An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity.... -An Arab Melancholia Sale, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood-which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taia's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Sale, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.

An autobiographical coming-of-age novel by the the "only gay man" in Morocco. An autobiographical novel by turn naive and cunning, funny and moving, this most recent work by Moroccan expatriate Abdellah Taia is a major addition to the new French literature emerging from the North African Arabic diaspora. Salvation Army is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of Taia's life with complete disclosure-from a childhood bound by family order and latent (homo)sexual tensions in the poor city of Sale, through an adolescence in Tangier charged by the young writer's attraction to his eldest brother, to a disappointing arrival in the Western world to study in Geneva in adulthood. In so doing, Salvation Army manages to burn through the author's first-person singularity to embody the complex melange of fear and desire projected by Arabs on Western culture. Recently hailed by his native country's press as "the first Moroccan to have the courage to publicly assert his difference," Taia, through his calmly transgressive work, has "outed" himself as "the only gay man" in a country whose theocratic law still declares homosexuality a crime. The persistence of prejudices on all sides of the Mediterranean and Atlantic makes the translation of Taia's work both a literary and political event. The arrival of Salvation Army (published in French in 2006) in English will be welcomed by an American audience already familiar with a growing cadre of talented Arab writers working in French (including Muhammad Dib, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Katib Yasin).

Informed by post-independence avant-gardes and the vernacular traditions of her native Morocco, Khalili's artistic approach combine performative strategies of storytelling, reactivating the "civil poetry" as defined by Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and inspired by the old tradition of Moroccan Al-Halqa. As a political voice endorsing the collective one from the singular experience, Pasolini's civic poet mirrors the Moroccan "Halqa," the country's most ancient form of public storytelling. Mixing up popular tales, ancient poems and political references the Al-Halqa performer subverts official historiographies and narratives to eventually become at once the people's "living archives" and its public voice. Operating similarly, Khalili's work develops civic platforms for first person accounts eventually forming collective stories of resistance.