Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb (Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics) 9781786600813, 9781786600837, 1786600811

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Contested Borders

Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics is an interdisciplinary series, developed in partnership with the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, which is based in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, UK. The series focuses on innovative research produced at the interface between critical theory and cultural studies. In recent years much work in cultural studies has increasingly moved away from directly critical-theoretical concerns. One of the aims of this series is to foster a renewed dialogue between cultural studies and critical and cultural theory in its rich, multiple dimensions.

Series editors: Glenn Jordan, Visiting Research Fellow, Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. Former Director of Butetown History & Arts Centre. Laurent Milesi, Reader in English, Communication and Philosophy and Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University. Radhika Mohanram, Professor of English and Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University. Chris Müller, Department of Media, Music, Communication & Cultural Studies, Macquarie University. Chris Weedon, Professor Emerita and Honorary Chair, Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University.

Titles in the series: Culture Control Critique: Allegories of Reading the Present, Frida Beckman Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence, Günther Anders and Christopher John Müller, translated by Christopher John Müller Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and the Location of the Caribbean Figure, Roshini Kempadoo The Attention Economy: Labour, Time, and Power in Cognitive Capitalism, Claudio Celis Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution, Jolan Bogdan Chinese Subjectivities and the Beijing Olympics, Gladys Pak Lei Chong The Extreme in Contemporary Culture: States of Vulnerability, Pramod K. Nayar Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities, edited by Rocco Gangle and Julius Greve Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money, edited by Laurent Milesi, Christopher John Müller and Aidan Tynan Materialities of Sex in a Time of HIV: The Promise of Vaginal Microbicides, Annette-Carina van der Zaag From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine, Marcelo Svirsky and Ronnen Ben-Arie Affective Connections: Towards a New Materialist Politics of Sympathy, Dorota Golańska Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora, Anindya Raychaudhuri Hypermodernity and Visuality, by Peter R. Sedgwick

Partitions and Their Afterlives: Violence, Memories, Living, edited by Radhika Mohanram and Anindya Raychaudhuri Back Issues: Periodicals and the Formation of Critical and Cultural Theory in Canada, Gary Genosko, with Kristina Marcellus Archaeology of Colonisation: From Aesthetics to Biopolitics, Carlos Rivera-Santana Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb, William J. Spurlin

Contested Borders Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb

William J. Spurlin

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 William J. Spurlin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Spurlin, William J., author. Title: Contested borders : queer politics and cultural translation in contemporary francophone writing from the Maghreb / William J. Spurlin. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2022] | Series: Critical perspectives on theory, culture and politics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021059555 (print) | LCCN 2021059556 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786600813 (cloth) | ISBN 9781786600837 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Gay men’s writings, North African (French)—History and criticism. | Lesbians’ writings, North African (French)—History and criticism. | Sexual minorities in literature. Classification: LCC PQ145.7.A35 S68 2022 (print) | LCC PQ145.7.A35 (ebook) | DDC 840.9/353—dc23/eng/20220301 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059555 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059556 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For David, again, and always . . .

Contents

Acknowledgementsxi Introduction 1 1 Sexual/Textual Crossings: Towards New Representations of Sexual Dissidence in the Maghreb

29

2 Historical Antecedents: Imperial Crossings and Same-Sex Desire between Men in North Africa

55

3 Disruption, Fragmentation and Alternative Sites of Memory: Gender and Sexual Dissidence as Forms of Decolonisation in Francophone Post-Independence Literature in the Maghreb

83

4 New Translations of Masculinity and Same-Sex Desire through (Re)negotiating Gender/Sexual Borders: Rachid O., Eyet-Chékib Djaziri and Abdellah Taïa 119 5 Nina Bouraoui: Further Translations of Sexual Alterity through Embodiment and Intersectional Crossings of Identic, Geopolitical, Temporal and Generic Borders

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6 Migration and/as Translation: Cultural Mediation and Negotiation as Ongoing Struggles for the Decolonisation of Queer Desire

201

References 227 Index 239 About the Author

247 ix

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deepest thanks to those whose generous support and assistance enabled me to complete the research and writing of Contested Borders. I am very grateful to the librarians and staff at all the archives in which I worked, especially at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the British Library in London, and libraries at Loyola University of Chicago and the University of Chicago, for helping me to find sources that were difficult to locate. I am also grateful for two sabbaticals while working on this book: one at the University of Sussex, when I began work on dissident sexualities in the Maghreb, and the other being a one-year sabbatical granted by Brunel University London, which enabled me to travel to other archives and to bring the research for the book to completion. I would like to thank those in the Princeton Research Group ‘Figuring the Queer in African Literatures and Cultures’, especially Wendy Belcher, who invited us to Princeton University’s Center for African and AfricanAmerican Studies in 2014 in order to present and discuss our various research approaches and work in queer African literatures and cultures and to interrogate each other’s work in formal seminar work and debates and informally in conversations on long walks around the Princeton campus and over working dinners and drinks. Naminata Diabate, Brenna Munro, Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi (Tunji) and Neville Hoad in particular provided invaluable feedback and suggestions to the resultant article I contributed to the special issue ‘Queer Valences in African Literatures and Film’, along with others in the group, published in the journal Research in African Literatures in 2016. I thank Tunji Osinubi for inviting me to be part of the special issue, for his careful reading of my work and for his thoughtful suggestions on the article in his role as co-editor. That foundational piece helped to form a blueprint

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for the current book and sharpen my views on queer translation and the relation between translation and migration in the context of those who cross the borders from North Africa to Europe and identify with gender and sexual dissidence. Closely related to this, I thank Thomas Beebee at Penn State University for the opportunity to guest-edit a special issue of the journal Comparative Literature Studies on the gender and sexual politics of translation which was also instrumental in helping to articulate and shape the emergent field of queer translation studies. The opportunities to present on the research for Contested Borders at various stages certainly provided me with valuable feedback from a wide variety of audiences, both academic and general. I would like to thank the various research centres and institutions listed below for hosted invitations to give public lectures or plenary talks on my work on topics related to this book, especially around queer migration and diaspora, queer translation, and francophone literature from the Maghreb. These include the colloquium Le Postcolonial-en-Devenir (Future Postcolonialisms), organised by Chantal Zabus and the École Normale Supérieure et Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) in 2011 when I first began work on this project, and which resulted in the publication of my revised talk as a chapter ‘Postcolonially Queer: Sexual Dissidence as Cultural Struggle in Emergent Democracies in Africa’ in The Future of Postcolonial Studies (Routledge 2015). The colloquium and the volume also marked the twenty-fifth-anniversary publication of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (Routledge 1989), who also contributed to the volume, and I thank Chantal Zabus for her efforts in organising the colloquium and editing the volume. I am very grateful to Kanika Batra for kindly inviting me to give a keynote address at the Annual Comparative Literature Symposium held at Texas Tech University on Translation/Transnation in 2016, and I would like to thank Pamela Caughie and the Departments of English and Modern Languages and the Women’s Studies Programme for inviting me to give an academic lecture on queer francophone writing from the Maghreb at Loyola University of Chicago in 2017. Thanks also to Héctor García Chávez, director of the Latin American and Latinx Studies Program at Loyola, and Gina M. Olsen, associate director of the Centre for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) at the University of Chicago, for the opportunity to give a lecture on translation, diaspora and queer politics in contemporary North African writing at CSGS, also in 2017. I want to express thanks to Azza Heikal, Dean of Humanities at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Studies, for the warm reception and opportunity to give lectures on my work for Contested Borders for faculty and graduate students at both the Cairo and Alexandria campuses in Egypt in 2015, where I

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enjoyed immensely discussions of, and the enthusiasm for, the feminist work of Assia Djebar among graduate students at Alexandria, particularly in light of the rapid political shifts happening in Egypt at the time not long after the Tahrir Square demonstrations for democracy. Professor Heikal’s firm beliefs in the power of scholarship on gender, and the importance of higher education to transform lives and societies, were indeed inspirational. I appreciate the many kind invitations to give plenary talks or invited lectures on this work at other research seminars within departments or programmes or as special events with smaller more intimate audiences where there was always plenty of time for discussion. These include the Modern Literature Research Seminar at the University of Leicester; the Department of Modern Languages at University College London; the Arts and Humanities Research Council Network Symposium on Partitions at Cardiff University; the Centre for the Study of Inequality, Culture and Difference at Nottingham Trent University; the Department of Comparative Literature at Renmin University of China in Beijing; the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Furman University in South Carolina in the United States; the Southern Modernities Association of South Africa, which held a co-organised conference with the Comparative Gender Studies Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) on queer modernities at the University of Pretoria; and the Remuera Library in Auckland, New Zealand. I remain indebted for the opportunity for genuine critique of my work in all of these contexts from the perspectives of so many different cultures, which has truly enriched it. I am similarly grateful for the forums provided by the Modern Language Association (MLA) for invitations to speak on this work, especially through the Division of Nonfiction Prose, Excluding Biography and Autobiography, early on; the Division of Literary Criticism; the Comparative Literature Forum on European Regions, and the Forum for European Relations, as well as the opportunities to present this work at the first two MLA International Symposia in Düsseldorf in 2016 and in Lisbon in 2019. I am also grateful to the African Literature Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies, and especially the International Comparative Literature Association and my colleagues on the Comparative Gender Studies Committee, which I chaired from 2010 to 2016, who responded to my work and provided sound suggestions and resources. At Rowman & Littlefield, I thank my editors Frankie Mace, Natalie Mandziuk, and Sylvia Landis for their kind assistance, patience and support for this book; and I thank Linda Kessler, production editor, and Monika Jagadeesh and Arun Rajakumar at Deanta Global who oversaw the the page proofs and the production of the index.

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Finally, my heartfelt thanks to those individuals who provided encouragement, support and insights in reading or hearing my work during the time I was working on this book, especially Ulrike Kistner, Radhika Mohanram, Margaret Higonnet, Bella Brodzki, Chris Weedon, Christopher Norris, Meredith Jones, Gretchen Gerzina and Jonathan Evans. I thank Pierre Zoberman, Anne Tomiche and Luc Beaudoin for their generous help in discussing the nuances of translation from French into English in this book, and I can never thank enough my husband, David A. Smith, for his patience and understanding during the research and writing process. His undying love and unconditional support have been with me for my entire academic career as far back as my own graduate studies and have helped to sustain me through my writing and through the many joys and tribulations of academic life. W.J.S.

London

Introduction

Transnational, global and border studies since the 1990s have challenged a preoccupation with discrete geopolitical and territorial demarcations of state sovereignty, and studies of societies and cultures that are primarily statecentred, through generating new analyses of mobilities, border crossings and cross-border negotiations, given that the world, according to Vladimir Kolossov and James Scott, has become increasingly composed of relational networks rather than of fixed spaces alone (6). On the other hand, one cannot deny the materiality of geopolitical borders and the ways in which they structure our views of the world. As I write this introduction in London in 2021, the borders of the UK have become more firmly instantiated and affirmed as it has now left the European Union (EU), ending, among other things, the free movement of people from within the EU across British borders. Yet, at the same time, there is the curious question regarding the newly invented border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK (known now as the Northern Ireland Protocol), as a result of Brexit, and the porous border, or lack of a border thereof, between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, preserved in order to protect the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement which were part of the Northern Ireland peace process signed in Belfast in 1998.1 The Northern Ireland Protocol allows for the continued free movement across the ‘invisible’ border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, where the former is technically no longer in the EU as it is part of the UK, but is not completely outside of the EU either through its relationship with the Irish Republic. This may lead one to ask, then, to what extent, and under what circumstances, do geopolitical borders remain fixed, visible entities and to what extent are they fluid and porous, and for whom and under what specific conditions and contexts? At the same time, however, the paradox of borders, ‘as both fixed and fluid, territorial and embodied’ 1

2

Introduction

(Bauer 37), is by no means a recent phenomenon realised in attempts to achieve a single world economic system and the financialisation of the globe since the fall of the former Soviet empire in 1989. Edward Said quite explicitly notes that one of the ongoing legacies of colonial power has been the production of postcolonised subaltern subjects, including migrants, asylum seekers, displaced persons, exiles and others unassimilated to what he refers to as ‘the emerging structures of institutional power’ and new states and boundaries produced through struggles for independence, where postcolonial subjects are caught in the tension between the legacies of colonialism and the newly independent postcolonial nation-state (Culture and Imperialism 332). The borders erected between Europe and its others, between the global North and the global South, and between the First and Third Worlds, not only have their historical antecedents in colonial relations and have helped to perpetuate hegemonic thinking in terms of how the globe is constructed and understood through spatial demarcations but are also discursive or symbolic indicators and creators of power relations, hierarchies, and inclusion and othering, given that geopolitical borders are also not the only borders that organise social life. To what extent are geopolitical borders self-evident markers of difference, territorial and otherwise, that create socio-spatial distinctions between places and groups, or to what extent are they invented, permeable markers of division, subject to reconfiguration and shifts of meaning for different actors who may cross them? Further, to what extent do the contours of the self shift through various crossings of geopolitical and symbolic borders, such as those between racial, gender, sexual, ethnic and class categories, and how does this engender processes of rebordering of self and place? How are the dualisms mentioned earlier, that is, between so-called centres and peripheries, rethought and renegotiated? Certainly, cultural hybridity, or the interaction and processes of identification that emerge through cross-cultural contact, undermines, to some degree, the efficacy of geopolitical borders and contrived notions of national cultural homogeneity contained within them. As Homi Bhabha notes, what emerges with hybridity is an ‘incomplete signification’, that is, ‘a turning of boundaries and limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority are negotiated’ (Nation and Narration 4; emphasis added). A focus on the space in-between not only puts pressure on the significance of geopolitical borders as absolute, natural markers of territorial space but can also work to destabilise the binary thinking that structures the social categories of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class as effects of power and discursive practices. Being positioned in the space in-between also enables the negotiation of new forms of identity and the articulation of new meanings through encounters with ambiguity, contradiction and nuance that occur at the intersections between cultures, including the colonial

Introduction

3

encounter as a defining historical antecedent that lingers in post-Brexit controversies around the Northern Ireland Protocol. Moreover, what do the paradoxes of borders, the inhabitation of the space between them and the concomitant processes of rebordering that may occur as a result, imply for the study of queer sexualities in their movements across borders, and, as Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler ask in their volume Queer Diasporas, one of the first major collections to address what they describe as ‘the frictional relation between geopolitics and embodied desires’, what intricate realignments of identity, politics and desire occur through queer movement across officially designated spaces (3)? Contested Borders investigates further this question through analysing representations of dissident sexuality in literature written in French from the Maghreb, focusing primarily on recent autofictional literature written by a new generation of queer authors, who are from the Maghreb and spent their childhoods and adolescences there, namely Rachid O. and Abdellah Taïa (Morocco), Eyet-Chékib Djaziri (Tunisia) and Nina Bouraoui (Algeria), and who then later emigrated from the Maghreb to Europe, eventually settling in France.2 Yet, writing about dissident sexuality and gender is not a contemporary ­phenomenon in the Maghreb, given the history of the Maghreb as a site of plural border crossings and border contestations, as well as cultural blendings, a crossroads between the Orient, the Occident and Africa. In speaking of the ambiguity of the term Maghreb, an Arabic term which means ‘west’, Mildred Mortimer notes that the Maghreb is the westernmost region of the Arab world for those in the Middle East, but from the perspective of those located in the West, the term conveys a site of oriental meaning and location (Afterword, Maghrebian Mosaic 307), thereby demonstrating shifts in the perception and the significance of geopolitical and regional borders. Considering this history, Contested Borders begins with earlier literary representations of same-sex desire between men in ghazal poetry written between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries in the Ottoman Empire which extended into North Africa into part of what is known as the Maghreb today. According to established literary conventions of the Empire’s belletristic period, especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, male poets wrote of the physical beauty of, and in some cases expressed abstract or chaste, but passionate, homoerotic desire for, smooth or downy-cheeked male youths, part of a tradition which coexisted alongside religious prohibitions against sodomy, while raising broader distinctions, or borders, between what was officially tolerated and what was specifically forbidden by Islamic law with regard to various forms of enacted affectional and homoerotic relations between men more generally, which will be discussed in chapter 2. French colonialism in the Maghreb, buttressed by European medicine, attempted to reduce North African forms of homosexuality to orientalist

4

Introduction

fantasies of decadence and excessiveness; it also eroded tolerance of the passionate love of male youth and pederastic themes expressed in Arabic literature, particularly as it had appeared in the belletristic tradition of the Ottoman Empire, as the new Western-educated elites in parts of the Arab Muslim world colonised by Europe, which would include the Maghreb, adopted European Victorian attitudes towards (homo)sexuality through travel to, or study in, Europe and brought these attitudes back home (El-Rouayheb 156), though it would be erroneous to assume that all late Victorian and post-Victorian attitudes towards homosexuality in particular were puritanical or repressive.3 But since medical and juridical views in Europe continued to read homosexuality as a sexual perversion generally and as a crime from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, which covers roughly the period of French imperial power in the Maghreb, such predominant, though not exclusive, European views continued to cross the Mediterranean into the Maghreb well into the twentieth century and were upheld by nationalist elites in the aftermath of colonialism, along with additional interpretations of homosexuality as alien to modern Arab Muslim societies and cultures as homosexuality gradually became depathologised medically and no longer criminalised in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. As these influences have implications for the postcolonial period, I examine representations of gender and sexual dissidence from feminist and queer perspectives in post-independence francophone literature in the Maghreb as a form of resistance to the newly formulated, but narrow, borders of national belonging in the period following independence from French colonial rule. Critical to this project, then, it is important to note that prior to the emergence of recent queer Franco-Maghrebi writing, there has been a historical precedent of representing dissident sexualities as a public or political act that involves the negotiation of various borders as far back as the early Ottoman period. In francophone literature following independence from colonial rule in the Maghreb, sexual transgressions are represented, as Jarrod Hayes notes, to deploy sexuality not merely as a private act but as a public and political discourse as a critique of the sociopolitical order in post-independence Maghrebian societies (Queer Nations 8). I would add that this public arena for the expression of same-sex desire also would include its expression in the Ottoman Empire given that it is expressed in literature written in Arabic, and thereby in the public domain, even though under highly formulaic literary conventions, and may or may not express the actual desires of the male poet but perhaps his mastery of the rhetorical conventions and the aesthetics of literary form at the time, though this literature may not necessarily express a critique of a predominantly, though certainly not exclusive, heteronormative social order at least in any explicit manner.

Introduction

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Contested Borders is by no means an attempt, however, to write a history of homosexuality in the Maghreb as I focus only on two earlier historical moments – one in the early Ottoman period and the other in the period following independence in the Maghreb from French colonial domination in Algeria and from the French protectorate regime in Morocco and Tunisia – where in both periods there is a rich literary tradition of representing samesex desire, with connections to, and varying degrees of negotiation with, the social, cultural and ideological contexts in which the pertinent texts were written, as is the case with the more recent literary work I address later, though with very different effects in each period. I hope to demonstrate in this book, through analysing the representation of sexual dissidence in literature from the Maghreb, particularly in the autofictional work by the more recent queer writers, that postcolonial forms of sexual dissidence and struggle may be better understood through the dialogical, contradictory and liminal spaces produced in the encounters between cultures, when ‘two or more cultures edge each other’, as Gloria Anzaldúa notes (19), in this case through the Mediterranean border, rather than only as a response to anti-imperialist postcolonial nationalism in the Maghreb, on the one hand, or through transplanted social movements (feminism and queer politics) from the West, on the other. Reading African cultures, particularly in the Maghreb, as circulatorial, rather than as fixed and static, that is, as relational and as mediated, can help to destabilise fixed notions of North African and Arab Muslim identities defined through essentialised categories of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, class and sexuality while exposing new, hybrid sites of heterogeneity and difference. Speaking of francophone postcolonies in Africa, which is similarly a further development of Bhabha’s theory of the double-writing of the nation – the gaps, the tensions and the splittings created between nationalist pedagogy, where imagined communities are given essentialist identities a priori as part of a patriotic body politic, and the actual everyday performativities of the nationalist narrative, ‘marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign’ (‘DissemiNation’ 297, 299), a translation, but never an exact repetition – Achille Mbembe speaks to the ways in which ordinary people are able to simulate adherence to the innumerable rituals that life in the postcolony requires, alongside the ability ‘to say the unsayable and to recognize the otherwise unrecognizable’ (108), a trope, a form of translation from silence around what is marked as taboo into language, and a border crossing from the private into the public sphere, an opening up and form of resistance that works across the various literatures of/from the Maghreb in different forms, which I will examine in this book. The representation of sexual alterity and difference shifts from being located as a private act to the public sphere much more overtly and quite centrally in the published texts of a new generation of francophone writers

6

Introduction

from the Maghreb, who are attempting, like their feminist predecessors in the period following independence, such as Assia Djebar, to reclaim what has been written out of dominant historical narratives and narratives of national belonging in the postcolonial nation-states of the Maghreb. Rachid O., EyetChékib Djaziri, Abdellah Taïa and Nina Bouraoui accomplish this through foregrounding translation and narrative reflexivity around incommensurable spaces of queerness in order to index their negotiations of multiple languages, histories, cultures and audiences. Equally important, their autofictional writing serves as important primary sources for the study of sexual dissidence in the Maghreb and for examining the relation, or the borders, if you will, not only between the private and the public but between the individual and society, between self and other, between North Africa and Europe, between the past and the present, as well as between masculinity and femininity. Autofictional writing itself is situated in the interstitial space between autobiography and fiction and provides a discursive opening to translate one’s emergent sense of self textually into writing, into literary form, a translation that is never a simple reiteration or reflection of the self in its present understanding at the time of writing. As Shirley Jordan explains, ‘The sense of self which protagonists and narrators seek is brought into existence through writing, and takes shape as the text takes shape’ (18–19; emphasis added), with the stress on the processes of, and the struggles towards, self-understanding, particularly in shifting circumstances, such as migration, thereby displacing or deferring the idea of a fully present and knowable self, given that the translation of one’s sense of self in the present moment is always already a performative enunciation of identity, but only partially or contingently so. Autofictional writing not only is the genre but becomes the method in the literary work I am considering, a process for the authors to reconfigure the contours of the self that occurs through having undergone the crossing of geopolitical borders and being positioned in the space between two very different cultural worlds, given that autofictional writing itself performs the crossing of generic borders as it addresses the effects of the material crossings of geopolitical borders by the authors, or through their protagonists/narrators, who are figurations of the authors themselves. These highly complex textual and political strategies respond to the fact that Rachid O., Djaziri, Taïa and Bouraoui negotiate and produce new translations of sexual subjectivity as a shifting site of identification and meaning given that Franco-Maghrebi spaces of sexual dissidence are inflected by globally circulating discourses and embodiments of queerness, reducible neither to received conceptions or norms of homosexuality, presently or historically, in the Maghreb, nor to Western forms of sexual identity or sexual politics. Rather, the practice of cultural translation that is driven by migration, and which drives the autofictional writing of the writers concerned, is derived from the attempt, according to Paul Bandia, to bridge the geographical distance and the transfer

Introduction

7

of experience from the culture of origin, while negotiating new identities, and the pressures of a foreign space, in the culture of settlement (275–76), given that the texts are written in France following emigration from the Maghreb. I refer to cultural translation in this study as a contiguous process of cultural exchange historically derived from the colonial relation, but also manifest through the contemporary processes of transnational migration and exchange, particularly in the experience of those who emigrate from the postcolonies to the former imperial, metropolitan centres in Europe. I am interested, then, in exploring the ways in which contemporary FrancoMaghrebi gay and lesbian writers engage in cultural translation through their writing as a way of negotiating the felt experiences of dissonance, contradiction and fragmentation between their indigenous cultures, inherited from one or both parents and close family members and having grown up in the Maghreb during their formative years, and postcolonial, post-immigration conditions experienced through eventual settlement in France as young adults in order to make sense of their sexual subjectivities as always already culturally mediated and configured within shifting power relations and networks of meaning, pertaining not only to sexuality but to its intersectionalities with race, gender and class. But at the same time, cultural translation is more than a struggle to address and resolve the ambiguities and differences that occur through crossing borders but is an ongoing interminable process, not without the possibilities of untranslatability and retranslation. For the contemporary lesbian and gay writers, the process of cultural translation can be productive of new strategies for agency and resistance to cultural hegemonies on both sides of the Mediterranean border separating the Maghreb and France historically and geographically, while theorising the very fluidity of that border as an act of survival, crossed physically, but recrossed again and again imaginatively as the Maghreb continues to serve as a critical reference point through the act of writing in the present in Europe. Before moving to the book’s structure and content, I would like to mention my use of terminology in writing about the representation of gender and sexual dissidence in literature from the Maghreb, especially in the contemporary period, since the writers themselves identify in varying extents as queer, as gay and as homosexual, which I try to contextualise in my discussion of their work. I generally use the term ‘homosexuality’ to describe same-sex sexual desires and sexual relations between men historically or when discussing the inscription of the term and its use in medical and juridical texts and contexts in the colonial and post-independence periods. In the contemporary period, it is particularly challenging using this term when translating from French since the use of l’homosexualité to describe same-sex sexual desires and practices, or the use of l’homosexuel as a form of identification, may not be imbued

8

Introduction

with the same degree of medical-clinical or juridical baggage as ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homosexual’ in English. For this reason, I have tried to avoid the use of these terms, where possible, in examining the work of the contemporary writers who have emigrated from the Maghreb to Europe except in translation, unless in its most general usage. I do use the term ‘queer’ to name spaces in-between geopolitical, discursive and temporal borders that put pressure on any absolute differences and fixities of categories on either side of the virgule, including those of Occident/Orient, active/passive and masculine/ feminine, and as a so-called umbrella term to name sexually dissident desires, identities and practices that challenge heteronormative social relations.4 That said, however, I have also tried to avoid overuse of less specific terms, such as ‘marginal sexualities’, ‘alternative sexualities’ or ‘non-conforming sexualities’, to discuss same-sex desires and same-sex affectional and sexual bonds when addressing these in the literature written in the Maghreb after independence from French colonial authority (chapter 3) and especially when discussing texts written in the contemporary period (chapters 4–6) because these terms are not specific enough to capture the politics of sexuality and gender with which the writers are engaging and working through in their works in resistance to the new nationalist imaginaries produced in the period immediately following independence, or in the more contemporary period with regard to resistances to active/passive homosexuality as paradigmatic for same-sex sexual relations between men, and, in Nina Bouraoui’s work, through the struggle to find a link between her desire for women and her desire for reclaiming and embodying her Algerian cultural heritage, and her struggle to connect the two when living in France. While I appreciate the notion that terms such as ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘LGBT’ can denote identarian models of sexual difference, sexual identity and sexual politics based in the West and should not be imposed in contexts outside of the West where they did not emerge historically, the specificity of same-sex desire, with the use of more general terms, potentially becomes lost. After all, terms such as ‘marginal sexualities’ could also refer to other sexual practices, such as bestiality, and its conflation with homosexuality is all too evident and documented in colonial statutes, such as Section 377 in the penal codes of former British colonies which still exists in its original or in modified form in several postcolonial nation-states today formerly under British colonial administration, and has been repealed in others, as I will discuss in chapter 2. The statute specifically punishes voluntary carnal intercourse ‘against the order of nature’ and, according to the statute, is specifically meant to punish sodomy, buggery and bestiality, and the argument of homosexuality being ‘against the order of nature’ is also referenced in current laws against homosexuality in the Maghreb. The use of such general terms as ‘alternative’ or ‘marginal’ sexualities, because of their lack of specificity and reference to same-sex desires and sexualities, potentially runs the risk of

Introduction

9

the conflation of same-sex sexual relations between consenting adults with bestiality and with paedophilia, and this very rhetoric has appeared already in the language of some national leaders in Africa to perpetuate homophobia through arguments that configure homosexuality as alien to indigenous African cultures.5 In addition, as Ruth Vanita warns in writing about same-sex love and eroticism in premodern and early modern India, while terms such as ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ were not used to describe same-sex sexualities or those who practised them in India’s past, neither were terms such as ‘alternative’ or ‘marginal’ sexualities, and certainly not with their present connotations. While Vanita argues that the use of such terms today is ‘only a convenient fiction’ that leads us to find these terms more acceptable when addressing sexualities of the past (4), I would tend to agree and argue the same point for cross-cultural readings of same-sex sexualities, particularly with reference to the context of North Africa, where writers who have subsequently emigrated from the Maghreb to Europe, and have written specifically about their own gender and sexual struggles, do not use generic terms such as ‘marginal’ or ‘alternative’ to describe their sexual lives or lived experiences. I use the term ‘gay’ to refer to the contemporary male writers (Rachid O., Djaziri and Taïa) and to differentiate them from Nina Bouraoui. I occasionally refer to Bouraoui as ‘lesbian’, particularly in the second work in her autofictional trilogy that I examine, Poupée Bella, where she is exploring questions of sexual identity in an attempt to shake off the vestiges of her Algerian (bi)cultural heritage, only to reclaim and resituate herself in relation to this heritage in the third autofictional work Mes Mauvaises Pensées. Bouraoui is also referred to as a lesbian writer in the critical scholarship on her work, but the label is problematic and one that, for her, is limiting in terms of the ongoing, heuristic (re)construction of identity with which she struggles in her writing, and this is addressed in more detail in chapter 5. It is also important to note that I only use the terms ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ either when referring to this group of writers in general or to refer to them individually, given that they now live in France. For example, in her book Garçon Manqué, Nina Bouraoui writes of her childhood and early adolescence in Algeria, where she performs masculinity through cutting her hair, throwing away her dresses and taking on masculine personæ, and writes of her awakening sexual alterity, but without specifically naming it as ‘lesbian’. As Helen Vassallo notes, Bouraoui uses the terms fausse fille (false girl) or garçon manqué (tomboy) without the adequate terminology at the time to assert herself as lesbian (Body Besieged 26); it is also a narrative strategy for naming that which has been marked as taboo in Algeria by not stating it directly. In Poupée Bella, where Bouraoui continues the narrative of self by writing about her life in Paris after moving there and exploring lesbian community in the Milieu des Filles, in the lesbian subculture and bars, where she asserts that she is in the time of her homosexuality,

10

Introduction

and that she is a girl who loves girls,6 I describe her as lesbian to the extent that homosexuality in English historically, and certainly presently, has been used to refer to men and potentially erases the specificity of lesbian desire. But I only use the term in a provisional or contingent sense to the extent that Bouraoui eventually realises that she cannot forget her Algerian heritage and allow that to be overridden by her sexual identity, and, given the various intersections of her identity, she leaves the question of identity (and labels) open to avoid the limiting aspects of identic fixity. Abdellah Taïa, however, in an interview with Alberto Fernández Carbajal, conducted and published in English, refers to himself as ‘gay’ throughout, discussing how he had told his family he was gay; explaining the fear of being raped as a young, feminine, gay boy in Morocco; and discussing how an Arab literary tradition before Islam still lives in him through his experience as a gay, Muslim, Arab boy growing up in Morocco in the early 1980s as explored in his autofictional work Une mélancolie arabe (Carbajal). The use of terminology, therefore, remains complex and contested to the extent that it inscribes other borders, and it is important to find a balance between what Brian James Baer describes as the two binary poles of radical alterity and total transposability (55), which otherwise assumes there is no space in-between, that is, where same-sex sexualities in indigenous contexts are so different they are either beyond Western comprehension and always already subject to false understanding, on the one hand, or that any attempt to describe or translate sexualities in non-Western contexts into Western languages or Western understandings reproduces an imperialist gesture, which, in both cases, results in paralysis, though the possibilities for gaps in understanding and for spaces of untranslatability, as I shall argue in this book, must not be underestimated or elided. But is there a space in-between or a way to navigate in some way the problematic binary identified by Baer? Vanita reminds us that names, terms, signs and concepts, like all material realities, are constantly in flux and only approximations (6), and this is especially true, I have found, in autofictional writing from the Maghreb where authors begin to theorise their varying identifications with sexual dissidence in the Maghreb and the shifting meanings of their sense of self, especially as they cross geopolitical borders from a postcolonial context to settle in the former imperial centre in France. I cannot agree with formulations by Joseph Massad, for example, who accuses scholars and activists in the West of transforming what he refers to as ‘practitioners of same-sex contact’ in Arab and Muslim societies and cultures by producing subjects who identify as ‘homosexuals’ or as ‘gay’ where they simply do not exist (Desiring Arabs 162–63). In Massad’s view, such problematic forms of naming reproduce traces of Western cultural imperialism if it is assumed that same-sex sexual practices in the Arab world have yet to catch up with the liberatory Western model of gayness

Introduction

11

(173), the latter part of which may be true if Western sexual categories and identities are assumed to be universal without any local, historical or cultural contextualisation, and if one assumes that same-sex sexualities in indigenous contexts remain unaffected by the circulation of queer bodies, discourses and materialities across the globe. These very circulations are referenced and evident in the work of the contemporary writers I discuss in this book even prior to emigration, and the representations of sexual dissidence that emerge in the texts are, in fact, not reducible simply to ‘same-sex (sexual) contact’ but navigated both in the Maghrebian homeland and through the intercultural dynamics of the crossing of geopolitical borders and are thereby reducible neither to the received traditions and practices of same-sex sexualities in the Maghreb nor to sexual identities and politics in Europe, but occupy a space of hybridity rather than what Valerie Traub critiques as a reductive ‘unidirectional importation of a conceptual apparatus derived largely from European and Anglo-American perspectives’ (14). In response to Massad’s claims, rather than maintaining absolute borders between East and West that categorise forms of sexual difference by geopolitical location alone, it might be more productive, as Sean Chabot and Jan Willem Duyvendak argue in writing about globalisation and transnational diffusion between social movements, to examine instead how the negotiation of sexual identities may be influenced by, but not blindly copied from, the West, since they are modified and adapted to fit particular circumstances and traditions (721–22). When the writers I have just been discussing leave the Maghreb and move to France, they hardly experience a more stereotypically liberal and progressive West because they soon encounter various forms of racism, ranging from hostility towards immigrants from North Africa in France, Islamophobia and racialised sexual objectification to patronising curiosity from the white gaze. There is no attempt in the work of the writers I discuss, or through my analysis, to reinvent the colonial hierarchies that regard the West as more liberally advanced, sexually or otherwise, as there is a simultaneous struggle by the authors, evident in their writing, to reposition themselves in relation to their Maghrebian homelands following emigration and after settlement in France, a continual back and forth, rather than a simple, unidirectional movement from one geopolitical location to another: that is, there is a psychological deterritorialisation, or refiguring, of borders to help overcome the effects of displacement in French society. I will critique Massad in more detail in chapter 1, but when he argues that the hetero/homo distinction did not emerge historically out of Arab Muslim societies and that the so-called Gay International incites discourse about homosexuals and produces gays and lesbians where they never existed before, which, in turn, destroys traditional social and sexual configurations of desire in

12

Introduction

non-Western societies and cultures (Desiring Arabs 188–89), his argument reproduces and maintains a problematic Occident/Orient opposition. Furthermore, it assumes that those social and sexual configurations of same-sex desire of which he speaks are static and simply remain frozen in time and place, without entertaining any possibility of transnational or cross-cultural interchange either with regard to same-sex sexual relations between Arab Muslim men beyond active/passive performances or substitutive sex, or without any influence from the cultural mediation of sexualities through the media, the internet, international travel and social networking sites, the latter of which were key forms of communication and textual sites of democratic struggle in the Arab Spring movements which began in the Maghreb (Spurlin, ‘Shifting Geopolitical Borders’ 75). Forms of transnational exchange, through the processes of migration and the crossing of geopolitical borders from postcolonial contexts to the West, or as queer discourses and materialities travel globally and are taken up in indigenous contexts, redefine the meanings of terms such as ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘queer’ as they are put to strategic use, translated and redefined in new cultural contexts as sites of resignification or translation and not as exact repetitions of Western forms of sexual difference, identity and politics.7 Speaking against monolithic views of the Muslim world and to the diversity of its elaborations of homosexuality in an essay in the collection Être homosexuel au Maghreb, a volume with contributors specialising in gender and sexuality in the Maghreb from sociological, anthropological, legal and social science frameworks who are based in the Maghreb or in Europe, Fabio Corbisiero writes, ‘En fait, il faut considérer la diversité qui caractérise le monde musulman car les pays qui le composent ont élaboré des politiques, des stratégies et des représentations sociales de l’homosexualité très diversifiées’ (128).8 The Maghreb is where the Arab Muslim world, Africa and Europe cross and intersect, a reconfiguring of borders depending on the lens through which one reads the region as the westernmost part of the Arab Muslim world or as part of the so-called Orient. Its own geopolitical and cultural borders have been reconfigured and reshaped through North African, Berber, Arab and European influences, which, as Achille Mbembe reminds us in speaking of Africa more broadly, cannot be reduced to a succession of moments and events, as these are so deeply layered, imbricated within one another: What we designate by the term ‘Africa’ exists only as a series of disconnections, superimpositions, . . . sounds and rhythms, ellipses, . . . parables, misconnections, and imagined, remembered, and forgotten things, bits of spaces, syncopes, intervals, moments of enthusiasm and impetuous vortices – in short, perceptions and phantasms in mutual perpetual pursuit, yet coextensive with each other, . . . in which instants, moments, and events are, as it were, on top of each other,

Introduction

13

inside one another. In this sense, we must say that the [African] postcolony is a period of embedding, a space of proliferation. (242; emphasis and brackets added)

The fragmentations and interweavings, the processes of layering and continual becoming, that seem to constitute Africa and its diaspora speak to the cultural history of the Maghreb, which also includes an inter-layering, as I hope to show in this book, of queerness. While Mbembe is not concerned specifically with queerness in his theorisation of the postcolony, it may be implied, perhaps, by my somewhat perverse overreading of the sexual layerings in his words which I have italicised in the quotation above. But the layerings and embeddings of which Mbembe speaks suggest to me same-sex desires and sexualities as also intimately interwoven into the fabric of African postcolonies, certainly in the Maghreb and in its diaspora. The book begins with further mapping of its theoretical framework articulated in the early part of this introduction, particularly around the paradox of borders conceived as fixed and reinforcing national and cultural demarcations, and as fluid, permeable, transitional zones of cultural mediation that may enable queer or alternative ways of reading and inhabiting the world. The latter reading of borders appears to be more closely tied to the Maghreb with the history of the multiple conquests and colonisations of North Africa and its close proximity to both Europe and the Middle East which have left their imprints on the Maghreb and have reconfigured its cultural borders. Mbembe’s work theorising African cultural and social formations as relational, circulatorial and mediated, which questions any logic of permanent stability and coherence with regard to African postcolonies and the African diaspora, calling attention not only to disruption and fragmentation but to radical contingency, plurality and difference, has enabled, for me, a new theorisation of queerness not as merely intersecting with the postcolonial, as I had argued in a previous context, but as layered and entangled within it, destabilising further the disciplinary border between postcolonial and queer studies as is discussed in chapter 1. The blurring of cultural and linguistic borders within the Maghreb historically, and especially the physical crossing of geopolitical borders by more recent sexually dissident writers who have emigrated from the Maghreb to Europe, also works metaphorically, I argue, for renegotiations of sexual, gender and cultural identities in the spaces between discursive categories and new crossings and blendings of genre that arise out of the material conditions of liminality, cultural and identic hybridity, and the experience of living in diaspora. Chapters 2 and 3 examine historical antecedents in writing about same-sex desire in the early Ottoman period, which included parts of North Africa, and in the Maghreb in the period following independence from French colonial

