The purpose of the “I Journées Internationales Genre et Francophonie: Penser le Maghreb,” to be held for two days at the Conde Ansúrez Palace of Congresses (University of Valladolid), is to increase the visibility of fictional portrayals of identity conflict in contemporary French-speaking Maghreb literature.

To that end, it identifies the main problems which women and members of the LGTBIQ+ community must cope with when they attempt to fully develop as people and show themselves freely in public without fear or shame, as well as the strategies they use to get by in a system of moral, religious, economic or sexual coercion.

Both men and women authors show their commitment to society through writing which delves into the darker side of life in Morocco and Algeria, and also in France, to deconstruct several myths about inclusiveness, and to establish a brighter Maghrebi imaginary than the one some media try to force upon us, especially at a political time marked by the rise of the extreme right.

The events will be attended by two of the most outstanding voices in contemporary French-language Maghrebi literature: Abdellah Taïa and Fatima Daas. On Thursday, February 23, they will be taking part in the session “Translating Arab thought or the Arab imaginary in the French language,” along with translators Souad Hadj-Ali and Lydia Vázquez, accompanied by Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe’s International Relations coordinator.

Abdellah Taïa is a Moroccan writer, filmmaker and playwright. He has lived in Paris since 1998 in ideological exile. He studied French literature in Rabat and moved to Geneva in the 1990s to pursue his studies, which he would later continue at the Sorbonne. In 2006, he publicly revealed his homosexuality in an interview with Tel Quel magazine, becoming the first Moroccan intellectual to do so, forcing him to endure criticism in his native Morocco. In his work, he discusses what it means to be homosexual in a homophobic world, of the feeling of otherness, of his search for identity as a foreigner in France, and of the social experiences of the Moroccan generation of the eighties and nineties. His works have been translated into Spanish by Lydia Vázquez and published by the Madrid publishing house

Cabaret Voltaire. The most notable include La Vie lente (Slow Life), Un Pays pour mourir (A Country for Dying) and Celui qui est digne d’être aimé (He Who Is Worthy of Love).

Fatima Daas was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France in 1995. Her Algerian parents settled in Clichy-sous-Bois, a small town in the department of Seine-SaintDenis, on the outskirts of Paris, where she grew up surrounded by a large family that had been expecting a son. She was a rebel at school, claiming the right to express her ideas as she wrote her earliest texts. At high school, she took part in writing workshops and ended up enrolling in the Master’s degree program in Literary Creation at the University of Paris 8. She defines herself as an “intersectional feminist.” Her first novel, La Petite dernière (The Last One) was a revelation on the French literary scene in 2020, and a Spanish-language translation by Lydia Vázquez has recently been published in Spanish by Cabaret Voltaire, as "La hija pequeña".