Configurations and transfers of sexuality, gender and desire in the opening of an Arab melancholy of Abdellah Taia, or "the crossing of borders"

This article analyzes the opening segment of Abdellah TaTa's novel, Une melancolie arabe. It attempts to show that an imaginary scenario is at stake in this first part of the narrative which displays the genesis and the early development of a queer affectivity and sexuality, deeply questioning predetermined and fixed gender identities. Such a scenario is anchored not only in the narrator's autofictional psyche but also in the ideological, material, and social conditions of an underprivileged urban zone of Morocco in the 80s. It also generates a desire of escaping through writing a situation which does not offer any recourse and is simultaneously lived from the inside and denounced from the outside.