14

Introduction

rule prior to the contemporary authors who write more directly about their same-sex desires and experiences. Homoerotic literature can be traced back to the work of Abū Nawās, a poet of classical Arabic literature who lived in the latter part of the eighth and into the ninth century and wrote about the love of male youths through his erotic poetry in the form of ghazal. He also wrote ghazal poetry for women, though, as Massad notes, literary critics, such as Taha Husayn, who had studied in France and returned to British-occupied Egypt to teach and published weekly lectures in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Siyasah in the 1920s, using his training both in Arabic classical and Renaissance literature and in the Western canon, believed that the poems of Abū Nawās written for youthful boys were of higher quality than the ones written for women (Massad, Desiring Arabs 61, 64). While descriptions of the beardless or downy-cheeked male as the beloved are common in Arabic poetry from the ninth century, according to Khaled El-Rouayheb (63–64), in the Ottoman Empire, specifically between 1516 and 1798, a period in which Arab-Islamic high culture was permeated with poetry (El-Rouayheb 60), the ghazal remained the common genre of love poetry and was replete with casual and sympathetic references to desire for young men before the advent of modernisation and Westernisation in the early nineteenth century (El-Rouayheb 1) and prior to European colonisation, which in the Maghreb would be in 1830 with the French conquest of the city of Algiers. While it is often assumed that, in pederastic poetry, the beardless male youth is desired for his femininity by a male poet, the research suggests that some of the youths were masculine, some had beards and some were young men and not boys, representing a range of ages and gender associations. There were also borders to be negotiated between refined and passionate love expressed in verse for a man or for a woman by a male poet and actual sexual intercourse through penetration which was unlawful under Islamic law, except in the context of vaginal intercourse in marriage or concubinage, but as there was no single juridical concept for other forms of physical expression of desire between men, such as kissing, fondling or intercrural intercourse (El-Rouayheb 153), a negotiable border was created between what was tolerated (expressions of chaste love for men in poetry by male poets, and, to some extent, nonpenetrative physical expressions of desire between men) and what was condemned (anal intercourse between men) though there were variations in the application of the law in different parts of the Ottoman Empire with regard to anal intercourse between men, or liwāṭ, and unlawful fornication between a man and a woman, and whether they were the same or a different kind of sin. But pederastic love poetry, through which male poets expressed love for beautiful male youths, who were not necessarily mere substitutes for women given the range of ages and gender attributes, and could, but did not necessarily, correlate with the actual desires of the poet, was not regarded as criminal

Introduction

15

under Islamic law to the extent that liwāṭ was encoded into law as a specific act, and not as desire in the Ottoman period. The chapter also addresses French colonial conquest in the Maghreb in the nineteenth century, with its mission civilisatrice, buttressed by the founding of the Algiers School of French Psychiatry, which legitimised colonial racism through the tools of Western medicine and science, and regarded homoerotic expression and practices between Arab Muslim men in the Maghreb as primitive and as signs of unbridled sexuality which formed part of the broader ideological production of race in colonial administrative and medical practices. The French did not approve of the representation of pederastic themes and the expression of passionate love for male youth by male poets in Arabic literature, imposing European medical, juridical and social views of homosexuality as a perversion, which not only pathologised what were considered to be homosexual acts but, unlike in the Ottoman period, pathologised desire, as well as those forms of homoerotic expression not covered previously under liwāṭ, given that homosexuality gradually became to be seen medically in identarian terms and shaped by nineteenth-century European views on sexuality under French colonial power in the Maghreb.9 The third chapter examines literature in the period immediately following the independence of Morocco and Tunisia as French protectorates in 1956 and Algerian independence from France with the end of the Algerian Revolution in 1962. Developing Fanon’s notion of littérature de combat in Wretched of the Earth as a way of resisting the continuing effects of imperial power, even though the decolonised subject of which Fanon speaks, particularly in Black Skin, White Masks, appears to be male, I make the case, in agreement with Jarrod Hayes’s argument articulated in his book Queer Nations, that Maghrebian feminist work in the period, especially that of Assia Djebar, and texts addressing sexual dissidence take critiques of Fanon’s elision of gender further through intersectional analyses that broaden struggles towards decolonisation and the effects of colonial racism by critiquing nationalist appeals to a fixed, homogenous national identity. I address a selection of francophone texts from the Maghreb by Rachid Boudjedra, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Assia Djebar as various forms of combat literature through their refusals to confine gender and sexual dissidence, especially articulated and enacted same-sex desires, to the private domain by encoding these directly into the public sphere of literary production in the two decades following independence from French imperial power, and, specifically in Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, through interrupting and rewriting the history of Algerian resistance to French colonialism by recuperating the lost voices of women who participated in the Algerian Revolution. While same-sex desire may not be central to these works, what is important about the texts is their renegotiation of cultural

16

Introduction

borders; even though French continued to be used by writers in the Maghreb following independence, especially when writing about such taboo subjects as homoeroticism, homosexuality and gender insubordination, the writing is often punctuated with Arabic or Berber words which foreignise the French language rather than simply mimicking the language of the former coloniser, thereby inhabiting the bilingual and bicultural spaces between the inheritance of French language and culture from colonialism and Maghrebian languages and cultures, performing textually the very struggle for identity and decolonisation. At the same time, inhabiting the space between disrupts linearity and coherence in textual narrative in order to express both the fragmentation of identity, that is, being both within the nation and marginalised, alongside a queering of the imagined homogeneity of the newly independent nation-state – an intertwining, in both cases, of the fragmentation of identity and nation through the fragmentation of textual form. In Boudjedra’s La Répudiation, for example, homosexuality appears to be contained parenthetically within the text, as a correlation to its marginalisation in the larger society in Algeria, but also exceeds those textual and social borders. In Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent, the protagonist’s memory of a homoerotic past cannot be repressed nor contained within linear narrative, disrupting both the coherence of the narrative and the fictional narrative of the nation-state’s nationalist pedagogy and history as heteronormative. Similarly, the crossing and confusion of the borders of gender are represented through the protagonist of Ben Jelloun’s novel L’Enfant de sable and its sequel La nuit sacrée, who is born female, then forcibly raised as a boy to become a man by the father, having been given the name of Ahmed, and then is renamed as Zahra by the father before his death and begins to live as a woman. This crossing and back creates a site of gender fluidity and dissidence that critiques narrow constructions of gender duality in the Moroccan nationalist imaginary, represented through the lack of linear narrative through which the tale is narrated, and its lack of resolution or the full ‘restoration’ of Zahra’s gender identity based on biology alone. Assia Djebar’s interspersing of Algerian women’s testimonies, and their articulations that do not signify on the discursive or symbolic register, including their echoes, sighs and whispers, along with the insertion of her own voice and memories in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, serve to fragment and disrupt hegemonic, heteromasculinist narratives of Algerian history and serve as discursive struggles and narrative strategies for Algerian women to contest the borders of social, cultural and historical confinement and erasure and to refigure the meaning of the nation. Djebar’s work is an important precursor to the more explicitly queer work that follows from the 1990s, given that ‘if nationalism is not transformed by an analysis of gender power’, as Anne McClintock argues, ‘the nation-state will remain a

Introduction

17

repository of (straight) male hopes, (straight) male aspirations, and (straight) male privilege’ (385; parentheses added). The literature by a new generation of francophone writers who did not experience French colonialism directly as they were born after independence, yet had lived through the lingering traces of French colonialism when living in the Maghreb as children and adolescents, and gradually become aware, in varying ways, of their gender and sexual difference, is analysed in detail in chapters 4–6, the remaining chapters of this book. What distinguishes this group of writers from those earlier is that they position themselves queerly in the public space of literary and cultural production, where their gender and sexual dissidence is quite central to their texts, and narrated and reimagined in the diasporic space between their childhood homelands in the Maghreb and their settlement in France. This discursive destabilisation of the geopolitical borders between the Maghreb and France, what Abdellah Taïa refers to as l’entre-deux, enables and mediates strategies of identify formation and disidentification, creating possibilities for new negotiations and articulations of gender and sexual alterity. Chapter 4 focuses on close readings of selected texts by Rachid O., Eyet-Chékib Djaziri and Abdellah Taïa, all of whom participate in what Brenna Munro refers to as ‘a queer refusal of normative masculinity’ (206), that is, a refusal to repudiate feminine identifications, a transgression of the norms of masculine identification and embodiment. Rather than repudiating their feminine pasts at the moment of writing, the feminine pasts of these writers are recoded, that is, translated, as a way of understanding their pathway to queer alterity, disrupting phallic masculinity as the predominant structure for social relations under the legacy of colonialism and in the postcolonial nation-state. While all three authors take the passive role in their sexual relations with other men, I argue that they negotiate a new space of dissident sexuality in their same-sex sexual relations that are more egalitarian, not a complete rejection of the active/passive model, but a reclaiming, a redefining, a translation of the passive role as one of agency, intimacy and sexual pleasure rather than accepting its more traditional signification as a site of stigmatisation and feminisation. Thus, there is both the textual citation of gender and sexual norms in the works of Rachid O., Djaziri and Taïa only to be translatively transgressed through creating in their writing a hybrid space of masculinity in homoerotic terms, reducible neither to phallic heteromasculinity, defined in strict opposition to femininity, nor to emasculation from being penetrated sexually by other men. I claim that their rethinking of sexual relations between men is reducible neither to active/passive homosexuality nor to mere reproductions of Western models of sexual identity but queers the conflation of active/passive homosexuality with binary conceptions of gender as structuring how men in the Maghreb relate to one another sexually. Djaziri writes of an intimité partagée, in terms of his sexual relation with

18

Introduction

Khélil in Un poisson sur la balançoire, which not only is a transgression of social norms, and the norms of active/passive homosexuality, but their shared intimacy is a bond based on pleasure (146) for both partners and not based on predefined, gendered sexual roles, and the partners are certainly not reducible to mere ‘practitioners of same-sex contact’, which is how Massad prefers to describe sexual relations between men in Arab Muslim societies and cultures in Desiring Arabs (162). These translations of masculinity and same-sex desire, and these hybrid inscriptions of what Taïa describes as autre chose (something else, something different), are overlaid by the crossings of borders between the Maghreb and Europe, whether imaginatively through having had exposure to European gay men in the Maghreb or following actual settlement in France, between masculinity and femininity, between active/passive and egalitarian homosexuality, between past and present, between the public and the private, where location in the interstitial spaces between produces a site of struggle towards decolonisation initiated in the Maghreb but continued within postcolonial and post-immigration conditions in France. Fractured identity and displacement in the spaces between the Maghreb and Europe, between the borders of gender, between past and present, and between the generic borders of autobiography, memoir and fiction through autofictional writing are also taken up by Nina Bouraoui, in ways somewhat similar to the writers just mentioned. But Bouraoui’s approach to rethinking sexual dissidence is also quite distinct given both the difference of gender and the historical trauma she experiences and embodies from the inheritance of colonial conflict and the Algerian Revolution, being the daughter of an Algerian father and a French mother living in Algeria, where the family’s loyalties to the newly independent Algerian state were questioned, and later when the family moves to Rennes in France, where Bouraoui encounters hostility as a biracial child of a mixed marriage and ends up feeling that she is neither Algerian nor French but suspended between both identifications. Chapter 5 examines the early autofictional trilogy of work by Bouraoui, comprising Garçon Manqué, Poupée Bella and Mes Mauvaises Pensées, by analysing the traumatic personal effects of the troubled history between Algeria and France, and the forced separation from her childhood home in Algeria because of racial tensions and suspicions around her parents’ mixed marriage, as well as Bouraoui’s later attempt, after settlement in Paris as a young adult, to try to lose her mark of racial difference by asserting sexual difference; the chapter then analyses her attempt to reclaim her Algerian past in which her earlier struggles with gender norms, and her eventual lesbian existence, are embedded. The site of struggle for Bouraoui across the three texts in the trilogy is most aptly summarised in her well-known and often-quoted passage in Garcon Manqué, ‘Tous les matins je vérifie mon identité. J’ai quatre problèmes. Française? Algérienne? Fille? Garçon?’ (163),10 which links her

Introduction

19

racial and cultural difference with her gender difference as suggested through the title of the first work Garcon Manqué (Tomboy), about her younger years in Algeria where she assumes the masculine personæ of Brio and Ahmed and refers to herself as a fausse fille, which foregrounds her eventual sexual alterity. The twin pairings of française/algérienne and fille/garçon are linked as binary structures into which Bouraoui cannot fit, hinting at their problematic, yet constructed, nature, suggesting a resistant space in-between when she writes earlier in the text, ‘Je reste entre les deux pays. Je reste entre deux identités. . . . J’invente un autre monde’ (Garçon Manqué 26; hereafter cited as GM; emphasis added),11 with the mentioning of another world or un autre monde as echoing the hybridity of autre chose referenced earlier, the ‘something else’ being reducible to neither side of the French/Algerian binary pair. Rather than being concerned with her racial difference and having to negotiate the French/Algerian split and taboo renderings of female masculinity which haunted her both in Algeria and then in Rennes as an adolescent, where her cross-gender identification was racialised as a form of primitivism, in Poupée Bella, the second work in the autofictional trilogy, Bouaroui’s narrator, now a young adult, searches a world that speaks of and to her within the Milieu des Filles, within the highly sexualised terrain of the lesbian subculture of bars and clubs in Paris, a space where she hopes to recognise who she is and where she can create a new history unencumbered by a colonial past and restrictive categories, declaring, ‘Je suis une femme, je suis un homme, je suis tout, je ne suis rien’ (7).12 While this collapses the borders of gender, saying that she is now everything (je suis tout), having reclaimed lesbian desire from its repressed awakening in her past, and her gained sense of lesbian community in the Milieu des Filles, which is predominantly white, I argue that it is through the act of writing, and through the psychoanalytic process encapsulated in the third autofictional work Mes Mauvaises Pensées, that Bouraoui realises the limits of lesbian existence without a link or a claim to her Algerian heritage, not in an essentialist sense of geophysical return, but as a discursive reterritorialisation of Algeria, of its memory and personal significance, materialised, that is, translated, through the written text. Bouraoui is able to position herself, through her fictional narrator, at least momentarily, in the world as being both of Algerian heritage and living in France as lesbian regardless of the uncertain futurity this process of continual becoming brings, which is a process of attempting to reconstruct or translate a postcolonial queer self. The final chapter attempts to connect the more recent contemporary queer francophone writing from the Maghreb through an analysis of migration and/ as translation, where, through the crossing of geopolitical borders, Rachid O., Djaziri, Taïa and Bouraoui reframe and rewrite, in varying ways, their Maghrebian pasts, especially their early articulations of gender and sexual alterity and the attendant struggles, which reflect not merely their actual

20

Introduction

pasts but their memories and the personal significance of their Maghrebian youths as understood through experiences of migration and living in diaspora at the time of writing. Writing about their Maghrebian childhoods and adolescences, and the experience of migration and settlement in France, also transforms cultural assumptions in the Maghreb that homosexuality is taboo or a foreign import into Arab Muslim societies, while also challenging fantasies in Europe of cultural integration and social cohesion given the racism, Islamophobia and hostility towards immigrants from North Africa that the writers encounter after having moved to France. At the same time, the chapter argues that the space in-between occupied by the writers is a queer space that contests the fixities of national cultures and identities on both sides of the Mediterranean through the struggles of cross-cultural negotiations and translations of sexual identity as it intersects with other axes of social positioning in shifting locations and contexts instead of being restricted to static views of sexual dissidence and same-sex sexual practices confined to particular geopolitical origins and locations. Translation occurs by necessity through migration as a mediating process where various cultural systems and languages intersect, converge and transform, given, as I have argued elsewhere, that translation is intertwined with new forms of textual and cultural production, rather than it being a linear process of the linguistic or cultural reproduction of equivalence (Spurlin, ‘Queering Translation’ 173), thereby producing new modes of perception and reading the world. Using the work of Waïl Hassan and his idea of translational literature, and Rebecca Walkowitz’s notion of born-translated literature, the chapter proposes translation not only as a focal mode of analysis for reading the contemporary queer francophone texts written in diaspora, instead of being incidental to them, but the very writing of the texts as staging and performing translational acts in the textual renamings of the lived experiences of gender and sexual dissidence. These textual or translational performances occur within the French language as its received meanings are transgressed and reworked through the processes of translocation and transcultural negotiation, yet not without acknowledgement of remainders of incommensurability and unassimilable indeterminacy, that is, spaces of untranslatability, residues of difference that cannot be integrated, given that migration and translation remain mediating and interminable processes subject to ongoing renegotiation and counter-translation. More than simply producing new forms of sexual dissidence from postcolonial contexts in a transnational world, the translational work that emerges in the autofictional writing of Rachid O., Djaziri, Taïa and Bouraoui functions heuristically and oppositionally as a way for them to think themselves out of the fixed hierarchies of colonial legacies and as a mode for the narrative reframing of narrow cultural nationalist readings around race, gender,

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sexuality and belonging, both in the Maghreb and in France, as part of the struggle towards decolonisation. The crossing of borders and the mediation of cultures encoded in their work challenge the hegemony of established, discrete geopolitical spaces located within territorial, national or regional borders as the basis for understanding sexual and cultural identity. Critics like Massad, however, who do not seem to entertain the possibilities of intercultural exchange, would reduce cultural translations of same-sex sexualities to the tainting of a supposedly pre-existent purity of Arab Muslim cultures through the hegemonic filter of Western sexual taxonomies. But the critical question to be asked is whether any cultural system can be purely itself and none other.13 While I concede that the contemporary francophone writers I have selected may not be typical ‘native informants’, given their French education in the Maghreb, some having families and relatives living in Europe, and the access for some to schooling and higher education in Europe, their texts nonetheless perform the intersectional and intercultural complexities of developing a sense of sexual subjectivity and its ongoing negotiation and translation through translocation and movement across borders. At the same time, however, this book is not proposing a narrative of progressive development from indigenous practices of same-sex sexualities in the Maghreb towards a reification or valorisation of sexual identity and sexual politics in the West, a ‘civilising mission’ of progress and liberation, which would simply reinvent the trope of primitivism embedded in, and justifying, the imperialist gesture. Rather, the approach of the book foregrounds and develops what Jarrod Hayes, Margaret Higonnet and I described in our volume Comparatively Queer as a comparative praxis focusing on ‘an in-between that transforms what it is presumed to separate and join’ (6). It is precisely the focus on l’entre-deux and the struggle between cultural worlds, encoded particularly in the work of Rachid O., Djaziri, Taïa and Bouraoui, that prevents the problematic reduction of postcolonial same-sex sexual subjectivities either to indigenous or to Western terms through the creation of a hybrid space of sliding, rupture, blending and fragmentation: a queer site of struggle that enables theorisation of one’s shifting relation to African cultural identity, to queerness and to the world. I have found it surprising that both Epprecht in Heterosexual Africa? (16–17) and Massad in Desiring Arabs (188–89) express concerns that when Western academics working in queer studies and Western LGBTQ activists (whom Massad references as the Gay International), as well as local academics and activists based in Africa and in Arab Muslim societies, expose homophobia and hostility towards those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, they put at greater risk all of those who enact same-sex sexual practices in indigenous contexts, leading to what Massad describes as ‘police harassment in some cases [that] could lead to antihomosexual legislation’ (Desiring Arabs 188–89; brackets added).

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I would argue that antihomosexual legislation already exists in the Maghreb, as I will discuss in chapter 4, as it does in other parts of Africa, but is silence, or any kind of silencing or holding back, the alternative, which trivialises the important activist work being done in the Maghreb by such LGBT associations as Mawjoudin in Tunisia, Aswat in Morocco and Alouen in Algeria referenced earlier in this introduction in my notes, given that silence has already constituted same-sex sexualities historically through their relegation to the private space of the non-dire, to l’indicible, to the unspoken, to the taboo, in the Maghreb and in other Arab Muslim societies, as referenced by the writers I discuss in this book who struggle against it. It may be more useful to take up the position articulated by Gibson Ncube who has written a monograph in French on the more contemporary queer authors I examine in this book, where he proposes the importance of queer writing from the Maghreb, which speaks more openly of sexual dissidence, for opening new public spaces of discussion on sociopolitical and cultural issues that have been marked previously as unspoken (162).14 Such a project may open new forms of signification around entrenched meanings of same-sex sexualities both in the Maghreb and in the West, while contributing to global conversations not only on queer knowledge but also on immigration, cross-cultural negotiation and systemic social inequalities, especially where a variety of oppressions intertwine, enabling the proliferation of new and multiple sites of decolonised queerness.

NOTES 1. I should point out that even before Britain left the European Union (EU), there was never borderless travel for those holding passports from other EU member states since citizens from other member states still had to pass through immigration and passport control upon entry into the UK with their EU passports as a form of identification. This was because the UK and the Republic of Ireland were not signatories to the Schengen Agreement, signed in Schengen, Luxembourg, in 1985 by only five European countries. What became known as the Schengen Area within Europe expanded gradually with more signatories and the abolition of passport controls at mutual borders in 1995 between those nations that had signed the Schengen Agreement, allowing for borderless travel between participating countries. Switzerland, although not a member of the EU, also signed the agreement and abolished border controls with other EU member states in the Schengen Area in 2009. It is important to note, therefore, that a nation being a member state of the EU is not the same as being in the Schengen Area, as is the case with Switzerland, but also with regard to the UK and the Republic of Ireland. However, while the UK was not a member of the Schengen Area but an EU member state until 2020, once those with EU passports entered the country, there were no restrictions on length of stay, domicile, study, work or retirement in the UK while the latter remained a member state of the

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EU. The UK and the Republic of Ireland have maintained freedom of travel between the two countries as part of the Common Travel Area since 1923, which is still in force, even after the UK left the EU, which also further complicated Brexit with regard to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in addition to the Good Friday Agreement. And in recent years, some Schengen EU member states have reinstated border controls for those arriving from within the Schengen Area, permitted under Schengen protocol for periods of time, in response to recent emergencies, such as the refugee crisis of 2015, threats to national security and entry restrictions because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but not always without xenophobic implications. I mention this to show the complications around borders, their constructive nature and the shifting significance of borders and their crossings in a relatively small geographical area of the globe and in a relatively short period of time. 2. While Rachid O., Djaziri and Taïa were born in the Maghreb, Bouraoui was born in Rennes, France, to an Algerian father and French mother. Djaziri is of a similar racial background, born to a Tunisian-Turkish father and a French mother, but was born and grew up in Tunisia. Bouraoui’s parents met at the University of Rennes during the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), and two years after Nina Bouraoui’s birth in 1967, the family moved to Algiers, spending summers in Brittany, France, until 1981 when the family returned permanently to France because of racial tensions in the still newly independent Algeria and questions about her parents’ racially-mixed marriage and their loyalty to Algeria as opposed to the former coloniser. The effects of this rupture, when Bouraoui was only fourteen, had significant impact on her later life in terms of her Algerian roots, which I will discuss in chapter 5. But since Algeria is so significant in Bouraoui’s early life, as seen in her early writing, I still refer to it as her childhood home as she spent most of her childhood and early adolescence in Algeria, though I wish to qualify that she is from Algeria because her father is Algerian, and she lived there for a significant part of her early life, though she was not born there, and is part French. 3. At the turn of the last century, for example, there was a noticeable shift in Europe with regard to the restrictive codes around sexuality, particularly as the rising modernist movement attempted to shake off the last vestiges of the past, especially those of the nineteenth century, by searching for new ideas and new forms in literature and art, thus creating a climate of exploration and experimentation. Breaking free of received artistic conventions of the nineteenth century was also reflected in social reforms that included new ideas that challenged conventional ideas pertaining to sexuality. Dagmar Herzog, in her book Sexuality in Europe, points to the rise of burgeoning ventures into non-traditional sexual arrangements, particularly in the interwar period, that began to proliferate in various parts of Europe, including love triangles in artistic and intellectual milieus, which demonstrated the fluid boundaries and ambiguities around the newly minted hetero/homo binary, the primary discursive organiser of sexuality, inherited from the 1860s when homosexuality, according to Foucault, shifted from a temporary aberration to an identity (Foucault, History of Sexuality 43); the separation of sex from reproduction; the flourishing of gay and lesbian subcultures in cities such as Berlin and Paris; outdoor-oriented organisations dedicated to health reform and nudity; and sex reform organisations (Herzog 50).

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Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1918, English sex researcher Havelock Ellis and Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel led the World League for Sexual Reform, founded in Copenhagen in 1928, and advocated for safe birth control, women’s equality and the equal rights of those deemed ‘unsuited’ for marriage, such as homosexuals. Hirschfeld himself campaigned for the rights of homosexuals as far back as 1897 and tried, without success, to gain public support for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Germany based on mutual consent between adults. See also Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 on the lesbian subculture in Paris at the time that crossed into the avant-garde and Ruth Margarete Roellig’s Berlins lesbische Frauen (1928) on the lesbian subculture in Berlin during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) in Germany. It is interesting that it was during this time since the turn of the last century that homosexually inclined European and American male writers, such as André Gide, who travelled to Tunisia and Algeria in the early twentieth century, and other writers, such as William Burroughs and Joe Orton, who visited Tangiers in Morocco later in the 1950s and 1960s, travelled to North Africa in order to act on homoerotic and pederastic desires legally prosecuted at home, which, once again, reinscribes the colonialist gesture and forms of indigenous exploitation, rather than simply marking homosexuality as a site of personal liberation for either party, given the racial and economic power differentials of white man/brown boy: ‘boy’ referring to male youth from adolescence to late teens and early twenties (Boone, ‘Vacation Cruises’ 104, 105n14). Travel writing by such writers as those mentioned above are not included in this book as their work would fall under the rubrics of European literature. 4. Unlike the terms ‘marginal’ or ‘alternative’ sexualities, which I will discuss in a moment, ‘sexual dissidence’ is closely connected to queer to the extent that the term stands in political opposition to the normative and to official policies. The literary work that I consider in this book represents homosexuality as a political position against narrow and exclusionary notions of nationalism in the Maghreb in the period following independence, as Jarod Hayes has argued (Queer Nations 2), and through the autofictional writing of more contemporary queer writers who have emigrated from the Maghreb to France and write about, through their protagonist-narrators, their personal experiences of, and struggles with, gender/sexual alterity, thereby placing what has been traditionally marked as private and taboo in the Maghreb into the public sphere through publication, also a dissident act of agency and resistance. 5. Indeed, the former and late president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, used similar rhetoric reminiscent of the colonial-era laws that criminalised homosexuality when denouncing gay men and lesbians at the official opening of the International Book Fair held in Harare in 1995 when the government decided to exclude a small exhibit by Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ). As reported in the New York Times on 2 August 1995, Mugabe said at the official opening that ‘if we accept homosexuality as a right, as is being argued by the association of sodomists [sic] and sexual perverts, what moral fibre shall our society ever have to deny organised drug addicts, or even those given to bestiality, the rights they might claim and allege they possess under the rubrics of individual freedom and human rights?’ (qtd. in Dunton and Palmberg 9–10).

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6. See Nina Bouraoui, Poupée Bella: ‘Je suis dans le temps de mon homosexualité’ (17); ‘Je suis une fille qui aime les filles’ (23). These points reveal lesbian desire without saying it directly through the word lesbienne, and this will be discussed further in chapter 5. 7. To be fair, in an interview with Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and Stella Magliani-Belkacem, published in the newsletter Jadaliyya produced by the Arab Studies Institute, entitled ‘The Empire of Sexuality: An Interview with Joseph Massad’, Massad clarifies that the adoption of the category ‘sexuality’, when it travelled with European colonialism to non-European locales, was neither identical nor symmetrical with its deployment in European contexts, and that whatever new sexual identities that may be created or generated in the peripheries are not always mappable on to the hetero/homo binary. I have already argued the first point, and I would agree with him on the second point as it is questionable as to whether all Western practices of sexual dissidence necessarily map on to the hetero/homo binary as well (see my discussion of Sedgwick below). But I cannot agree with Massad’s assertion about the ‘tiny number of gay-identified Arabs organized in Gay Internationalist organizations’ who are ‘complicit with an imperial sexual regime that rearranges the world along the hetero-homo binary, which they fully adopt without questioning and insist on reproducing and disseminating across the Arab world as the road to liberation’ (Massad, ‘The Empire of Sexuality’). The contemporary work that I consider in this book does not reproduce the hetero/homo distinction as the basis for sexual identity but takes it up as part of a struggle to rethink the active/passive distinction as the predominant paradigm for sexual relations between Arab Muslim men and creates a space for the gay male authors to (re)name their experience of sexual alterity. For Bouraoui, the struggle is more about the relationality between her sexual identity and her racial and cultural heritage. And, as Eve Sedgwick reminds us in Epistemology of the Closet, it is important to consider how the modern hetero/homo distinction in the West is structured not by the supersession of one model and the withering away of another ‘but instead by the relations enabled by the unrationalized coexistence of different models during the times they do coexist’, which implies, in her view, a denaturalisation of the present, rather than of the past, to challenge the limits of the idea of ‘homosexuality as we know it today [in the West]’ (47–48; brackets added). While it is true, as Sedgwick explains, that without a concept of gender, there could be no concept of hetero- or homosexuality, she also asks the extent to which gender is definitionally built into all determinations of sexuality (31). In other words, to what extent are all sexual practices and sexual object choices structured along the lines of the hetero/homo distinction even in the West where the distinction was named? 8. Trans. In fact, one must consider the diversity that characterises the Muslim world because the countries that comprise it have developed very diverse politics, strategies and social representations of homosexuality. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French into English are mine. The terms ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’ and ‘queer’ appear throughout the volume Être homosexuel au Maghreb, published both in Tunisia and in Paris, and the title of the book means ‘being homosexual in the Maghreb’. These same terms also appear in local LGBTQ rights groups from the Maghreb and in a 2016 document condemning

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the German Parliament for declaring countries in the Maghreb (Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria) as ‘safe’ countries of origin with regard to those seeking asylum from these countries, but without recognising incriminating laws in those countries based on sexual orientation and gender expression. The document is signed by representatives from LBGTQ groups in North Africa, such as Mawjoudin (We Exist; Tunisia), Aswat (Voices; Morocco) and Alouen (Colors; Algeria), which are local organisations. It would be reductive to read these local organisations as foreign intrusions into Maghrebian culture under the strong arm of LGBTQ international groups, such as the International Lesbian and Gay Association or the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, though there may be influences around issues of gender and sexual rights, or to reduce the reach of these groups to whom Massad would term ‘native informants’ (Desiring Arabs 172) who are Western-educated upper-class supporters of these groups in the Arab Muslim world or in the Arab diaspora (Desiring Arabs 189) given the important activist work that the named LBGTQ groups do to protect sexual dissidents in/from the Maghreb. See the document at https://www​ .statewatch​​.org/​​media​​/docu​​ments​​/news​​/2016​​/may/​​germa​​ny​-ma​​ghreb​​-not-​​safe-​​c​ount​​ ries.​​pdf. 9. See note 3 and my earlier discussion just preceding the note in my text above regarding the imposition of European Victorian views of sexuality in the colonies as those values began to shift in Europe towards the fin de siècle, though it is questionable if the more liberal views in the early twentieth century, largely confined to urban metropolitan parts of Europe, had discernible effects on colonial attitudes towards the sexualities of the colonised. 10. Trans. Every morning I check my identity. I have four problems. French? Algerian? Girl? Boy? 11. Trans. I remain between the two countries. I remain between two identities. . . . I am inventing another world. 12. Trans. I am a woman, I am a man, I am everything, I am nothing. 13. See Spurlin, ‘Queering Translation’, 178–79 for the context of my criticism of Massad’s argument around non-identarian and perfunctory sexual bonds between Arab Muslim men. Also, I am indebted to Massad’s translations of texts written in Arabic into English as a non-Arabic speaker, but while translation work involves a crossing between languages and cultures, Massad seems to lack a theory of cultural translation that acknowledges the negotiations of meanings in the spaces between geopolitical and regional borders, particularly centre-periphery borders that he seems to keep erect, neglecting residues of difference that remain in any translative act and that are not reducible to one culture or another. Similarly, in an African context, Marc Epprecht’s book Heterosexual Africa? dismisses ‘queer theory as a research strategy in Africa’ (16) because of its associations with North American academia and with whiteness, which rehearses a nativist, originary myth of African culture that produces an homogenous African subject, a view which not only has had a history of having been critiqued by prominent African studies scholars such as Kwame Anthony Appiah nearly thirty years ago in his book In My Father’s House, as I mention in my review of Epprecht’s book in African Studies Review (160), but also has been challenged more recently by other scholars, such as Ian Barnard, who, in his book Queer

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Race, resists ‘conceding queer theory to whiteness’ (6) and affirms queer theory as already inscribed in racial politics while acknowledging the importance of work being done at the intersections of race and sexuality as Brenna Munro notes as well (255 n42). At the same time, scholars in Africa are actively reframing and reformulating queer theory in African contexts, which will be discussed in chapter 1. See also my review of Epprecht’s Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. African Studies Review 53.3 (2010): 159–62. 14. ‘Les voix incarnées à travers les récits de nos romanciers ont la capacité d’ouvrir un nouvel espace public de discussion de ce qui jusque-là était indicible et tabou . . . dans la création des espaces publics de débat libre de diverses questions sociopolitiques et culturelles’ (Ncube, La sexualité queer au Maghreb 162). Trans. The voices embodied in the stories of the novelists mentioned have the capacity to open up a new public space for discussion of what was previously unspeakable and taboo . . . through the creation of public spaces of free debate on various sociopolitical and cultural issues.

Chapter 1

Sexual/Textual Crossings Towards New Representations of Sexual Dissidence in the Maghreb

The permeability of geopolitical borders, largely influenced by transnational processes, migratory movement and digital technology, has produced, in recent years, far-reaching transformations of political subjectivity, citizenship and sovereignty no longer necessarily confined to the modern nation-state. Borders, to the extent that they are understood as porous and permeable, have become less continuous, linear structures enclosing a geopolitical territory, thereby diffusing the traditional distinctions between what is internal and what is external to the nation-state (Andrijasevic 396). But, on the other hand, some borders have become more heavily demarcated in response to demographic shifts, migration, asylum, border disputes and transfers of labour and capital, as well as intensified immigration controls, border policing and deportation as forms of economic and political protectionism in response to reframed nationalisms and heightened xenophobia in various parts of the world. It is important, then, to note that various forms of biopolitical domination continue to be produced within and across geopolitical borders, which implies a kind of inconsistency and ambivalence towards the permeability of borders, and the ways in which various forms of reborderisation occur, to the extent that, as Eithne Luibhéid observes, the roles of the nation-state, nationalism, and nation-based citizenship have not disappeared entirely under conditions of globalisation, the economic restructuring of the globe, and migration, given that such conditions can both uphold and contest regional, transnational and neo-imperial sites of power, while producing simultaneously various forms of exclusion, marginalisation and struggle (173–74). And Gayatri Spivak has reminded us not to over-invest in the seeming penetrability of borders and to contextualise points of departure and arrival, particularly for subjects who cross borders, given that borders are more easily crossed by those from metropolitan countries, ‘whereas attempts to enter from the 29

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so-called peripheral countries encounter bureaucratic and policed frontiers, altogether more difficult to penetrate’ (Death of a Discipline 16). When positing the permeability of borders, a question that needs to be asked is, border permeability for whom? Along these lines, it is important to recognise that geopolitical borders, similar to symbolic or discursive borders, such as race, gender, sexuality and class, are neither entirely fixed nor impenetrable, but are constructed, invented, discursive entities that operate as relational sites of power, (re)negotiation and struggle. As Henrice Altink and Chris Weedon observe in their volume Gendering Border Studies, borders can no longer be regarded as part of the international geopolitical landscape of the nation-state system but are part of a larger network of discursive practices that create and sustain meanings, norms and values that shape everyday life (2). A focus on the paradox of borders enables a radical queering of hegemonic notions of national and cultural origin and cultural authenticity to the extent that they are conflated with fixed geopolitical demarcations, as well as a renewed engagement with the proliferation of differences(s) and continued forms of (re)bordering, that influence how we construe the world. Yet, somewhat similar to Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, in speaking of a feminist practice without borders, that we must take caution not to romanticise the deconstruction and delocalisation of borders and acknowledge ‘the fault lines, conflicts, differences, fears, and containment that borders represent’ while simultaneously bearing in mind that while there is no single, unitary sense of a border, ‘the lines between and through nations, races, classes, sexualities, religions, and disabilities are real – and that a feminism without borders must envision change and social justice work across these lines of demarcation and division’ (Feminism without Borders 2; emphasis added). While much work has addressed the implications of borders as shifting sites of demarcation and meaning for gender studies, such as Mohanty’s theorisation of a feminism without borders (but which is not borderless), I am interested specifically in taking this work further to exploit the queer potential of the liminal zones between borders, particularly within diasporic, transnational spaces between North Africa and Europe. In one sense, I take on Jasbir Puar’s approach in Terrorist Assemblages to displace ‘queerness as an identity or modality that is visibly, audibly, legibly, or tangibly evident’ through a focus on assemblages that enable us to become more attuned to movements, intensities and affectivities ‘as they inhabit events, spatiality, and corporealities’ (215) with specific reference to (queer) corporeal and discursive crossings between the Maghreb and Europe. How are the paradoxes and contradictions between borders as fixed and reinforcing national boundaries and cultural parameters, on the one hand, and as fluid, porous and, according to Janet Bauer, catalysts for persistent tension and social change, on the other (36), potential sites for both reinforcing and transgressing demarcated

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spatialities, identities, languages and discursive categories? The queer potential of these paradoxes, liminalities and contradictions are explored in Contested Borders insofar as they inform and ‘come out’ of contemporary queer francophone autofiction that has emerged in recent years from the Maghreb. The contingency of borders and their transitionality and destabilisation enable queer or alternative ways of looking at and inhabiting the world, through what Alphonse de Toro describes as difference, alterity and supplementarity as starting points (22) that subvert and exceed the internal/external distinctions constructed through the very instantiation of borders. This is especially true when considering, for example, postcolonial subjectivities, which have historically negotiated, by necessity, the spaces between national and cultural borders while not being fully contained by them. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, notes that postcolonial subjects ‘exist between the old and the new, between the old empire and the new state, [and] their condition articulates the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism’ (332; emphasis added). At the same time, Said stipulates that as a result of postcolonial and imperial conflicts, new states and new boundaries were produced that did not, or could not, contain those unassimilated to the emerging structures of institutional power (332); in other words, those who exceeded containment within specific borders and oscillated between them, recodified, refigured and resisted, in various ways, imperial notions of self, cultural authenticity, national belonging, and national and cultural sovereignty. Reading and inhabiting the world from a position of difference is important to the extent that postcolonial forms of sexual dissidence and struggle are best understood through the interactive, contradictory and liminal spaces produced in the encounter between cultures, given that anti-imperialist postcolonial nationalisms often dismiss homosexuality as a remnant of empire, and given that sexual struggles in indigenous contexts historically have been reduced by Western scholars to understandings of sexual identity and visibility in the West, which thereby reinscribes the imperialist gesture in a new light as I have argued elsewhere.1 Closely related to how far one takes the imperialist gesture, I admire Joseph Massad’s historical acumen and precision in his thorough analysis of the history of same-sex sexualities in the Middle East and in the Arab Muslim world in his book Desiring Arabs, particularly his exposure of the conflicts between what orientalists and Arab intellectuals deemed to be the ‘civilisational value’ of Arab culture, which included sexuality as a critical index, but with so-called civilisational value determined by a European world view with roots in colonial history (Desiring Arabs 4–5) and in post-Enlightenment thinking. But I cannot agree with Massad’s idea of the so-called Gay

