On Friday, June 6 at 7 pm, Casa Árabe de Madrid receives the writer Abdellah Taia (pictured) for the presentation of his latest book, El bastión de las lágrimas (The Bastion of Tears). The author will talk with Karim Hauser, coordinator of Cultura de Casa Árabe. Free entry until capacity is reached. In French and Spanish, with consecutive interpretation.
Years after his mother’s death, Yusef, a Moroccan teacher living in exile in France, returns to Salé, his hometown, to sell the apartment he inherited. As Yusef dives into the streets of today’s city, a lost world takes shape, a world in which gender or class difference is paid at a very high price.
As he prepares to fully embrace the legacy of a terrible and abusive childhood, but also marked by deep love for his sisters and his deceased mother, Yusef visits the Bastion of Tears, the ancient walls of Salé, to fulfill his last promise to Nayib, a friend from the past.
The author, Abdellah Taia, was born in Rabat in 1973. After studying literature at the Mohamed V University in Rabat, he moved to Paris in 1998 where he began his career as a Moroccan writer in French. He has so far published, among other texts, eleven novels: My Morocco (2000), Le Rouge du tarbouche (2004), The Salvation Army (2006), An Arab Melancholy (2008), King’s Day (2010), Infidels (2012), A Country to Die (2015), One Worthy of Love (2017), The Slow Life (2019), Living in Your Light (2022) and The Bastion of Tears (2024). Always attentive to current events in Moroccan and Arab politics, he regularly collaborates with the French and international press for opinion articles. In 2013 he directed his first feature film, The Salvation Army, based on his eponymous novel, and in 2024 he premiered Cabo Negro. Currently residing in Paris.
