Autobiography example marocains

Haunted by space both actual and metaphorical, remembered and constructed, Lalla Essaydi's work reaches beyond Islamic culture to invoke the Western fascination with the veil and the harem as expressed in nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings with the odalisque. The world that Western artists encountered in North Africa was suffused with the exquisite beauty of the architecture, the interior decor, and women's clothing. It is this beauty that Moroccan-born artist Essaydi reclaims in Les Femmes du Maroc, her second powerHouse Book.

Essaydi's work revisits the world of women, suggesting the complexity of feminine identity and the tension between hierarchy and fluidity that are at the heart of Arab culture. Not simply a critique of either Arab or Western culture, Essaydi's photography offers a more active, even subversive engagement with cultural patterns to convey her own experience as an Arab woman.

In these images, the text adorning the women's bodies is partly autobiographical. Essaydi speaks her own thoughts and experiences directly, as a woman caught between the past and present, between East and West, and also as an artist, exploring the language in which to "speak" from this uncertain space. Without specificity of place, the text itself becomes the world of the subjects-their thoughts, speech, clothing, shelter, and nomadic home. However, this text is incomplete. It involves the viewer as well as the writer in a continual process of reading and revising, of losing and finding in its multiple and discontinuous threads. Similarly, the women in the photographs require multiple visual readings. Both are as elusive as "woman" herself-not simply because she is veiled but because she is still in progress.

Moroccan writer and filmmaker (born 1973)

Abdellah Taïa (Arabic: عبد الله الطايع; born 1973) is a Moroccan writer and filmmaker who writes in the French language and has been based in Paris since 1999. He has published nine novels, many of them heavily autobiographical. His books have been translated into Arabic and many European languages.

Described by Interview Magazine as a "literary transgressor and cultural paragon," Taïa became the first openly gay Arab writer in 2006, and, as of 2014, he remains the only openly homosexual Moroccan writer or filmmaker. His first movie, Salvation Army, is widely considered to have given Arab cinema "its first gay protagonist." Since his coming-out, according to one source, Taïa "has become an iconic figure in his homeland of Morocco and throughout the Arab world, and a beacon of hope in a country where homosexuality is illegal."

Early life and education

Taïa was born in 1973 in Rabat, Morocco. According to The New York Times, Taïa "was born inside the public library of Rabat...where his dad worked as a janitor and where his family lived until he was 2." He grew up in Hay Salam, a neighborhood of Salé, a town near Rabat. His family was poor. He had nine siblings. He first came into contact with literature through his father's job at the library.

Taïa lived in Hay Salam from 1974 to 1998. He has described the experience:

Everything I have known about the world comes from this city and this neighborhood. Everything I want to put in my book is also coming from this world. The house where I lived there was very small, only three rooms for eleven people. One room for my father, the second for my older brother, Abdelkebir, who exerted a big influence on me, and the last one for the rest of the family: my mother, my six sisters, my little brother and me. Life for me stil