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International being responsible for (re)producing gay men and lesbians in Arab Muslim societies where they simply do exist, given his argument that the hetero/homo split is foreign to Arab Muslim societies because it did not emerge historically out of them (Desiring Arabs 162–63) as his analysis fails to account, as I pointed out in the introduction, for the ways in which sexual struggles are always already culturally mediated and configured within a network of power relations pertaining to race, gender, ethnicity, religion and class, in addition to, and alongside, geopolitical location, without fetishizing the latter as a primary determinant of sexuality. In reading Massad’s more recent book Islam in Liberalism, I was hoping for a more refined, nuanced and less dogmatic position, but he argues instead in this latter work that the West, particularly Europe and the United States, proselytises and imposes its own value system and model of social and political order as a civilisational regime on to all Muslims whom it supposedly seeks to rescue from despotic and oppressive systems of rule, and that this missionary role of liberalism is particularly directed towards Muslim women and Muslim ‘homosexuals’ (with homosexuals in scare quotes here by Massad supposedly to denote Western views of homosexuality) in order to save them from misogyny and homophobia, respectively, and from intolerance, generally (3). Certainly, these forms of neo-imperialism, where they exist, are evident as effects of colonialism and continue in the more recent history of relations between the West and the Middle East, but what is missing is the specificity on how those in Arab Muslim societies and cultures take up sexual alterity and sexual identity and position themselves, in various ways, as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer or as sexual dissidents. Are they merely mimicking sexual identities and sexual politics ‘deployed’, to use Massad’s term (Islam in Liberalism 217), from the West? I agree with Massad that Islam is so much part of Europe and was there at the birth of Europe as he declares in the opening lines of Islam in Liberalism, where Islam historically and presently has been projected as Europe’s external other so that Western liberalism can be defined in opposition to it (1). In other words, European liberalism, according to Massad, ‘constitutes Islam in constituting itself’ by projecting its anxieties around despotism, intolerance, misogyny and homophobia on to Islam so that Europe emerges as democratic, tolerant, philogynist and homophilic (Islam in Liberalism 12). The strength of Massad’s claims that Western liberal epistemology universalises ‘the West as humanity and the translation of the non-West into modes of subjectivity that the West can recognise and tolerate’ (Islam in Liberalism 233), and that the assimilation of the world to Euroamerican normativity seems the only pathway to civility in contrast to Arab Muslim societies, which are represented through the discourses of the neo-imperial policies of the West, rather self-servingly and a priori, as unjust, intolerant and regressive (Islam in Liberalism 216–17), lends credence to the

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continued and ongoing reproduction of the civilising mission within colonial policy from the nineteenth century in a new, but already familiar, key. Though the historical relation of Islam to European liberalism is not the topic of this book, but touched upon later in this chapter and in chapter 2, and is particularly relevant to European colonialism in the Maghreb and its representations of same-sex sexualities underwritten by Western medicine as decadent and primitive, Islam in Liberalism disappointedly seems to rehearse the same arguments about homosexuality in Arab Muslim societies and cultures as did Massad’s Desiring Arabs, with Islam at the forefront this time, and with a high degree of defensiveness and vengeance against the critics of the earlier work. The literary work that I examine later in this book, particularly queer writing by writers who have emigrated from the Maghreb to Europe and write about their negotiations of same-sex desire in relation to broader questions of cultural identity and struggle, supports Massad’s concession in his later book that the adoption of same-sex sexualities in non-Western contexts is neither identical nor symmetrical with the deployment of sexuality in Euroamerican contexts (219). This is an important site of clarification I would have liked to have seen developed in Islam in Liberalism as his argument still lacks a theory of hybridity, or at least an acknowledgement of intercultural interaction, and an undoing of his own epistemological certitudes in relation to the variant forms of samesex sexualities and queer existence in Arab Muslim societies and cultures without reducing those who engage in struggles for erotic autonomy to ‘a miniscule minority’ of Westernised elites in Arab Muslim societies and upper-class supporters in the Arab diaspora, who have been badly influenced by the so-called Gay International and are thereby devoid of human agency, as compared with poor and nonurban men ‘who practice same-sex contact’ (Desiring Arabs 173, 189) and for whom Massad supposedly speaks. Massad claims that sexuality, conceived as an ontological category, which tells, or is, the truth of the subject, is a product of European histories and social formations (Islam in Liberalism 219), and may very well be true to a certain extent, but sexuality as a category has been, and continues to be, questioned in the West today by those of us who work in queer studies, along with any universalist claims around the efficacy of the hetero/homo distinction as structuring and exhausting the possibilities for erotic autonomy and embodiment, given that the essentialism of the hetero/homo split does not take into account the intersectional and intercultural constitution of subjects who identify, in varying ways, with sexual alterity and difference, and how sexuality constitutes, and is constituted by, race; ethnicity; gender; class; religious, national, and regional affiliations; and other subjectivising factors and alliances, and not simply by the gender of object choice alone. Massad takes so much time in Islam in Liberalism defending his earlier positions in his chapter on sexuality in/and Islam, with Islam justifiably in scare quotes in the title of his third chapter ‘Pre-Positional Conjunctions:

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Sexuality and/in “Islam”’, and, indeed, in all of the chapter titles in the book, perhaps to demonstrate more legibly and typographically an invented version of Islam promulgated by the West. But Massad attacks his critics of Desiring Arabs relentlessly, both in the main text of the third chapter and especially in its long footnotes, sometimes longer than his main text on some pages, assailing those who disagree with him as ‘unperturbed by the rendering of queerness as an identity category’, referring to Hala Kamal’s use of the term ‘atypical sexual identities’ in trying to translate ‘queer’ into Arabic, but missing the point of Kamal’s use of ‘atypicality’ and her qualified ‘closest possible translation’ of the Arabic phrase al-hawiyat al-jinsiya al-la namatiya as more or less equivalent to ‘atypical sexual identities’ (qtd. in Massad Islam in Liberalism 234–35),2 which does allow for a space of queerness through the intimation of nonnormative sexualities and a recognition of slippage in translation not reducible to equivalence, direct assimilation or to ‘the economy of the production of sameness’ for which Massad accuses her (Islam in Liberalism 237), given that translation can only be approximations of meaning always already subject to retranslation as I shall argue later. ‘Queer’ does not translate into Arabic straightforwardly or self-evidently because it does not carry the exact same meaning it has in the West, and the history of the encoding of the term in the West has also been marked by ambiguity and indirection. Other critics are charged with ‘careless misreading’ of Desiring Arabs (Islam in Liberalism 236 n53): ‘righteous indignation’ at scholarship, like Massad’s own, that supposedly uncovers what he refers to as the analytic errors of Western academic studies on Arabs and Muslims (253) and other obsessions with, and ‘distortions’ of, his own work (255 n110). Rather than starting with repeating his previous claims and refuting those with whom he disagrees, Massad could pay closer attention to how Arab Muslims who engage with struggles pertaining to same-sex desires are not mere ‘classes of urbanites, including a good number of intellectuals’ (255 n110) who simply mimic Western sexual identities and leave behind their indigenous cultures, but negotiate new, hybrid forms of same-sex sexual expression and identities in relation to their Arab Muslim cultural heritage and personal histories.3 These struggles are not only captured in post-independence francophone literature from the Maghreb, despite Massad’s rather flippant attempt to tar Jarrod Hayes’s book Queer Nations with the same brush he uses against his other critics through disparaging Hayes’s claim that nonnormative sexualities infiltrate dominant nationalist discourses and can loosen their political stronghold (Islam in Liberalism 244–45), even though this seems very much the case in depictions of sexual transgressions in post-independence francophone literature from the Maghreb as a critique of the prevailing social order (Hayes, Queer Nations 7–8) which I reference and develop in chapter 3. This critical lens that Hayes’s work provides is also evident in more contemporary

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queer francophone writing from the Maghreb that is analysed in chapters 4–6. In fact, Nina Bouraoui, in moving to Paris and exploring the lesbian subculture there, in the predominately white Milieu des Filles, attempts to shake off the vestiges on her Algerian cultural heritage for the sake of lesbian existence as her primary identificatory site only to cause her pain and a sense of loss later on. All of the contemporary writers I discuss claim sexual subjectivity as autre chose, as something different from what is understood as sexual difference in the Maghreb, reducible neither to ‘same-sex contact’ nor to sexual identity in the West, and they certainly do not present Europe with higher civilisational value as a bastion of enlightenment, tolerance or integration given the racism and Islamophobia they experience there. In addition, both Rachid O. and Abdellah Taïa, in particular, struggle with being both Muslim and gay in their writing, and to reduce these writers to Westernised elites trivialises their struggles and raises other questions around who is committing a form of epistemic violence towards whom. Speaking of homosexuality in Arab Muslim societies from a very different perspective with specific reference to Beirut, Lebanon, Jared McCormick addresses the ways in which discussions of homosexuality actually are moving into public discourse, especially through the mediation and influence of digital technology and the internet (244). While specifically acknowledging that understandings of gay and lesbian identity from the West are not simply transposed straightforwardly to the Middle East, it is important to note that the social changes that developed after the Lebanese Civil War, following the Taif Agreement in 1989, created fertile ground to redefine social borders, including the exploration of sexual definitions and differences (245). Based on his study of gay Lebanese men in Beirut and of Helem, the first gay rights organisation in the Arab world, which Massad castigates for deploying invented ‘categories, experiences, and objects of knowledge named heterosexuality . . . bisexuality, and homosexuality’ as a way to institutionalise and universalise gay and lesbian identities through Western-fuelled NGOs in spite of the earlier colonial deployment of European bourgeois sexuality (Islam in Liberalism 225), McCormick found that his informants navigated between various identities in a struggle to find more egalitarian same-sex sexual relationships in terms of emotional reciprocity and resistance to predefined roles based on gendered active/passive sexual relations between men (247). While the study refers to Massad’s Desiring Arabs in acknowledging a very fine line between increasing awareness and pushing the limits, or borders, of gender/ sex codes in traditional family life, for example, and working to modify the law to protect the lives of LGBT people, McCormick does help to dispute Massad’s claim about gay men and lesbians not existing in the Arab Muslim world and that the hetero/homo split is an enforced universalist binary that came out of a history of the medicalisation of sexuality in the West, a

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structure imposed onto Arab Muslim societies and culture from the West that all Arab Muslim sexual dissidents adopt universally. Rather, McCormick’s study challenges seriously the active/passive binary as paradigmatic for understanding sex between Arab Muslim men (he does not address same-sex relations between women in his study), while accounting for gay Lebanese identity as a site of negotiation and struggle and as culturally and socially mediated: that is, as influenced through sexual politics elsewhere, including the West, without being wholly reducible to them. Reducing queer theorising to a distinctly Western phenomenon, or casting it a priori as an imperialist gesture, sets up problematic binary distinctions that position queerness in the West as always already in complete opposition to indigenous forms of sexual dissidence and struggle while neglecting the mediation of cultures where the degree of influence may be of ‘more or less’ rather than an either/or binary trope where indigenous sexual desires, identities and practices are completely subsumed to their Western articulations and understandings, or are constructed as complete incommensurable differences, neither of which would be viable positions since they do not account for the contestations, contradictions and negotiations that occur in the spaces between cultural borders. Specifically speaking on sub-Saharan francophone Africa, which has resonance for the Maghreb, and challenging the so-called classical conceptions of ‘a geopolitical border that determined the definition and the organisation of the modern state in Europe’ and its attendant inside/ outside distinction (Andrijasevic 395–96), Achille Mbembe, in his book On the Postcolony, writes that ‘African social formations are not necessarily converging toward a single point, trend, or cycle. They harbor the possibility of a variety of trajectories neither convergent nor divergent, but interlocked, paradoxical’ (16; emphasis added). In other words, African postcolonies may be better conceived as assemblages, traversals and multidimensional timespaces that position African cultures as relational and mediated, as circulatorial, destabilising fixed assumptions of African identity and culture imposed by colonialism and its aftermath through essentialised categories of race, ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality, while exposing new sites of heterogeneity and difference, part of which this book aims to explore. Furthermore, postcolonial subjects in diaspora, according to Delphine Fongang, constantly reshape their identities through relocation and occupy a space of interstitiality at the threshold between sociocultural, economic, political and ideological contradictions as a site of unremitting struggle (5). This is especially significant given that more recent queer francophone writing emerging from the Maghreb that I examine later in this book is written by authors who have emigrated from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria and have settled in France, where diaspora becomes the material condition that produces particular literary creations to the extent that the identities of the authors of these texts become bifurcated

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and fractured in relation to the shifting demands of being transnational subjects (Fongang 6) who navigate continuously the space between two different cultural worlds, that is, between the Maghreb and Europe. The reshaping of identity and the navigation of spaces between geopolitical borders relates in compelling ways to those seeking asylum in the West based on sexual dissidence. In an article published in the Journal of Ethnic and Minority Studies, Alexander Dhoest documents problematic issues at work during the procedures for forced migrants seeking asylum in Belgium based on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) criteria which impose Western conceptions of sexual and gender identity as part of the asylum procedure. The study is based on research on asylum regulations and practices, interviews with advocates, and in-depth interviews on the experiences of forced migrants from countries where homosexuality is criminalised in order to address what Sharalyn R. Jordan refers to as ‘the shifts and realignments in identity that occur with migration’ while ensuring ‘access to refugee protection for those facing homophobic and transphobic persecution without reifying Western identity categories’ (qtd. in Dhoest 3).4 Actually, Joseph Massad’s work, which Dhoest’s study cites, is critically important in this context to the extent that European asylum procedures assess SOGI applications on Western LGBTQ models that may not take into account, as Dhoest indicates, a well-founded fear for prosecution and for belonging to a social group with stigmatised sexual or gender identities in the home countries of those seeking asylum when Western conceptions of how dissident gender and sexual identities are performed, discursively and bodily, are applied, possibly resulting in unjustified rejections of applications, possible deportations and rehearsed performances of particular gender and sexual identities by asylum seekers that align with the assumptions of sexual and transgender identities held by immigration officials (8–9). This would be a case where Western sexual and transgender identities are universalised and imposed upon asylum seekers, based on narrow SOGI criteria, who may not have had access to, or may not have identified with, LGBTQ identity, community or politics as these are understood in Western contexts, pointing to asymmetrical relations of power and economic access. However, while it is not my intention to dismiss altogether the value of Massad’s scholarship through pointing to its helpful implications in the context of European asylum, this acknowledgement does not diminish my concerns with Massad’s work articulated and argued earlier as Dhoest’s research also demonstrates, among his sample group of mostly cis-gendered male asylum seekers, that those who more clearly identified as gay prior to arrival in Belgium were granted asylum and their identification as ‘gay’ did ‘not necessarily imply the wholesale adoption of Western identity models’, even as ‘gay identity models have been globally spread for a while now and have entered into

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dialogue with local cultural models of sexuality across the world’ (Dhoest 10; emphasis added). This is precisely the point I have been arguing in relation to Massad and the importance of hybridity, intercultural encounter and cultural translation as the discourses and materialities of queerness, including digital and corporeal materialities, cross geopolitical borders, creating shifts in the meaning of ‘queer’, ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ not reducible to their Western articulations and significations even if the same terms are used. Coming back to Africa and shifting away from the idea of queer as a vestige of Western imperialism in indigenous contexts, what is also interesting is the queer potential of the postcolonial in general and of Africa in particular. Picking up from Said, mentioned earlier, the delocalisation of borders has always been quite integral to postcolonies in Africa, which have historically inhabited the spaces between two or more cultural worlds, especially true in the case of North Africa, given its close proximity to Europe and a history of European imperialism in the region, as well as its equally close proximity to the Middle East and the Maghreb’s earlier colonisation by the Ottoman Empire prior to the advent of French colonialism beginning in the early nineteenth century. These historical antecedents, which I shall address more specifically in chapter 2, are critical not only for examining the remapping of borders between Arab Muslim and European influences in the Maghreb but also for rethinking the postcolonial/queer relation. In my earlier work on southern Africa, I proposed a dialogical relationship between postcolonial and queer theory, given that up until the 1990s, postcolonial theorising did not interrogate sufficiently same-sex desire in its analyses of the effects of imperialism on gender, and it seemed, at least in my view, to reinvent the sex and gender codes of the West, privileging heteronormative social relations while largely neglecting a history of same-sex desire in indigenous contexts before, during or after the colonial encounter. Historically speaking, sexual difference, when it did appear in postcolonial literature, signified metaphorically a political relationship between coloniser and colonised to mark relations of power and subordination. According to Rhonda Cobham, the signifier ‘homosexual’ was read historically as an internalisation of orientalist discourses through which the subaltern ‘other’ was constructed as feminine so as to represent discursively power relations between Europe and its colonies (47).5 What does this supposed anxiety around the loss of masculinity imply about postcolonised women and gender and sexual dissidents and their decolonisation? Even within the field of postcolonial studies, this failure, until the 1990s, to engage fully sexual dissidence in its analyses of gender and sexuality is indicative of what Spivak has termed as the ‘infrastructural problem of the restricted permeability of global culture [and] the lack of communication within and among the immense heterogeneity of the subaltern cultures of the world’ (Death of a Discipline 16; emphasis added). The heterogeneity

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of indigenous cultures still requires ongoing analysis and deconstruction to this day as a resistance to a prescribed, fantasised and fixed homogeneity, especially around those forms of gender performance and sexual desire not bound specifically to heteronormative social relations. Queer studies, on the other hand, roughly up until the same time period, remained narrowly Eurocentric in perspective and showed little interest in cross-cultural variations of the expression or representation of same-sex desire to the extent that homosexualities in non-Western cultures were imagined through the imperialist gaze of Euroamerican queer identity politics, or appropriated through the economies of the West. At this same time, in the mid-1990s, I was studying the ways in which the sexual politics that emerged in the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa, and the effects in the region, might allow for a broader scope of inquiry at the critical nexus of postcolonial and queer theory since neither were particularly sufficient in and of themselves in a postcolonial and post-apartheid context as intersectional tools of analysis for the politics of race and sexuality. It was appearing to me at the time that I was there and doing my research that the transitional phase South Africa was experiencing in its shift towards democracy in the early and mid-1990s was not merely reducible to the constitutional end of apartheid in South Africa but needed to include analyses of critiques of other systems of domination that were occurring simultaneously, in addition to, and alongside, racism and that ‘were implicated in and supported the ideological machinery of apartheid’ (Attridge and Jolly 2), including sexism, homophobia, classism, language bias and other sites of power that could also be traced to South Africa’s colonial antecedent. In this sense, my resultant book Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa took an intersectional mode of analysis, made necessary by a history of colonialism, challenging normalising ideologies of national belonging, race, gender, class and sexuality, all of which marked the apartheid era and were not totally eradicated in the ‘New’ South Africa that followed despite juridical change, which included the first democratic elections of 1994 that put the ANC in power and Nelson Mandela in office as president of South Africa, and the ratification of the new South African Constitution in 1996, which protected all human rights and civil liberties by law, including those who identified, in various ways, with sexual difference. In this sense, queer struggles become imbricated within broader forms of anti-apartheid and post-apartheid resistance while simultaneously becoming forms of decolonisation themselves. This is not to reduce or trivialise the violences of a colonial and racist past in South Africa, and on the continent more broadly, which by no means is to be relegated to a historical aberration given that the effects of colonialism and the apartheid regime continue in the present day, but is to account for power and resistance as multifaceted,

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intersectional and operating across multiple vectors and through different communities and constituent groups. Though a theorisation of postcolonial and queer inquiry as dialogical and mutually inflecting lenses, and as a mode of analysis, was helpful at a time when postcolonial and queer studies were not the overlapping and intersectional sites of analysis they have since become, I am now convinced of the limitations of that approach, especially given the permeability and porousness of borders, both geopolitical and discursive, as implied by Achille Mbembe in the context of postcolonial Africa: Conflict arises from the fact that the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic, and that it is in practice impossible to create a single, permanently stable system out of all the signs, images, and markers current in the postcolony; that is why they are constantly being shaped and reshaped, as much by the rulers as by the ruled, in attempts to rewrite the mythologies of power. (108)

This logic of contingency, impermanence and fragmentation, made possible through the effects of a colonial history of disruption, enables one to rethink, as Ayo Coly has argued, African postcolonies as ‘an always-in-process and multidirectional timespace of multiplicities, embeddings, proliferations, simultaneous enunciations and dissolutions’, and thereby to theorise the inherent queerness of the postcolonial (3–4). The simultaneous enunciations and dissolutions that cross and intersect postcolonial timespaces alongside the remapping of borders, geopolitical and otherwise, help to create a conceptual space at long last for theorising queer as a postcolonial enunciation that disrupts the oppositional boundary between postcolonial and queer that my earlier work may have unintentionally perpetuated as I have argued elsewhere.6 As Coly rightfully clarifies in rethinking the postcolonial/queer relation, The two have long been kept at bay by critical theorists, discursively sealed off from one another as if to preempt contamination that each side will leave to regret. Conversely, projects of ‘queering postcolonial studies’ and ‘decolonizing queer studies’ (Spurlin 2006: 7) have mostly adopted the convergence and intersectional model. . . . I am, however, concerned that the model reinscribes the postcolonial and the queer within the very binary logic that the approach sought to resist in the first place. The implicit premise that the queer and the postcolonial are indigenous to different locales reifies the notion that the queer is a foreign import into the postcolonial. My reformulation . . . grounds the queer in the postcolonial and asserts that the queer is organic to the postcolonial. (2; emphasis added)

I remain convinced of the efficacy of Coly’s (re)theorisation of the postcolonial as queer, that is, as always already inhabited by fracture, by splittings, by

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difference and by radical contingency supported by Mbembe’s work, which has opened a space for the theorisation of queerness in African literatures and cultures, though Mbembe does not specifically address the politics of sexual difference. I would like to take this theorisation further, given that the idea of the postcolonial as queer is not reducible only to the confines of geopolitical borders within Africa, since African culture, as relational and mediated, rather than as limited to the borders of the continent alone, is complicated further when these continental borders are crossed by queer migrants who have emigrated from the African postcolonies to Europe, such as the writers I discuss in chapters 4–6. While I contested earlier Joseph Massad’s assertion that the so-called Gay International has produced gay men and lesbians in the Arab Muslim world where they simply do not exist through work that specifically references struggles for sexual rights in Arab Muslim societies, such as in Lebanon, what makes the Maghreb a queer postcolonial space is not only various forms of resistance to heteronormativity, which I shall discuss in later chapters, but also the plurality of its cultures and languages, a plurality historically constituted and mediated by Africa, the Middle East and Europe and thereby not reducible to mere territorial borders alone.7 This speaks to the centrifugal disruption, fragmentation and contradictions of which Mbembe has spoken in relation to other struggles for concrete ideological centralisation and coherence. The dialogical tension between fragmentation and coherence, between power and resistance (Mbembe’s rulers and ruled), which echoes Bakhtin and Foucault, along with a history of colonisation which neither Bakhtin nor Foucault addressed sufficiently, is best summed up by Mildred Mortimer, who, in her introduction to Maghrebian Mosaic, points to the transitionality of the Maghreb as set in struggles between tradition and modernity and between cultural specificity and openness to the world (6). These struggles, and their attendant contradictions, within the landscape of the Maghreb, are especially pertinent to gender and sexual struggles. As with the struggles in navigating sexual identity in Lebanon mentioned earlier, and the search for more egalitarian relationships based on affective and sexual reciprocity between men through resisting the active/passive binary as paradigmatic (McCormick 247), such struggles, while perhaps not socially visible, are encoded in the contemporary writing I examine by gay male writers from the Maghreb. Pointing to the fallacy of holding up a Mediterranean model of active/passive homosexuality as a marker of absolute difference between the sexual epistemologies of the Middle East and the West, Joseph Boone, who has researched extensively male same-sex desire and sexuality in Middle Eastern Arab cultures, argues that to assume that distinct subjectivities somehow arise naturally from this geopolitically based binary misses the complex layerings of male erotics being negotiated in a polyvalent sphere of

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homoerotic possibility, pleasure and prohibition (so much part of Maghrebian history and cultural landscape as represented in an earlier generation of Maghrebian writers)8 that displace univocal narratives and logics that obscure diversities (Homoerotics of Orientalism 48–49). The crossings of borders, including symbolic or discursive borders, enable sites of mediation and crosscultural exchange, and, as Boone aptly reminds us, this includes currents of (sexual) knowledge and desire flowing in multiple directions (49), while similarly reflecting the constant tensions between enunciation and dissolution, and the chaotic pluralities in African postcolonies of which Mbembe has spoken, and the impossibility, therefore, of imposing a single sexual epistemology on the region. One focus of this book is attending to the various ways in which the active/passive binary, as a given model for structuring sexual relations between men in the Maghreb, is resisted and reworked in contemporary queer francophone writing from the region, which does not preclude its actual inscription and representation but addresses a critical reconfiguring of its structure both sexually and epistemologically. Despite work, such as that of Joseph Massad and Marc Epprecht, which has reductively suggested the foreignness of queer theorising in Middle Eastern and African indigenous contexts, respectively, and therefore plays directly into the hands of postcolonial nationalists who already read homosexuality as an import of empire or as a Western intrusion,9 and despite arguments that indigenous scholars, activists or sexual dissidents themselves do not embrace the term ‘queer’, which would thereby make any use of the term in the postcolonial or developing world an imperialist gesture, more contemporary queer work has similarly challenged the efficacy of simply rejecting queer theory and queer inquiry a priori as instruments of imperialistic hegemony, a gesture which would reinscribe the West/East, global North/global South binary in a transnational world. Shalmalee Palekar, for example, argues for the importance of constructing a hybrid queer theory capable of accommodating local specificities and pluralities while not ignoring the effects of neo-imperial and neoliberal influences (8). As Geeta Patel similarly notes, queerness can be a site that ‘produces a space for sexual hybridity alternate to and in excess of simple identity categories’ (138). And pertaining specifically to Africa, and recalling my earlier discussion on my use of terminology for representing sexual dissidence in postcolonial or indigenous contexts, and on varying forms of identification with queerness in particular contexts, Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas remind us in their Queer African Reader that the term ‘queer’ can be, and is, used as an intellectual and political frame in African contexts by writers, scholars and activists. They write, ‘We use the term queer to underscore a perspective that embraces gender and sexual plurality and seeks to transform, overhaul, and revolutionize African order, rather than seeking to assimilate into oppressive heteropatriarchal capitalist frameworks’ (3). Also, taking the work of Mbembe

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further into the realm of gender and sexuality in Africa, Stella Nyanzi, who also uses the term ‘queer’ in her work in medical anthropology, writes in ‘Queering Queer Africa’ that ‘queer Africa must reclaim . . . African modes of blending, bending, and breaking gender boundaries’ (66; qtd. in Currier and MigraineGeorge 288; emphasis added). Moreover, this returns us to the question of borders and their continual shifts and reterritorialisations, where sexual and cultural identities become blurred and reconfigured in the spaces between traditionally marked geopolitical and discursive borders, which is clearly addressed in new queer writing from the Maghreb. Since the Maghreb is situated at the crossroads between East and West, given the geographical positionings of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia on the Mediterranean shore opposite Europe, and given the historical influences of European, African and Middle Eastern cultures on the region, the Maghreb, according to Mildred Mortimer, has privileged historically cultural pluralism and multilingualism, transcending homogeneity, monolingualism and discrete territorial boundaries (5), which speaks therefore to geopolitical and cultural borders as shifting sites of demarcation and signification as I have been arguing. As with other parts of Africa marked by cultural disruption and contingency, the Maghreb, with its multiple crossings of languages, histories and cultural influences, is certainly marked by the tensions and paradoxes of borders as fixed and reinforced, on the one hand, and as fluid and porous, on the other. At the same time, one must not sentimentalise the multiple sites of border crossings with regard to the Maghreb as the intersections of cultures, languages and identities that comprise the Maghreb have been influenced by a history of colonial power. Algeria was under French colonial rule from 1830 to 1962 and was part of an imperial project to extend French borders d’outre-mer through its mission civilisatrice with the imposition of the French language, as, according to Hassan Hanafi, a ‘civilising force’ (16).10 Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881, and Morocco in 1912, and local languages and cultures were suppressed under the weight of imperial control. French novelists, travellers and physicians in the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, read North Africa as ‘a space of savage violence and lurid sexuality, but also a space of insanity’ (Keller 1). These colonial readings, of course, enable one to understand colonialism not only as a form of territorial invasion or as a military power but as a form of epistemological domination, whereby the European gaze, as Thierry Fabre points out, constructed categories necessary to exercise its power (8),11 which resulted in colonial subjects seeing themselves as subordinate to Europe. While European colonisers in North Africa regarded themselves as emblazoning such Enlightenment ideals as reason, progress, liberty and social justice, while the contrary ideas of superstition, backwardness, inequality, social injustice and unreason were projected on to the colonial peripheries beyond Europe (Hanafi 19),12 the

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colonial politics of mise-en-valeur not only exploited the labour of colonised people but underwrote France’s mission civilisatrice through a modernisation of the so-called primitive or barbarian worlds through education, the construction of cities modelled on Europe and the establishment of new institutions that ‘civilised’ colonial space and colonial subjects according to the ideals of republican virtue (Keller 5), and all of this was bound to the imposition of French as an official language of colonial administration, government and education. While this history will be addressed more specifically in the next chapter, I mention it now because it is important to bear in mind the effects of this history on more contemporary postcolonial writing emerging from the Maghreb, especially with regard to gender and sexuality as they relate to the recuperation of memory and the quest for identity, particularly for those writers who have left the Maghreb and are now living in France. A central issue this book will examine is the effects of a history of Ottoman and French imperialism on postcolonial writing from the Maghreb in relation to gender and sexual alterity. Generally speaking, Maghrebian writers have regarded the process of colonisation, according to Mildred Mortimer, and I might add, its ongoing effects, as a wound (1). Franco-Algerian writer Nina Bouraoui, for example, a second-generation writer whose mother is French, and whose father is Algerian, and who did not participate directly in the political struggle for independence, culminating in the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), links this troubled past, that is, the wound, between Algeria and its former coloniser symbolised by the war, to her own personal struggle with gender, sexual and cultural identity within her writing. In the first of a series of three autofictional works, Garçon Manqué, Bouraoui writes, ‘Je viens de la guerre’ (32), which not only references the war but its effects on her personal struggle to name her lived experience of sexual dissidence, implied by the title of her work, and the space of alterity she occupies between France and Algeria, and its link to the space she occupies between the gender binary. While postcolonial texts from the Maghreb are written in French, the use of French cannot be reduced to a simple act of postcolonial mimicry. By writing in French, the contemporary writers I shall discuss, as well as an earlier generation of postcolonial writers from the Maghreb, use French strategically to rework its received meanings in Europe; as Mortimer argues, Maghrebian writers breathe new life into standard French language usage, indigenising the language through inserting Arabic or Berber words, and more importantly, as a way of broaching taboo subjects, such as sexuality, which is more easily accomplished in French (5) than in the more sacred language of Arabic with its close association to Islam and the language of the Qur’an. Francophone in postcolonial contexts does not simply refer to literacy in French language and culture, particularly outside of metropolitan France, but is, as Debra Kelly

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notes, also a political strategy (38) to resist the assimilation of French writing in postcolonial contexts to a universalising French perspective through celebrating instead the interspersal of words, idioms and traces of other languages within a French language text, thereby constructing a more dynamic literary form (Hiddleston, ‘Writing World Literature’ 1389). Francophone writing in the Maghreb is often a strategy for exploring new forms of alterity, renaming the world, recuperating memory and redefining the self. The use of French as a language of colonial inheritance, and as a form of resistance to standard European French by Maghrebian writers, involves a simultaneous renegotiation of borders, not only between France and the Maghreb, and between Europe and Africa more broadly, but between the past and present, and between what Mortimer refers to as cultural specificity and an openness to the world, and between tradition and modernity, especially in the depiction of gender struggles and sexual dissidence (6). The breaking down of borders, both geopolitical and discursive, focuses our attention on the possibilities of spaces between the categories, what Mortimer refers to as glissements, or slidings, hiatuses that open up new hybrid spaces that rupture the borders between traditional indigenous values, particularly around family and gender, and the imprisoning European orientalist gaze (9) that continues to objectify postcolonised subjects. These ruptures operate also as queer spaces in the search for new forms of heterogeneity and difference, and as ways to write oneself out of the predominant system of (post)colonial inscription and representation. Closely related, just as autofictional writing from the Maghreb challenges Western assumptions of a fully unified self, and is a struggle against the effects of French colonisation, including the hegemonies of neo-colonialism and nationalism in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia following French domination, the borders of the very genre of what is understood to be autobiographical writing in Western literature are, by necessity, reworked and renegotiated. More than simply the rendition of a life in aesthetic or literary form, postcolonial autofictional writing, which shatters any strict binary relation between fiction and autobiography, is a process of decolonising the mind through the very act of writing itself – it is therefore both a creative and a political act, to the extent that postcolonial writers occupy a space in-between European writing and their indigenous cultures, that enables an imaginative and discursive (re)positioning of the self in the world. As with the use of the French language by postcolonial writers in francophone contexts such as the Maghreb, it would be simplistic to assume that any form of autofictional writing is simply an act of postcolonial mimicry. As Debra Kelly argues, postcolonial writers from the Maghreb have been influenced intertextually through the influence of the French language and French literature through the education system, which often recolonises by making Maghrebian subjects who write feel

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inferior to French canonical writers. As a result, she argues, autobiographical writing, in its various forms (life writing, autofiction, etc.), becomes a mode of writing that is revisionary in its attempt to question the self through the very act of writing, rather than simply to reflect one’s own image, and, in the process, the act of writing challenges and revises the very mode of the genre used to investigate struggles for subjectivity (Kelly 31–32). This means that postcolonial francophone writers in Africa, certainly the ones I shall consider from the Maghreb, take up the French literary and intellectual tradition in which they were schooled as a cultural reference point and subvert it for different needs and purposes in a highly politicised context that demands the invention of new generic forms to resist what Kelly refers to, in citing Aimé Césaire, as la chosification (or the objectification) of (post)colonised subjects (Kelly 45). More than a mere representation of an essential self, defined as separate from others, autofictional writing from the Maghreb is concerned largely with identity, but the writing, according to Kelly, is simultaneously a site of memory, self-interpretation and translation of self, usually with an emphasis on reimagined childhood and the conditions of the author’s ancestral homes and early influences of their indigenous cultures (Kelly 31) that are recalled, reclaimed and understood in a new relation to self, especially if the writer is living in diaspora. Concerns with aspects of identity and (re)interpretations of the self are certainly true of the contemporary queer autofictional writing I examine in this book; all of the writers reference their childhoods in the Maghreb as a way of trying to understand their North African ancestral homelands and the dissonance they experience there in terms of their gender alterity in their early years. At the same time, however, the writers struggle with the (im)possibility of writing their lived experiences, which, as Kelly argues, in writing about Abdelkebir Khatibi’s La Mémoire tatouée, comes to inscribe itself in the actual process of composing autobiographical discourse (225). There is a gesture towards self-understanding and a revelation of the self that is ultimately deferred, both an enunciation and dissolution, and this becomes perhaps even more pronounced in writing about gender and sexual difference. In this regard, the act of writing is linked to an identity coming into being, that is, created in and with the written word (Kelly 234–35), but never completely coalescent with it – as with all forms of signification, there will always be a space of indeterminacy, a gap or space of difference, that will displace a fully present and knowable self. As Nina Bouraoui writes in a sequential autobiographical work to Garcon Manqué entitled Poupée Bella, ‘Je suis en devenir homosexuel, comme je suis dans le livre en train de se faire’ (49).13 The emphasis, I argue, is neither on the revelation of a transcendent self nor on a preconceived notion of Western mimicry, but on writing as a heuristic attempt to make sense of a contingent self in the process of becoming.

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Another characteristic of contemporary francophone autofictional writing from the Maghreb written by gay and lesbian authors is that third or first person is often used, but little or no attempt is made to make explicit whether the narrator and author are the same person (Kelly 9). This is particularly salient in Eyet-Chékib Djaziri’s work, where his protagonist-narrator, Sofiène, in Un poisson sur la balançoire, and its sequel Une promesse de douleur et de sang, bears a resemblance to the author’s life growing up in Tunisia in the former work, being bullied by other boys for his perceived feminine behaviour, and his move to France in the latter work to continue his schooling. These hiatuses, these glissements within this genre of writing, while deconstructing binary relations between the Maghreb and France, similarly undermine received or Western forms of autobiographical writing and subvert the borders of genre, since autobiography is usually written in the first person and biography in the third person, signifying that the autofictional self is split and inscribed as both self and other. This is an attempt by writers like Djaziri to represent and (re)write their gendered/sexual subjectivities against the grain of dominant discourses of colonial and postcolonial systems of representation that may potentially elide or misrepresent their gender and sexual differences. Given that there is an attempt to recreate the self in the language of (an) other, that is, in French (Kelly 237–38), alongside an attempt to revise and reinvent the very form of representation, the emphasis is less on the discovery of a unified, fully present self, but on the tensions between cultural and historical origins involving spaces of migration and moving across geopolitical and discursive borders, as well as between the borders of self and other, in order to open up new possibilities of self and lived existence beyond fixed dichotomies through the simultaneous search for new systems of representation in the creative act of writing. In this regard, the very borders of genre are displaced as autofictional writing becomes difficult to define as a single genre and blends into autobiography, memoir, life writing and theoretical essay, sometimes being a combination of all of these, but never any one of them singly. As a result, the works of the contemporary writers I shall discuss later are more than simple reflections of their authors’ lives, but are vehicles for the construction of subjectivity to resist the silence imposed on dissident sexualities by official discourses in the Maghreb and by the orientalising gaze of the West by writers caught in, and trying to make sense of, the contradictory, liminal spaces between two different cultural worlds. In discussing the work of contemporary queer writing from the Maghreb, I will use the term ‘autofiction’, which includes a blending of both memory and invention to construct the self through the act of writing, what Rosie MacLachlan refers to as a creative reproduction of one’s sense of self through blurring the generic distinction of autobiography and fiction (2), a form that ‘comes out’, in both senses of the word, of the material conditions of liminality and the lived

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experience of diaspora that produces a particular kind of literary production as mentioned earlier. The logic of contingency, impermanence, plurality and paradox that constitutes African postcolonies, according to Mbembe and others, as well as the multiple histories, cultures and languages that have shaped the Maghreb historically, and the strategic use of the French language by Maghrebian writers, alongside the reworkings of genre as forms of decolonisation, have resulted in various forms of interarticulations, inconsistencies and slippages, which, according to Joseph Boone, imply reading closely and deeply for nuance, suggestion, indirection and contradiction, as well as paying close attention to the structures used to convey meaning (Homoerotics of Orientalism xxiv). By reading carefully between text and cultural context, and, I might add, between languages when translating, Boone suggests, alternative stories of same-sex affinities can be brought to the fore (Homoerotics of Orientalism 49). What is also important about new queer francophone autofictional writing emerging from the Maghreb is that it demonstrates the fallacy of an opposition between sexual acts and sexual identities in the Foucauldian sense,14 given that the reduction of same-sex relations between men in or from the Maghreb to the performance of a sexual act or to the active/passive binary neglects the axis of desire, and, as Boone describes, the emotions with which one invests the object of one’s affections (Homoerotics of Orientalism xxx), which is corroborated in the work by gay male writers I examine in terms of their struggles for more egalitarian relationships with male sexual partners and for romantic love and desire. Furthermore, what makes the Maghreb queer is not merely same-sex sexual acts per se, given the work of Coly and Mbembe already discussed earlier, but also, as Jarrod Hayes has argued, the subversive potential of queer lies in the critical practice by which dissident sexualities enter public discourse through their representation in writing (Queer Nations 7–8). I would add, however, that there is a double-voicedness operating in the contemporary queer writing I consider from the Maghreb, an act of enunciation and subsequent dissolution or disavowal regarding same-sex desire, particularly when it occurs between men, where the gendered active/passive binary is referenced, and, while not necessarily repudiated, critiqued. In Nina Bouraoui’s writing, there is a citation of her given gender and her North African homeland, a rejection of the originary status of both in determining her identity, and then a reformulation of their relationality in the third work of the autofictional trilogy following Garçon Manqué and Poupée Bella entitled Mes Mauvaises Pensées, suggesting, following her settlement in Paris, a desire for her North African homeland, her gender alterity and her desire for women as interconnected and contingent upon one another, contesting the fixity of both geopolitical and gender/sexual borders and their obstructions in articulating a new sense of lived identity.

