L’Armée du Salut, adapted from Moroccan Abdellah Taïa’s (b. 1973) 2006 novel of the same title, is the author-filmmaker’s first feature-length film. The film is also the first ever made in Morocco about homosexuality in the country. Debuting in February 2014, the film thus far has been widely shown in theaters across the country. It was shown in Rotterdam in January and in France in May 2014.
Taïa’s film miraculously skirted censorship despite pressure from the PJD (Parti de la justice et du développement/Party for Justice and Development), the leading Islamic political party in Morocco. Although considered a somewhat moderate party, its officials were still outraged by what they deemed a film promoting values that are deemed un-Islamic. Taïa explains in an interview (“Le film de Abdellah Taïa sélectionné au festival de Tanger,” www.tanger-experience.com) that even though the film was finally shown in theaters, it was not without controversy from the first moments he began shooting. In El-Jadida on the Atlantic coast, Islamist-leaning students organized demonstrations at the university against the filmmaker and his production staff. Despite this setback, L’Armée du Salut was ultimately made, and subsequently was one of the twenty-two films nominated for the Grand Prix at the Tangiers Film Festival in February 2014. Such an honor reflects the schizophrenic sociocultural and political reality of a country in transition in an era of rapid globalization. While Morocco is one of the most progressive nations dedicated to improving human rights in the Arab world, it is still a country that considers homosexuality a crime, as prescribed in Article 489 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes “lewd or unnatural acts with an individual of the same sex.” Those condemned of “homosexual acts” can serve up to nine months in prison and suffer significant fines.
L’Armée du Salut is for the most part autobiographical: a coming-of-age story about a young boy embracing his homosexuality and the difficulty of expressing his sexual orientation in a society that is very much entrenched in and structured by traditional gender roles. For many Moroccans, upholding the sociocultural divisions between men and women are imperative. But these divisions, certainly for younger generations, are becoming increasingly difficult to accept. Thus, Taïa suggests that his film is not only about social alienation because of sexual orientation, but also about the disenfranchisement of young people who seek to challenge traditional mores. “This film corresponds to my vision about life in Morocco and how this country treats its individuals, whether hetero or homosexual, . . .in how it strangles their aspirations and their true freedoms,” the filmmaker notes in the online interview.
The film is divided into two parts. The first focuses on a young Taïa (played by Saïd Mrini), living and coming of age in the late 1980s in Salé, a somewhat disenfranchised working-class suburb of Rabat. During this time he engages in his first homosexual encounters with older men in back alleys and behind half-built walls on the building sites of his neighborhood. The second chapter transitions to an older Taïa (played by Karim Aït M’Hand), who has embraced his homosexuality through several sexual liaisons. These relationships include one with Jean, a Swiss man on holiday in Morocco. Abdellah ends up leaving Morocco to pursue his studies in Switzerland, where he encounters Jean again but now rejects him. In a heated argument Abdellah tells Jean that “he explained everything in his letter” as to why he no longer wants to continue their relationship, although viewers are not privy to the content of the letter or what ultimate understanding is worked out between the two men. Jean accuses Abdellah of being “an opportunist” and for having “taken advantage of him.” Abdellah notes that he has arrived in Switzerland because of his academic success through rigorous work at the University of Casablanca where he obtained his first diploma. Jean can no longer “keep him” as he did in Morocco; Abdellah wants nothing from his former lover. Taïa’s message extends past a simple quarrel between lovers to convey the more comprehensive message that most immigrants to Europe do not seek handouts, and that until Europeans see them in another manner, they will be caught in stereotypes that lead to more misunderstanding, doubt, xenophobia, and racism.
Upon his arrival at the university in Geneva, Abdellah is told that he is a month too early to claim his student grant money. Without resources, he finds himself alone, in the cold, rainy, isolating streets of Geneva with nowhere to go. By chance, he happens on the Salvation Army shelter for homeless or wayward travelers, many of whom are immigrants. It is in the Salvation Army dormitory that Abdellah metaphorically finds the “salvation” he seeks: not only a place to sleep safely, but a space of freedom where one is recognized as an individual, first and foremost, in a community of men whose marginalization and alienation—not because they are homosexual, but because they are “foreign”—forge the very human bonds young Taïa has sought throughout his life.
