The Coming out and reinvention of oneself through autofiction: Abdellah Taia, Rachid O. and Eyet-Chekib Djaziri

A pioneering wave of openly gay Maghrebian novelists broaching non-normative sexuality has emerged in the last two decades. Writers such as Rachid O., Abdellah Taia and Eyet-Chekib Djaziri have penned autofictional novels depicting the struggles of assuming an exclusively "gay" identity in the Arab-Muslim societies of the Maghreb. Autofiction presents itself as an important conceptual tool that allows these writers to deal with issues concerning their so-called deviant sexuality. Autofiction through its breaking of boundaries between the real and the imagined, between the public and the private, facilitates a process of coming out as well as making public what is deemed taboo and unspeakable. This article also contends that autofiction, as an unstable genre, is employed by these writers to embody the fluidity and insuperable difficulty of putting into perspective phenomena such as sexual and gender identities.