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Contested Borders examines new representations of sexual dissidence in contemporary autofictional writing from the Maghreb as shifting sites of signification reducible neither to received notions of homosexuality in North Africa nor to Western forms of sexual identity. Taking into consideration Homi Bhabha’s notion of (post)colonial mimicry as neither reducible to the colonialist self nor to the colonised other, ‘but the disturbing distance in-between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness’ (Location of Culture 64), alongside Judith Butler’s idea that what distinguishes ‘original’ and ‘copy’ is the excess that lies between them in the performance of gender norms,15 as Jarrod Hayes, Margaret Higonnet and I discuss in our volume Comparatively Queer (3), the approach Contested Borders will take is an examination of the space between various borders as a queer site of comparative inquiry. This implies analysis of multiple sets of crossings inscribed in the texts I shall consider, including actual and imagined crossings of geopolitical borders and identity categories (race, class, gender, sexuality, national affiliation, etc.), destabilising the categories and the binary oppositional logic that constitutes them, and calling attention to new spaces of indeterminacy, difference and excess as these are imbricated within the relational and shifting spaces between North African postcolonies and Europe, and, by extension, the West. Like gender, queerness never designates a substantive being, but, taking Butler further, refers to a relative point of convergence among specific sets of social and cultural relations.16 One of the points of this book is to examine the specificity of these relations, and the spaces between them, in new queer francophone writing from the Maghreb. It is also hoped that this book will help to develop new critical tools for what it means to compare and to explore further the interimplications of postcolonial and queer theory, particularly in African and Arab/Islamic studies, as a mode of analysis and critique. Such a relational and intercultural approach implies not only close reading and examination of autofictional works by lesbian and gay writers from the Maghreb but attention to translation not merely as a critical praxis but as a mode of inquiry. Given that translation is not reducible to straightforward, unimpeded correspondence between languages and is a socially mediated and ideologically constructed process, care will be taken with regard to the close readings of the primary sources in this study with the translation of selected passages for the benefit of non-French-speaking readers, while simultaneously addressing the contingencies of translated passages where appropriate. As Emily Apter argues, translation not only crosses linguistic and national borders but also reveals their limits by giving us glimpses of languages touching in zones of non-national belonging, perhaps at the very edges of mutual intelligibility (‘Philosophical Translation’ 61; emphasis added), indeed, in spaces between discrete national and linguistic borders. It is important to allow for

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epistemological pauses in doing translation work, that is, as Apter continues, citing the late critic Barbara Johnson, to allow contradictory meanings to come into play so that one pays more attention to that which gets lost in translation as a way of doing theoretical inquiry rather than reducing translation to a mere philological exercise (‘Philosophical Translation’ 52–53). Because the postcolonial writers I discuss inflect a European language (French) with vocabularies and turns of phrase indigenous to their own cultures, rather than using French in the same way as European writers, for whom French is their primary or only language, as I have argued earlier, translation in these texts is actually occurring cross-culturally within the same language, as a practice of difference. This subversion of language seems, on the one hand, to decolonise the historical legacy of the language of colonial literature (Zabus, African Palimpsest 118), and the underlying subversion simultaneously queers the European language, as used by postcolonial writers in the present day, by creating new possibilities of expression and meaning to name lived experience differently from the ways in which it might otherwise be named by the standard, conventional forms of European language usage – indeed, a form of (queer) translational praxis within the postcolonial frame. Translation, therefore, is a property quite inherent to textuality and semiotic systems. As Judith Butler notes in her introduction to Gayatri Spivak’s fortieth anniversary translated edition of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology published in 2016, ‘For a text to be a text it must already, from the start and before any translation, bear this property of being translatable’ (xxi). Close readings of the texts written in French I discuss and analyse will therefore pay careful attention to the complexities of translating textual passages from French into English, allowing the nuances and sites of uncertainty, ambiguity and untranslatability to emerge, recognising that the process of translation may have been inscribed quite deliberately in the writing of the texts in French as the writing itself is configured within shifting power relations pertaining to race, gender, class, sexuality and the ongoing effects of European imperialism. As Lawrence Venuti reminds us, translation is not exempt from its configurations within relations of dominance and marginality (‘Translation as Cultural Politics’ 68). Bearing in mind that the former colonial language is already translated/ transgressed in the texts I will examine in order to produce new sites of textual/sexual dissidence, my own translations of selected passages from these texts into English will seek to resist their reconstitution in what Venuti refers to as the ‘values, beliefs and representations that pre-exist [the texts] in the target language’ (68; brackets added), recognising that any translation cannot be completely satisfactory in itself. But translation understood as a site of alterity, rather than of homogeneity, can enable the disruption of cultural values that reinscribe ethnocentrism, racism and cultural imperialism, and, as a site of textual dissidence, can contribute to more democratic geopolitical

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relations (Venuti, ‘Translation as Cultural Politics’ 78). By attempting to inhabit, even momentarily, the otherness of a source text, in working across languages and cultures, and bringing to light the slippages of signification that may not be able to be accommodated in accordance with the predominant cultural values of the target language, translation becomes a transgressive practice that disrupts and challenges, producing new, unassimilable circuits of linguistic and cultural difference. This book will pay close attention, where possible, to the multiple strategies available for translating specific passages of the francophone texts under consideration into English, while, by necessity, being careful not to lose sight of ideological inflections and cadences imbricated within the specific use of French by the francophone writers concerned, often in dissident ways, as a form of decolonisation. At the same time, the book recognises that translation of the self is occurring as a heuristic process through the act of writing by the more contemporary queer writers. Finally, while this chapter has addressed the crossings of borders on several fronts – geopolitical, linguistic, generic and identarian – this book, with its main focus on Franco-Maghrebi writers living in diaspora, challenges what Ashley Currier and Thérèse Migraine-George refer to as the disciplinary confinement of African studies to the African continent, to African nationalist articulations or to transatlantic frameworks alone, so that through this geopolitical dissidence, and the flexibility and porosity of queer studies, a new site of comparison is opened that (re)forms queer African studies ‘into a shifting site of cross-disciplinary turbulence’ (283). These turbulences and ruptures that occur through the dialogical engagement of African and queer studies may enable the production of new forms of gender and sexual signification in the spaces between these disciplinary borders while simultaneously transforming both disciplines through the very encounter, exposing the gaps, ambiguities and indeterminacies that defer fixity, certainty, presence and immediate visibility across the geopolitical stretch of African identity and culture while highlighting the differences and contradictions that constitute queer African subjectivities. Perhaps, as Currier and Migraine-George articulate, queer African studies can operate as a space where the very contours of cultural and sexual identities become questioned and blurred – both allowing for the forging of new forms of alliance, sociality and kinship while transcending limited notions of cultural location, belonging and identity (291). The sites of supplementarity and heterogeneity that emerge in the relationality between African and queer studies expose the instability of cultural norms and the nation-state system as the basis for citizenship alone in consideration of the contingencies, variabilities and translative displacements that always already constitute queer, postcolonial African subjectivities, while always retaining spaces of liminality, contradiction and impasse between these disciplines through their very crossings and intersections.

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NOTES 1. See Spurlin, Imperialism within the Margins, especially Chapter 1. 2. See also Hala Kamal, ‘Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating The Encyclopedia of Western and Islamic Cultures into Arabic.’ Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.3–4 (2008): 265. 3. The actual ‘miniscule minority’ of Arab Muslims Massad mentions, referenced in Desiring Arabs and earlier in my discussion, seems to have grown slightly in his latter book Islam in Liberalism to include urban classes and ‘a good number of intellectuals’ as referenced above. But it would be helpful to see some empirical or statistical evidence as to the actual numbers of the so-called urban elites in Arab Muslim societies and those middle-class Arab Muslims who live in diaspora, where those in both groups supposedly tend to take on Western lesbian and gay identities, as compared with the supposed majority of Arab Muslims living in nonurban and poorer parts of the Arab Muslim world who supposedly practise only ‘same-sex (sexual) contact’. 4. See Sharalyn R. Jordan, ‘Un/convention(al) Refugees: Contextualizing the Accounts of Refugees Facing Homophobic or Transphobic Persecution’. Refuge 26.2 (2011): 165–82. 5. See also Spurlin, Imperialism within the Margins, 19 and 148 n2. 6. See Spurlin, ‘Contested Borders: Cultural Translation and Queer Politics in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb’. Research in African Literatures 47.2 (2016): 107–08. 7. In addition to activism in Lebanon, already discussed, and more specific to the Maghreb, see the statement signed by activists in the Maghreb on 17 May 2016 condemning homophobia, transphobia and biphobia in response to the adoption of a bill put through the German Parliament in May 2016, which erroneously described Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria as ‘safe countries of origin’, and which would thereby make the seeking of asylum difficult for LGBTQ citizens from those countries regardless of homophobic laws that remain on their statutes, and which would enable the German government the right to deport asylum seekers from these countries without a right of appeal. The statement, referenced in the introduction, views the bill as a violation of Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a violation of sexual rights as human rights and as a violation of human dignity by denying threatened individuals the right to seek asylum, legal protection and recourse to safety while perpetuating discrimination against gender and sexual dissidents from the Maghreb. The statement can be viewed at https://www​.statewatch​.org​/media​/ documents​/news​/2016​/may​/germany​-maghreb​-not​-safe​-countries​.pdf. 8. An earlier tradition of writing about homosexuality in the Maghreb will be addressed in chapter 3. See, for example, Rachid Boudjedra’s La Répudiation published in 1969, which is part of a historical precedent of representing dissident sexualities in francophone literature from the Maghreb as a political act. 9. Afsaneh Najmabadi, whom Massad criticises for complicity with certain Arab Muslim ‘native informants’ and Western gay activists who call for the identification and subjectification of people based on their sexual practices and desires and insist that the state arbitrate their sexual rights (Islam in Liberalism 245–46), an argument

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he admits is also made in Desiring Arabs, similarly makes the claim, as I do earlier, that in rendering homosexuality external to other places as an alien concept repeats the very same line of thinking taken up by homophobic cultural nativists ‘happy to (al)locate homosexuality “in the West”’ (Najmabadi 19). 10. Writing in French, Hanafi compares British colonialism with French colonialism, by noting that the former operated by taking control of the maritime trade routes so as to have easy access to its Commonwealth. Speaking specifically of French colonialism, he writes, ‘Le colonialisme français souhaitait élargir la France, surtout en Afrique puis en Asie (le Viétnam), pour former la France « d’outre-mer ». Il consistait à « franciser » les peuples, les cultures et les langues pour assumer la « mission civilisatrice » de la France. La francophonie en est le modèle. Le colonialisme culturel commençait par la langue’ (Hanafi 16). Trans. French colonialism wished to enlarge France, especially in Africa, then in Asia (Vietnam), in order to form an overseas France. It consisted of Gallicizing people, cultures and languages as a way of assuming France’s civilising mission. The French-speaking person is the model. Cultural colonialism began with language. 11. ‘Les vainqueurs ont su faire prévaloir leur regard et construire les catégories nécessaires à l’exercice de leur domination’ (Fabre 8). 12. Speaking of this double standard of values, Hanafi writes: ‘Et si l’on analyse les Lumières européennes et leurs idées (la raison, la science, l’homme, la liberté, l’égalité, la justice sociale, le progrès, etc.), on constate que celles-ci ont été appliquées uniquement à l’intérieur de l’Europe. À l’extérieur, ce sont les idées contraires qui ont été appliquées: déraison, magie, superstition, Dieu, la domination, l’inégalité, l’injustice sociale et l’agression, etc. (19). Trans. And if one analyses the European Enlightenment and its ideas (reason, science, humankind, liberty, equality, social justice, progress, etc.), one ascertains that these ideas have been applied uniquely within Europe. Beyond Europe, contrary ideas have been applied: unreason, magic, superstition, God, domination, inequality, social injustice and aggression, etc. 13. Trans. I am [in the process of] becoming homosexual as I am within the book in a process of being made (brackets and emphasis added). 14. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 57 and Spurlin, Imperialism within the Margins, 137–38. I have critiqued the use of Foucault in Imperialism within the Margins in interpreting same-sex marriages among indigenous male migrant miners on the South African gold mines, given that historical work has read the marriages as circumscribed within the social contingencies of apartheid capitalism operant at the time and has interpreted them largely within heteronormative assumptions of gender leaving little room for sexual agency or erotic autonomy. Likewise, Zackie Achmat has critiqued historical studies of these marriages for not considering the homoerotics of desire upon which the marriages may also have been built (see Achmat 104). As with the active/passive binary as a frame for understanding sexual relations between men in Arab Muslim societies, the axis of desire seems to be problematically elided in both contexts. This creates a fantasised cartography of the world and of time–space reminiscent of colonialist and orientalist modes of perception and sets up problematic relations of equivalence between geographic/cultural space (West/East) and sexual practices (egalitarian homosexuality vs active/passive homosexuality) by confining,

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through a binary relationship, particular sexual practices to particular geopolitical locations. 15. See Butler, Gender Trouble: ‘The original [is] nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original’ (41); hence, there is no originary gender norm to be embodied and performed as gender norms are no more than social constructions. 16. See Butler, Gender Trouble: ‘What the person “is,” and, indeed, what gender “is,” is always relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined. As a shifting and contextual phenomenon, gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations’ (15).

Chapter 2

Historical Antecedents Imperial Crossings and Same-Sex Desire between Men in North Africa

Given that the Maghreb, an area of about 4,200 kilometres along the North African shore of the Mediterranean and an intermediate zone separating the Mediterranean Sea from the Sahara Desert, is marked by the relational spaces between multiple languages, histories and cultural influences, the (re) negotiations of borders, both geopolitical and discursive, have operated as intersecting sites of power, negotiation and struggle. This is by no means a recent or contemporary phenomenon but deeply layered in the history of the Maghreb and has compelling implications for the study of the representation of sexuality in queer francophone literature that has emerged recently from the Maghreb. The name ‘Maghreb’ itself refers poetically to the land of the sunset, or to the religious and cultural stronghold of Islamic influence to the West of Egypt and the Middle East. As Jamil Abun-Nasr argues, the Maghreb has a long history of being coveted by the major powers in the Mediterranean, and its conquerors up through the Second World War imposed their political hegemony and institutions on to the region and exploited its economic and human resources (1). Indeed, the region is very much marked by heterogeneity and difference and historically has been the point where other cultures and ethnic groups meet, intersect and converge. Situated between East and West, Mildred Mortimer points out that ‘the Maghreb as a geographical and cultural entity is capable of privileging cultural pluralism and multilingualism . . . that sees beyond territorial boundaries’ (5). Likewise, speaking of the Maghreb as a site of multiple cultural intersections in his book Maghreb Pluriel, Abdelkebir Khatibi reminds us that it is important to think about the Maghreb for which it is – a topographical site between the Orient, the Occident and Africa (38–39)1 – that is, as relational, mediated, circulatorial and destabilising fixed identities imposed by colonialism and its aftermath while exposing new sites of heterogeneity and difference. 55

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The crossing and blending of other cultures in the Maghreb can be traced back to the Berbers, the original pre-Arab inhabitants scattered across the North African region, especially what is now Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, but also Egypt, Libya, Niger and Mali.2 The term ‘Berber’, according to Abun-Nasr, comes from the Latin term barbari, or barbarian, which the Ancient Romans used for those who spoke neither Latin nor Greek; the later Arab conquerors also adopted this name for the Berbers to refer to them as primitive or foreign, and towards the third century BCE, the Berbers spoke a language which classical writers referred to as ‘Libyan’ (2), which nowadays refers to the Amazigh languages and dialects often referred to as the Berber languages. While it is important to note that historically the Berbers adopted the languages of their many conquerors (e.g. Carthaginian, Roman, Arabic and French) for literary purposes and for forms of governance, the Arabisation of the Berbers after the Arab conquest (AD 647–709, following the conquest of Egypt in AD 642) enabled the Berber languages to be overlaid with Arabic with the expansion of the territory of Islam. It was this fusion of Arabs and Berbers under the influence of Islam, according to Abun-Nasr, that resulted in the emergence of a cultural identity distinct from Europe and from Islamic societies in the Mashriq, the region of the Arab Muslim world east of Egypt, and by the tenth century, a distinct Maghrebi form of Arabic can be documented (3–4).3 Even following the Arab conquest, other cultural influences were integrated into the Maghreb; this included such historical events as the migration of Andalusian Muslims from Spain following the Christian (re)conquest of Spain in the late fifteenth century; Turkish influences with the absorption of Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, but not Morocco, into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century; Jewish migration to the Maghreb from Europe, particularly in the seventeenth century, whereby European Jews joined Jewish communities already established in the Maghreb prior to the Arab conquest; and black slaves brought to the Maghreb through trade with Sudan until the beginning of the nineteenth century, including black slave girls who served as concubines for Muslim rulers (Abun-Nasr 5). The period of early Ottoman rule (1516–1798) is particularly significant for what Khaled El-Rouayheb describes in his book Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World as being positioned in time at ‘the eve of modernity’ (1) in relation to the casual, yet specific, references to male poets’ expressions of desire for male youths in Arabic literature, a point which I shall discuss and develop momentarily. What is also important in the history of the Maghreb is the tension between tribalism, as a form of social and political organisation based on clans and lineages from common ancestors, and the centralised state. As Abun-Nasr argues, the tribes never functioned in complete isolation from the influence of the state seeking to control them by consolidating its dominion over the lands

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the tribes claimed as their own, and Berber leaders often adopted the methods and organisation of the state, largely confined to urban areas, to defend themselves from state encroachment (12–13). In this respect, it would be erroneous to regard tribalism and the centralised state as completely oppositional in binary terms since historically they seemed to have mutually influenced each other. Prior to the Arab conquest, tribalism was regarded as a primary obstacle to the consolidation of the authority of the Maghreb’s many foreign conquerors; in much of the historical record, tribalism is regarded either as marginal or as a threat to the centralised state (Abun-Nasr 14). The Arab invaders, who conquered the Maghreb in the name of religious and political ideals, were themselves originally organised tribally; after the thirteenth century, according to Abun-Nasr, relations within the tribes were no longer determined solely by the tribal leaders’ claims to authority, but became more complex as tribes became influenced by close ties to urban religious leaders under the influence of Islam, which linked the Berber tribes with the Arab conquest (18). Further, as trans-Sahara trade developed and expanded, Maghrebi towns drew in people from diverse ethnic origins including the Berber tribes; yet this direct contact also brought about a sense of cultural superiority among those living in urban areas in relation to more rural communities, and it was the religious leaders, or the ulama, and not the Muslim political leaders themselves, who played a part in the political legitimation process (Abun-Nasr 19–20). In this sense, during the Islamic period of the Maghreb, prior to European colonisation, tribalism and state organisation tended to complement and reinforce one another in a dialogical sense; according to Abun-Nasr, state leaders contributed to the consolidation of the tribal structure for the sake of political stability, which seemed to be safeguarded by the ulama as the critical link, and the tribes also contributed to the rise and stability of states through trade (24–25). Of course, French colonialism would recreate the marginalisation of the tribes in the name of the heterosexual nuclear family as the primary social unit, but I mention this because the tension between rural and urban areas still remains part of the context of gender and sexual dissidence in the Maghreb, where social class, access to education, the internet and globally circulating discourses of queerness often reinscribe the urban/rural split. How does sexuality figure into this history of border crossings and meeting points of other ethnic groups and cultures drawing from Africa, Europe and the Middle East that comprise the Maghreb? While the hetero/homo construction became the primary discursive organiser of sexuality since the late nineteenth century in the West, though queer theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others have critiqued the ‘radical condensation of sexual categories’, and have explored its ‘unpredictably varied and acute implications and consequences’ (9), pre-nineteenth-century Arab-Islamic

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cultures, including those in the Maghreb, lacked a concept of homosexuality as it is now understood in the West. This does not mean that ‘homosexuality’ did not exist in early modern Arab-Islamic cultures but that it was understood neither in identarian terms nor necessarily as the binary opposite of what we now understand to be heterosexuality. More importantly, in examining the representation of same-sex desire in Arabic literature of the Ottoman period from the early sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, where samesex desire between men is specifically encoded textually, El-Rouayheb notes that Western concepts of homosexuality fail to capture critical distinctions peculiar to Arab-Islamic cultures historically, particularly between same-sex desire and same-sex sexual acts, which cannot always be reduced to instances of homosexuality as an overarching phenomenon (6), so that we resist what I have previously referred to as the homogenisation of desire (Spurlin, Imperialism within the Margins 142) by being careful not to conflate, historically speaking, sexual practice with sexual identity which comes out of a history of Western sexuality. However, this does not mean that the hetero/ homo binary distinction, while problematic and limiting more broadly to the extent that there are other dimensions of sexuality that may have little or no distinctive or explicit definitional connection to the gender of object choice (Sedgwick 31), is conceptually or completely absent in modern Arab Muslim societies. According to El-Rouayheb, three distinctions were critical to understanding same-sex desire between men between the early sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries of the Ottoman Empire in the Arab-Islamic Middle East and North Africa. These included the distinction between active and passive roles as the roles were gendered and did not have the same sexual meaning, given that the male who was penetrated was dishonoured and stigmatised through being feminised (El-Rouayheb 153), and marked as not having quite achieved full masculinity in the case of male youth, whereas the active sexual role in sexual relations between men was often seen as another manifestation of male virility and was not stigmatised.4 Second, there is a distinction to be made regarding infatuation and the idealisation of a man’s love for beautiful women or male youths, as often expressed in poetry during this period. These forms of desire were disassociated from fornication in the case of a man expressing love for a woman, and from sodomy in the case of a man expressing love for a male youth; in other words, there is a historical distinction to be made between passionate and chaste love expressed in verse, which could be related to loving an omnipresent God whether directed to a man or a woman, and carnal lust, expressed through unlawful sexual intercourse, whether between a man and a woman or between men, which was punishable by religious law (El-Rouayheb 153). Finally, there is the importance of the distinction between permissible and prohibitive sexual acts in understanding the history of sexuality in Arab Muslim

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societies, particularly in the Ottoman Empire. While anal intercourse was unlawful and could result in severe corporal punishment or even capital punishment in some cases as El-Rouayheb notes (6), he also argues that there was no single juridical concept or punishment for other forms of physical expression of male-male desire, such as kissing, fondling and intercrural intercourse (153), thus creating a distinction, as well as a potential negotiable space, between toleration and condemnation. Joseph Massad clarifies further that there was no contradiction or mutual exclusion between a man falling in love with a male youth, as expressed publicly through verse, and juridical prohibitions on sodomy (Desiring Arabs 31). While the differences between active and passive homoerotic forms of sexual expression, and the extent to which these remain paradigmatic in samesex sexual relations between Arab Muslim men today, were discussed in the previous chapter and critiqued as absolute markers of difference between homosexualities of the West and the Arab Muslim world, and will continue to appear and be challenged in contemporary queer francophone writing from the Maghreb, the second and third distinctions mentioned earlier are also quite particular to the history of same-sex desire and same-sex sexuality in Arab Muslim societies. While the literature of the period is replete with praises of physical beauty in both men and women, the beauty of the usually beardless or downy-cheeked male youth described by male poets is often marked as an inspiration for poetic composition (El-Rouayheb 57–58), perhaps echoed in the work of Abū Nawās, a well-known poet of classic Arabic literature who lived in the latter part of the eighth and early part of the ninth century, and celebrated, through the poetic form of the ghazal (erotic poetry), the love of male youths. While it is often assumed that it was the boy’s physical resemblance to women that formed the basis for the attraction, alongside his feminine qualities of shyness, modesty and the need for instruction, handsome youths who demonstrated such masculine qualities as courage and physical strength were also sources of male attraction (El-Rouayheb 66), so it is important not to see the refined and chaste expression of desire for a male youth as a mere substitute for a woman. This is supported by Joseph Boone, who acknowledges the ideal of the beautiful male youth as an accepted object of male desire that crossed class, national and racial borders across the Ottoman Empire (Homoerotics of Orientalism 61); Boone reads the beautiful boy as a trope that crosses the range of gender associations, unsettling Western, largely heteronormative, assumptions about femininity as the self-evident component of the youth’s appeal given that he may also appear masculine in appearance and behaviour (63–64). In the ghazal, which was the common genre of love poetry of the Ottoman period, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, El-Rouayheb notes that while many scholars assumed the love object of the male poet to be female, a great deal of the anthologised poems quite specifically refer to the beard-down of

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the beloved, marking the beloved as a young male (62), and given the frequency with which the beard-down is mentioned in love poetry of the period, the poems that are pederastic clearly outnumber the ones that express the male poet’s desire for women, though the absence of references to the beard-down often makes it indeterminate as to whether the object of affection is a woman or a male youth (64).5 In the belletristic tradition of the early Ottoman Empire, then, passionate love was often expressed by male poets for handsome beardless or downycheeked youths as desire through the aesthetic form of established literary conventions and not as a form of homosexuality or sexual identity in the modern sense; at the same time, it is important to note, as Boone points out, that one cannot assume that the male poets themselves were lovers of beautiful boys, but may have wanted simply to show their mastery of poetic form and conventions (Homoerotics of Orientalism 306). El-Rouayheb notes that Arab Muslim belletrists in the early Ottoman period expressed their preferences for women or for male youths, but seldom for adult men with masculine features (71), which further calls into question Western sexual categories,6 but he also clarifies, citing seventeenth-century religious scholars, such as Mar‘ī ibn Yūsuf al-Karmī, that sometimes male youths appear more handsome with fluffs of hair on their faces, and their beauty could thereby exceed that of the beardless male youth (El-Rouayheb 80).7 This calls into question the more rigid, but less critical, claim made by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe that ‘the culturally appropriate basis for desiring boys is their beauty, not their incipient masculinity’ (302). It appears, then, that there is a much broader range of male homoerotic desire expressed in the poetic invocation, idealisation and desirability of male youths in the early Ottoman period, particularly as represented in the ghazal, with references ranging from smooth-cheeked youths to those with downy-cheeked beards, from male youth who appear more feminine or androgynous to those who are more masculine and well into their adult years. Boone argues that these differences should not be taken as inconsistencies or contradictions but as demonstrations of the flexibility that has contributed to the longevity of the trope of the beautiful male youth in Arab Muslim history and literature, which has made the trope both a source of appeal to homoerotic imaginations and a source of orientalist fantasy and appropriation (Homoerotics of Orientalism 67). What is most important to note, however, is the coexistence of the literary idealisation of pederastic love for male youths expressed by male poets alongside religious prohibitions against sodomy; El-Rouayheb points out that this is not any more problematic than the coexistence of the literary idealisation of what we might call now heterosexual love, alongside religious prohibitions against fornication; thus, the possibility of chaste and the religiously permissible love of beauty could be expressed in poetry by men towards unrelated

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women or towards male youths (93–94). But there was a gap between permissible and prohibitive sexual acts in juridical practices in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, that is, between toleration of the expression of homoeroticism in love poetry and, in some cases, even actual forms of same-sex sexual practices between men, on the one hand, and austere religious condemnation, on the other. What Islamic law certainly prohibited was liwāṭ which refers specifically to anal intercourse between men. There was a great degree of variation among Sunni juridical schools in various parts of the Ottoman Empire as to the criminality of liwāṭ and its relationship to zinā, which refers to unlawful fornication between a man and a woman. While some schools regarded liwāṭ as a variation of zinā and others did not, and generally punished the former less severely, El-Rouayheb notes that the Mālikī school, the predominant juridical school of North Africa and Upper Egypt, was unique and had the most severe ruling on sodomy committed between men among the Sunni Muslim schools of law in the Empire, given that the juridical code distinguished between the punishment for anal intercourse between a man and a woman (the woman not being the man’s wife or concubine), which was punished as zinā, or illicit vaginal intercourse, and anal intercourse between two men, which was punished more severely as liwāṭ and made the offenders liable for unconditional stoning (121).8 What is also interesting is the inherent distinction of the gender of object choice differentiating liwāṭ and zinā, which also makes it similar to the hetero/homo distinction in the West, but without the attachment of specific sexual identities as the terms liwāṭ and zinā only referred to the criminalisation of specific sexual acts; nor did the distinction between liwāṭ and zinā imply an exclusivity of desire directed towards one gender or the other, though the same could be said of the modern hetero/homo split today in spite of the imagined exclusivity projected on to the binary pairs in the West through the imposition of corresponding sexual identity categories for each. But the critical point to be made is that liwāṭ was encoded into law specifically as anal intercourse between men, that is, as a specific act, and not as desire, and is therefore narrower than notions of modern and contemporary homosexuality in the West. Men kissing or caressing, or intercrural intercourse between men, often warranted a fine or physical chastisement such as flogging, but was not regarded as liwāṭ under Islamic law, and those acts that did not involve anal penetration between men were not regarded as serious as zinā. Along these lines, as El-Rouayheb qualifies, standard manuals of Islamic law pointed out that the mode of intercourse (i.e. the insertion of a penis into an anus or vagina) was generally more important than the gender of the partners, and the other three juridical schools of the Empire (Ḥanaf ī, Shāfi’ī and Ḥanbalī) regarded anal intercourse between a man and woman (who was not the man’s wife or concubine) and anal intercourse between men

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as instances of the same type of transgression meriting the same punishment (137–38).9 The composing of pederastic love poetry by a male poet expressing love for beautiful male youths, then, was not reducible to liwāṭ, nor was his falling in love with a beardless youth or a younger male with masculine qualities, just as male poets’ expressions of love for beautiful women were not reducible to fornication or zinā. It also seems that there was considerable flexibility and discretion in juridical practices for forms of sexual acts between men that did not include anal intercourse; El-Rouayheb points out that there was no single juridical concept or punishment for other kinds of sexual acts between men, but for the most part, anal intercourse was a more severe sin than other forms of sexual expressions between men (kissing, caressing and intercrural intercourse), which were, in turn, regarded as less severe than illicit sexual intercourse between a man and a woman (153). This brief, cursory look at the history of sexuality in the Ottoman Empire from the early sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, in instances when same-sex desire was specifically encoded in literature in Arabic, demonstrates that borders between assumed sexual distinctions are highly contested and require more nuanced thinking and revision not only around sex between men and sex between a man and a woman, and between active/ passive roles in sex between men, but also between what was permissible and what was prohibitive, as well as between the expression of passionate, chaste desire for beautiful male youths by male poets and physical sexual acts between men which varied in their juridical meaning and social significance. There also appears to be a wide continuum in the spaces between the chaste expression of desire for a male youth by male poets, on the one hand, and specific sexual acts, including the committing of unlawful sexual intercourse, or liwāṭ, on the other, that is, between what was tolerated and what was condemned, representing varying degrees of fluidity, not only of geopolitical borders within the Ottoman Empire but between sexual borders as well. There was a marked changed, however, in the period between the midnineteenth century and early twentieth century because of the influence of European colonialism; the French colonialists in North Africa, for example, often accused Arab men of being ‘indigenous sodomites’ and threats to public health and safety (Keller 44). El-Rouayheb notes an erosion in the tolerance of the representation of the passionate love of male youths as a result of the adoption of European Victorian attitudes by new, modern-educated, Westernised elites, including Arab Muslim authors and scholars who sanctioned French disapproval of pederastic themes in Arabic literature, and the changing of the gender of the beloved in the translations of the poems from Arabic into French by French translators in the colonial period in instances when male same-sex desire was textually encoded and overtly expressed (156) in order to bring the texts concerned in line with received conventional

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European tastes and norms at the time. For example, Rifā’ah al-Ṭahṭāwī, who studied in Paris between 1826 and 1831, spoke of the French disapproval of pederastic themes in Arabic literature, including his own espousal of such views. Speaking of the French, he writes that they consider the love of male youth ‘to be an example of moral corruption, and they are right’ (qtd. in El-Rouayheb 156).10 Furthermore, as Massad notes, Muḥammad bin ‘Abdullah al-Ṣaffār of Morocco, in writing of his brief sojourn to France in the winter of 1845–1846, indicates, in speaking of French men, that ‘for them, only flirtation, rhapsody, and courtship with women exist, for they are not inclined toward young men and juveniles, as for them this is a great shame and merits punishment, even though it be with mutual consent’ (qtd. in Massad, Desiring Arabs 34).11 These comparisons of French abhorrence for representations of same-sex love in Arabic literature, as well as male flirtation and romance with male youth, and even the endorsement of French views in al-Ṭahṭāwī’s case, suggests, as El-Rouayheb argues, that these travellers came from home cultures where such affective and sexual practices were already familiar (2). Speaking on the translation of ghazal poetry written in Arabic expressing a male poet’s desire for a male youth and subsequently translated into French, al-Ṭahṭāwī writes, One of the positive aspects of their language and poetry is that it does not permit the saying of ghazal of someone of the same sex, so in the French language a man cannot say: I loved a boy (ghulām), for that would be an unacceptable and awkward wording, so therefore if one of them translates one of our books he avoids this by changing the wording, so saying in the translation: I loved a young girl (ghulāmah) or a person (dhātan). (qtd. in El-Rouayheb 62)12

Coincidentally, this shift in thinking towards pederastic themes in Arabic literature, influenced by French colonialism, simultaneously invoked a gender and sexual politics of translation that challenges any straightforward, symmetrical or untroubled relation between source and translated text and exposes the power dynamics that very much construct the processes of interlingual translation and cross-cultural negotiation. As Lawrence Venuti notes, ‘The effects of translation are also social, and have been harnessed to cultural, economic, and political agendas’ (Translation Studies Reader 5); in this case, the social effects and political agenda are those of French imperialism, its political agenda and its distaste for pederastic themes in Arabic literature. In writing about sexuality and intimate life in the Arab Muslim world, Shereen El Feki contends that in the writing of Arab sexual history over the past century or so, homosexuality has been buried, so much so that today’s intolerance is seen as the authentic voice of tradition when it is actually more of an echo, perhaps a translation in the Benjaminian

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sense, of the region’s colonial masters (224). This shift has an even longer history in the language used by European travellers through the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in describing the erotic overflow they associated with the Ottoman world and its remnants following Ottoman rule. Boone refers to the proximity of the homoerotic to the heteroerotic in accounts of European travellers, which is also, I might add, certainly discernible in colonialist discourses of the nineteenth century and in translations of pederastic poetry from Arabic into French, where the site of erotic crossings between Occident and Orient blurs the distinctions between morality and laxity and between constraint and excess (Homoerotics of Orientalism 112–13). These various points of contact between Orient and Occident have resulted in the transposition of the just-mentioned binaries ‘onto and across each other’s axes’ (Boone, ‘Vacation Cruises’ 104), given a more tolerant view of male same-sex desire as encoded into Arabic literature in the early Ottoman period, and the subsequent adoption of European Victorian views on sexuality in Arab Muslim societies, followed later by the sexual revolutions of the 1960s in Euroamerican contexts and the successive decriminalisation of homosexuality in the West, alongside a heightened intolerance of homosexuality in Arab Muslim societies since the 1970s, despite a more nuanced history of homosexuality in Arab Muslim cultures, as a form of resistance to Western decadence underpinned by broader anxieties about the encroaching expansion of Western imperialism in the aftermath of colonialism. While, on the one hand, as Joseph Massad rightly argues, sexual rights have now become the hallmark of liberal democracy in the West, Arab Muslim nationalisms frequently consider, in varying degrees, Islam as the last bastion of resistance against this particular encroachment of Western hegemony and against a broader history of Western imperialism (Desiring Arabs 195). Contemporary struggles among sexual dissidents in Arab Muslim societies, including those in the Maghreb, continue to question such received binaries between East and West, between past and present, between active and passive homosexuality, between the private and the public, and between genders. Abdelkebir Khatibi, in his book Maghreb Pluriel, asks us to find other ways of getting around the Arab/Islamic divide in order to rid ourselves of our obsessions with origins (14);13 it is important, on the one hand, he says, to listen to the Maghreb resonate in its linguistic, cultural and political plurality, and, on the other, only with the outside rethought, decentred, subverted, diverted from its hegemonic determinations, can one get beyond unformulated identities and unspoken differences (39).14 This resistance to Western heritage and postcolonial patriarchy as hegemonic determinations, I would add, must include an affirmation of the pluralities of sexuality coming out of the Maghreb as one of the last bastions of decolonisation.

