Abdellah Taïa May Be Gay And Arab But His Vision Is For The Whole World-- Go Rimbaud!

We first met Moroccan author Abdellah Taïa here at DWT about a year and a half ago in a discussion of marriage equality. I found his work in Out back then, and the new issue of the same magazine has an essay by him on the Arab Spring from another perspective: "Gay, Muslim, and Free." He says the Arab Spring has changed his writing. "I write as a revolutionary now, more political than ever. To join Arab history as it moves is a duty. I feel like Arthur Rimbaud. I see. To clean the slate is imperative."

Ever since I was a kid grappling with my own sexuality, one of the most positive things about being gay was the outlaw aspect, the social rebel. I don't know how many young gay people can even find that aspect in the clutter of glamorized, commercialized acceptance these days. I remember relating to Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" (video above) through that prism.

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

And then there was Kris Kristofferson's song that Janis Joplin made into a smash, Me And Bobby McGee:

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing don't mean nothing honey if it ain't free, now now.
And feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues,
You know feeling good was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

It's part of my theory that gays always play a disproportionately large part in any revolutionary movement, whether political, cultural or social-- or at least they did before all the acceptance kicked in. But if that theory doesn't work in California and New York, it sure still works in Mississippi and the Arab world. Taïa has been living in Paris but he seems very inspired by events from Bahrain to his own native Morocco.

Arabs are finally in the process of exiting the prisons in which many dictators have tried to imprison them. The Arabs-- the people that have been called fatalistic and submissive-- are staging a revolution. Better than that: They are reinventing the idea of revolution.

...This uprising overwhelms me, brings tears to my eyes and allows me, as an Arab writer, both Muslim and gay, to dare to feel hope. The determination I've always had, since childhood, to be myself, to tempt the truth, despite insults and misunderstanding—I see it now among other Arabs. Not only my own country of Morocco, but also with Arabs who, until recently, were far from my thoughts and my heart.

Before, the Arab world seemed like a fiction, a unified façade invented by the elite in order to dominate the people, to maintain them in poverty, unemployed and silent; to impose upon them a religion in order to control them; to keep them from thinking or from becoming free.

Now, a miracle is emerging in front of our eyes daily. Nightly. Arabs are emerging from their fear, defying power, sacrificing themselves. This moment is historic. It comes from within itself. And it's there because free voices continue to emerge. We want a lay society, freedom of religion, freedom of the body. We want equality, justice. We want to define our own existence. We want individuality, not only recognized by the legal system, but protected by the laws. For heterosexuals, as well as for homosexuals.

...I know some homosexuals who stood daily with the millions of Egyptians on Tahrir Square, in Cairo, in order to topple the regime and force President Mubarak to resign. I know homosexuals in Morocco, in Syria, in Tunisia who participated actively in the revolution.

I speak of homosexuals because I am one. And this revolution is also mine-- ours.

I am not a dreamer. I am not an idealist. For the first time in my life, I see that the Arab world can change. Will change. Has even started to change.

Go Rimbaud!