds a renewal, as he “was becoming this whole other person, someone I didn’t even know yet (. . .) I would get to write about my life, my past, my future, write it all down for myself and for others.” The vignette looks forward to the formation of a self that Abdellah cannot know in advance, a self that will feel capable of assuming narrative agency, a self who is writing the text that we hold in our hands: “Lose myself entirely, the better to find myself.”
Jean badmouths him as “nothing but a whore, like so many other Moroccans”, but he no longer feels diminished by the slur. Having lost himself, Abdellah’s formlessness distils into a potential for emancipation. Here, where one is not identical to oneself, one can become other than who one is: a self-transcendence that the word “salvation” indexes. It unfolds in the transitional period of the “meantime,” where uncertainty lingers and “perhaps my dream of being an intellectual in Paris will have become a reality”. An othering from within.
So it is with Mohamed who, visiting his murdered brother’s grave, wonders less optimistically: “what shall I become? A devil, most likely.” Abdellah’s confidence in writing as a channel of legibility jars against Mohamed’s doubts about the efficacy of prayer: “what are [the words] for? My little brother never had a chance to sin.” Mohamed’s thoughts tarry with the afterlife, with the incapacity of language to resurrect what is lost. His ruminations, ironising the absurdity of any such divine calculus, do not preclude anxiety over his own destiny, whether in this life or beyond. It seems certain that, even if “Allah will help,” “men will make [freedom] happen.”
What can he become, in the aftermath of life and text? If “the devil is people,” must one learn to exist as a devil in order to survive a world of people? When Abdellah in Salvation Army visits the French Department secretary, he sees himself refracted in her eyes as “this little demon (. . .) in the end”. Reading Choukri and Taïa together, we might apprehend their images of devils as another resignification, indicting not innate evil but the corruption of their environment, that which leaves individuals with no choice but to be devils. Refracted through the prism of “Islam,” angels and devils are desacralised, stripped of moral gravity. Taïa answers Choukri’s religious doubt by assigning to himself the secularised task of his own salvation.
Both works end inconclusively, opening up an interim—a bridge between the Abdellah/Mohamed who lives and the Taïa/Choukri who writes, between diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds. At the limits of language and law, class and race, literature and form, the space of becoming other than who one is—more than who one has been made to be—opens up a mode of anticipation. It is an anticipation akin to that of the third world writer who perpetually considers how their work will be read, translated into the dominant European and first world languages. In an age of world literature, Classical Arabic can no longer retain its sacred correspondence between form and meaning. It, too, must leave its habitual perch and take flight into the shared air of translatability.
Although Choukri and Taïa’s work likely has come to us through the industrial circuits of world literature, we would ironically be doing them a great disservice to read them merely as testaments of their culture. To speak uncritically of them as novels or autobiographies would reproduce the epistemic violence of categorisation already imposed on Choukri and Taïa in their lives, erasing the specific work that their texts perform on the levels of language, form, and genre. Such restrictive modes of reading, at their most egregious, represent but the other side of the Islamist protesters who would ban these texts for their sacrilege.
Better to say that they exceed the names of author, genre or country, like the “troubles that couldn’t be shared no matter who asked” (in Salvation Army), or the “music and the voices” that “took me off to a world . . . all in bluish-green” even though “I did not understand the words” (in For Bread Alone). Choukri/Mohamed/For Bread Alone and Taïa/Abdellah/Salvation Army happen, so to speak, in the future perfect: the ‘will have been’ but ‘not yet here,’ the “someday” that “the people decide to live.”
Writing makes a kind of sense—unfurls a kind of truth—in hinting obliquely at what can only take place off-stage, beyond the scene of writing. In other words, life; there lies its desacralised silence.
Alex Tan is a writer, aspiring translator, and student of comparative literature at Columbia University, with a particular interest in the literatures and language politics of Southeast Asia and the Maghreb. They currently work with Transformative Justice Collective in Singapore, and serve as assistant editor of fiction at Asymptote.
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