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French imperialism refigured understandings of same-sex desire and homoerotic expression between men informed by the swift instantiation of an essentialist binary between coloniser and colonised, that is, between the European self and the Maghrebian other, between l’homme civilisé and l’homme primitif, what the French referred to as its mission civilisatrice, which was necessary for the seizure and deployment power. As Farid Laroussi remarks, French culture is steeped historically in humanist and Enlightenment thinking which privileges human reason, rationality and the dignity of the citizen-subject endowed with human rights which the state is to uphold and protect; but, at the same time, there is a deferral of the contradiction and tension arising from the recognition of racial otherness and racial oppression in the colonial endeavour (16).15 At the same time, colonial ideology was an ideology of expansion; for French imperialism, unlike British imperialism, which developed initially out of a desire to control trade routes and exploit the resources of faraway lands, the point of the imperialist project was to enlarge France in Africa and in Asia in order to create a France overseas or la France d’outre-mer through the imposition of French language and culture as Hanafi has argued (16) and as I have mentioned in the last chapter. Along these lines, however, Hannah Arendt has questioned the supposed benevolence of France’s mission civilisatrice. The attempt, she argues, was to spread the benefits of French culture and incorporate overseas possessions into the French national body by welcoming those who were conquered and colonised into the fraternity of French civilisation. But in practice, she continues, this resulted in the exploitation of indigenous populations for the sake of the French nation as they were put into the service of national defence, where ‘the colonies were considered lands of soldiers which could produce a force noire to protect the inhabitants of France against their national enemies’ (129). Not only was French colonialism based on an ideology of expansion in a sense somewhat different from British colonialism, it was also based on a Eurocentric view of the world that divided into centres and peripheries, into civilised and primitive spheres informed by scientific racism (Hanafi 18).16 It is also important to point out the difference between direct colonial rule in Algeria (1830–1962) in relation to the status of Tunisia and Morocco, which became French protectorates comprised of a social coexistence (and source of tension) between those who wanted to maintain some trace of a precolonial past, such as cultural traditions and keeping relative autonomy in relation to centralised state control, as already mentioned in the earlier context of the Arab conquest of the Berbers, and those who occupied, on the other hand, according to Nadir Marouf, more of a space of modernity, such as the elite in more urban areas of Morocco, for example, who saw indigenous cultural and religious taboos as obstructing the pathways to democratisation and modernisation (15–16).17 At the same time, as Jamil M. Abun-Nasr points

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out, many Muslims from the Maghreb emulated European customs learned from the French, and even though they suffered the injustices of the colonial system, they admired the discipline and organisation that made the system possible. However, in the years following the First World War, especially in the period between 1930 and 1939, national aspirations and a resistance to colonial domination and influence began to crystallise in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia and lasted through the Second World War, the immediate postwar years (324–25), and through to independence for the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco in 1956 by agreement with France, and through to the long Algerian Revolution (1954–1962) for independence.18 French imperialism, as based on an ideology of expansionism and Eurocentrism that had produced binary thinking around race and sexuality in particular, was especially acute in France’s prize colony, Algeria. Speaking specifically of the Algiers School of French Psychiatry, Franz Fanon notes in The Wretched of the Earth that students were taught to understand North Africans as irredeemably primitive, mentally deficient and criminally impulsive (298–300). Fanon, who was born in Martinique, trained as a psychiatrist in France, and moved to Algeria in the 1950s siding with the insurgency during struggles for decolonisation, brilliantly linked medicine and science as insidious tools of colonial conquest to the extent that, as Richard Keller explains, medical knowledge became a technology of exploitation through extracting intelligence from indigenous populations in the Maghreb, thereby contributing to the dehumanising logic of colonial rule and bringing a new degree of sophistication (and credibility) to colonial racism (4). Psychiatric medicine was very much integrated into the civilising mission of colonial rule and contributed to it by aiming to produce physically and mentally sound subjects and a healthy labour force to meet the demands of the globalised colonial market system (Keller 5). But most important, psychiatry produced a medical discourse that framed the distinction between the normal and the pathological subject according to social and biological criteria; from the moment of the conquest of the city of Algiers in 1830, ‘natural historians, physical anthropologists, social scientists, and physicians developed farreaching demographic, zoological, and biological knowledge about climate, race, and disease that frequently enhanced colonial power and marginalized indigenous populations’ (Keller 11). This is precisely the deferral, or the gap, in the tension between European Enlightenment thinking and colonial racial oppression as noted by Laroussi, to the extent that knowledge and reason as the epitome of humanism, which reached its pinnacle in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, operated in collusion with an imperialist regime a century later that, through colonial institutions, developed and advanced scientific racism steeped in institutional authority as a strategy of power. Laroussi also points out that those possessing colonial power often ended up

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believing the representations of the colonial subject they invented so as to validate and make sense of the imperial undertaking (18). The colonial enterprise played a formative role in reshaping the history of sexuality in the Maghreb as did European colonialism in other parts of the Arab Muslim world. Under colonialism, the so-called Orient, in this case the land immediately across the Mediterranean from Europe in North Africa and influenced by Arab-Islamic culture, specifically Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, emerged generally as an intellectual invention defined or appropriated as the binary opposite of a supposedly more civilised Europe. The influence of European medicine in particular played a central role in the history of sexuality in the Maghreb, given the direct influence of psychiatric medicine in France’s civilising mission through the setting up of the Algiers School of French Psychiatry, formally established in 1925, though, as Keller mentions, medical and scientific discourses that interpreted North Africans as primitive, mentally deficient and criminal had long preceded the foundation of the School (124). So, there is an intersection in the history of sexuality in the Maghreb with that of Europe, given the medicalisation of homosexuality from the nineteenth century in both contexts, but with significant differences related to the civilising mission of French colonialism, and the attempt by the French, as Keller argues, to renew deliberately Latin influence and expansion in North Africa, which had been under assault, in the French imperialist view, through the earlier spread of Islam in the region since the fall of the Roman Empire and into the early mediaeval period (24). Looking at the history of sexuality in the West, particularly in Europe, important shifts occurred in the history of medicine that connected it more closely to the juridical sphere and to the relationship between the health of the individual and that of the nation-state. In his book The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault speaks of a significant discursive shift in biomedical knowledge around the end of the eighteenth century centred around ‘a new “carving up” of things and the principle of their verbalization’ through the process of the medical commentary (xviii), which implied a new relationship between the perceptible and the stateable, between what is seen and what is said, thereby instantiating a redistribution of the relation between signifier and signified, that is, ‘between the symptoms that signify and the disease that is signified’ (xviii–xix). In other words, according to Foucault, the medical commentary assumes an excess of the signified over the signifier, a residue of thought that has not yet been articulated in language, so that the act of commenting is thought to give voice to that which has not yet been explicitly stated and is thus allowed to speak (Birth of the Clinic xvi) – that is, it uncovers deeper meanings by stating what has been signified and by simultaneously (re)stating what has not been specifically said. The discursive shift from the totality of the visible to the overall structure of the expressible is what occurs

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in the medical commentary; as Foucault more succinctly argues, ‘The clinical gaze has the paradoxical ability to hear a language as soon as it perceives a spectacle’ (Birth of the Clinic 108). The mediation of the medical commentary is thought to strengthen the bond, suture the gap, between signifier and signified, between a symptom and its meaning, and give biomedicine a new discursive structure and a veneer of rationality and scientific precision. But the clinical gaze of which Foucault speaks is, of course, not without its concomitant social, ideological and cultural interpretations of the symptoms and signs of illness and disease, which were very much at work in colonial medicine. Not only was there a shift in the discursive structures of Western medicine at the end of the eighteenth century, but there was also a simultaneous epistemological shift in biomedical practices to the extent that medicine became linked to the destinies of nation-states. According to Foucault, this meant that medicine was no longer confined only to a body of knowledge and to techniques for curing ills, nor as concerned with the qualities of vigour, suppleness and fluidity that were lost in illness which medical practice could restore, but assumed a normative posture and became authorised to dictate the standards for the physical and moral relations of the individual and of the broader social world in which he or she lived. As Foucault theorises, since the nineteenth century, medicine ‘was regulated more in accordance with normality than with health’; that is to say, in considering the life of groups or societies, the life of the race, as well as psychic life later in the century, biomedical concepts became structured around the polarity of the normal and the pathological (Birth of the Clinic 34–35). Interestingly, it is also at the end of the eighteenth century, as George Mosse argues, according to Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, et al., in referencing their acknowledged debt to Mosse’s pioneering work Nationalism and Sexuality, that the rise and proliferation of modern nationalisms in Europe were linked to the construction of white, middle-class norms of the body and sexuality (Parker, Russo, et al. 2), thus producing a correlation between the moral and physical (and later psychological) health of the individual and the health of the state – and the conflation of good (sexual) health with social conformity. The legacy of these two historical shifts articulated by Foucault, as well as the fusion of the medical and juridical spheres, which often forms the basis for citizenship, rights and national belonging, are especially salient since medical knowledge, and its concomitant social authority on sexuality, not without its political biases, had, from the nineteenth century, influenced and buttressed colonial power well into the twentieth century. Coincidentally, it is within the context of biomedical and psychiatric discourses in the mid-nineteenth century that homosexuality, as a form of sexual identity, appears, as Foucault elaborates in his History of Sexuality, in contradistinction to an earlier focus on

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sodomy as a sexual act in early modern civil and canonical codes.19 But it is important to note that these significant shifts in medical discourse and practice around health and disease, and the frequent invocation and citation of medical science in juridical practice to make claims about the health of particular nations and ethnic and social groups, which found its summation in the rise of European fascism in the early and mid-twentieth century,20 enabled the medical articulation of homosexuality as such, and in the colonies, European medical discourses on homosexuality were transferred to indigenous populations where the practice of same-sex sexuality was taken as further proof of decadence and disease, thus invoking further the normal/pathological split and putting the imperial authority of Western science into the service of ideological production around race. This was certainly the case with regard to the Algiers School, which, as Mehammed Mack points out, promulgated and prolonged ‘the climactic eugenics of colonial propaganda’ through a rather tenuous conflation of the Mediterranean climate with sexual delinquency (106). At the same time, imperial readings of indigenous others in the colonies as savage and primitive and as marked by an uninhibited sexuality, including a tradition of homoerotic pederastic love poetry coming from the Arab Muslim world, along with other homoerotic pleasures, informed medical discourses on non-heteronormative, non-reproductive sexualities and thereby instantiated the normal/pathological split in a new key through the medicalisation and racialisation of homosexuality in colonial medicine. It is important to note, as Mercer and Julien point out, that ‘historically the European construction of [homo]sexuality coincides with the epoch of imperialism and the two inter-connect’ (106; brackets added). We already know, for example, that there was a gradual erosion in the ­representation of pederastic themes by male poets in Arabic literature and in the poetic expression of passionate love of male youth from the midnineteenth century as a result of French disapproval and the changing of the gender of the object of the beloved in poems expressing overtly same-sex desire between men when these were translated from Arabic into French, given that French colonialists saw Arab men in North Africa in particular as ‘indigenous sodomites’ as discussed earlier, and given that European colonialism, as Mbembe argues, more broadly operated as a relation of power based on violence, intended to cure Africans of their supposed laziness. . . . Given the degeneracy and vice that, from the colonial viewpoint, characterized native life, colonialism found it necessary to rein in the abundant sexuality of the native, to tame his or her spirit, police his/her body. (113)

Even though Foucault’s History of Sexuality is a history of Western (homo) sexuality, there is a link in the medicalisation of sexuality in nineteenth-century

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Europe to imperial thinking and to medical practice in the colonies. But more specifically, as Hema Chari points out, Foucault’s analysis of the discursive construction of the homosexual ‘other’, medicalised in the nineteenth century, is analogous to imperial constructions of sexually deviant and decadent racial others in colonial discourses, which justified the need for colonial intervention and power (282). While Foucault does not account for the influence of colonialism in his history of sexuality, and the ways in which samesex sexual practices between men, in particular, were racialised as a form of decadence and primitivism in the colonies, his distinction between ars erotica and scientia sexualis21 reinvents problematic binaries between West and East, between centres and peripheries, keeping imperial taxonomies in place and producing a fantasised cartography of the world and of space-time reminiscent of orientalist modes of perception.22 Moreover, this view sets up problematic relations of equivalence and sameness between geopolitical spaces and sexual practices through failing to account for the permeability of borders and their crossings as potential sites for transgressing fixed, demarcated geopolitical spatialities and normative hierarchies pertaining to gender, sexuality and other discursive categories. It appears that the belletristic tradition of passionate love expressed by male poets for handsome beardless or downy-cheeked youths, as well as the negotiation between various forms of sexual contact between men in terms of what was permissible and what was prohibitive during the early Ottoman period, could, perhaps, be considered as part of an ars erotica tradition in the early modern Arab-Islamic world albeit with the problematic binary-laden baggage of Foucauldian thinking between it and scientia sexualis, which fixes the relation between geopolitical space and sexual practices as just discussed. To take an example from neighbouring Egypt, in Egyptian writer Najīb Mahfūz’s 1947 novel Midaq Alley, homosexuality is specifically mentioned and marked as a sexual identity rather than as a mere sexual practice with the recognition of this ‘perversion’ as having, as Joseph Boone argues, historical roots in Arab Muslim culture (Homoerotics of Orientalism 235), which is demonstrative of colonial influences on reading homosexuality both as a sexual identity and as a perversion with cultural traces to an earlier model of active/passive homosexuality. At the same time, Europeans, in trying to satisfy their own psychosexual fantasies, particularly around the poetic celebration of male beauty, tended, as Max Kramer notes, to transform these traditions beyond recognition through constructing notions of unbridled sensual indulgence, thus enabling the imperialist enterprise to legitimate its civilising mission insofar as the Arab Muslim world in the Middle East and North Africa appeared to condone and enjoy what the West understood as sexually perverse and unnatural (‘Islam and Homosexuality’ 127). Furthermore, European travellers and writers, such as André Gide, E. M. Forster, William

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Burroughs and others, reinscribed the orientalist gesture in their attraction to ‘the homosexually inscribed Arab male’ youth (Boone, ‘Vacation Cruises’ 90) readily available commercially as sexual partners. While such travel writing by homosexually leaning or homosexually motivated European men from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century is not the point of this book, in the Maghreb, in particular, this similar orientalist trope of homosexual and exotic otherness informed, and was upheld by, medical racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the institutional authority of the Algiers School, which buttressed colonial power in the region and maintained the distinction between vigorous, healthy European bodies and racialised decadent bodies. As Said notes in Orientalism, ‘Along with all other peoples variously designated as backward, degenerate, uncivilized, and retarded, the Orientals were viewed in a framework constructed out of biological determinism and moral-political admonishment’ (207). These views played into the broader colonial trope on the axis of sexuality that Africans were sexually uncontrollable and polymorphously perverse (Hayes, Queer Nations 34), thereby racialising sexuality. Moreover, this assignation of decadence came out of orientalist judgements that Arab Muslim culture had suffered moral decline, backwardness and degeneration after centuries of Ottoman rule (Massad, Desiring Arabs 8), and was therefore in need of European refinement. However, in viewing orientalism as a textual mode of production that seeks to define and understand the so-called Orient as an object of study in order to penetrate and control it, orientalism, as a strategy of power, we have also learned, tells us a great deal more about the Occident and the Western gaze under colonialism than it does about the Orient. Likewise, as Laroussi warns, one cannot avoid a particular discursive mode of thinking that may be identified as ‘orientalism’ in doing postcolonial work on the Maghreb; to dismiss this ideological dimension of the postcolonial, he continues, is to attempt a sanitisation of academic discourse in research in this area and is to provide an alibi for our complicity in perpetuating a form of neo-colonialism (9). This is probably doubly the case in doing postcolonial queer work on sexuality when one is positioned in the Western academy, which does not mean that this work cannot be done, but that there needs to be a critical interrogation of the orientalist impulses that may come out of this work, even when it is done with the highest degree of self-reflexivity. On the other hand, there are more blatant forms of orientalism and neo-colonialism present when oppositional LGBTQ movements in the West position the postcolonial world as barbaric, in contrast to Western ‘civilised’ democracy, and attempt to explain the absence of visible lesbian, gay and queer movements in indigenous contexts as a defect in political consciousness and maturity, which thus fails to theorise adequately the imbrication of (neo)colonial thinking within what is

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thought to be oppositional, radical and resistant (Alexander 28). The privileging of queer visibility and LGBTQ rights in Western terms, therefore, repeats the colonialist gesture by marking indigenous forms of sexual dissidence as primitive, and obscures the ways in which dissident sexualities in the postcolonial world have emerged under a different set of historical, material and ideological conditions. Further, according to Joseph Massad, with whom I have had profound political differences regarding dissident sexualities in Arab Muslim societies, but who has done astute historical work, the transformation of sexual practices into identities through universalising gayness and gaining ‘rights’ becomes a mark of ascending civilisation, while the repression of those rights, as seen through the Western gaze, becomes a mark of barbarism and backwardness. Likewise, Massad continues, for Islamists, the spread and tolerance of homosexuality marks the decline of civilisation and repressing it may ensure civilisation’s ascendance (Desiring Arabs 195). I do not particularly agree with the latter assumption, that the repression of homosexuality may ensure civilisation’s ascendance, as we have also heard that very argument in the history of homosexuality in the West,23 but both assumptions do not adequately interrogate, as Massad contends, ‘civilisational thinking’ (Desiring Arabs 195), and seem caught up in a problematic binary that reinvents the French mission civilisatrice in new terms. New francophone literature by lesbian and gay authors from the Maghreb, which I analyse later, attempts to disturb or subvert this reformulated binary thinking through occupying the space in-between in order to produce new forms of sexual subjectivity reducible neither to received notions of homosexuality in North Africa nor to Western forms of sexual identity. Returning to comparisons between French and British colonialism that I mentioned earlier, I could find no laws produced in the Maghreb during the colonial period that specifically criminalised homosexuality or same-sex sexual practices, with the exception of Tunisia, which I will discuss in chapter 4, unlike a more uniform approach in the former British colonies with the specific introduction of Section 377 into colonial penal codes. The colonial anti-sodomy statute, Section 377, which was introduced in India in 1860, served as the model for other British colonies, and remains in the penal codes of several former British colonies today, in its original form, including in such countries as Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Jamaica and, until recently, India, where Section 377 was overturned in 2018 and homosexuality decriminalised. Section 377 exists in adapted form in Brunei, Sri Lanka, Samoa, Somalia, Sudan and in parts of sub-Sahara Africa. In other former British colonies, the statute has been repealed, such as in Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand and now in India. Section 377 specifically punishes voluntary carnal intercourse against the order of nature and finds penetration as proof of illicit carnal intercourse and was specifically meant to punish the offences of sodomy,

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buggery and bestiality.24 Certainly, nineteenth-century French attitudes during the colonial period in the Maghreb did not approve of pederastic poetry in the belletristic tradition of Arabic literature where male poets celebrated their passion for handsome male youths. While there was generally both a curiosity and simultaneous disavowal of male homoeroticism among colonialists in the Maghreb, and forms of sexuality between indigenous men that did involve anal intercourse, it seemed that, for French colonialists, Islamic law, and prohibitions against liwāṭ, sufficed to keep unlawful sexual intercourse in check to a degree, which still prevails today, though through different interpretations of what constitutes liwāṭ in different contexts in Arab Muslim societies with a considerable range of juridical discretion and flexibility as was the case in the past. But while liwāṭ did not condemn same-sex desire, or the desire for sexual intercourse among and between men, Western medicine pathologised desire as well. In addition, French colonial discourse, in producing the trope of sexually uncontrollable and sexually perverse North Africans, which simultaneously infantilised colonised people, further consolidated heterosexuality by reducing the importance of the social, political and economic functions of the extended family, indigenous kinship systems, and the ulama, especially in the rural Maghreb, through imposing its own image of the nuclear family as the norm and as the apex of social life, which still underlies nationalist discourses today, thereby excluding homosexuality from the nationalist imaginary as a threat to the stability of the nation and to the traditional, heteronormative nuclear family (Hayes, Queer Nations 34–35). The importation of homophobia from the European imperialist mindset, while not condemning those who committed sodomy to death by stoning, was nonetheless in many ways less tolerant of same-sex desire without many of the nuances allowed for under previous Ottoman rule. Of course, by the time of European imperialism in the Maghreb, homosexuality gradually had come to be seen medically in identarian terms, which was not the case during the Ottoman period. What is also interesting is that, in the mid-twentieth century, a new Arabic term shudhūdh jinsī began to appear in the works of some Arab historians and literary critics that condensed, into a single category, phenomena that had been previously distinguished, such as active pederasty, effeminate male passivity, sodomy, and the passionate love of boys (El-Rouayheb 158–59), which would also include forms of male homoerotic expression not specifically covered by liwāṭ, including, for example, intercrural sex, kissing, mutual masturbation and caressing. El-Rouayheb argues that the newer twentieth-century term shudhūdh jinsī was introduced to express broader, contemporaneous European concepts around ‘sexual inversion’ and ‘sexual perversion’, as influenced by Western medicine, particularly, I would add, following the publication of Havelock Ellis’s book Sexual Inversion in English in 1897. This political use of Western medical knowledge thus served to mark all forms of male

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passionate attraction to boys or men as forms of depravity or sickness regardless of active/passive positions taken by the sexual partners in anal intercourse and regardless of whether men practised other forms of non-penetrative sex between them (El-Rouayheb 159). Though Ellis argued for homosexuality as a natural phenomenon, and not as a disease or form of degeneracy, the idea of sexual inversion nonetheless became medicalised in ways not intended by Ellis. An aversion to all forms of homosexuality, expressed through the adoption of shudhūdh jinsī as a term, very much narrowed the gap for any negotiation between the prohibitive and the permissible and aligned same-sex desires and practices in Arab Muslim contexts with Western, medicalised understandings of homosexuality as a perversion and as a form of sexual inversion, the latter of which was a common way of reading homosexuality in the West up until the end of the Second World War and the publication of the Kinsey report in the immediate post-war years. While shudhūdh jinsī indicates a shift towards European medical thinking on homosexuality in Arab Muslim societies and cultures, El-Rouayheb acknowledges that the term was never really adopted in spoken Arabic and that the distinction between active and passive sexual intercourse between men still largely remains the paradigm for understanding male homoerotic practices, particularly in less Westernised parts of the Arab Muslim world (161). Yet Joseph Boone has critiqued the tendency to associate Arab Muslim homoeroticism with a rigid active/passive model, given that this model tends to reinforce binaristic understandings of gender and sexuality and reflects Western-influenced preconceptions of machismo rather than the sexual nuances of Islamicate cultures (Homoerotics of Orientalism 68–69).25 I would add, however, that the significance of this conceptual distinction between active and passive homosexuality is beginning to shift as evidenced in the contemporary queer francophone writing from the Maghreb analysed in the later chapters of this book. Historically, as I stated at the beginning of this chapter, the Maghreb is a zone of multiple cultural intersections, situated geographically between Orient and Occident, between the global North and global South, and marked by the relational spaces between multiple languages, histories and cultural influences, particularly given the effects of both the Arab conquest, which enabled the spread of Arab Muslim culture and culminated in the subsequent absorption of the Maghreb into the Ottoman Empire, and French colonialism, which was tied to the spread of French language and culture d’outre-mer as part of the larger goal of French imperial power. This intermediary zone of the crossings of cultures has produced a history of (re)negotiating geopolitical, cultural and discursive borders which have continued to operate as shifting sites of power, negotiation and struggle both within North Africa and in the Maghrebian diaspora. I have been interested in this chapter in examining

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what these various forms of border crossings might mean for the history of sexuality in the Maghreb, particularly as I consider the shifts in thinking that are marked in what I refer to later as new queer francophone writing emerging from the Maghreb and published in France, which, of course, sets up other negotiations of cultural and identic borders. Mildred Mortimer, who has written extensively on the Maghreb, and its postcolonial history, has noted that indigenous writers during the French colonial period depicted North Africa as a world closed ‘with colonized subjects caught in a circle of violence directed against the colonizer and also among themselves’ (4). Yet, in the postcolonial era, she argues that this emphasis begins to shift to present historical, social and cultural differences and affinities through individual voices, with the major theme of francophone Maghrebian literature, both in North Africa and in the diaspora, being the quest for identity (Mortimer 4–5) following colonialism, which is often a predominant trope of postcolonial literatures worldwide. However, Abdelkebir Khatibi, in my view, has taken Mortimer’s historically informed, but slightly clichéd, argument further through challenging the very notion of identity as a problematic category and questioning its viability for a politics of decolonisation. Even the word ‘Arab’, he notes, can signify a war of words and ideologies depending on the contexts of use and exchange, but nonetheless reveals, he argues, the active diversity and plurality that constitute the Arab world, whereas any pretence towards an Arab identity of self-sameness overlooks, and demands that one examine, what remains in the margins within Arab cultures, that which is fragmented and does not fit, including, for example, Berbers, Copts and Kurds, and especially women, as well as the differences between nation-states within the Arab world and the differences of its people (13).26 Picking up on the effects of imperial power, both Arab/Islamic and European in the Maghreb, I would add that gender and sexual dissidence also needs to be included as part of this plurality and is part of the history of the Maghreb that is often overlooked and not taken into account within a politics of decolonisation. Looking for what is marginal, fragmented and different, that is, the continual and ongoing (re)thinking of otherness/otherwise, while always a risk, is a monumental undertaking, but is one that must be part of everyday social and political struggles, according to Khatibi (33–34).27 In his view, alterity, otherness, what does not fit into, or is elided by, dominant discourses is in fact dissymmetrical to individual, social or cultural identity in any fixed sense, since the self, particularly for postcolonial subjectivities, is not an ontological being but constituted by otherness (30).28 If the continual engagement with plurality of thought, of une penséeautre, is necessary for a transformational ‘double critique’ from specifically Maghrebian perspectives, as Khatibi envisions, that negotiates the spaces between Western colonial heritage and patrimonial indigenous inheritance,

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including religion (12),29 both of which comprise the history of the Maghreb, then the politics of gender and sexual difference must also be part of this transformational struggle along with the renegotiation of gender and sexual borders that has occurred in various forms within the history of the Maghreb. The traces of this history, I shall argue, are very much inscribed in the contemporary texts written from what I would describe as queer perspectives by Franco-Maghrebi writers whose works are examined in chapters 4 through 6. The representation of same-sex desire in Arabic literature, where it is specifically encoded textually, and is marked by a history of various discursive and geopolitical border crossings, was evident at the time when the Maghreb, with the exception of Morocco, became part of the Ottoman Empire in the early sixteenth century, beginning with the capture of the city of Algiers in 1516. But this history of same-sex desire demonstrates not only its difference from the history of homosexuality in the West but also its later links with the influence of Western medicine under French imperial power and exposes the nuances between homosexuality and Islam, which were not always necessarily configured in strict oppositional terms. While the historical record focuses predominantly on same-sex desire between men, one must not presume the absence of lesbian existence just because sexual relations between women were not as specifically encoded in early modern juridical codes. El-Rouayheb does make passing references to ‘sexual intercourse between women’ as an independent transgression not being punished as severely as illicit vaginal penetration between a man and a woman or as liwāṭ, but as being punished on a similar level as non-penetrative sexual behaviour between men (137–38), so this indicates that same-sex sexuality between women, though not as severely punished or specifically encoded into law, was not altogether absent. It is important, as I have argued elsewhere, that the axis of sexuality not obscure the axis of gender analysis so that the possibilities of lesbian existence can emerge (Spurlin, Lost Intimacies 46), possibilities of lesbian existence not necessarily congruent with contemporary or Western forms, especially when one examines later feminist writing from the Maghreb, and the possibilities of close affective bonds between women made possible through specific social structures, such as the purdah and the hammam, along with challenges to the (straight) male authorising gaze and its associations with sovereignty and power, points I shall address in the following chapter. NOTES 1. ‘Il faudrait penser le Maghreb tel qu’il est, site topographique entre l’Orient, l’Occident et l’Afrique’ (Khatibi 38–39).

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2. The earliest historical reference to the Berbers is marked with the arrival of the Phoenicians on the Mediterranean coast of what is now the Maghreb at the end of the second millennium BCE, an area which was already inhabited by the Berbers as Jamil Abun-Nasr points out in his history of the Maghreb in the Islamic period (1–2). He also acknowledges that theories on the origins of the Berbers are both contradictory and speculative as the Berbers did not constitute a homogeneous ethnic group; that is, while they were West Asiatic in origin, the Berbers are a composite people, and their dissimilar ethnic elements may be a result of a number of migrations to the Maghreb region in prehistoric times. At the same time, there is also archaeological evidence of Berber contact with south-western Europe as well (Abun-Nasr 2). 3. Abun-Nasr also clarifies, as do other historical sources, that the Berbers gradually came to see themselves, along with the Islamic religious leaders who settled in the Maghreb, as defenders of Islam, thus contributing to their own Islamisation, while, at the same time, resisting Arab caliphal political authority. In this sense, Islam developed characteristic features of its own specific to the Maghreb and distinct from the Mashriq (3–4). 4. El-Rouayheb does stipulate that age-structured sexual relations between men were not the only form of sexual relations to exist between men, nor were they necessarily acceptable in any form as I shall discuss, but age-structured sexual relations were considered the usual type of sexuality between men. He also stipulates that male youth could sometimes assume the active sexual role, that some men had sex with other adult men, and that some pederastic relationships lasted beyond the time in which the younger partner could be regraded as a 'boy' (33). 5. The specific poetic anthologies to which El-Rouayheb refers include Rayḥānat al-alibbā by Aḥmad al-Khafājī (1659), Sulāfat al-‘aṣr by Ibn Ma‘ṣūm (ca. 1708), Nafḥat al-rayḥānah by Muḥammad Amīn al-Muḥibbī (1699), al-Rawḍ al-naḍir by ‘Uthmān al-‘Umarī (1770/1) and Shammāmat al-‘anbar by Muḥammad al-Ghulāmī (1772/3). See El-Rouayheb 174 n36. To give some textual examples in translation, ‘Uthmān al-‘Umarī from the above list writes, ‘I was infatuated with the honey-lipped when he was beardless, until the myrtle of interlocked ‘idhār [beard-down] became apparent’; Muḥammad Amīn al-Muḥibbī similarly writes, ‘Beauty has protected his cheeks with ‘awāriḍ [plural of āriḍ for beard-down], with which he has killed souls and revivified eyes’ (El-Rouayheb 62–63). 6. El-Rouayheb does qualify that the belletrists of the period may not have necessarily expressed their own amorous feelings or experiences in their works since they may have been following a well-established literary convention. But this does not imply that pederastic love was necessarily always fictional or a mere literary exercise when non-belletristic evidence is examined, such as explanatory comments in some love poems that refer to a concrete occasion and a specific male youth, as well as chronicles or biographical works of the period, where it is not clear why some passages, such as those referring to same-sex desire and pederastic love, are treated as fictional, while other passages in the same work are treated as factual accounts of past events (78–79). 7. This is also confirmed by Joseph Boone’s research, where he notes that ‘for all the praise of the smooth-cheeked lad in the poetic tradition of the ghazal, there also

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existed a vigorous subgenre debating and sometimes championing the equal merits of youths with facial hair’ (Homoerotics of Orientalism 64). He also notes that the term ‘male youth’ could refer to a male between the ages of ten and forty, depending on geo-social context (107). 8. The strictness of the Mālikī school is also apparent, according to El-Rouayheb, through legal scholars regarding the beardless youth as a temptation to adult men generally (115–116). 9. However, it is important to note that some juridical schools differentiated punishments for men committing liwāṭ; the Ḥanaf   ī school, for example, punished married men more severely than unmarried men. The punishment for active sodomy was usually a fine, the severity of which differed according to the active partner’s economic condition and marital status, and passive sodomy was usually punished through the imposition of a fine and a whipping. But the Shāfi’ī school took things a bit further and considered whether an offender who had committed liwāṭ was already in a state of iḥṣān, that is, in a state where one had already once consummated a legally valid marriage. If the offender was in the state of iḥṣān when committing either liwāṭ or zinā, he was liable to death by stoning. Otherwise, the punishment was 100 lashes and banishment for a year for committing zinā; the same punishment applied for liwāṭ depending on whether one was in the state of iḥṣān (stoning if so, lashes and temporary banishment if not), but the passive partner who was penetrated was never liable to stoning. The man in the state of iḥṣān, then, was more severely punished, whether he had committed liwāṭ or zinā, since he would have had access to licit vaginal intercourse that should have satisfied his phallic-insertive urges. But if he assumed the active or insertive role in an illicit sexual relationship, this meant he was wilful and therefore deserving of more severe punishment (El-Rouayheb 119). 10. See also Rifā’ah al-Ṭahṭāwī, Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz fī takhlīṣ Bārīz, 1834 [The Extraction of Gold in the Abridgement of Paris], in Al-‘Amāl al-kāmilah li Rifā‘ah Rāf’i al-Ṭahṭāwī, ed. Muḥammad ‘Imārāh. Part II (Beirut: al Mu’assasah al‘Arabiyyah li al-Dirāsāt wa al-Nashr, 1973), 78. 11. See also Al-Shaykh Muḥammad bin ‘Abdullah al-Ṣaffār, Al-Riḥlah al-Tiṭwānīyah ilá al-diyār al-Faransīyah 1845-1846, ed. Umm Salmá (Tiṭwān: Matba’at al-Haddad Yusuf Ikhwan, 1995), 95. Also see Muḥammad al-Ṣaffār, Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845-1846, ed. Susan Gilson Miller, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 12. See al-Ṭahṭāwī, Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz fī takhlīṣ Bārīz, p. 78 as above. 13. ‘Oui, chercher autre chose dans la division de l’être arabe et islamique, et se dessaisir de l’obsession de l’origine’ (Khatibi 14). 14. ‘D’une part, il faut écouter le Maghreb résonner dans sa pluralité (linguistique, culturelle, politique), et d’autre part, seul le dehors repensé, décentré, subverti, détourné de ses déterminations dominantes, peut nous éloigner des identités et des différences informulées’ (Khatibi 39). 15. On this point, see also Hanafi (19) and chapter 1, note 12, p. 53. 16. As Hanafi elaborates, ‘Le racisme a conduit non seulement à asseoir ce mythe de la supériorité, mais aussi à considérer le modèle européen comme le seul modèle

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à suivre par les nations du monde’ (Hanafi 18). Trans. Racism managed not only to establish this myth of [European or Aryan] superiority but also considered the European model as the only model for the nations of the world to follow (emphasis and brackets added). 17. ‘Comment expliquer cette cohabitation entre . . . une segmentation sociale qui a gardé quleques traces du passé précolonial (lequel, d’une certaine manière, garde une relative autonomie par rapport à la centralité étatique) et, d’un autre côté, un espace constitutif d’une modernité en marche portée par l’élite et qui surprend par la levée des tabous qui obstruaient jusque-là la marche vers le démocratisation de la société marocaine’ (Marouf 15–16)? Trans. How are we to explain this cohabitation between . . . a social segmentation which has kept some of the traces of a precolonial past (which, in a certain way, retains a relative autonomy in relation to the centrality of the state) and, on the other hand, a constitutive space of modernity on the move, shouldered by the elite, and which is astounding through the lifting of taboos that have obstructed hitherto the march towards the democratisation of Moroccan society? 18. Given the large number of Algerian and Tunisian Muslims who fought in the French army during the First World War, there was an expectation of political rewards such as full rights as French citizens. Approximately 173,000 Algerians served in the French army, 87,000 were engaged in combat and about 25,000 lost their lives (Abun-Nasr 328), and in Tunisia 63,000 served in the French army during the First World War and about 10,500 were killed or were listed as missing (Abun-Nasr 354). In addition, Tunisian nationalism was awakened in the 1920s by the Destour Party, aroused by Wilsonian doctrines for self-determination and Arab aspirations for independence and unity (355), and then by the Neo-Destour Party, which broke away from the Destour in 1934 because it had settled for political reforms over its earlier goals for independence. The Neo-Destour was committed not only to independence from imperial domination, but to the creation of a new society (359). 19. See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 42–43. 20. For an analysis of the influence of biomedicine on notions of racial hygiene and its juridical effects under the Third Reich, see my book Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism, especially chapters 2 and 3, and Robert N. Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. 21. Foucault notes in his History of Sexuality, specifically mentioning Arab Muslim societies, as well as Eastern cultures and cultures of the past, that, in a tradition of ars erotica, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, and not in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and forbidden (57). Of course, this is a very broad argument, and does not account for the specific laws against liwāṭ, and a necessary negotiation for male poets who wrote of same-sex desire, and for males who engaged in same-sex sexual practices, between what was tolerable and what was forbidden, as I discussed earlier in relation to the Ottoman Empire between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Another problem with Foucauldian thinking, where Foucault theorises homosexuality as an emergent identic category in the nineteenth century, as opposed to its earlier status as a temporary aberration (History of Sexuality 43), is that it disavows, to some extent, as I have argued in another context, the centrality of colonialism, given that colonised bodies are assumed to have remained contained

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or frozen in history within an ars erotica, without progress or movement in time (Spurlin, Imperialism within the Margins 136–37), which potentially plays a role in reinventing the orientalist gesture. 22. I am here making use of Edward Said’s term ‘orientalism’ as an occidental mode of perception through which the so-called Orient is experienced and shapes ‘the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West’ (Said, Orientalism 58), an invention coming out of imperialist world views with ongoing and present-day effects. While Said is referring to the Orient as the Near and Middle East, I am using the term to describe the colonial encounter in the Maghreb as a strategy of power. While the so-called Orient has been associated historically with ‘the escapism of sexual fantasy’ as well as ‘a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe’ (Said, Orientalism 190), thus becoming a grid onto which Europeans could project and inhabit psychosexual fantasies of illicit, exotic sexuality while simultaneously disavowing it, Said conspicuously leaves out the realm of the homoerotic and same-sex sexuality in his theory of orientalism, which is later picked up and developed by such queer scholars as Joseph Boone. But the larger issue of orientalism reveals that sex emerged ‘as one of the main axes by which civilization and barbarism can be classified’ (Massad, Desiring Arabs 6) in the imperialist context, a dualism which has shifted between the West and some postcolonial contexts mentioned earlier. 23. Indeed, in looking at the early history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the West, particularly in the United States, prior to the isolation of the human immunodeficiency virus, new discourses of sexual perversion centred on metaphors of erotic indulgence, hedonism and moral laxity were formed in relation to deep prejudices around race, class, gender, sexuality and addiction, as Cindy Patton has pointed out, erasing the social realities that shaped the pandemic (Inventing AIDS 25), while placing gay men and intravenous drug users as carriers of HIV associated with decadence and disease and as threats to civilisation. 24. Section 377, which was the colonial anti-sodomy statute first introduced in India and then used as a model for the penal codes in other colonies of the British Empire, specifically reads as follows: ‘Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to a fine. Explanation. Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section. Comment. This section is intended to punish the offence of sodomy, buggery and bestiality. The offence consists in a carnal knowledge committed against the order of nature by a person with a man, or in the same unnatural manner with a woman, or by a man or woman in any manner with an animal’ (Ratanlal Ranchhoddas and Dhirajlal Keshavlal Thakore, The Indian Penal Code, 27th ed., Nagpur: Wadhwa, 1992; qtd. in Suparna Bhaskaran, ‘The Politics of Penetration: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code’, Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita, New York: Routledge, 2002, 15).

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25. See also Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Moustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 16; and Dina Al-Kassim, ‘Epilogue: Sexual Epistemologies, East in West’, Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire, eds. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 301; both of whom Boone cites. 26. ‘D’autre part, le nom « Arabe » désigne une guerre de nominations et d’idéologies qui mettent au jour la pluralité active du monde arabe. . . . Car l’unité du monde arabe est chose du passé. . . . Et d’ailleurs, cette prétendue unité tant réclamée englobe non seulement ses marges spécifiques (berbères, coptes, kurdes . . . et marge des marges: le féminin), mais elle couvre aussi la division du monde arabe en pays, en peuples, en sectes, en classes . . .’ (Khatibi 13). Trans. On the other hand, the name ‘Arab’ designates a war of nominations and ideologies which brings to light the living plurality of the Arab world. . . . Because the unity of the Arab world is a thing of the past. . . . And, besides, this so-called unity that is so strongly claimed encompasses not only its specific margins (Berbers, Copts, Kurds . . . and the margin of margins: the feminine [women]), but it also covers the division of the Arab world into countries, into peoples, into sects and into classes. Brackets added. 27. ‘Le dialogue avec toute pensée de la différence est monumental. . . . Une pensée-autre est toujours un complot . . . un risque implacable. . . . Énbranler, par une critique vigilante, l’ordre du savoir dominant . . . , c’est introduire la pensée dans la lutte sociale et politique actuelle’ (Khatibi 33–34; emphasis added). Trans. Dialogue with all the thought of difference is monumental. . . . Thinking otherwise is always a conspiracy . . . a relentless risk. . . . To shake, through a vigilant critique, the order of dominant knowledge . . . , is to introduce thought into the current social and political struggle. 28. ‘L’altérité est dissymétrie de toute identité (individuelle, sociale, culturelle): je suis toujours un autre et cet autre n’est pas toi, c’est-à-dire un double de mon moi. . . . Et cet autre est constitutif de ma séparation ontologique, de ma douleur au monde’ (Khatibi 30). Trans. Alterity is dissymmetrical to all identity (individual, social, cultural): I am always an other and this other is not you, that is to say, a double of my self. . . . And this other is constitutive of my ontological separation, of my pain in the world. 29. ‘Engageons-nous d’emblée dans ce qui est réalisé devant nous et essayons de le transformer selon une double critique, celle de cet héritage occidental et celle de notre patrimoine, si théologique, si charismatique, si patriarcal’ (Khatibi 12). Trans. Let’s get involved right away in what is being done before us and try to transform it according to a double critique, that of this Western heritage and that of our own heritage, so theological, so charismatic, so patriarchal. Khatibi is not directly citing the influence of Islam here, but links it indirectly, I believe, to part of the cultural inheritance specific to the Maghreb even though, technically speaking, Islam was not indigenous to the region even though it has a long history there. But the double critique of which he speaks includes both Western influences from the legacy of colonialism and the patrimonial/patriarchal heritage of the Maghreb of which Islam forms a part. Indirectly, I believe, he is also speaking of gender oppression by his use

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of the masculine terms ‘patrimony’, which often refers to paternal inheritance, and ‘patriarchy’, which, of course, by extension, has implications for sexual dissidents as well, who often fall outside of these heteronormative familial and socio-juridical categories.

