Abdellah Taïa and an Emergent Queer African Islamic Discourse: Texts, Visibility and Intimate Archives

ABSTRACT This article discusses the work of Abdellah Taïa, the first openly gay Moroccan novelist to write his queerness, as a major contribution to an emergent queer African Islamic discourse. Bringing Taïa’s work into conversation with diverse literary texts from elsewhere on the continent, the article makes two major interventions in the field of queer African studies. First, it centres Islam as a resource for queer agency, creativity and subjectivity in contemporary Africa. This addresses Western conceptions of queer politics and queer rights that operate on a largely secular, if not anti-religious and specifically anti-Islamic basis. Second, it renegotiates the marginality of North Africa, and especially the Maghreb, in queer African studies. This addresses problematic historic divisions between North and sub-Saharan Africa, and acknowledges the political, cultural and intellectual unity of the continent. The article demonstrates that literary works make visible queer lived experiences on the continent. Drawing on Michelle Caswell’s ideas of the ‘archiving of the unspeakable’ and Achille Mbembe’s concept of the ‘unarchivable’, this article adopts a ‘scavenger methodology’ to argue that literary works are important in creating an emergent queer African Islamic discourse as well as an alternative archive of African queer lived experiences.