Emotionally, L’Armée du Salut is very rich, although the tightly wound emotions are often conveyed more by what is not said than by what is said. Abandonment and loss, frequent influences on Abdellah’s reality, are conveyed primarily through image rather than words. As Taïa has noted in many interviews, images from classic Arab (particularly Egyptian) films of the 1950s have inspired the way he constructs his scenes. Films such as Bab al-Hadid (1958) from the famous Egyptian cineaste Youssef Chahine convey strong emotions on the part of protagonists often struggling with sexual frustration, failed love, and loss. According to comments made by Taïa in his keynote presentation at the conference “Around Abdellah Taïa” (University of Miami, 2014), Chahine was a prominent influence on him from a very young age. In an interview with the New York Times he spoke of compiling scrapbooks during his childhood filled with pictures of Egyptian movie stars such as Faten Hamama and Souad Hosni. In several scenes in L’Armée du Salut (as in the novel), Taïa alludes to his great love for Egyptian classic films and celebrities in portraying the nuanced, emotional love that often cannot be expressed in dialogue but only through language and allegorical song. “Egyptian movies saved me,” Taïa notes. “Women appeared without veils and alcohol was consumed openly. . . .There was already the idea of transgression through television happening in my house with my sisters. In my head, I connected that to homosexuality” (quoted in Aida Alami, “Muslim, Gay, and Making No Apologies,” New York Times, April 11, 2014).
In one scene young Abdellah sits with his sisters and mother watching the film Days and Nights (1955) by Henri Barakat which features the celebrated Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez (1929–77) singing Ana lak ala Tool (I Am Forever Yours, 1955). Later, this song of love and loss is again sung by Abdellah’s new roommate, Mohammed, in their room at the Salvation Army. Mohammed, also from Morocco, has come to Europe to find work. In the last scene of the film Abdellah offers an orange to his roommate. Mohammed tells him that he will accept the fruit after he sings the song they both know so well, Ana lak ala Tool. The orange and the song from the other side of the Mediterranean bind them together in their Arab roots, but also sets them free. It is at this moment that Abdellah recognizes that no matter the outcome of his future in Europe, he is sure of his identity in the present.
Audiences will notice first and foremost the lack of dialogue, the parsed words, the un-uttered sentences: what should be said, but isn’t. The unsaid and the unsayable in Moroccan culture are aspects of the film that leave us, like the young Abdellah, uncomfortable in our own skins. Taïa uses many symbols to evoke the real-life oppression he feels as he is caught in the binds of traditional society. The film’s opening scene, focusing on young Abdellah as he walks by a pressure cooker spinning and emitting steam as it cooks the family’s evening meal, metaphorically captures the emotional turmoil pent up inside him. A decaying boat, wrecked on the beach, mirrors Abdellah’s feelings of being stuck, stranded in a no-man’s-land of what cannot be articulated. Stolen glances between men, gestures that go without words: all of these make up the silent and/or metaphorical homosocial codes that young Taïa must navigate.
The metaphorical pressure cooker of Abdellah’s life is contextualized with each scene as we understand how separation, alienation, violence, and abjection dictate what masks he must wear in order to survive. Although in the family home Abdellah professes to prefer “women’s space”—watching television with his mother and sisters and doing laundry, the “work of women”—young Abdellah is forced into more masculine roles by a mother who displays an allegiance to social norms and a father who is patriarchal and domineering only because he must be according to traditional Moroccan family structures. As a young boy, feeling no total allegiance to either masculine or feminine realms, but nevertheless constantly being faced with having to make a choice between them, Abdellah is often set adrift, to negotiate life on the liminal edges of these socially gendered divisions. Although the young Abdellah knows he can never give in to the heteronormativity of the society in which he lives, he does eventually find ways to circumnavigate the division of spaces between men and women in order to find his own path. In many ways, Taïa’s film is first and foremost about how to learn to love, be loved, and find one’s way as an individual. Therefore, on a universal level, Taïa makes his film relatable to all viewers, no matter their sexual orientation.