Chapter 3

Disruption, Fragmentation and Alternative Sites of Memory Gender and Sexual Dissidence as Forms of Decolonisation in Francophone PostIndependence Literature in the Maghreb

In examining the historical record of same-sex desire in the Maghreb and the larger Arab Muslim world in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as during the period of French colonialism within the Maghreb, there appears to be a salient preoccupation with affective and sexual relations between men. But in post-independence literature, sexuality not only continues to be ­represented, but begins to play a noticeably more political role, as does gender, acting as important sites for decolonisation and resistance to the privilege and power of nationalist elites in the aftermath of colonialism. In speaking of the violence during the Algerian Revolution by the French in order to maintain colonial rule in Algeria, Frantz Fanon acknowledges in Toward the African Revolution that while Tunisia and Morocco as protectorates, were able to reach independence without fundamentally challenging the French empire, Algeria, by its status, the length of the occupation, and the extent of the colonialist foothold, raises in broad daylight and in a critical fashion the question of the collapse of empire, resulting in the French forces in the war having had reacted with a marked and disconcerting ‘brutality and violence’ (147).1 Yet, in his Wretched of the Earth, where Fanon speaks of a fighting phase and ‘a revolutionary literature and a national literature’ (223) to combat the effects of imperial power as a stage of further development from that of mere mimicry, or ‘that which deprives the colonized subject of any claim to self’ (Boyarin 255), to what extent is the (de)colonised subject of which Fanon speaks figured as male? More importantly, to what extent does the littérature de combat that he proposes, as a more advanced stage

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of revolutionary resistance, comprise struggles against heteronormativity, including those relating to the politics of gender? Further, are Fanon’s more or less generic terms as ‘the Antillean’, ‘the Black man’, ‘the Negro’ and ‘the colonized’, while not specifically marked for gender, understood to be inclusive of women? What of his use of ‘the Black man’? In his rather controversial Foreword to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Homi Bhabha comments, in choosing ‘to note the importance of the problem rather than to elide it in a facile charge of sexism’, that the use of ‘man’ and other masculine pronouns in Fanon has more to do with humanness more broadly, which includes both men and women, while ignoring the specific question of gender difference (Foreword xxvi; emphasis added). Bhabha also notes that this issue of gender difference is beyond the scope of his Foreword, thereby deferring any discussion of gender in the work, except for acknowledging Fanon’s passing references to women of colour and to machismo in black men in Black Skin, White Masks (‘Remembering Fanon’ xxvi). Feminist thinkers have not let Fanon, or for that matter, Bhabha, so easily off the hook. In Fanon, Anne McClintock notes that black women seem possessed by black indigenous men who appear as active subjects, making women appear as mere appendages (362), as when Fanon writes that ‘the Negro . . . is viewed as a penis symbol’ (Black Skin, White Masks 159) and that a black man’s ‘wife will be aware that she is marrying a joke’ (25) to the extent that he adopts the language and culture of the coloniser (through mimicry) thereby renouncing his blackness. While the importance of indigenous postcolonial women as agents of anticolonial and postcolonial struggle is problematically elided in Fanon and in Bhabha’s Foreword, it is almost as if women become simultaneously placed outside the scope of the human; as McClintock argues, ‘postponing a theory of gender presumes that [postcolonial] subjectivity itself is neutral with respect to gender’ (363; brackets added).2 The metaphor of women as appendage, as secondary to men, is further evident in Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’, where Algerian women’s militancy and participation in the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), which ended French colonial rule in 1962, is subsumed under the larger nationalist liberation struggle. While Fanon acknowledges that Algerian women served in the Revolution as armed soldiers and suicide bombers, and ‘ceased to be a complement for man’ during the period of the war (A Dying Colonialism 109), McClintock argues that while female militancy was no more than ‘a passive offspring of male agency and the structural necessity of the war’, women’s liberation has been attributed to, and subordinated under, the broader nationalist struggle, as if gender conflict vanished naturally after the Revolution (366–67), even when women once again (re)assumed their subordinate roles to men in the context of the heterosexual family. In other words, while Fanon

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acknowledges that colonial racism is part of ‘the systematized oppression of a people’ . . . and ‘the destruction of cultural values, of ways of life’ (African Revolution 33), all forms of ruling, including those of postcolonial nationstates, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, operate by constructing and consolidating already existent social inequalities, including the construction of hegemonic masculinities as the basis of state rule (‘Cartographies of Struggle’ 61), which would also necessarily include the mimicry not only of imperial language and culture on the part of whom Fanon refers to as ‘the black man’, but of phallic, violent masculinity as well. This must imply, in my view, a recognition of the imbrication of gender and sexuality within any analysis of colonial racism and its effects while simultaneously accounting for the fact that ideologies of gender and sexuality must be linked to race and class differentials, and to the process of decolonisation, thereby implying an analysis that must necessarily be relational and intersectional.3 One does begin to see the gradual emergence of this intersectionality, especially with regard to the legacy of colonialism, in literature from the Maghreb immediately following independence, that is, from the late 1960s through the 1980s, as well as later in the postcolonial period. Despite Fanon’s masculinist and (hetero)sexist rhetoric, Jarrod Hayes has argued that Fanon’s notion of littérature de combat is nonetheless still pertinent to the extent that it has potential within other forms of Maghrebian literature, not just those texts specifically about anticolonial revolution, but would also include texts addressing women’s struggles, neo-colonial forms of oppression, and resistances to sexual normativity, irrespective as to whether these issues are central or marginal to the texts as a whole (Queer Nations 2). At the same time, in my view, feminist approaches in particular, as well as texts addressing sexual dissidence, could take critiques of Fanon’s elisions of gender and sexuality further through intersectional analyses that broaden the effects of colonial racism and interrogations of various forms of neo-colonialism and nationalism which often repeat the colonialist gesture through strategies of exclusion and through appeals to a fixed homogeneous national identity. This is also supported by José Muñoz in pointing out that disidentification with Fanon could offer a powerful reformulation to the extent that Fanon’s misogyny and homophobia, the latter of which is mentioned in my earlier endnote below, could be interrogated while his anticolonial discourse is still useful as a more mediated identification with his work (9). For example, revelations of gender insubordination and nonnormative sexualities in literary and cultural texts often contradict narratives of national belonging, and could be regarded, according to Hayes, as forms of combat literature à la Fanon (Hayes, Queer Nations 2), which simultaneously, in my view, can become vehicles with which to expand Fanon’s work on race and revolutionary struggle and speak to the concerns raised by

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McClintock, Mohanty and other postcolonial feminists, while also creating a space for theorising sexual dissidence and queering dominant fantasies of cultural origin and national belonging which often exclude the articulation of non-heteronormative sexualities in postcolonial contexts. This chapter will address how a specific, small selection of texts by writers from the Maghreb, including Rachid Boudjedra, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Assia Djebar, can be considered as forms of combat literature through their representations of the political roles of sexuality and gender in the two decades immediately following independence from French colonial domination.4 Somewhat in contradiction to Joseph Massad’s claims that Western gay movements have attempted to produce ‘homosexuals, as well gays and lesbians, where they do not exist’, and have repressed local same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into (Western) sexual epistemologies (Desiring Arabs 163), and his reduction of those Arab Muslim men who do engage in same-sex sexual acts to ‘practitioners of same-sex (sexual) contact’ (Desiring Arabs 162; parentheses added), though I do concede that it is important to be observant of, and critically attentive to, sexual differences between cultures, there has been a historical precedent of representing dissident sexualities in francophone postcolonial literature from the Maghreb as a deliberate political act as opposed to a momentary aberration or exception from an otherwise heteronormatively based literary canon and social life. As Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun notes, ‘en général, c’est dans le roman d’expression française qu’on trouve le plus d’audace dans la contestation de l’ordre social et dans la transgression des tabous, surtout d’ordre sexuel’ (‘Défendre la diversité culturelle du Maghreb’ 272; emphasis added).5 Ben Jelloun’s use of ‘especially’, which I have italicised in the original French and in my translative endnote, is telling, to the extent that the challenging of sexual taboos implies a critique of the patriarchal and heteronormative social order in postcolonial societies in the Maghreb through refusing to confine gender and sexual otherness, particularly articulated and enacted same-sex desires, to the private domain by encoding them instead directly into the public sphere of literary representation. At the same time, in addition to the dismantling of the public/private split, it is important to challenge another problematic border between active and passive homosexuality as paradigmatic for thinking about sexual relations between men in Arab Muslim societies, and to examine the ways in which the border between gendered active/passive sexual roles in same-sex sexual relations between men and what is known in the West as egalitarian homosexuality is deconstructed in post-independence Maghrebian literature. Gendered active/passive roles in same-sex sexual relations between men are part of the history of homosexuality in Arab Muslim societies as discussed

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at length in the last chapter with regard to the trope of the beautiful male youth, though Boone has contested the idea of active/passive homosexuality as paradigmatic even within the context of the early Ottoman Empire, given that the active/passive model reinforces binaristic understandings of both gender and sexuality in highly rigid terms without enough attention to sexual nuance in same-sex relations (Homoerotics of Orientalism 68–69). These nuances become much more pronounced in post-independence francophone literature from the Maghreb. For example, Moroccan Berber writer Abdelhak Serhane, in L’Amour Circoncis, wherein he discusses the sexuality of young Moroccans and highlights the difficulties of male sexual bonds in a Muslim country, speaks of homosexuality in the traditional heterosexually gendered way as paradigmatic among young Arab Muslim men who have sex with men. He writes, ‘l’homosexualité “active” et l’homosexualité “passive” n’ont pas la même signification symbolique dans l’imaginaire collectif des Marocains. La première est considérée comme une manifestation de virilité par opposition à la seconde qui est vécue comme une source d’humiliation et de dégradation’ (159).6 However, it would be fallacious to dismiss these sexual roles as merely ‘traditional’ or as ‘underdeveloped’ in relation to a supposedly more homosexually progressive West. As Andrea Duranti has pointed out, exclusively active/passive relationships, where they exist, do challenge traditional views of family as well as religious strictures in Arab Muslim cultures (82), and therefore should not simply be relegated to a more primitive stage in the history of homosexuality in Arab Muslim societies. But in his 1983 novel Messaouda, Serhane writes of so-called egalitarian homosexuality, not just between Western and indigenous men as in the tradition of sexual tourism in Morocco, but between indigenous men in the Maghreb as well. Interestingly, he borrows the word nouiba from a Maghrebian dialect of Arabic to describe sex between males where each fucks the other in turn (Hayes ‘Queer Resistance’ 86–87), thereby breaching the border between languages and between gendered active/passive roles. Even though Serhane is describing sex between male adolescents, the novel still counters dubious claims that sexual bonds between men are non-reciprocal in Arab Muslim societies which supposedly distinguishes them from so-called egalitarian homosexuality problematically confined to Western cultures. Yet while Serhane challenges nationalist assertions that egalitarian homosexuality is foreign to Arab Muslim societies and cultures, I would contest the other side of the graphic border of the virgule and read a notion of egalitarian homosexuality as somewhat utopian, even to the extent that it is associated with homosexuality in the West, given, that if left undeconstructed, it could assume that any vector of power, or any type of gendered or sexual politics, is absent in any sexual relationship, thereby eliding the ways in which

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sexuality is always already intimately experienced, but socially mediated. Reducing understandings of same-sex bonds and sexual expression between men in Arab Muslim societies and cultures as structured by the supposed non-reciprocity of the active/passive binary regarding mutual pleasure and limited to the private sphere, or reducing same-sex bonds between men to discursive and more public sexual identities as they exist in the West, is a form of sexual homogenisation, which, according to Mehammed Mack, in speaking of the clandestinity of the banlieue and Franco-Arab sexual subcultures in France, ‘neglect[s] the less tangible, private, and communitarian ways . . . in which sexual marginality has presented itself’ (47). Furthermore, associating egalitarian homosexuality with the West ignores the history of dominant, and highly homophobic, interpretations of homosexuality in the West which have historically reinscribed the active/passive binary by conflating homosexuality in general with passivity and feminisation. Kathryn Bond Stockton notes, in citing Leo Bersani, that gay men historically have been associated with anal penetration and sexual passivity in public discourse (14) regardless as to whether they occupy the active or passive position. Furthermore, she asks the extent to which the bottom role is merely one that is entirely passive or humiliating. Stockton argues in her book Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame that shame and debasement, often culturally conflated with sexual passivity, are consciously, creatively, consistently or obliquely (re) negotiated into intimate acts of pleasure (150), which similarly questions the idea that sexual bonds between men, to the extent that they are structured by the active/passive binary in Arab Muslim societies and cultures, exclude any form of reciprocal pleasure. Even if confined predominantly to the private realm and not being publicly visible, while recognising, as I pointed out in the last chapter, that queer visibility cannot be taken as the universal marker of politically progressive thinking and social action, same-sex sexual expressions and erotic practices remain nonetheless socially mediated by a range of historical, cultural, cross-cultural and ideological conditions, and therefore cannot be reduced or confined narrowly to particular geopolitical locations, just as the passive role in homosexual relations cannot be read exclusively as powerless and humiliating, devoid of erotic agency or pleasure, or as indicative of homosexuality more generally. Correspondingly, Maghrebian feminist writings have deconstructed problematic borders between nationalism and feminism, and between Islam and feminism, and have challenged the mutual exclusivity of these binary divisions, theorising possibilities of a feminist nationalism that do not exclude women from the public sphere (Hayes, Queer Nations 10). During the Algerian Revolution and into the post-independence period, for example, there were shifts in the significance of the veil in relation to constructions of a feminist nationalism that resisted simplistic equations of the veil as

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grounded in the universal oppression of women without examination of the specific social, cultural and historical contexts in which the veil was worn. As Chandra Mohanty has argued, practices of veiling do not have identical social significance; reading the veil only as a coercive symbol for women’s oppression fails to account for specific contexts and strategic uses of the veil as, for example, a revolutionary or oppositional gesture, as was the case with middle-class Iranian women who, during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, veiled themselves willingly to show solidarity with veiled working-class women in opposition to the Shah and to forms of Western cultural (neo-)imperialism (‘Under Western Eyes’ 34). In Algeria, women participated actively in the Revolution as soldiers and as freedom fighters against French colonial rule alongside their male compatriots and were often veiled as a strategic way of hiding weapons. My point is that just as the supposed non-reciprocity of sexual pleasure, when structured by the active/passive binary in male homosexuality, needs to be more nuanced, as well as questioned as paradigmatic of all sexual relations between men in Arab Muslim societies, the veil is a polyvalent and highly nuanced symbol rather than carrying a singular or unitary meaning. While the veil can serve as a visible border to separate men and women spatially, it can, at the same time, potentially liberate and break down the public/private border so that women can claim the public sphere with impunity and without recognition by other men. There is also a subversive discourse around the veil, from the way heads nod towards other veiled women, to the ways in which the veil is continually moved and adjusted. Far from being purely an oppressive symbol, the veil can be put to strategic use as it was during the Algerian Revolution, but in slightly different, non-verbal, but still resistant, ways in the period that followed. Speaking to this, the late Algerian feminist, Assia Djebar, writes, ‘Et ces mêmes femmes, présentes, psalmodiant, chuchotant, penchant la tête vers l’une, vers l’autre, arrangeant leur voile par petits gestes secs, faisant crisser les plis du tissu sous leurs cuisses lourdes’ (Femmes d’Alger 154),7 while referencing, at the same time, both the jolting effects of the years since the Revolution, which did not bring about the liberation of women, and the surge of women’s suffocated cries despite their silenced, muzzled voices (154).8 Djebar seems to be suggesting that it still remains highly questionable as to whether in its aftermath the Algerian Revolution redefined women’s struggles within nationalist struggle as had been promised or anticipated. As Mildred Mortimer argues, in speaking of Djebar’s work, As French colonialism once sought to stifle voice and memory, denying the colonized the right to their own language and history, so Maghrebian patriarchy still attempts to restrict movement and vision, denying Algerian woman

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her right to circulate freely in public space where she may see and be seen. (‘Reappropriating the Gaze’ 213)

Postcolonial independence in Algeria, as in other postcolonial nation-states, affected women in different ways from men, and even though women in Algeria fought for national liberation and independence alongside men, the rise of religious fundamentalism after independence in the Maghreb viewed feminism and homosexuality suspiciously as unwelcome intrusions into traditional Arab Muslim cultures, what Joseph Massad refers to as a ‘chipping away’, with regard to homosexuality (Desiring Arabs 195), but would also apply to feminism. Feminist writing from the Maghreb, particularly from Algeria, as Susan Ireland notes, refers to the failure of cultural nationalism to establish a truly democratic government that upholds women’s rights, and this pinnacled in Algeria most pointedly through the passing of the Family Code as part of shari’a law in 1984 which reduced women to the status of minors, rather than as full individual citizens with rights, and defined them as guardians of tradition which had to be protected from modernisation and Western influence in the aftermath of colonialism (172–73). In this regard, while postcolonised nations develop and transition politically and economically, women are often restricted to the domestic sphere as preservers of national culture.9 Feminist literature from Algeria exemplifies and extends the kind of littérature de combat to which Fanon refers; even though Fanon does not specifically mention gender as a site of postcolonial struggle, feminist literature from the Maghreb is a literature of resistance and often makes use of the tropes of revolutionary struggle with which women identified as they fought and participated in the national struggle for independence from France (Ireland 176). And it is still a struggle that continues, to the extent that feminist struggles remain behind nationalist struggles; as feminist thinker, Hafsa Zinaï-Koudil, in Sans Voix, expresses most clearly, ‘la libération de la société passe nécessairement par la libération inconditionelle des femmes [the liberation of society necessarily involves the complete liberation of women]’ (Zinaï-Koudil 80; qtd. in and translated by Ireland 177). Literature addressing gender and sexual dissidence in the post-independent Maghreb and after can be connected to Fanon’s notion of a littérature de combat as a way of resisting not only the effects of colonisation but postcolonial nationalism to the extent that it often re-enacts forms of neo-colonialism insofar as nationalist elites have reinvented the imperialist gesture through strategies of homogenisation and exclusion. Feminist literature and literature addressing sexual dissidence (even if homosexuality is not the main theme in the immediate post-independence period) contest nationalist appeals to the preservation of an imagined spiritual domain of culture and, according to Jarrod Hayes, disrupt genealogies of origin which enable the articulation of a homogenous nation

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(Queer Nations 125). Taking further Benedict Anderson’s notion of nations as imagined political communities (6) to the extent that they are systems of social and cultural representation, Homi Bhabha exposes how postcolonial nationalisms can operate rhetorically as strategies of social reference and as apparatuses of power, arguing that the nation-state’s invention of national cohesion actually is made up of highly selective and repetitive cultural shreds and patches in order to invoke and sustain the signs of a national culture (‘DissemiNation’ 293–94). Such pedagogical strategies are mobilised by nationalist hegemony in an attempt to contain what it considers as menaces to its exercise and deployment of power. But the site of writing the nation, or producing the sign of the nation, is not only inscribed in the masterful image of ‘the people’ and their traditions but in the tension between the image of the people and the movement of its sign, that is, in the ambivalent movement between the hegemonic discourses of nationalist pedagogy and the variant performances of the narrative of the nation marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign as it circulates in culture, which allows the gaps, the differences, the interstitial spaces in between, the collapse of certainty, thus opening up possibilities for new narratives of ‘the people’ and their difference (Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’ 299–300), what I would read as a queer space captured in resistant feminist literature and texts addressing homosexuality in the post-independent Maghreb. In speaking of ‘scenes of gender’ in the Maghreb, Claudia Gronemann and Wilfried Pasquier point out that gender performance is considered not to be an effect of biological programming or a secondary effect of a metaphysical system of any kind but as being mainly the product of the symbolic structures of (re)signification (6)10 as Judith Butler has argued. These performative strategies disrupt the imagined homogeneity of the narrative of the nation, just as gender is (re)signified through the citation and embodiment of gender norms as gender is never a pure copy of those norms, but, like the embodiment and performance of the nation, is a shifting site of identification. In other words, then, neither the performance of the narrative of the nation nor the performance of gender repeats what is assumed to be originary and normative, but both are marked by a (queer) gap of difference through the movement and slippages of signifying structures, which I would like to explore with regard to the representation of gender and sexual dissidence in post-independence francophone literature in the Maghreb. Gender and sexual struggles remain important sites of decolonisation in the postcolonial world, and the Maghreb is no exception. There is a corpus of work coming from the Maghreb expressing the importance of disrupting the invented homogeneity of the nation, especially along the lines of rigid and prescribed gender norms and (hetero)sexual conformity. In the last chapter, I attempted to trace some of the historical moments in ghazal poetry of the

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early Ottoman Empire, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its representation of same-sex desire, as well as social and cultural negotiations at the time as to what extent sex between men was a punishable act. I then argued how the influence of French colonialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly through the discourse of Western medicine, under the institutional authority of the Algiers School, sought to establish heteronormativity as part of its imperial project and so-called civilising mission in the name of protecting public health and safety from the threat of ‘indigenous sodomites’. This meant, as Abdulhamit Arvas points out, that ‘by eradicating homoerotic friendship, affection, and its affective expression’, prevalent in early modern Ottoman culture, and by institutionalising marriage and the family, ‘heteronormativity replaced the conventional homoerotic tone in literary works’ (103). In the years immediately following independence from French colonial rule, sexual dissidence returns in literature from the Maghreb, as Jarrod Hayes has argued, as a way of challenging official versions of national history (Queer Nations 17), and as a way of marking new forms of meaning and strategies of identification that disrupt national cultural hegemony, even if homosexuality is not central to the texts concerned. Similarly, feminist work, especially that of the late Assia Djebar, has rejected the heterosexual male gaze and, as I have already intimated, has theorised the importance of gender struggles as part of the ongoing process of decolonisation, and Djebar’s work serves as an important precedent to contemporary queer writing from the Maghreb, which is why, in addition to constraints of space, I have chosen to focus on her feminist work in particular. Rachid Boudjedra’s novel La Répudiation was published in 1969, just seven years following the end of the Algerian Revolution and French colonial rule in Algeria. Much has been written about the representation of homosexuality in the novel as a way of resisting the effects of colonialism and postcolonial Algerian nationalism, both of which attempted to naturalise monogamous heterosexuality, repress homoeroticism and naturalise homosocial relations between men initially through the consolidation of imperial power held by French men under colonialism and then by male nationalist elites, and through the public separation of the sexes under Algerian and Islamic patriarchy. In this regard, the representation of homosexuality works as a kind of combat literature and, as Hayes notes, in Boudjedra’s novel, denaturalises official paradigms of national identity (Queer Nations 74) through the transgression of the taboo of homosexuality in Maghrebian societies particularly following colonial rule. Sexual struggles are thus part of the process of decolonisation through repudiating colonialist and nationalist ideologies of homosocial forms of power, as critiqued by Mohanty, and heteronormativity, imposed first by French colonialism and then by postindependence rulers.

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What is interesting about Boudjedra’s representation of male homosexuality in La Répudiation is that it challenges the border between so-called egalitarian homosexuality, often identified with the West, and gendered active/ passive homosexuality, given that Zahir, the brother of the narrator of the novel, does not assume only the passive sexual position in his sexual relations with other men. Zahir is the only indigenous Algerian character in the novel identified as homosexual, with the exception perhaps of the tavern owner whose establishment Zahir frequents near the docks of his small Algerian port town, and who is also identified as such: Le patron est gras et doux; c’est un homosexuel et, malgré ses airs efféminés, personne ne le soupçonne; c’est un peu le père de toute le monde. . . . C’est dans cette taverne que mon frère aîné vient boire quand il a le cafard (et il l’a continuellement). (Boudjedra 82)11

But Zahir’s sexuality is not reducible merely to same-sex sexual acts, as the narrator writes specifically that Zahir does not like women and prefers men, saying he is homosexual without actually uttering the word specifically to identify him: Zahir, lui, n’aimait pas les femmes. Il était amoureux de son professeur de physique, un juif aux yeux très bleus et très myopes qui venait souvent à la maison, malgré l’hostilité marquée de ma mère. Au début, je pensais qu’être homosexuel était quelque chose de distingué, car le juif était très beau, avait une voix douce et pleurait très facilement. (Boudjedra 103)12

This links Zahir more to a discursive sexual identity, that is, as being homosexual (almost by default, given the fact that Zahir does not like women), rather than reducing his homosexuality to a predefined, scripted sexual act structured by the gendered active/passive binary. As a result, the openness with which Zahir’s homosexuality is revealed and represented poses a threat to the social and political order of the post-independent nation-state which typically has eschewed homosexuality as an aberration. In addition, homosexuality is also represented as a foreign intrusion into an indigenous culture still trying to shake off the vestiges of empire through one of the objects of Zahir’s affections. His physics teacher, a Jewish man, is extremely handsome, but nonetheless a foreigner associated with contamination of the purity of the nation-state, not merely because of his Jewish presence in a Muslim country but, as Hayes argues, because of the possible infectiousness of his homosexuality as well (Queer Nations 82), so much so that Zahir’s mother has to clean the house thoroughly after the teacher leaves: ‘La mère, sitôt le professeur parti, aérait les chambres, lavait les verres dans lesquels le mécréant avait bu et récitait des formules incantatoires’ (Boudjedra 104).13

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In another scene, Zahir’s family witnesses Zahir having sex with another boy on the rooftop terrace, exposing the secret of homosexuality in a more public space, rather than keeping it confined to, and hidden in, the private sphere, therefore challenging both heteronormativity and the received tradition of Arab Muslim homosexuality as merely covert and highly gendered: ‘Lui que ma mère a surpris, un jour, dans une position scandaleuse, en compagnie d’un gamin du voisinage . . .’ (Boudjedra 210).14 The sexual act is further described in terms of Zahir’s body mounted on the back of the boy where the bodies become ‘emportés tous les deux dans un monstrueux va-etvient qui ébranlait leurs corps élancés, la tête ballottante, à la recherche d’un plaisir, somme toute, formel . . .’(211; emphasis added).15 This entire scene is placed in parentheses in Boudjedra’s text, which contains, in Hayes’s view, a kind of textual or narrative veiling similar to the sequestering of female bodies and female sexuality (Queer Nations 84), a link I shall discuss later in relation to the feminist work of Assia Djebar. I have italicised the word plaisir in French in the Boudjedra quotation above because it is erotic pleasure itself that seems to drive the sexual act mutually for both partners in the rooftop scene, rather than the sexual act being prescribed in advance by active/ passive roles as is the case when the narrator of the novel earlier recalls being fondled by another man in his childhood who forces him to touch his penis. For this reason, as Hayes points out, Zahir’s lovemaking on the rooftop seems to resemble an egalitarian form of homosexuality, and its unveiling is not a mere revelation but ‘the unveiling of a veiling where homosexuality can only be [otherwise] known as enigma, secret’ (Queer Nations 91; brackets added). Yet, at the same time, the trace of active/passive and pederastic homosexuality is not entirely erased either through the narrator’s recollection of his own earlier experience of same-sex relations of a different sort; Boudjedra is thus contesting the border between active/passive homosexuality (often associated with homosexuality in Arab Muslim cultures) and so-called egalitarian homosexuality (often associated with the West) as both forms of homoerotic expression exist in the Maghreb. Boudjedra, in defying social norms that demand that sexuality be confined to the private sphere, ‘unveils’ publicly both forms of homosexuality through the medium of literature as a form of resistance, that is, as a form of littérature de combat, responding to the repressive heteropatriarchal social order reinscribed after independence from colonial rule. Boudjedra challenges the relation between tradition and modernity in La Répudiation; instead of positioning active/passive and egalitarian homosexuality in oppositional terms and restricted to particular geopolitical spheres, the novel undermines the virgule separating these binary oppositions, in the same way, as Gilles Carjuzaa argues, francophone Algerian novelists like Boudjedra undermine binary relations between Islamists and secularists and between francophone and arabophone intellectuals in order

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to avoid entrapment in a one-dimensional mythical past and in a monolithic sense of tradition reconstructed in utopian terms in nationalist discourses (57). This involves a conscious repudiation of the effects of colonialism and post-independence nationalism in postcolonial Algeria without resorting to a mere mimicry of the West, given that so-called egalitarian homosexuality is not simply a by-product of the West but is recontextualised in its representation in newly independent Algeria in Boudjedra’s text as a form of decolonisation and resistance to heteronormative paradigms of national identity. In addition, Boudjedra’s veiling/unveiling of homosexuality in the novel, through the use of parentheses, as Hayes points out, suggests that it may not be all that parenthetical or marginal (Queer Nations 89) in either of its forms, even though official nationalist discourses prefer to keep homosexuality contained within the parenthetical margins of the nation-state. Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun also critiques official post-independence narratives of nation and national belonging, and, perhaps more so than Boudjedra, stages textually the contradictions and slippages between hegemonic nationalist pedagogies and the variant performances of the narrative of the nation by individuals and social groups, opening up new possibilities for difference through the representation of gender and sexual dissidence which challenges the homogeneity of the nationalist imaginary. Like Boudjedra, Ben Jelloun questions the borders erected between the public and the private, between the past and the present, but also, and perhaps more profoundly, between the expressed and the repressed. Laïla Ibnlfassi, in fact, credits Tahar Ben Jelloun for being ‘the Maghrebian writer considered most daring in approaching taboo themes such as sexuality and homosexuality’ (162) in his writing; however, since Ibnlfassi’s comment was published in 2001, I would revise this slightly to argue that Ben Jelloun was probably the most daring at the time in terms of addressing the taboo of homosexuality, as more recent writers, particularly the ones I shall discuss in the next chapters, have done this since that time and much more overtly, though they have emigrated from the Maghreb and have settled in France. In Ben Jelloun’s 1981 novel La Prière de l’absent (The Prayer for the Absent), the character of Sindibad recalls a homoerotic friendship with Jamal, a fellow student, while they were both students at Al Quaraouiyine University in Fès. We learn that Sindibad’s given name is Ahmad Suleiman and that he is an excellent student and begins to question established cultural traditions in Morocco. At the time they are students, Ahmad kisses Jamal in private: ‘Ahmad l’aimait avec la passion du secret et du silence’ (Ben Jelloun, La Prière 84),16 but is unable to declare his love for Jamal openly and they eventually become separated; Jamal’s father takes him to an undisclosed location as there is concern that Ahmad and Jamal’s passion will transgress social and community norms, and this despair becomes the source of Sindibad’s

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(Ahmad’s) troubled mind (Ibnlfassi 160–61).17 In order to make sense of what has happened to him through the loss of Jamal, Sindibad begins to write as a form of salvation from his torment (Ibnlfassi 161): ‘La peur de perdre la raison le hantait. Alors il s’était mis à écrire dans une chambre noire éclairée par une bougie. Tant qu’il écrivait, il se sentait en sécurité’ (Ben Jelloun, La Prière 79),18 though he does spend time in a psychiatric hospital. It is the memory of an erotic past with another male, according to Jarrod Hayes, that constitutes a liberation and a challenge to nationalist discourses of (hetero) sexual normativity that write the nation, as Sindibad discovers not a national identity but an alternative identity rooted in passion and same-sex love (Queer Nations 129–30). As Laïla Ibnlfassi observes, Sindibad’s suffering is accentuated by a sense of exclusion from a society that forces him to keep his desires secret (161) and confined to the private realm. Speaking specifically of Fassi society, Ben Jelloun refers to Fès as ‘une société qui cultivait ses préjugés et s’accrochait à ses privilèges’ as well as a ‘société arrogante’ (Ben Jelloun, La Prière, 84).19 Sindibad’s writing and the memory of samesex love is a way to resist profoundly entrenched cultural traditions as he tries to provide the self with some degree of autonomy (Ibnlfassi 161); thus, Ben Jelloun’s novel is a form of littérature de combat, of which I spoke earlier, operating as a site of struggle against the legacy of colonialism and against narrow forms of nationalism promulgated by nationalist elites in the aftermath of colonial rule, while the novel simultaneously reflects the plurality of the Maghreb and its history. Additionally, Sindibad’s memory of same-sex love does not remain hidden but keeps returning and cannot be contained; the relation between past and present, as well as between the public and the private, thus becomes blurred and marked by excess. The pressure of what has been repressed also affects the coherency of the narrative as it attempts to represent Sindibad’s love for Jamal through madness. Here, the form of the novel becomes intimately entangled with the textual content, given that the novel does not follow chronological order (Ibnlfassi 153) as the encroaching memory of the past disrupts its narrative structure, which foresees, to some extent, the autofictional writing of more contemporary queer francophone writers from the Maghreb, especially that of Nina Bouraoui. Speaking to what Sindibad is experiencing in recalling images and sensations of his past, which is analogous to the fragmented narrative structure, Ben Jelloun, in addressing Sindibad’s recurring memories of a homoerotic past, writes, Dans son cas, c’était un passé lointain, une partie de sa vie qu’il pensait avoir définitivement enterrée et oubliée qui revenait se présenter devant son regard, image par image, recréant des sensations étranges et des émotions plutôt

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pénibles provoquées par des situations dont le souvenir n’était pas totalement éteint. (La Prière 78)20

What happens in Sindibad’s mind is reflected in the disjointed, non-linear form of the novel’s plot, given that the received rules of narrative need to be revised and reworked in order to capture the excess of same-sex desire which cannot be contained either within the framework of linear narrative or in official narratives of the postcolonial nation-state, the latter of which Ben Jelloun refers to as ‘le lieu de la servitude de l’âme’ (La Prière 84), or the site of the captivity of the soul. Yet, the madness that Sindibad experiences becomes, according to Ibnlfassi, the vehicle, and layer of protection, through which the unspeakable taboo of homosexuality can be articulated as opposed to remaining silent (162–63) even though the word ‘homosexual’, unlike in Boudjedra’s La Répudiation, is not specifically mentioned at all in Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent. In one sense, the novel’s title Prayer for the Absent could be a requiem for an absent self, that is, ‘a search that results in accentuating the absence of selfhood in a society that does not permit the individual the truthfulness of being’ (Ibnlfassi 165), just as the text as signifier seems to defer the signified meaning, or just as any single performativity of gender never fuses completely with gender norms, or just as, according to Hayes (influenced by Bhabha), there will always be a gap of difference between the ideal standards of national identity proffered by nationalist pedagogy and the performativity of national identity, particularly by marginalised groups, such as sexual dissidents, which instantiates a necessary rewriting of the nation (Queer Nations 135) beyond what is officially prescribed. At the same time, any rewriting of the nation also generates new fictions of national belonging and creates simultaneously new sites of exclusion to the extent that such fictions are dependent upon reinforcing national and discursive borders and ignoring other instances of difference and excess that cannot be contained within the parameters of the nationalist imaginary. This is reflected in the narrative of La Prière de l’absent, given that Sindibad discovers something other in the self which can neither be contained nor expressed and, through madness, results in a self that is not coherent, just as the novel’s inscription of sexual otherness disrupts the narrative cohesion of the text, and more broadly the fictional heteronormative narrative of the postcolonial nation-state. Ben Jelloun’s work combats discourses of national belonging that are repressive, such as the relegation of homosexuality to the secretive realm of the private sphere; speaking of homosexuality directly in his book La plus haute des solitudes, he writes, ‘Au Maghreb, c’est un sujet tabou. On n’en parle pas. . . . On n’en discute pas vraiment, tout au plus on l’évoque pars des métaphores et des jeux de mots’ (73).21 Also exposing publicly, through literature, what is regarded as taboo, which functions as a deliberate critique

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of the remnants of imperial domination in postcolonial nationalism in the Maghreb, Ben Jelloun’s novel L’Enfant de sable (1985) and its sequel La Nuit sacrée (1987) cross and confuse the borders of gender as a way of interrogating biological sex as the source of gender, and as a means for exposing how material conditions and social norms narrowly construct gender roles within postcolonial nationalist imaginaries in the Maghreb. Both novels in the sequence tell the story of a character born as a girl who is raised as a boy and ‘becomes’ a woman again. But L’Enfant de sable is narrated by a storyteller and is told neither in a linear fashion nor with narrative resolution. A father decides, after his wife had given birth to seven daughters, to name his eighth child, born female, Ahmed, and to raise the child as a boy to become a man. Speaking of her masculine performativity, the daughter reflects, ‘Ma condition, non seulement je l’accepte et je la vis, mais je l’aime. . . . Elle me permet d’avoir les privilèges que je n’aurais jamais pu connaître. Elle m’ouvre des portes et j’aime cela. . . . ’(Ben Jelloun, La Nuit sacrée 50).22 Before his death, the father (re)names Ahmed ‘Zahra’, supposedly restoring his daughter’s ‘original’ gender and repressed femininity, symbolised by the daughter’s bound breasts, and Zahra then begins to live as a woman. On one level, the violent imposition of masculinity on to the body of the daughter when forced to live as Ahmed becomes emblematic of the colonised space, and serves allegorically, according to Mustapha Hamil, as a parable of the postcolonial nation-state, with the violent imposition of French language and culture on to the body and culture of the Moroccan subject (67). In a similar vein, Jarrod Hayes argues that La Nuit sacrée, where Ahmed lives as Zahra, reflects an attempt to search for the roots of gendered identity which parallels, in his view, a search for the origins of postcolonial national identity (Queer Nations 173). But Hayes argues further that the second novel is not a mere attempt to restore biology as the basis of gender, so that sex and gender are naturalised (Queer Nations 171) and thus (re)aligned as the matrix of heterosexuality demands once the secret of Ahmed’s/Zahra’s birth and upbringing is revealed,23 nor does the La Nuit sacrée provide narrative closure for the confusion of gender represented in the earlier L’Enfant de sable, such as when a woman asks Ahmed in the street, ‘Que caches-tu sous ta djellaba, un homme ou une femme . . .?’ (113) (‘What are you hiding under your jellaba, a man or a woman . . .?’ (Ben Jelloun, The Sand Child 84)), and Ahmed replies, ‘Je ne le sais pas moi-même’ (‘I myself don’t know’) (qtd. in Hayes, Queer Nations 166). Ahmed’s performativity of masculinity nonetheless still challenges any natural link between sex and gender and his/her subjectivity is still split when Ahmed becomes Zahra as a result of having crossed the gender binary, given that the possibility of any ‘return’ to a so-called natural state of gender is deferred. This is because when Zahra adopts a feminine identity, as Hamil notes, this pushes the masculine gender identity, performed as Ahmed,

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to the background of memory, but without ever erasing completely its trace; in this sense, one can only come to terms with the present through recognising the continued existence of the past (71). What is interesting is that Zahra was able to inhabit, albeit momentarily, a position of masculinity as Ahmed, thereby occupying a place of authority and privilege as noted in the earlier comment on his/her condition in the quotation above, while, at the same time, subverting the fixity of the gender binary. Moreover, by ‘becoming’ Zahra, Zahra inhabits both Ahmed and Zahra, given that Zahra can no longer return to an ‘original’ gender; both genders are always already embodied, and his/her gender remains irreducibly composite since Zahra remains suspended in the space between (or implicated within) two chains of signification and two temporalities – Ahmed and the past with Zahra and the present (Hamil 66–67). This site of temporal and gender fluidity displaces a full restoration of an ‘original’ gendered identity and calls attention to gender as a site of struggle as well as to the inscription of gender in power relations. Zahra’s enforced transgendering, as Hayes argues, expresses the power of men, in this case Zahra’s father, over women and their bodies (Queer Nations 180) while also pointing out that in Zahra’s removal of the mask that was Ahmed, Zahra loses status as a fully empowered citizen and must pay the price of withdrawing from the public stage of the nation and retreat to the domestic sphere, considering that Zahra’s first job is as a domestic servant, that is, as une domestique (Queer Nations 179). This calls to mind the roles of women under postcolonial nationalism as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, where women returned to their former domestic roles, to what Fanon had referenced as ‘complements’ to men after fighting bravely alongside their male compatriots during the Algerian Revolution, and is a stark reminder that any liberation experienced by Zahra through a restoration of a so-called original gender is flawed since that ‘liberation’ must simultaneously imply subordination to men and to hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, by having lived a previous life as a man and performing masculinity as a woman, by keeping the trace of a past life in retelling his/her story at the beginning of La Nuit sacrée, Zahra does not merely attempt to repossess what has been lost, as I have been arguing, but disrupts the authority of hegemonic masculinity within postcolonial nationalism. Not only has Zahra inhabited masculinity as Ahmed, but through the act of telling the story in the first person in the novel, Zahra’s present identity as a woman, who had lived previously as a man, is asserted, as one who has resisted not only an essentialising return to an ‘original’ gender (pre-Ahmed) but becomes symbolically caught, as a decentred subject, in the tension between the colonial past and the postcolonial present, a subject position which would similarly eschew essentialising appeals in postcolonial nationalist discourses for a precolonial subjectivity and authenticity (Hamil 71–72). As Zahra has performed

