Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the Arabic by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories Press, 2025
Nearly halfway through Living in Your Light, the narrator, Malika, plainly states: “Survival doesn’t make us into better people.” Abdellah Taïa’s latest novel tells the story of this survival in three parts, ranging from 1954 to 1999, showing us the endurance of his protagonist through rejection, death, love, and loss—but also her gradual hardening. When Malika makes the above statement to her daughter, Khadija, she’s already recognized that life has made her more severe than the young woman who falls in love in the novel’s opening.
Malika is a complex narrator, at times honest with herself and at other times stubborn, and Taïa clearly designates her as representing his own mother, M’Barka. The author has written on his mother in previous works, but has never explored her motivations, her character, or her complications so intimately. In his collection of short stories, Another Morocco, he writes: “M’Barka and I love each other, with much more than the love between a mother and son,” and has said elsewhere that his favorite word is M’Barka. However, their relationship is complicated, and Living in Your Light is plainly Taïa’s way of deciphering and honoring his mother’s journey.
Thus, Living in Your Light is one of Taïa’s most impressive works to date for its ability to tightly capture the struggles of a woman’s independence in Morocco, headed by Malika’s determination to control her own life, and continually thwarted by the forces of poverty, war, and colonization. Throughout the novel, Taïa writes of the physicality and torture of love, alongside larger questions of agency and resistance.
In the first part of the novel, Malika is still a young woman, living with her father but resented by his new wife. She’s seeking an escape when she meets Allal, with whom she quickly becomes infatuated, and Taïa describes with simplicity the sensation of two people falling in love. As Malika takes Allal in, she describes the sight and smell, his “strong neck. . . . The dark black hairs of your short beard. Your nose, long and thin. Your lips, the color of the land here: red ocher. Your ears, huge and strange,” and breathing “in the smell of your body . . . of a man beaten by the sun for years and years, browned by the sun, almost black from the sun. A body that’s sweating, dripping.” But for Malika, even the physical connection is ultimately something that cannot live up to the initial vision in her head. Recognizing early that Allal and his best friend, Merzougue, are much closer, she reacts jealously when she sees them on the terrace of the house “on top of each other, naked” on a hot summer night.
Despite the unconventional arrangement between herself, Allal, and Merzougue, Malika’s marriage is a source of true joy—but one disrupted early in a scene where she and Allal visit the Ouzoud Falls. At first, the two are happy, thrilled, and “surrounded by love” at the Falls, but soon find themselves frozen beneath a French helicopter searching for members of the resistance. Soldiers come out, pointing guns at Allal and Malika, but ultimately leave the two shocked but unharmed. In the aftermath, Malika reassures herself that the only solution is to “[h]ope that one day we will forget,” making clear that decolonization does not proceed so simply; though the novel largely takes place in the aftermath of Morocco’s independence from France in 1956, neither the country nor her own life are truly free from influence, even after the French officially withdraw.
Allal signs up to join the French war in Indochina, with a different hope: that the money from waging another country’s war can offer him and Malika (and Merzougue) a life outside of his family’s home, but his quick death in Indochina shatters Malika. His family too turns on her, offering her a very small share of the money the French had paid to compensate for his death. Poverty and colonialism are central to the narrative in Living in Your Light, from the incidents at the Ouzoud Falls and the death of her husband in a foreign war, both setting the direction of Malika’s life towards the final scenes depicting her in her old age.
Later, Malika remarries to a man named Mohammed, but little changes except her own view of the world. In the second part of the book, she meets Monique, a French woman with which her family becomes enamored, and who wants to hire her daughter, Khadija, and potentially take her to France. Mohammed believes Khadija would have better prospects in life, but Malika is enraged by the prospect of losing someone else she loves to the French. By this point, she has stripped back her expectations of life, having changed more than she wants to admit. While she had chided Allal for joining the war for financial reasons, she later encourages Khadija to stay in Morocco and marry a rich member of the royal court, expressing her conviction that “with a rich man from Rabat, our life would be easier. That we’d have a bit of wealth and comfort, finally.” Despite young Malika’s plea to Allal that “[m]oney isn’t everything in life,” she now understands the impact of poverty on one’s life and choices.
By 1999, as the novel closes, Malika is living alone in a small apartment in Sale, with her family unresponsive or distant as a young thief breaks in to rob her. This thief, Jaâfar, is an old friend of her own son, Ahmed; both are gay and seeking to survive in a world that has been cruel or willfully blind to their suffering, and now Jaâfar has been driven to crime by the very same forces that have shaped her life and the lives of those around her. Tortured by her losses, Malika is forced to confront the choices she made, the difficulty of fighting these forces in life, explaining to the thief in her apartment that “the past will always be the past. It can never be forgotten.” Malika pleads with the thief to help her locate Ahmed, who left for France but no longer returns her calls. She momentarily considers reaching out to Monique for help, but Jaâfar forces Malika’s to examine her own role in driving her son to France. He reminds her how she ignored the rapes and abuse Ahmed suffered, focusing on her other children and family’s precarious financial situation.
In this final climactic moment, Taïa processes in fiction the painful dichotomy of his own relationship with M’Barka. He’s previously shared that while his mother did not reject him, she did not understand her gay son. Ultimately, like Malika with Ahmed, she did not protect him—though he also states that he has since “forgiven her.” Living in Your Light acts as a testament to this forgiveness, giving us a portrait of a woman with own her depth and unseen dimensions, wrestling with more than might have been apparent on the surface to a young boy. Taïa presents a fictional version of M’Barka as a woman who cannot escape her past, forced to try to navigate contradictions in her motives and continually renegotiating what she’s willing to compromise.
In Another Morocco, Taïa wrote about a moment when he was young, trying to secretly watch The Wounded Man, with its raw portrayals of cruising and gay sex, while his mother slept in the next room. The young Taïa was terrified she’d wake and learn his secret, but when she did wake up and before falling back asleep, he remembers M’Barka saying: “My son, you need to watch, watch what you want on television . . . I will not get upset . . .” It’s a simple moment, not directly acknowledging the truth but providing enough blessing that Taïa feels bowled over. This feeling now transforms into compassion in Living in Your Light, where Taïa’s love for his mother is made clear in this sensitive portrait of her shortcomings, which nonetheless acknowledges the emotional endurance necessary for her to survive.
Matthew Snider is a freelance writer based in Maryland. His writing has previously appeared in Asymptote, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Slant, and Ploughshares, online and elsewhere.
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