ABSTRACT
It is late January I am in Paris, walking beside the Canal de Saint Martin with Rachid. We have just had lunch in his favourite cous cous restaurant, where I presented him with my translations of two of his books, autofictions based on his life as a boy growing up gay in Morocco. As we walk, he is searching on his iPhone for photos to show me of the Jardin Zoologique in his hometown Rabat. When at last he finds some there are some magnificent gum trees in the foreground. “Look” he says, pointing to one, “that is like the tree I used to swing on in my garden, the one I wrote about.”