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both masculinity and femininity, having lived both as a man and as a woman, but never being quite fully either, the queer excess of his/her lived gender experience echoes the decentredness of postcolonial experience more generally to the extent that postcolonial nationalisms attempt to restore indigenous traditions and cultural references (often associated with femininity) that were suppressed under the weight of European imperial control, on the one hand, while remaining in an ambivalent relation with the West for the purposes of developing the institutions of the modern state (often coded as masculine), on the other, which, in both cases, subordinates women to hegemonic masculinity as the basis of state rule. But like Zahra, who cannot completely repress the masculinity lived as Ahmed, postcolonial nation-states can never become completely reducible to what they once were through attempting to resume a precolonial cultural authenticity, given the historical fact of the imposition of imperial rule (just as Zahra’s gender cannot be reducible simply to biological sex given the father’s violent imposition to raise his daughter as a boy eventually to ‘become’ a man), nor can postcolonial nation-states simply form a relationship of complete mimicry or congruence with Western nations (just as Ahmed performed masculinity, through the enforced crossing of gender, which is not completely congruent with hegemonic masculinity). One needs to consider the fact that Western nation-states have evolved historically out of a different set of cultural, material and ideological conditions influenced and contextualised by post-Enlightenment, liberal-rational thought that served as the basis for European sovereignty over its non-Western, colonised others. Zahra’s gender dissidence, in another respect, to the extent that it was enforced at an early age, can also represent the violence inflicted on the bodies of Arab women and nations by colonialist and nationalist or neo-colonialist systems of power (Hamil 74). At the same time, Zahra’s own reflections on his/her transgendered experience and perpetual suspension between the borders of gender, and the effects when no longer living as Ahmed, represent a refusal to settle neither on essentialised constructions of postcolonial identity based on the gender binary nor on gender identity constructions modelled on Western feminist politics. Gender and sexual dissidence work to refute fixed notions of national identity in the work of Boudjedra and Ben Jelloun discussed thus far, acting as sites of agency and resistance to postcolonial patriarchy in the aftermath of colonial power in the Maghreb. These counter-narratives of the nation extend the previous limits of littérature de combat articulated by Fanon through bringing gender and sexuality specifically into the question of decolonisation and disturbing further what Bhabha has described as the ‘ideological manoeuvres through which “imagined communities” are given essentialist identities’ (‘DissemiNation’ 300). And yet, there is something quite queer

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in Bhabha’s double-writing of the nation I mentioned earlier, that is, in the tension between the discourses of nationalist pedagogies and the variant performances of the nation. Queer theory, in its continual oscillation between normative ideologies and specific, historicised material practices, as I argue elsewhere, is a useful frame for understanding further the tension Bhabha describes to the extent that queer theory keeps difference at the foreground of inquiry, resists totalisation, and disturbs (hetero)normativity through disrupting totalising boundaries, addressing the jarring of meanings, and similar to Bhabha’s figure of dissemi-nation, queer theory exposes the disposition of knowledges and the distribution of practices that exist in relation to one another, thereby ‘erasing the harmonious totalities of culture’ and articulating ‘the difference between representations of social life without surmounting the space of incommensurable meanings and judgements that are produced within the process of transcultural negotiation’ (‘DissemiNation’ 312).24 Moreover, the representations of gender and sexual dissidence in the works discussed by Boudjedra and Ben Jelloun are not mimicries of LGBTQ identities in the West but are connected intimately with the effects of the overriding ideologies of postcolonial nationalisms in the period immediately following colonial rule in the Maghreb. Similarly addressing the relation between the past and present and between the public and private sphere, often through fragmented narrative, Assia Djebar’s feminist work addresses women’s struggles in Algeria’s transition from colonialism to independence, specifically looking at the effects of the Algerian Revolution on women’s lives. To reflect this in her actual writing, her seminal work Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980), as well as her subsequent text L’amour, la fantasia (1985),25 attempts to recover Algerian women’s sufferings and/as forms of resistance to colonial and postindependence historical narratives and to blur the generic borders between history and autobiography as strategies to interrupt and rewrite colonial as well as postcolonial history and attempts by Algerian nationalists to replace one history by another. Recognising the oppression of Algerian women through both French colonialism and Maghrebian patriarchy, heteromasculinist power under both regimes, as Zahia Salhi observes, ‘glorified manhood at the expense of sacrificing women’s place in [Algerian] history and society and severing their voices’ (64; brackets added). Assia Djebar was born in Cherchell, Algeria, in 1936; she was of Berber origin and educated in French when Algeria was still under colonial rule. As a result, she witnessed the latter part of French colonialism, the Algerian Revolution, and the post-revolutionary and postcolonial period that followed, and she wrote about these critical transitional periods as points of reference in terms of their effects on women’s lives. As Mary Ellen Wolf notes, Djebar tries to reconfigure the representation of Algerian women by re-engaging

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with colonial historical sources and postcolonial cultural practices to reveal the ways in which women are still made to serve competing patriarchal and nationalist agendas (26–27). Once again speaking of Fanon’s views on revolution and postcolonial nationalism, with references to his essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’ in his book A Dying Colonialism, Anne McClintock argues that women’s liberation is credited entirely to national liberation and it is only through nationalism that women ‘enter into history’. Prior to nationalism, women have no history, no resistance, no independent agency. . . . Feminist agency, then, is contained by and subordinated to national agency. (367)

Djebar therefore works to look at history again to rethink and rewrite the relationship between nationalist resistances to imperialism and its ongoing effects, with a specific focus on Algerian women’s struggles, through going into the historical archive in order to question masculinist assumptions and discourses about the history of the nation, and to inscribe, and therefore recuperate, the voices and struggles of ordinary Algerian women who played crucial roles in the resistance to colonialism, especially through their participation in the Algerian Revolution. As Hayes notes, Djebar envisions writing women into the nation in feminist ways (Queer Nations 196). Djebar accomplishes this through interspersing and interrupting the received historical archive with oral testimonies of surviving women in order to allow for alternative versions of the same historical events to emerge. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, or as it has now been translated, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1992), is named after Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting of 1834 based upon his permission to gain entrance in 1832 to the home and cloistered harem of an Algerian man employed by a French colonial official, a masculine gaze that is linked to the colonial conquest of an Islamic/oriental world (Mortimer, ‘Reappropriating the Gaze’ 215). This stolen glance by the painter, which occurred only two years following the French conquest of Algeria, serves as the catalyst for Djebar’s novel and becomes the controlling metaphor of the work, operating as a set of concentric circles and ripple effects, given that, as Mortimer argues, Algerian men, gradually more disenfranchised and dispossessed under colonial rule, strengthened their control of Algerian women (‘Reappropriating the Gaze’ 215–16). Part of this closing down of indigenous society, as referenced by Djebar in the following excerpt, has created further orientalising effects of mystery and exoticism by Western writers, film-makers and photographers; as Djebar writes, ‘Le regard orientalisant – avec ses interprètes militaires d’abord et ses photographes et cinéastes ensuite – tourne autour de cette société fermée, en soulignant davantage encore son « mystère féminin », pour occulter ainsi l’hostilité de toute une communauté algérienne en danger’

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(Femmes d’Alger 240).26 Challenging the dominating male gaze that insists upon women’s silence and invisibility, and referring to Algeria as a closed society in similar ways that invoke Ben Jelloun’s commentary on Moroccan society as arrogant and clinging to its entrenched prejudices in La Prière de l’absent, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement foregrounds the oral tradition of storytelling through what Djebar refers to in the work’s Overture as ‘un trajet d’écoute, de 1958 à . . . à aujourd’hui, septembre 2001’ (Femmes d’Alger 7),27 an approach which is deliberately different from the appropriative masculine gaze of colonial rule and Maghrebian patriarchy. The book consists of collected oral conversations by Algerian women which are ‘fragmentées, remémorées, reconstituées . . . transmises seulement par chaînes d’échos et de soupirs . . . mais toujours avec timbre féminin et lèvres proférant sous le masque’ (Femmes d’Alger 7).28 This implies not only the effects of women’s silenced voices, through echoes and sighs, but a recodification and rewriting of historical and personal experience through the emergence and mediation of strong female voices in order to disrupt the masculinist narration of colonial and post-independence history, an invocation of the Kristevan semiotic which operates in signifying practices as a transgression of the symbolic world of patriarchal language and culture, evident in the textual structure of the work which resists linear narrative.29 The fragmented bits and pieces of reconstituted and remembered conversations, spoken, but not written or recorded, often from those who served alongside their male combatants in the Algerian Revolution as warriors, as suicide bombers, as resistance fighters, similarly form a littérature de combat in the Fanonian sense given that post-independent Algeria did not honour its promise of emancipation for women. The women’s testimonies are thus forms of resistance to received historical accounts of Algeria’s colonial and postcolonial history and are an attempt to recuperate Algerian women’s lost voices. As Djebar writes through the character of Sarah, whom Clarisse Zimra, in the Afterword to the English translation of the book, describes as the authorial alter ego in the ‘Women of Algiers’ story (Zimra, Afterword 198), « Je ne vois pour les femmes arabes qu’un seul moyen de tout débloquer: parler, parler sans cesse d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, parler entre nous, dans tous les gynécées, les traditionnels et ceux des H.L.M. Parler entre nous et regarder. Regarder dehors, regarder hors des murs et des prisons! . . . La femme-regard et la femme-voix. . . . » (Femmes d’Alger 120)30

The active processes of speaking and looking, then, attempt to subvert the masculine voice of received, written history and culture and the male gaze that appropriates women as objects by positioning women in the narrative of the text as speaking subjects in dialogue with one another. Returning to

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Delacroix’s painting and his orientalising gaze upon the women in the harem, Mary Ellen Wolf argues that the central question of the work becomes how to connect the figures of the women in the material harem of the past with Algerian women in the period in which Djebar is writing through creating a language ‘out of so many tones of voice still suspended in the silences of yesterday’s seraglio’ (Wolf 29; Djebar, Women of Algiers 1),31 which also implies dismantling the border between past and present so that they can be examined relationally. Noting that two of the women in the Delacroix painting appear to be in conversation, Djebar points out that ‘their silence has not stopped reaching us’ (145),32 and that while there is no traditional seraglio now, those very similar masculine structures that confine and constrain women’s movements and voices still are at work to impose ‘the law of invisibility, the law of silence’ (151).33 In this sense, the veil, then, becomes a critical link and a metaphor for the confinement of women’s bodies and the silencing of their voices, as a kind of moving harem, on the one hand, but in recognising the polyvalent signification of the veil mentioned earlier, it can also be read as a potential site for feminist agency to the extent that the veil allows women to enter the public sphere, protected from the gaze of other men, but also unrecognisable by them. Speaking back to Delacroix’s stolen glance of the feminine space of the harem in the nineteenth century, Djebar speaks of veiled women as still sequestered but as potential thieves with their own stolen glances of public space, which is a threat to masculinity and patriarchal power: Enveloppant totalement le corps et les membres, il permet à celle qui le revêt et qui circule au-dehors sous son couvert, d’être à son tour voleuse possible dans l’espace masculin. . . . Mais aussi danger que le regard féminin, qui, libéré pour la circulation au-dehors, risque à tout instant de mettre à nu les autres regards du corps mobile. . . . Une femme – en mouvement, donc « nue » – qui regard, n’est-ce pas en outre une menace nouvelle à leur exclusivité scopique, à cette prérogative mâle? (Femmes d’Alger 230–32; emphasis added)34

So it is important not to read the veil only as a sign of women’s oppression and exclusion, as I have mentioned earlier in the context of my discussion of Mohanty, but also to recognise, as Jarrod Hayes points out, that ‘there is no natural body beneath the veil waiting to come out’ (Queer Nations 194), given that no woman can shed entirely the veil of cultural meaning, and the veil of language, both of which reveal and conceal as was similarly the case with Zahra’s body in Ben Jelloun’s novels, L’Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée, discussed previously. In this instance, then, what Djebar is trying to do is to rewrite the script of gender through rewriting older fictions (Queer Nations 194). Part of Djebar’s broader feminist project, then, is to look for

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the possibilities for the restoration of the conversation between women frozen in Delacroix’s painting (Women of Algiers 151)35 and to imagine the ways in which women would (re)write history differently and occupy public space through a different trajectory. The women’s narratives in Femmes d’Alger are necessarily told in bits and pieces, resisting final totalised coherence, as the purpose is to interrupt and rewrite the dominant record of the French colonial conquest of Algeria, Algeria’s struggles for independence and the post-revolutionary period. This is accomplished through what H. Adlai Murdoch refers to as oppositional strategies of fragmentation and displacement that subvert received, coherent narrative forms imposed by the coloniser on to the colonised (71–72) in order to chronicle and elaborate the struggles of postcolonised women still subjected to patriarchal domination and appropriation in the aftermath of colonialism. Even though Murdoch is speaking more to L’Amour, La fantasia, his remark is relevant to Femmes d’Alger, to the extent that L’Amour, La fantasia continues the work of Femmes d’Alger through the insertion of alternative, disruptive narratives which reveals the indistinctiveness, contradictions and confusions of historical narratives, and the recording of history and interpretations of the past as sites of struggle. According to Patricia Geesey, Djebar brings Algerian women to participate in the analysis of their relationship to the history of their country and to demonstrate that they have a stake in their country’s history and evolution with the clear stipulation that the specificity of postcolonial feminine subjectivity needs to be more clearly distinguished from representations of the generic decolonised subject (159–60). At the same time, the fragmented voices in the text and the pluralities of the postcolonial experiences of the women represented reveal ‘a subject pervaded with ambiguity, as the impossibility of speaking the self as “I” marks an identitystructure at odds with its own integrity’ (Murdoch 86). Thus, the narrative of Femmes d’Alger overall seems very much marked by a deferral of an unveiled natural body, just as there is a simultaneous deferral of naming an essential or unitary female postcolonial subject. Yet the in-between space of the inter-dit, women’s muffled, whispered or sometimes screamed defiance, according to Dominique Licops, in referencing specifically L’amour, la fantasia, but also at work in Femmes d’Alger, emerges into a feminine tradition and is also an interdiction, expressing itself between the lines imposed by colonial, and later by, nationalist patriarchal language (Licops 47). Similarly, the experimental or alternative style of the text reflects its content, as was the case in Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent discussed earlier, and which will be taken up and developed by later writers, such as Nina Bouraoui and others, in terms of the fragmentation of narrative. Femme d’Alger is a hybrid narrative framed by a preface and postface, which bracket the main body of the work, and, according to Richard Watts, attempt to carve

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out a discursive space removed from the implied masculine, metropolitan critical voice that traditionally acts as an appropriative gesture to restrict the meaning of the work or impose authority over it (and therefore over the voices of the women represented in the text). Rather, the preface, and especially the postface, suggest intertextual openings instead of reducing the women’s collected testimonies to singular acts in themselves or presenting an authoritative analysis of the short stories contained between the beginning and closing texts. The postface, in particular, Watts observes, is part of the overall text itself, but written in a different but complementary mode (148–49). At the same time, neither the postface nor the preface fills in the gaps or makes what is implicit in the stories explicit; rather, Djebar’s paratextual framings, the preface and postface, reveal a hesitation, a deferral or reticence, to say too much and therefore repeat the imperialist gesture (Watts 149). They imply a kind of textual bordering, the formation of a narrative enclosure within (containing the stories themselves), perhaps a metaphor for the seraglio, yet the diversity of the ‘echoes and sighs’ represented in fragmented voices cannot be contained fully within this paratextual framework, but exceed it, just as the voices of resistant Algerian women cannot be socially contained or constricted. As Jane Hiddleston argues, ‘The erasure of the subject is coupled with a proliferation of diverse traces and echoes’ (Out of Algeria 20) that cannot be captured in a singular, determinate or categorical way as this would once again subject Algerian women to another kind of confinement. For example, Leila, a recovering drug addict in a psychiatric hospital in the ‘Women of Algiers’ story, speaks inchoately about her memories of the Algerian Revolution, its violence and its violation of Algerian women: « Où êtes-vous les porteuses de bombes? Elles forment cortège, des grenades dans les paumes qui s’épanouissent en flammes, les faces illuminées de lueurs vertes . . . Où êtes-vous, les porteuses de feu, vous mes sœurs qui aurez dû libérer la ville. . . . On photographiait dans les rues vos corps dévêtus, vos bras vengeurs, devant les chars . . . On souffrait pour vos jambes écartelées pars les soldats violeurs ». (Femmes d’Alger 111)36

Leila’s account is told in fragments, in bits and pieces; the ellipses in the above quotation have not been added by me. Later when Sarah asks her to calm herself, and asks what good are words, Leila replies, ‘« Il me faut parler, Sarah! Ils ont honte de moi! Je me suis desséchée, je suis mon ombre d’autrefois . . . Peut-être parce que j’ai trop déclamé dans les tribunaux d’hier. . . »’ (Femmes d’Alger 112).37 Even the self is fragmented and disjointed here, a shadow of a former self, yet a space where past and present seem to intertwine, also reminiscent of Zahra’s memory of being Ahmed in Ben Jelloun’s La Nuit sacrée and Sindibad’s memory of being Ahmad in

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love with Jamal in La Prière de l’absent. Language is unable to encapsulate fully the experiences of women’s suffering in the Algerian struggle for independence, but, as Hiddleston argues, these experiences can only be captured by partial ‘fleeting traces of memories and anxieties from the past, but none of these add up to a coherent history’ (Out of Algeria 62). The fragmentation of the self is also evident in the story ‘The Woman Who Weeps’, addressing the physicality of a woman’s body as she reflects, ‘« Pars moments, je me dis: je ne sais pas où sont mes contours, comment est dessinée ma forme . . . »’ (Femmes d’Alger 126),38 which is similarly a comment, perhaps, on the textual body without definitive edges as Djebar’s text disrupts narrative and historical coherence and cannot be contained fully within the paratextual borders of the preface and postface. The polyphonic, multi-vocal passages of ‘The Dead Speak’ similarly disrupt any coherent narrative; the story of the ceremonial wake of the old woman is interrupted both by Aïcha’s thoughts and daydreams, her memories of the past, actual conversations and the narrator’s own commentary given in italics as subjective interludes where she punctuates and (re)positions herself in the text: ‘Moi, la voix anonyme qui accompagne les morts, la brume invisible qui suis de toutes les séparations . . .’ (Femmes d’Alger 201).39 There are both references to women’s ‘gagged mouths’ and ‘suffocating cries, fading as at dusk or in a vast, last lingering chord’ (Women of Algier 77),40 juxtaposed with the narrative voice in the interludes: Moi qui installe inexorablement une distance de plus en plus océane entre la plus vibrante des peines témoins et l’absence plombée qui chavire, moi qui . . . moi? . . . Moi, la lumière qui s’éteint tandis que la voix fissurée se suspend, dans l’impuissance d’être entendue ni par une oreille questionneuse ni même par quelques yeux aux aguets . . . (Femmes d’Alger 173–74)41

Another source of interruption and fragmentation is the insertion of autobiography in ‘The Dead Speak’ with Djebar’s memory of the death of her own grandmother triggered by the death of the old woman as told to Clarisse Zimra in an interview (Zimra 170–71). The text seems to be a gesturing towards a narrative coherence of women’s trauma and oppression, and towards a narrative voice, an authoritative ‘I’, that will bring cohesion and form to the women’s narratives. But there is a simultaneous enunciation, on the one hand, ‘Moi donc je suis la voix collective. . . . Moi, la voix qui chavire, qui coule de l’un à l’autre, qui dans un cœur en déroute soudain ruisselle de souvenirs, d’anciens chuchotements . . .’ (Femmes d’Alger 202–03),42 once again evoking the Kristevan semiotic, and a coinciding decentring, on the other hand, captured in the quotation above through the old whisperings, that defers the possibility of a single authoritative voice in the symbolic, discursive register.

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As Hiddleston argues, it seems as if Djebar is alluding to those aspects of women’s experiences that cannot simply be fixed in narrative; while there is a desire to uncover the oppression of generations of women, there is a simultaneous reluctance to reveal too much (Out of Algeria 67–68), reminiscent of the ongoing tension between the semiotic and symbolic in Kristeva’s theory of the signifying process. This discursive strategy is revealed, perhaps, in the very form of Djebar’s text – the indentations of text on the page, the italics, the disruption and hybridity of the narrative, the snares and suspensions, the textual excesses – which reveal women’s struggles to escape social, cultural and historical confinement through breaking out of textual confinement to a singular or univocal narrative. Along these lines, the scene of the hammam in the ‘Women of Algiers’ story is particularly significant; in this gender-exclusive space, Sarah speaks of ‘une pénombre de voix féminines’ (Femmes d’Alger 97).43 As Hiddleston points out, these feminine voices also consist of non-verbal modes of expression, closer to the rhythms and movements of the body (Out of Algeria 60), including sighs, whispers, whimpers and panting, once again, like the Kristevan semiotic, transgressing and disrupting the demands of rational symbolic articulation. Like other parts of Djebar’s text, the voices in the women’s hammam are polyphonic; Djebar describes ‘conversations ou monologues déroulés en mots doux, menus, usés, qui glissent avec l’eau, tandis qu’elles déposent ainsi leurs charges des jours, leurs lassitudes’ (Femmes d’Alger 94).44 Yet this homosocial space of the women’s hammam is not without its homoerotic potential free from the male gaze. Describing the women’s bodies, the focus of female gazes on female bodies, Djebar writes, La masseuse entrouvait les lèvres sur des dents en or qui luisaient; ses seins longs, traversés de veinules jusqu’à leur bout, pendaient. . . . S’arrêtant pour reprendre souffle, versant alors lentement une tasse d’eau chaude sur le dos nu bronzé, tandis que, sous elle, s’exhalaient des soupirs rauques. . . . Le couple des deux femmes installées sur la dalle, dominant les autres baigneuses, se renouait dans le rythme ahané, prenait forme étrange, arbre lent et balancé dont les racines plongeraient dans le ruissellement persistant de l’eau sur les dalles grises. (Femme d’Alger 92–93)45

The sensuality between women that Djebar describes in the hammam is not necessarily lesbian, if one were to define lesbian only in sexual or erotic terms. Jarrod Hayes argues that Adrienne Rich’s notion of the lesbian continuum may be of use here, given that it includes a range ‘of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman’ and can include ‘the sharing

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of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support’ (Rich 51), all of which occur inside the hammam in Femmes d’Alger and can be linked, on some level, to a broader feminine resistance to heteronormative social relations (Hayes, Queer Nations 210), given that, in this particular space, women derive sensual pleasure from one another, outside the realm of hetero-masculine activity, where desire is evoked through a feminine language with feminine symbols (such as the tree, water) but not specifically named as lesbian. The homosocial and homoerotic space of the women’s hammam is evoked in later works by gay men from the Maghreb as a significant reference point in shaping their desires for men through hearing the feminine language of this gender-exclusive space as children, as when a young boy is permitted to go to the women’s hammam with his mother or female relatives until about the age of seven. Postcolonial writers from the Maghreb continue to write in French as they did in the years following colonial rule. As Mildred Mortimer notes, Tunisian writer and critic Albert Memmi predicted in his 1964 work Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française that francophone writing in the Maghreb would be replaced by writing in Arabic as French writing would cease to be understood in local contexts (Mortimer, Afterword 305).46 Rather than the former colonial language disappearing as Memmi had predicted, French continues to be used in the present day by Maghrebian writers, especially when writing about such taboo subjects as gender and sexual dissidence, which, if written in Arabic, also a sacred language, could potentially offend some of the tenets of Islam. As Farida Abu-Haidar notes in citing Mortimer, Islamic culture is bound to the non-dire, that is, to the unspoken, and is prohibitive of personal disclosure, thus making expression easier in French than in Arabic (15).47 At the same time, French provides access to a wider reading audience and French publishing houses. However, it is important to note that the writers addressed here, as well the writers I will discuss in the chapters that follow, do not merely mimic European French but transform it, often through interjecting more apt Arabic or Berber words to describe local culture as opposed to translating these terms into French, or by reworking the word order of their sentences in French to resemble more closely Arabic syntax (Abu-Haidar 14). Djebar, for instance, often punctuates Femmes d’Alger with terms such as hazab (one who reads the Qur’an in the mosque), cheikh (to denote an elderly scholar) and taleb/ tolba (student(s) of the Qur’an). These discursive strategies, these translative moments, often have the effect of making French seem foreign to francophone readers outside of the Maghreb. Mortimer points out that writers in the Maghreb since independence continue to be concerned with questions of language and identity but work with the French language in ways that were inconceivable in the late colonial period (Afterword 306), and more contemporary writers, such

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as the ones I shall discuss in the chapters that follow, continue to use French in ways unlike European French. Moreover, reworking the language inherited from the coloniser, far from being a capitulation to the legacy of colonial rule, reflects an act of resistance to that legacy through what Michael Allan refers to as ‘the Arabic resonance’ (18) in francophone Maghrebian writing, particularly referring to that of Djebar. While Memmi noted that francophone Maghrebian writers are caught between two languages, and therefore caught between the culture of the former coloniser and that of the Maghreb, he remarks that ‘the two worlds symbolized and conveyed by the two tongues are in conflict; they are those of the colonizer and the colonized’ (Colonizer and Colonized 107). Yet, Djebar and the other writers I have considered in this chapter, while caught between French and Arabic, and the concomitant politics of identity implied in this struggle, nonetheless challenge the binary thinking Memmi sets up by writing across linguistic, ethnic and cultural borders, a form of deterritorialisation where the site of the lingering authority of French language and culture from the effects of colonial rule, and continued, yet reformulated, sites of national cultural hegemony in the Maghreb, particularly in the sphere of gender and sexuality, become challenged and subverted. The writers I have discussed in this chapter seem to embrace and critique both sites of authority; Françoise Lionnet, in glossing Martinican poet, novelist and theorist, Édouard Glissant, refers to the process of negotiating between languages and cultures as métissage, a braiding of cultural forms (racial, geopolitical and sexual) and languages through the revalorisation (and critique) of indigenous traditions and re-evaluations of Western concepts and ideas (4),48 indeed, a strategy of cultural hybridity acting as a kind of double-voicedness that pervades the writing and circulates nomadically in the spaces between language and cultures. Francophone writing from the Maghreb, then, performs the very struggle for identity and its splitting; as Murdoch notes, métissage, and the process of being caught in the space between two cultural worlds, including writing in the language of the former coloniser, involves the recuperation of the bicultural as ‘a means for subverting and rewriting the discursive framework of oppression from the very space of its own elaboration’ (89). Finally, in post-independence francophone writing from the Maghreb, gender and sexual dissidence serve as important sites of agency and resistance for those forms of struggle that cannot be contained under national cultural hegemony; they represent variant performances of the nation that confront and question harmonious totalities imagined through nationalist pedagogies while forming part of the process of decolonisation. It may seem questionable to categorise any one of the texts I have analysed in this chapter as a littérature de combat, or as queer per se, in what is a very small, but telling, sample of post-independence literature, but the texts nonetheless expose, challenge and critique the reproduction of gender and sexual norms that occurred in the

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aftermath of colonialism (and continues up to the present day) as part of the broader resistance to the effects of colonial and nationalist rule without mimicking Western feminism or Western sexual struggles. The contestation of borders between the public and private spheres, between genders or between the gendered borders of active and passive homosexuality, between the past and the present, and between languages disrupts not only prescribed gender and sexual norms as ways of being linked to normative citizenship, national belonging, and racial, ethnic and religious identity, but queer, to a large extent, the imagined homogeneity of the nation itself. The fragmentation of identities expressed through literary representation shape not only the content or meaning of the texts but are similarly supported by textual form through representations of same-sex desire in Boudjedra’s La Répudiation that appear to be contained parenthetically in the text (and in the margins of the larger society) but nonetheless exceed those textual and social borders. Similarly, in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent, the excess of sexual otherness, represented in Sindibad’s attempted repression of an earlier homoerotic past, and his ensuing madness, can neither be captured in linear narrative nor be relegated to the past, but disrupts the coherence of Sindibad’s narrative in the text as well as the fictional narrative of the presumed heteronormativity of the nation-state’s past. In Ben Jelloun’s novels L’Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée, Zahra’s enforced transgender experience from an early age through the father’s decision that his daughter be raised as a boy, Zahra’s resultant gender fluidity, and the correspondent lack of linearity in the former novel, and the overall lack of a narrative resolution of gender in the latter, expose and critique narrow constructions of gender within the newly independent nation-state, as well as exposing and critiquing the foreclosure of possibilities of a wider range of gender expressions in the Moroccan nationalist imaginary that do not align with the normative. Yet, the queer excess of Zahra’s position after having lived childhood and early adulthood as a male also provides no simple return to being a woman, with biology reinscribed as the origin of gender, which would leave Zahra subordinate to men, a position refused after having lived as Ahmed. But gender is invoked in the novel as a site of dissidence to set up a link between Zahra’s transgendered history, and the impossibility of a ‘return’ to a natural gender, and attempts by cultural nationalists to name and return to a precolonial, fantasised cultural authenticity to which there is also no return, given the violent imposition of imperial rule. Assia Djebar’s interspersing of Algerian women’s testimonies, including their echoes, sighs and whispers, along with the insertion of her own voice and memories, and the disruption of masculinist narratives of Algerian history through strategies of textual fragmentation, displacement and excess in defiance of received narrative forms, work textually as a way for Algerian women to break out of social, cultural and historical confinement. These

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works also point to the fact that there is a historical precedent of representing gender and sexual dissidence in francophone literature from the Maghreb as a political act even though these may be represented at times in what may appear to be oblique narrative strategies, multiple and overlapping narrative voices, and processes of veiling and unveiling in negotiating the borders between concealing and revealing, between the public and private spheres, and between the past and the present written in the twenty-five-year period following independence from colonial rule. NOTES 1. Morocco and Tunisia, unlike Algeria, were not colonies of France, but held the status of protectorates. Following the Agadir Crisis of 1911, whereby Germany and France, as imperial powers, expressed hostilities towards each other over political and economic influence in Morocco, especially after France put down a revolt in Fès through military intervention and Germany responded by sending a gunboat to the port of Agadir as a strategy to intimidate the French, the signing of the Treaty of Fès, with the support of the British, ceded Moroccan sovereignty to France with Morocco as its protectorate, which ended in 1956 following negotiations for independence in the Moroccan-French Agreement signed in Paris. Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881, just fifty-one years after French occupation and colonisation of its neighbour, Algeria. Tunisia’s status as protectorate lasted until 1956 following negotiations between France and the Tunisian (Neo)Destour (or Constitutional Liberal) Party, originally founded in 1920 then breaking from the Destour in 1934 with the explicit goal of liberating Tunisia from French imperial influence. Colonial power in Algeria concluded with the end of the Algerian Revolution or War of Independence and the signing of the Évian Accords in 1962. 2. Fanon also glosses over homosexuality as well in Black Skin, White Masks, writing in a footnote that he noticed no overt homosexuality in Martinique, but that he did observe what he described as ‘men dressed like women’ or ‘godmothers’, who otherwise led ‘normal sex lives’ and were gender normative (described as ‘he-men’), which he seems to correlate with what he describes as the possible absence of the Oedipal complex in the Antilles. Fanon also claims to have seen Martinican men who ‘became homosexuals’ in Europe, always taking the passive sexual role, but this, he argues, was not ‘neurotic homosexuality’, which he probably associates with (white) homosexuality more broadly, but ‘a means to a livelihood, as pimping is for others’ (180 n44). Fanon seems to recognise indigenous forms of gender and sexual dissidence in Martinique, but tends to normalise these in order to distinguish them from homosexuality in the West, and its attendant medicalisation, a view with which, as a psychiatrist at the time, he would have been familiar. There is also a normalisation and rationalisation of Martinican men who ‘became’ homosexual in Europe because of the need to make a living, as if their homosexuality were driven by social and economic circumstances and the effects of colonialism alone. Are these forms of indigenous gender and sexual

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dissidence simply masquerades? While Fanon does account for the difference of homosexuality in indigenous and postcolonial contexts, he seems also to rationalise it in order to rescue it from the pathologising tropes of homosexuality in Western medicine especially prevalent at the time of the book’s publication in 1952. 3. In elaborating on this last point linking gender to race and class, and specifically critiquing white, Western, middle-class feminism that does not address the construction of whiteness in relation to politicised gender consciousness, Mohanty remarks that ‘to define feminism purely in gendered terms assumes that our consciousness of being “women” has nothing to do with race, class, nation, or sexuality, just with gender. . . . Ideologies of womanhood’, she continues, ‘have as much to do with class and race as they have to do with sex’ (‘Cartographies of Struggle’ 55). I would add that ideologies of normative gender are always already implicated within ideologies of heteronormativity in addition to those pertaining to race, class and nation. 4. While the texts I have selected are by no means exhaustive, I merely wish to demonstrate a continuous, ongoing engagement with gender and sexual difference in literature from the Maghreb from the early Ottoman period, discussed in chapter 2, to the period following colonial independence in the current chapter through specific textual examples. This work is somewhat in contradistinction to later work starting in the mid-1990s when Maghrebian gay and lesbian writers became more focused directly and centrally on the politics of sexuality in their works as I discuss in the next three chapters. Jarrod Hayes has chronicled a far more detailed investigation of work from the post-independence period, including texts by Kateb Yacine and Leïla Sebbar in Queer Nations. 5. Trans. In general, it is in the francophone novel where one finds the most audacity in the contestation of the social order and in the transgression of taboos, especially of sexual norms. 6. Trans. ‘Active’ homosexuality and ‘passive’ homosexuality do not have the same symbolic significance in the Moroccan collective imaginary. The first is considered as a manifestation of virility in opposition to the second, which is experienced as a source of humiliation and degradation. 7. ‘And these same women, present, chanting, whispering, bending their head now to one then to another, rearranging their veil with crisp little motions, causing the folds of its cloth to rustle underneath their heavy thighs’ (Djebar, Women of Algiers 77). Generally, and unless otherwise noted, all translations of Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger into English are from the English edition Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. However, if I insert a quotation within a sentence, I may quote from the English edition to preserve grammatical sense and clarity in my own text, but I will put the original French in an endnote. 8. ‘Mais partout, durant toutes ces années qui chavirent bousculées par la guerre, meurtries, surgissent, derrière les bouches bâillonnées, les cris étouffés . . .’ (Femmes d’Alger 154). ‘But everywhere, from all these years that founder, years murdered under the jolts of war, behind the gagged mouths, surge the suffocated cries . . .’ (Djebar, Women of Algiers 77). 9. Ireland here is borrowing from Partha Chatterjee’s theory of postcolonial nationalism which must be distinguished from nationalism centred around wealth,

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industriousness, liberty and progress as these are products of post-Enlightenment thinking and are specific to Western societies that tend to apply them to modern politics in other parts of the world. Postcolonial nationalisms, according to Chatterjee, are often caught in the struggle between reaching the standards set by the West for progress and development in the material domain of society and culture, on the one hand, while simultaneously rejecting colonial (and later Western) influence so as to protect the distinctiveness of one’s spiritual culture, on the other (Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments 6), which women generally are charged with upholding and preserving from Western encroachment. 10. ‘La performance du genre n’est pas considérée comme l’effet d’une programmation biologique ou comme l’épiphénomène d’un système métaphysique de quel type que ce soit, mais comme étant surtout le produit des stratégies symboliques de (re)signification’ (Gronemann and Pasquier 6). 11. Trans. The tavern owner is fat and gentle; he is homosexual, and, despite his effeminate ways, no one suspects it; he is a bit like a father to everyone. . . . It is in this tavern that my elder brother comes to drink when he is feeling low (and he has this feeling all the time). 12. Trans. Zahir himself did not like women. He was in love with his physics teacher, a Jewish man with very blue eyes and very short-sighted, who came often to our house despite the obvious hostility of my mother. At first, I thought being homosexual was something refined, as the Jew was very handsome, had a gentle voice and cried very easily. 13. Trans. As soon as the teacher left, my mother aerated the rooms, washed the glasses from which the unbeliever had drunk and recited his incantations. 14. Trans. He whom my mother had seen in a shocking position in the company of a neighbourhood street-boy . . . 15. Trans. . . . carried away, both of them, in a monstrous back and forth which shook their slender bodies, heads tossed about, seeking, at the end of it all, a formal pleasure . . . 16. Trans. Ahmad loved him with the passion of secrecy and silence. 17. Ahmad becomes depressed and later takes on the identity of Sindibad, the legendary mariner from the Arabian nights tales, which, according to Ibnlfassi, creates a distance between him and his original identity (156), a queer gap, or slippage, that creates an absence. 18. Trans. The fear of losing his mind haunted him. So, he had taken to writing in a dark, candlelit room. As long as he was writing, he felt secure. 19. Trans. A society that cultivates its prejudices and clings to its privileges; an arrogant society. 20. Trans. In his case, it was a distant past, a part of his life, which he thought he had finally buried and forgotten, that came back and faced him, image by image, recreating strange sensations and rather painful feelings incited by the memory of situations which were not entirely extinguished. 21. Trans. In the Maghreb, it [homosexuality] is a taboo subject. We don’t talk about it. . . . We don’t really discuss it; at most, it is evoked metaphorically or through plays on words. Brackets added.