Slimane, Abdellah’s older brother, is the person in his family he perhaps loves and respects the most. Seemingly suspecting Abdellah’s homosexuality, Slimane—who is reading Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1948 novel Le Christ récrucifié (Christ Recrucified) as they sit together on a bench—tells Abdellah in French (a language that Abdellah as a young boy can’t understand) that “learning French” will help him to “leave Morocco” and escape. When Abdellah replies in Moroccan Arabic (Darija) that “French is only for rich people,” his brother replies, “power lies in knowledge.You shouldn’t be afraid of French.” This scene is significant since it not only recasts the language of the former colonizer into something positive—as a means to arrive at another destiny—but it also marks a turning point for young Abdellah, who sees the usefulness of an “other” language as a tool to articulate what he cannot say in his native tongue and to express an alternative identity for himself.
Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, Le Christ récrucifié, ironically first written in Greek and then translated into French, is strategically placed in this and several other scenes—in Slimane’s room at home on his nightstand, resting on his stomach as he sleeps, later on the bed in a beach hotel room, and finally in this scene with Abdellah—before it becomes an explicit object of their conversation. The novel is allegorical and symbolic; although it replays the Passion of Christ, it focuses more on emotions and passions that are often contradictory. Spirituality can often be hypocritical, as can tradition and unchanging acceptance of the way things are. Much of the Greek author’s existential writing reveals man’s internal struggle between himself and the powers of nature and, perhaps faith. Eventually, as the film progresses, all these aspects of human struggle reveal themselves to Abdellah as he navigates a path that will lead him to his true sense of self. Questions about spirituality and passion have been explored, in one way or another, in all of Taïa’s novels: Mon Maroc (2000), Le rouge du tarbouche (2004), L’Armée du Salut (2006), Une mélancolie arabe (2008), Le jour du roi (2010), and the recent Infidèles (2012). They are also the last questions that Abdellah is able to discuss with his brother before Slimane abandons him and his little brother, Mustapha, at the beach in order to find a girl. Despite a talisman “to keep him with us” given to Abdellah by his superstitious mother, Slimane slips into absence. “He abandoned us. . . .The talisman didn’t work. . . . . Mum you have to cast another spell,” Abdellah shouts into the phone to his mother with Mustapha beside him as they stand alone at the edge of the sea. This last scene closes the first chapter in Abdellah’s life. It also documents the first abandonment that sets him free.
Taïa’s film about homosexuality and coming of age in Morocco’s traditional culture also touches on other themes associated with this North African-Mediterranean country that are important, yet rarely seen on screen in the films made by European filmmakers. Poverty and primarily French-speaking (France, Belgium, Switzerland) Europe’s continued sexploitation of Moroccan youth is woven into the subtext of the film. Although Morocco has made significant progress in curtailing and prosecuting offenders partaking in sexual tourism, the country has by no means eradicated it. The trafficking of both Moroccan girls and boys by Europeans, as well as Saudis, is a sociopolitical subject that has been increasingly the topic du jour in the cultural production of Morocco—depicted in films, novels, and social media. Taïa’s film adds a layer of nuance that brings to the forefront the continuing exploitation by rich capitalist powers of less powerful developing nations in our era of rapid globalization.
While the constraints of cinematographic time compelled the author to cut many of the scenes detailed in his novel, Abdellah’s arduous journey to arrive at a place where he can defy social norms and ultimately claim his homosexual identity without fear of repercussion is no less painful. Not only is this a story about claiming one’s identity and right to be homosexual, it is also about the human need for recognition as an individual, for companionship and community, no matter one’s sexual preference.