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22. Trans. Not only do I accept and live my condition, but I like it. . . . It allows me to have privileges which I never would have known. It opens doors for me, and I like that. . . . 23. I refer here to Judith Butler’s explanation of the heterosexual matrix, largely borrowed from Monique Wittig’s ‘heterosexual contract’ and Adrienne Rich’s notion of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, which, in Butler’s words, ‘characterize[s] a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality’ (Gender Trouble 194 n6). It is specifically the gender binary within this matrix with which the novels refuse to align when Ahmed becomes Zahra. 24. See also Spurlin, Imperialism within the Margins, 97–98. 25. In L’amour, la fantasia, Djebar intervenes textually, and much more prominently, in hegemonic historical narratives in order to think herself out of them and (re) imagine them differently through a deliberate act of writing as rereading, alongside her continuous punctuating of received renditions of Algerian history through her own interjection: ‘je m’imagine, moi’ (L’Amour, la fantasia 16). I will confine my discussion to Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement as I believe it is the more salient precursor to later queer writing in the Maghreb. As with the later work, Femmes d’Alger also addresses the intersections of colonialism, nationalism, and gender as Michael Allan notes in his essay on L’amour, la fantasia (6), and similarly disrupts, rather than capitulating to, the hegemony of French language and culture even though it is written in French. 26. ‘The orientalising look – first with its military interpreters and then with its photographers and filmmakers – turns in circles around this closed society, stressing its “feminine mystery” even more in order thus to hide the hostility of an entire Algerian community in danger’ (Djebar, Women of Algiers 146). 27. ‘A journey of listening, from 1958 to 1978’ (Women of Algiers 1), though the French 2002 edition of the original 1980 French edition would translate into English as ‘a journey of listening from 1958 to . . . to today, September 2001’. The ellipsis in the later French edition could imply that the journey of listening and feminist struggle continues and has been ongoing since 1958. 28. ‘Fragmented, remembered, reconstituted . . . transmitted only by chains of echoes and sighs . . . but always in feminine tones, uttered from lips beneath a mask’ (Women of Algiers 1). 29. Julia Kristeva, in refiguring in more feminist terms Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of language acquisition and psychic development through the imaginary and symbolic processes, notes that the semiotic phase is a precondition of the symbolic, which precedes the establishment of the sign, and is linked to pre-Oedipal primary processes and oral and anal bodily drives ‘oriented and structured around the mother’s body’ (95), while the symbolic is marked by the positing of objects that are both separate and signifiable, which the child acquires at the formative mirror and Oedipal stages as the basis for maternal separation and for the acquisition of language in terms of the child’s understanding of the gap between signifier and signified through the attribution

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of difference, and where desire becomes constitutive of language and the perpetual effect of all symbolic articulation. Yet the semiotic phase, the state of preverbal gesticulations and sounds that do not signify, but are connected to the relations between bodily drives and vocal modulations, can function within signifying practices as a way of disrupting or transgressing the symbolic, as ‘a “second” return of instinctual functioning within the symbolic, as a negativity introduced into the symbolic order and as the transgression of that order’ (118; emphasis added). This is the case with Algerian women’s echoes and sighs described in Djebar’s text. For further clarification of the Kristevan semiotic, see Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 89–136. 30. ‘“For Arabic women I see only one single way to unblock everything: talk, talk without stopping, about yesterday and today, talk among ourselves, in all the women’s quarters, the traditional ones as well as those in the housing projects. Talk among ourselves and look. Look outside, look outside the walls and the prisons! . . . The Woman as look and the Woman as voice. . . .”’ (Djebar, Women of Algiers 50). 31. ‘. . . pour tant d’accents encore suspendus dans les silences du sérail d’hier’ (Femmes d’Alger 8). 32. ‘. . . leur silence ne finit pas de nous parvenir’ (Femmes d’Alger 238). 33. ‘. . . loi de l’invisibilité, loi du silence’ (Femmes d’Alger 247). 34. ‘Since the veil completely covers the body and its extremities, it allows the one who wears it and who circulates outside underneath its cover, to be in turn a potential thief within the masculine space. . . . But there’s also the danger that the feminine glance, liberated to circulation outside, runs the risk at any moment of exposing the other glances of the moving body. . . . Is a woman – who moves around and therefore is “naked” – who looks, not also a new threat to their exclusive right to stare, to that male prerogative?’ (Women of Algiers 138–39; emphasis added). 35. ‘. . . comment chercher à restituer la conversation entre femmes, celle-là même que Delacroix gelait sur le tableau’ (Femmes d’Alger 247). 36. ‘“Where are you, you women who carry the bombs? They form a procession, in the palms of their hands grenades that blossom out in explosions of flames, faces illuminated by flashes of green. . . . Where are you, you fire carriers, you my sisters, who should have liberated the city. . . . In the streets they were taking pictures of your unclothed bodies, of your avenging arms in front of the tanks. . . . We suffered the pain of your legs torn apart by the rapist soldiers’” (Women of Algiers 44). 37. ‘“I’ve got to speak, Sarah! They are ashamed of me. I’ve dried up, I’m the shadow of my former self. . . . Perhaps because I’ve held forth too much in yesterday’s tribunals . . .’” (Women of Algiers 45). 38. ‘“Sometimes I say to myself: I don’t where the edges of my body are, what my shape looks like . . .”’ (Women of Algiers 55). 39. ‘I, the anonymous voice who accompanies the dead, the invisible fog that belongs to all separations . . .’ (Women of Algiers 114). 40. ‘les bouches bâillonnées, les cris étouffés, s’éteignant comme en un crépuscule ou un immense point d’orgue’ (Femmes d’Alger 154). 41. ‘I who inexorably establish a more and more oceanic distance between the most vibrant of the witness-bearing sorrows and the staggering sealed absence, I who

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. . . I? . . . I, the light that goes out while the cracked voice hangs suspended, in the helplessness of being heard neither by a questioning ear nor even by some watchful eye . . .’ (Women of Algiers 93). 42. ‘I, then, am the collective voice . . . I, the voice that goes spinning, that flows from one to the other, that suddenly brings the rustling of memories to a heart in turmoil, memories, old whisperings . . .’ (Women of Algiers 115–16). 43. ‘the semidarkness of the feminine voices’ (Women of Algiers 33). 44. ‘conversations or monologues unrolled in gentle, trifling, worn-out words that slid off with the water, while the women laid down their everyday burdens, their weariness’ (Women of Algiers 31). 45. ‘The masseuse opened her lips halfway, showing golden teeth that shimmered; her long, pendulous breasts were crisscrossed with little veins all the way to the tips. . . . Stopping to catch her breath, then slowly pouring a cup of hot water over the naked bronze back, while hoarse sighs were exhaled below her. . . . The couple formed by the two women on the marble slab high above the other bathers, became entwined again in panting rhythm, taking on a strange shape, that of a slow, wellbalanced tree whose roots plunged down into the persistent streaming of the water on the grey stone’ (Women of Algiers 30). 46. See Albert Memmi, Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1964), 19. 47. See Mildred Mortimer, ‘Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography.’ Research in African Literatures 28.2 (1997): 103. 48. See also Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 462–63. Glissant is speaking specifically of the processes of cultural creolisation and crosscultural negotiation in the Caribbean context. According to Lionnet, the word métissage has been translated as ‘creolisation’ by J. Michael Dash, who translated Glissant’s work in his book Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays by Édouard Glissant (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), which was published in the same year as Lionnet’s book. But Lionnet takes issue with the translation of métissage as such in all cases and retains the use of the original word in French when necessary to go beyond cultural hybridity and account for the specificity of racial context. See Lionnet 4 n6.

Chapter 4

New Translations of Masculinity and Same-Sex Desire through (Re)negotiating Gender/Sexual Borders Rachid O., Eyet-Chékib Djaziri and Abdellah Taïa

While francophone post-independence writers from the Maghreb wrote about gender and sexual dissidence as a form of revolutionary literature and resistance to the immediate effects of colonial power, particularly critiquing postcolonial nationalism for its neo-imperialist strategies of homogenisation and exclusion in the newly independent nation-states of the Maghreb, more recent queer francophone writing continues to be positioned at the intersections of postcolonialism, gender and sexuality. But unlike their predecessors, a new generation of francophone writers, to whom I would like to turn in this chapter, are too young to have experienced colonisation directly in comparison with the writers discussed in the previous chapter, yet the effects of European colonisation continue to linger in the Maghreb. This new group of writers position themselves as ‘queer’ in the public sphere of literary and cultural representation, though not in the Euroamerican sense of the word, and do not limit the theorisation of their gender and sexual dissidence within the borders of their Maghrebian homelands alone but extend this theorisation across geopolitical borders to the diasporic space between where they grew up in the Maghreb and their migration to Europe. In the contemporary global and post-national world, of course, transnational movements are no longer only geophysical but virtual and digital, and discourses and cultures of sexuality in particular are no longer limited to the geographical confines of particular nation-states. The francophone writings of Rachid O., Eyet-Chékib Djaziri and Abdellah Taïa, as well as those of Nina Bouraoui, whose work I consider in the next chapter, are, in different ways, ‘autobiographical avowals of homosexuality’ (Kramer, ‘Gay in North African Literature’ 144), as 119

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they destabilise essentialist notions of origins, blur categories of identity and genre, and instantiate new sites of transcultural negotiation and exchange, often through a radical recontextualisation of the language of the former coloniser in which they write. What should be apparent from this book thus far is that it would be reductive to conflate the meanings of same-sex desire and same-sex sexualities in the West with other parts of the world. In chapter 2, I examined some of the ambiguities, contradictions and negotiations surrounding liwāṭ and male desire for male adolescents or young men as expressed in literature of the early Ottoman Empire. One of the major differences of modern homosexuality in the Arab Muslim world that has been put forth in scholarship is that it signifies a form of ‘substitutive sexuality’, at least in official discourses. While it is important to recognise cultural difference(s) regarding homosexuality, the very notion of homosexuality as a form of substitution for heterosexual sexual relations, though referenced, is highly contested in the work of the writers I will discuss in this chapter. In speaking of homosexuality in Morocco, Fabio Corbisiero writes in the collection Être homosexuel au Maghreb: L’homosexualité islamique présente des formes et des modalités différentes de celle de l’Occident. Par exemple, elle ne se produit pas dans des formes concentrées et visible (comme dans les quartiers gays des villes européennes), mais prend la forme d’une « sexualité de substitution » qui se pratique dans tout lieu privé ou submergé. L’espace de l’homosexualité marocaine est donc un lieu symbolique, surtout privé (une maison, un hôtel, un riyad, un hammam . . .) ou clandestin et socialement inexistant comme un champ inculte. (Corbisiero 115–16)1

According, to Corbisiero, then, homosexuality is not as publicly visible in Morocco, similar to other parts of the Maghreb; moreover, he notes that Islam values the protection and preservation of the family, values the virtues of modesty and chastity before marriage and regards heterosexual marriage as foundational, while homosexuality, on the other hand, is regarded as reversing the natural order between the sexes and is criminalised in the penal code (116–17). But the term l’homosexualité islamique is problematic as the distinction being made is between countries and political landscapes where Islam largely influences the social presence of homosexuality in the public sphere as compared with its greater social visibility in the West, and it is debatable as to whether homosexuality in Arab Muslim societies is a form of substitutive sex for all men who practise it. Yet, it is true that homosexuality is specifically criminalised in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. In Morocco, Article 489 of the penal code, dated 26 November 1962, well after Morocco’s

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independence from being a French protectorate, makes homosexuality illegal as it is considered against the laws of nature; it is punishable by six months to three years in prison and a fine (El Achir 75). In Algeria, according to the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) Report of 2008, Article 338 of the penal code, dated 8 June 1966, criminalises homosexuality with a penalty of imprisonment from two months to two years and a fine, and a longer prison sentence of up to three years and a higher fine for the adult partner if the other partner is under the age of eighteen (Ottosson 7).2 In Tunisia, Article 230 of the penal code from 1913, from when Tunisia would have been a French protectorate, was modified in 1964 and criminalises homosexuality for both men and women, including between consenting adults and in private; prison sentences can be up to three years and anal testing has been used to try to convict gay men of having committed sodomy. Most interesting for Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring movement in 2011, Wahid Ferchichi, professor of public rights and president of the L’Association tunisienne de défense des libertés individuelles, has argued that the criminalisation of homosexuality is not justified as it contradicts Article 24 of Tunisia’s new constitution of 2014, which protects private life (187), and also contradicts Article 23 which protects human integrity and dignity (188). In addition, Ferchichi argues that a society aspiring to be modern, democratic and rational cannot penalise, but must respect, private sexual acts between consenting adults, and that the rule of law must include protections for sexual preference alongside race, gender and religious and political convictions (186). And, of course, sexual relations between men still occur in all three countries even though homosexuality is criminalised in the Maghreb. The historical development and literary representation of homoerotic desire between men in the early Ottoman Empire and the later influences of French colonialism and its mission civilisatrice that I discussed in chapter 2, and post-independence forms of resistance to neo-colonial forms of nationalism through representations of gender and sexual dissidence by francophone Maghrebian writers discussed in chapter 3, in addition to the current social and political context regarding the legal status of homosexuality in the Maghreb, point to the difference of same-sex sexual practices not always reducible to the binary structure of active/passive sexual relations between men but in a context different from that which constitutes understandings of homosexuality in the West or in other regions of the world. Yet, while one can argue for the difference of same-sex affective and erotic practices in the Maghreb, as compared, for example, to the West, it is equally important to bear in mind that there is no monolithic Maghrebian ‘type’, just as Claudia Gronemann reminds us, in speaking specifically of Maghrebian masculinities, for example, that there is no invariant Arab Muslim masculinity (Masculinités Maghrébines 1), given that gender involves the embodiment

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of gender norms, and their (re)negotiation, as they exist within particular discursive and material practices. The process of decolonisation, Gronemann continues, articulates the conflicts between coloniser and colonised through literature and other discursive and visual forms, such as film, and serves to make us aware of the traumas of colonial domination while calling into question the regime of masculine hegemony that informed it, so that we understand gender not as a stable entity or as reducible to a person but as inscribed by the variables of discursive practices established in relation to social interactions (Masculinités Maghrébines 2–3). Historically, it may seem that in the Maghreb, and in other parts of the Arab Muslim world, there is more of a preoccupation with sexual roles (active/passive) than with sexual identities (hetero/homo), given that the active role in sexual relations between men is often regarded as an indication of masculine virility, as I have discussed earlier, while the male who assumes the passive role is often reduced to a non-masculine, and thereby stigmatized, status. But as Gibson Ncube has pointed out, writers such as Abdellah Taïa and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri challenge hegemonic discourses of masculinity in their works, surpassing the biophysical as the basis for masculinity, and construct another form of masculinity that is not fixed, but in a process of becoming, marked by a refusal to reproduce heteropatriarchal norms that conflate masculinity with sexual and physical domination (‘Arab-Muslim Masculinity’ 3). Going against the received wisdom that Arab Muslim men can practise homosexuality without necessarily identifying as gay, Ncube also argues that writers such as Taïa and Rachid O., whose works I shall discuss in this chapter, struggle with issues of identity in their homelands which do not acknowledge the existence of homosexuality, thus opening up a space of dissidence to question hegemonic power structures and produce new perspectives on sexual identity and identity construction in general (Ncube, ‘Sexual/Textual Politics’ 482, 484), which, enables, in my view, a further theorisation of same-sex sexual relations between men in the Maghreb beyond mere substitutive sex and a purely gendered active/passive sexual relation. At the same time, in speaking of the work of Rachid O., who struggles to be both Muslim and gay, Jarrod Hayes argues that European stereotypes that conflate Muslims with religious fundamentalism, and Islam with the repression of sexual desires, are very much challenged (‘Return of the Homopast’ 520–21). Rather, as Eric Fassin points out in his preface to Être homosexuel au Maghreb, ‘l’identité se négocie, en faisant avec ces contraintes de la société d’où l’on vient autant que de celle où l’on va’ (14) (Trans. Identity is negotiated, made with the societal constraints from where one comes as much as by those to where one is going). These acts of negotiation of sexual identity are particularly salient since the writers I discuss have left their homelands in the Maghreb, and are now living in diaspora in France, and point not only to sexual differences in the Maghreb

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as more or less distinct from sexual identities and politics in the West but to gender and sexual differences within the Arab Muslim world, particularly those from the Maghreb, and to new sites of gender and sexual dissidence, what José Esteban Muñoz refers to as emergent identities-in-difference, so as not to collapse gender and sexual identities into distinct homogeneities. For Muñoz, identities-in-difference refers to strategies of identity formation and disidentification, that is, a form of identity performance that dispels myths of a unitary identity as a strategy for survival for minoritarian or subaltern subjects. Speaking specifically about strategies of disidentification, Muñoz writes, Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counter­ identification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance. (11–12; emphasis added)

I would argue that strategies of identity formation and disidentification, which, for Muñoz, have particular resonance for queers of colour in the U.S. context, operate slightly differently in the autofictional texts I discuss in this chapter through and against the dominant ideologies of nationalist and religious discourses, gender norms peculiar to the Maghreb and Arab Muslim societies, and heteronormativity, as well as through and against the politics of racial and immigration conditions in France, as the writers struggle to envision new social relations in both contexts. The literary texts themselves, I argue, constitute and perform a fragmentation and decentring of identity to reflect the subversion of sexual norms through the subversion of textual norms and the borders between literary genres. At the same time, this new work contests homosexuality in the Maghreb as a form of substitution for heterosexual relations and as restricted exclusively to the private sphere. Another important distinction with regard to the writers I discuss in this chapter is that they have left the Maghreb and are now living in France, yet their memories of their lives in their home countries still inform their writing. This movement across borders, that is, across the banks of the Mediterranean, creates a third or liminal space between a cherished, yet homophobic Maghreb and a France that is more liberal sexually but often hostile to migrant and racial difference. This deterritorialisation, and the subversion of dominant ideologies of sexual, national and ethnic normalisation in both geopolitical spaces,

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enables, according to Gibson Ncube, the creation of a site of intercultural permeability from which to negotiate and construct a queer identity (‘Repenser la construction transméditerranéenne’ 123–24). In this regard, the act of migration, the aller-retour of which Ncube speaks, the back and forth, both real and imaginary, between the European and North African shores of the Mediterranean (‘Repenser la construction transméditerranéenne’ 126), forms a connection between the destabilisation of the geopolitical borders between the Maghreb and France and a new articulation of sexual alterity. While Ncube uses Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘third space’ and cultural hybridity as articulated in The Location of Culture to argue for the destabilisation of the polarity Maghreb-France as a precondition for articulating a new site of sexual difference (‘Repenser la construction transméditerranéenne’ 124), I find Trinh T. Minh-ha’s theory of immigration in her essay ‘Other than Myself, My Other Self’ a much more apt comparison, given her notion of the history of migration as ‘one of instability, fluctuation, and discontinuity’ (31), which sets the ground more productively for the articulation and negotiation of gender and sexual dissidence, as a way of, in her words, ‘crossing boundaries and charting new ground in defiance of newly authorized or old canonical enclosures’, and, at the same time, never being ‘content with any stability of presence’ (34). In this sense, the ‘old canonical enclosures’ can refer to the historical fact of colonialism and its ongoing effects, while those that are ‘newly authorized’ can refer to recent neo-colonial hegemonic practices coming out of postcolonised nation-states, as well as to recent postcolonial conditions in Europe and especially those for newly arrived immigrants from North Africa in France. Speaking of being caught in the diasporic space in-between, Abdellah Taïa, for example, writes in Mon Maroc, ‘Je vis dans l’entre-deux: chacune des deux cultures me tire de son côté (il y a donc une bataille en moi, dans mon corps)’ (140; emphasis added); yet he also reflects on the connection of this l’entre-deux location to his struggle for sexual identity in Une mélancolie arabe: ‘J’allais décoller, voler, écrire autre chose, aimer au grand jour, dire mon amour, être ce qui ne se dit pas, n’existe pas’ (31–32; emphasis added).3 Refracted in another sense, beyond Bhabha’s notion of third space, and also more closely aligned with the queer work of the Maghrebian francophone writers I discuss in this chapter, Gayatri Gopinath has defined queer diaspora as challenging postcolonial narratives of the nation-state through normative tropes of family, home and community linked to heteropatriarchal authority so that the idea of a queer diaspora is therefore ‘a simultaneous critique of heterosexuality and the nation . . . while exploding the binary oppositions between nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homosexuality, original and copy’ (Impossible Desires 11; emphasis added). In this sense, both diaspora and migration are linked to queerness, to the extent that, ‘within heteronormative logic, the queer is seen as the debased and inadequate copy

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of the heterosexual, so too is diaspora within nationalist logic positioned as the queer Other of the nation, its inauthentic imitation’ (Gopinath 11). Yet queer diaspora also implies an act of what Denis Provencher refers to as transfiliation, that is, a moving across linguistic, cultural and temporal–spatial borders (47) while attempting to articulate and pioneer new forms of sexual difference and new spaces of belonging through drawing on traditions and families of cultural origin (in the Maghreb) and the experience of living in contemporary France (Provencher 15). This implies a transformation of cultural logic within hegemonic systems through strategies of (dis)identification both in the Maghreb and in France; yet, it is the back-and-forth movement, the aller-retour of which Ncube speaks, that creates, as Minh-ha stipulates, ‘a mode of dwelling’ (33) and, I would add, produces a site of struggle for the construction of identity, given that ‘the “original” home neither can be recaptured nor can its presence/absence be entirely banished in the “remade” home’ (Minh-ha 33). The rupture from the country of origin in the Maghreb, then, for Rachid O., Djaziri and Taïa is never a complete rupture but persists as part of the back-and-forth movement that mediates the negotiation of sexual alterity and disentangles and distinguishes it from the mimicry of sexual identities in the West as well as from fixed ideas in the Maghreb that confine male same-sex sexual practices to the private sphere and to binary active/passive roles. In other words, Maghrebian, queer diasporic identity is ‘never simply binary’ (Minh-ha 30) but productive of new knowledge and new identificatory sites around gender, sexuality and national belonging, which the works discussed in this chapter articulate and explore. RACHID O. Moroccan writer Rachid O. was born in Rabat in 1970, studied in Marrakech and then won a scholarship to study in Rome in 2000. He is seen by many critics as the first francophone Moroccan writer to treat homosexuality openly in his work while writing from the position of a gay writer himself, unlike the earlier generation of francophone writers from the Maghreb, discussed in the last chapter, who write of homosexuality as a form of resistance to varieties of neo-colonialism in the newly independent postcolonial nation-state. Rachid O. does, however, as Gibson Ncube notes, take on the pseudonym of Rachid O. perhaps not to reveal his full name because of the taboo subject matter of his work (‘Repenser la construction transméditerranéenne’ 124). Rachid O. and his contemporaries, then, represent a break with a past tradition of writing about homosexuality; unlike earlier writers, such as Rachid Boudjedra and others, the work of Rachid O. and the writers I discuss in this chapter rewrite the dominant narrative of masculinity achieved through an Oedipal separation

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from femininity and do not describe their childhood narratives as apprenticeships of masculinity, as Jarrod Hayes argues, but show that the reproduction of phallic masculinity works against an attempt to disrupt the reproduction of colonial hierarchies (‘Return of the Homopast’ 498). And at the same time, there is a textual fragmentation in the narratives of the texts I shall discuss, including those of Rachid O., though not as much as through Djebar’s interweaving of her own autobiography and the voices of other Algerian women alongside the history of French colonialism in Algeria, but through a return to childhood as lived in the country of origin – Morocco in the case of Rachid O. – from the perspective of having moved to Europe and living in France, fluctuating in the space of l’entre-deux, that is, in the space between two different cultural worlds. Indeed, Rachid O.’s primary œuvres, L’Enfant ébloui (1995), Plusieurs Vies (1996), Chocolat Chaud (1998) and Ce qui reste (2003), constitute, according to Gibson Ncube, a series of fragmented memoirs ‘of the protagonist-narrator’s attempt to assume his homosexuality in a Muslim society in Morocco’ (‘Arab-Muslim Masculinity’ 1), which relates somewhat to the fracturing and fragmentation of narrative in the work of Tahar Ben Jelloun and Assia Djebar discussed in the previous chapter. As mentioned earlier, one point of comparison between the three writers I discuss in this chapter is their identification with a feminine past and a refusal to take up hegemonic notions of masculinity. The refusal to separate from femininity not only reworks psychically the standard Oedipal narrative for attaining masculine gender identification but similarly reworks the nationalist narrative that insists on independence as the trope for leaving behind a feminised relationship with the imperial power and a move towards masculinity, indeed, a hypermasculinity, through independence. Rachid O., according to Jarrod Hayes, reworks this rite of passage in becoming a man through strengthening his relationship to femininity rather than through separating from it, a kind of disidentification that is neither a full acquiescence to phallic masculinity nor a complete rejection of masculinity altogether but a reconfiguration in new terms. Rachid O.’s early identification with women occurs primarily in the space of the women’s hammam, where he can remain until the typical age when the male child is expelled from it (‘Return of the Homopast’ 513), which is supposed to be an early turning point towards identification with masculinity for young boys. In the women’s hammam, Rachid O.’s narrator identifies with the desires of women towards men, which later shapes his own desire for men. In my discussion in the last chapter of Assia Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, I noted a particular narrative that takes place in the women’s hammam, which is not only a gender-exclusive space but one where the female gaze is focused on female bodies, in the absence of the male gaze, and I theorised the women’s hammam as a homosocial

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and possible homoerotic space, as well as a potential site of feminist resistance to masculinist, heteronormative social relations. Similar to Djebar, the women’s hammam is intertextually, or translatively, interwoven into Rachid O.’s work for slightly different, queer, purposes. His autofictional work L’Enfant ébloui (1995) dispels myths around the development of masculine gender identification through a separation from femininity, a Western model of gender normativity inherited from psychoanalytic thinking, which interrupts simultaneously the intertwining metaphor of the broader postcolonial narrative from the feminised colony, ideologically penetrated by the European coloniser, to the hypermasculinised postcolonial nation-state. A double-voicedness operates here, circulating nomadically in the cultural spaces between Africa and Europe. Rachid’s narrator writes of the memory of embracing femininity at a young age in Morocco when he is allowed to go to the women’s hammam with his mother or with female relatives until about the age of seven. He writes, ‘C’est un endroit, le hammam, où les femmes sont intimes et rigolent entre elles’ (L’Enfant ébloui 33).4 Rachid does not find this close intimacy when forced to go to the men’s hammam when he is a bit older and can no longer gain entrance into the women’s section. Standing at the actual partition at the entrance, indeed, at the material border, between the two hammams, and therefore at the very border of gender, Rachid O. recollects, À l’entrée du hammam, il y a deux portes collées, Hommes et Femmes. C’est un choc pour un enfant de ne plus entrer par la porte à côté où il a passé longtemps. Il n’y avait rien de spécial au hammam des hommes, c’était très différent du hammam des femmes, c’était humainement froid. Il n’y avait rien de chaud que la chaleur, la vapeur. . . . Quand ils [les hommes] se lavent les fesses ou le sexe, ils se cachent. . . . Pour moi, c’était une frustration de ne rien voir, car je voyais tout chez les femmes. (L’Enfant ébloui 34; brackets added)5

This rite of passage is painful for the narrator; as Khalid Zekri notes, the expulsion of the young boy from the women’s hammam is part of the process of becoming a man, with all of its connotations, including virility, vigour and sexual potency, where the young boy’s body, along with the ritual of circumcision, becomes subjugated to the law of the distinction between the genders and produces him as a masculine subject with supposedly a non-negotiable sexual identity (269–70),6 though Rachid O.’s texts stage the transgressions of these normative assumptions of masculine embodiment. At the same time, the women seem to know that Rachid is aware of their intimate discussions about men. The women try to speak in a coded language so that he cannot quite understand, which also relates more broadly to the use of French, the language of the former coloniser, being reworked as a form of

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resistance as it is associated with desire, and in Rachid O.’s case, with queerness. Rachid O. writes, Peu à peu, quand je grandissais, quand elles parlaient d’un homme elles en parlaient au féminin pour me tromper et moi j’étais content parce que je voyais bien que c’était un homme et qu’on me prenait pour un enfant. . . . Elles n’avaient pas de doubles vies, juste elles parelaient de leurs maris au féminin. . . . À un moment de la conversation, je comprenais qu’il y avait quelque chose – un mot – qui ne pouvait s’employer que pour un homme, . . . par exemple, quand elles décrivaient les mains d’une nana, je voyais bien que c’étaient celles d’un homme. (L’Enfant ébloui 26)7

Rachid’s narrator learns from a young age how to break the code and read in between the lines of, that is, to translate, the voices of his female relatives and other women. Sometimes when his aunt and his sister are with other women, such as neighbours, speaking about men, they admonish him and tell him to go away: J’étais tout le temps avec elles. Et avec les autres femmes, les voisines. J’étais toujours derrière, derrière ou devant mais je préférais derrière car quand elles étaient entre elles à parler des hommes et qu’elles s’apercevaient que j’étais là, elles disaient: « Qu’est-ce que tu fais là? Va jouer avec les garçons. » Je préférais être derrière, on ne se rendait pas compte de ma présence et je pouvais écouter tout. . . . Et quand elles parlaient d’hommes, elles me rappelaient que j’étais un garçon et pas une fille et que je ne devais pas être collé à elles. (L’Enfant ébloui 25)8

Most important, Rachid’s narrator seems attracted to the ways in which women in the gender-exclusive space of the hammam, and in the spaces when women are outside of the company of men, speak of men in a feminine language, which he comprehends and for which he acknowledges as shaping his desire for men later in life: ‘Je commençais à m’intéresser aux hommes comme elles s’y intéressaient’ (L’Enfant ébloui 31).9 Rachid O. inscribes and transforms the close intimacy of the women’s hammam, similar to Djebar, as well as his close relations with women in general, into his homoerotic desires for other men; his strengthened relationship with femininity, rather than a separation, thus opens up a new possible space for masculinity through homoerotic desire and unreads the traditional Oedipal association of masculine gender identification with a separation from femininity and with the fear of castration. His work also destabilises the imaginary political matrix that assigns each gender its identity and place in the social hierarchy, and this very questioning of the essence of what is understood as man as conflated with conventional masculine gender

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calls into question the naturalisation of heteronormative practices (Zekri 269, 271),10 including the cultural rituals of circumcision and expulsion from the women’s hammam, both of which are intended to fix masculine gender identity and/as heterosexual desire. Moreover, the past and present are blurred in Rachid O.’s work, similar to that of other writers I shall discuss in this chapter, and somewhat similar to Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent discussed in the previous chapter; Hayes notes in speaking specifically of Rachid O., ‘the narration of childhood leads into the story of homosexuality’, whereby ‘the past becomes a living part of the present’ (‘Return of the Homopast’ 515). At the same time, the past becomes reimagined through memory in order to understand and embody, in the more contemporary work, an emergent sexual alterity. The close relation of Rachid O.’s narrator to women is also manifest in his desire for his uncle as a young boy, a man who is not really his uncle, but whom Rachid describes as ‘mon faux oncle’ (31) in Plusieurs Vies, who appears more as a close friend of his father and who is ‘libre et sans famille’ (10), or free and without family. Rachid O.’s desire for his uncle is also connected to his close relations with other women as they talk about him: J’adorais mon oncle et j’adorais comme les femmes parlaient de lui, la plupart d’entre elles jouaient avec des mots pour le désirer, faisant des blagues parce qu’il était spécialement beau, qu’elles aimeraient bien l’épouser, avoir quelqu’un comme lui à la place. (Plusieurs Vies 10; emphasis added)11

Again, the emphasis is on a coded language, a playing with words, a feminine language expressing desire, though in heterosexual terms, which Rachid’s narrator understands. When he is in the men’s hammam with his brother and his friend, just after he had been expelled from the women’s hammam, they hear a noise through the wall in the women’s section of the hammam and his friends turn to Rachid: ‘Sur un ton moqueur, ils me demandent: « Alors, Rachid, qu’est-ce qui se passe maintenant? », parce que je connaissais encore tout récemment’ (L’Enfant ébloui 35).12 The fluidity with which Rachid O. is able to cross socially marked spaces of gender is also a translative space since he is able to translate the desires of women for men in order to understand and articulate his own desires; yet, this is never an exact translation given the difference of his gender, which thereby produces a slightly different significance for male desire directed towards men. This coded feminine language that describes desire for men also translates into the young Rachid’s desire for his uncle’s body in the private space of the male hammam when he is a bit older: Mais en fait c’était très beau de le regarder se laver, un spectacle que je pouvais regarder longtemps, très très longtemps, son corps grand et massif sur lequel il passait du temps à frotter, ou le savon blanc sur sa peau brune. . . . Et depuis

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ce jour-là, j’aime l’os qui dépasse au sommet de la raie des fesses, je ne sais pas comment il s’appelle, chez lui il était évident et ça m’impressionnait, un mélange de sentiments, ça me frappait et me choquait, c’était sensuel à la fois. (Plusieurs Vies 14)13

This scene almost seems a mirror image of the sensuality of homoeroticism described in the women’s hammam by Assia Djebar in her Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement; while there is nothing sexual happening in either hammam, the possibilities of same-sex desire are intimated as formative yet transgressive. In this sense, Rachid O.’s childhood becomes foundational to his later identity, as Khadija El Achir relates, for Rachid, ‘le passé est partie prenante du présent’ (70), that is, where the past is part of the present. In the last chapter, it was evident in the work of Boudjedra and Ben Jelloun that the active/passive sexual relationship was already breaking down and fracturing as paradigmatic for sexual relations between men in Arab Muslim contexts, and the binarism was even challenged in scholarship on earlier histories of homosexuality in the early Ottoman period as discussed in chapter 2. But the subversion and fracturing of this relationship becomes more prominent in contemporary writing as all of the male writers I describe in this chapter take up, and even celebrate, the passive sexual role and recode its derogatory status. With Rachid O., it is more about subverting traditional gendered roles and stereotypes of young Arab Muslim men sexually, politically and religiously. Rachid O. writes not only of his feminine identifications in his youth with female relatives and women but also of taking on the passive role in his sexual relationships with other men. For example, he describes his relationship with Antoine, a Frenchman living in Morocco, who is much older, as ‘un couple paternel ou amoureux’ (L’Enfant ébloui 93), that is, as a paternalistic or loving relationship, depending on the context. While living with Antoine while still an adolescent, the relationship is described at times as loving, such as when Antoine takes Rachid to school and picks him up afterwards and is affectionate with him after Rachid’s father strikes him physically for getting a low grade in mathematics at school. But the relation with Antoine can also be abusive. At one point, Rachid O. writes that he prefers that Antoine beat him rather than shout at him (‘J’aurais préféré qi’il me batte plutôt que de m’engueuler’ [L’Enfant ébloui 99]). Rachid does receive a beating with an electrical cord from Antoine because of his jealousy towards Antoine’s relationships with other boys: Quand il est rentré, je ne sais plus ce que j’avais fait, j’avais gueulé, Antoine a pris un vieux fil d’électricité qui traînant, m’a poussé dans la salle de bains et m’a frappé. J’étais content et pas content: s’il me frappe, c’est qu’il n’est plus doux avec moi . . . c’était normal dans un rapport de paternité . . . (L’Enfant ébloui 104)14

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While Rachid O. reduces this rather violent scene of corporal punishment to love, it does put him and Antoine on unequal footing; at the same time, as Khadija El Achir argues, this scene also takes on political meaning, given that Antoine is French, is older and takes the more dominant role in the relationship. The paternalism with which Rachid O. describes his relationship with Antoine evokes the colonial relationship as a common form of torture used by the French during the Algerian Revolution was to apply electricity to the genitals of their Algerian prisoners of war; at the same time, the relation between coloniser and colonised was one that was also paternalistic (33).15 Similar to the feminist work of Assia Djebar, the colonial relation remains imbricated within Rachid O’s autofictional narrative and cannot be escaped, a significant differentiation from Western narratives even if they describe affective and erotic relations between men that are age differentiated and marked with paternalism on the part of the older partner. In addition to challenging the significance of the active/passive binary and the stereotypes that Arab Muslim men, when they are in a sexual relationship with another man, take the active role as a sign of their masculinity and virility, or are stigmatized and regarded as degraded and weak in the passive role, Rachid O. also writes of an identity that embraces both his homosexuality and his religion as a Muslim rather than seeing these in oppositional terms. As Jarrod Hayes notes, Rachid O. participates in the recovery of a history neglected by official discourses while articulating a subjectivity that resists sexual and neo-colonial exclusion (‘Return of the Homopast’ 522–23). While it is true that Islam values the heterosexual family, the virtues of modesty, chastity before marriage and limiting sexual relations until marriage (Corbisiero 117), as with most religions, actual lived experience often takes a different turn. The fact that Rachid O. is both gay and Muslim resists Western stereotypes and fixed ideas about Islam being necessarily oppressive to Arab Muslims who identify as gay or lesbian given that Rachid O. proudly claims both subject positions. Another contradiction is Rachid’s bold assertion that he does not drink alcohol because he does not like it and not because his religion forbids it; but he maintains that he likes and eats pork regardless of Islamic dietetic prohibitions; when he moves to France, especially, he is confounded by the way people do not understand that, for him, it is simply a matter of personal taste. As Rachid O. explains, Je n’aime pas l’alcool mais j’aime manger du porc, c’était pour moi une question de goût et pas de religion. En France, la première chose qu’on me demande est: « Est-ce que tu bois de l’alcool? », quand on veut m’inviter pour prendre un verre je sens que les gens donnent plus d’importance à ce que je ne boive pas d’alcool parce que c’est une question de goût que parce que ma religion l‘interdit. Les gens, ici (en France), c’est très bizarre, quand je dis « Je n’aime pas l’alcool », ils sont soulagés, on dirait qu’ils préfèrent que je ne boive pas d’alcool par goût que par religion. (L’Enfant ébloui 127–28)16

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A Muslim man who eats pork and does not drink alcohol because he does not like it rather than because of religious doctrine, and a Muslim man who asserts a dissident sexuality, shattering beliefs about homosexuality as substitutive sex, along with a refusal to separate from a feminine past, and one who takes on the passive role in his sexual relationships with other men, represent multiple sites of disidentification and a reconfiguration of self as a strategy for survival while simultaneously decolonising desire. As El Achir writes, Rachid O. ‘articule une identité musulmane, qui embrasse au lieu de la marginaliser son homosexualité. Le fait d’incorporer l’homosexualité chez un sujet musulman permet de se décoloniser des clichés coloniaux’ (111).17 Finally, unlike his contemporaries, Rachid O. uses the pseudonym ‘O.’ instead of his actual surname for his work. On one level, it could be that he is hiding and does not want to risk making his own homosexuality fully public. But the narration of his work can also be a double play; Gibson Ncube theorises that the ‘je’ or ‘I’ of the first-person narration in Rachid O.’s work refers both to the author and to the narrator/protagonist, so that there is a fictive ‘je’, or the person in the past being written about, that is, the younger self, separate from the moment of enunciation in the writing, and the other ‘je’, who is the actual writer in the moment of writing. The relation of these two positions, Ncube continues, the oscillation between the protagonist and the writer, where one is, to some extent, a reflection of the other, demonstrates the instability of sexual identity (‘Le coming out’ 209), as this confusion is reflected not only in the content of the texts but through the narration of the autofictional text itself through its blending of autobiography and fiction. Rachid O.’s texts lean towards the uncertainty and ambiguity of sexual desire and sexual identity, a refusal to fix them in any definitive way, which is shaped by a further desire for decolonisation. Going further, Khadija El Achir analyses the ‘O’ in Rachid O.’s pseudonym by aligning it with zero, a space of neutrality, and a space not reducible to the circular symbols for male and female – thereby a third space beyond the traditional gender binary or that of hetero/homosexuality (120). One cannot reduce the pseudonym simply as a form of hiding or the author keeping his sexual life private since Rachid O. is one of the first writers from the Maghreb to write openly of his homosexuality and of being both queer and Muslim. Unlike the earlier generation of writers discussed in the previous chapter, homosexuality is not a subtext but explicitly the theme of his works. El Achir theorises that the ‘O’ used by the author refers to the circle in geometry as the symbol of perfection and as symbolic of the impossibility of separating knowledge of the self from knowledge of the other (120–21), perhaps a site of desubjectification, on the one hand, and a space of in-betweenness, on the other. Postcolonial cultural nationalisms often read homosexuality as a remnant of empire and as a form of imperial penetration that weakens the nation-state and is alien to its indigenous cultures. Rachid O., however, recuperates as memory

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and cultural struggle his refusal to separate from femininity as the psychic precursor to ‘proper’ masculine gender identification, and as a way of understanding his desire for men despite nationalist, cultural and religious prohibitions against it, making use of distinctively European discourses (e.g. psychoanalysis) blended with Maghrebian cultural practices (the hammam, segregation of the sexes) to do so, which functions as a significant site of decolonisation to the extent that phallic heteromasculinity is challenged. In addition to the breaking down of borders through cultural blending and hybridity, an aller-retour that functions as the precondition for the clear articulation of sexual alterity, there is also an inversion of hegemonic categories, particularly around masculinity and femininity, between active and passive homosexuality, and between past and present in Rachid O.’s texts. As El Achir writes of Rachid O.’s work, ‘Il y a des inversions des valeurs, des règles, des clichés, des rôles’ (37), that is, there are inversions of values, rules, clichés and roles, and, of course, inversion has been the dominant trope for understanding homosexuality as sexual inversion, but within a pathological history tied to the failure of meeting prescribed gender, and therefore, prescribed, sexual norms, since, as Judith Butler reminds us, sexuality has been regulated in Western culture, and in the history of Western medicine, I would add, ‘through the policing and the shaming of gender’ (Bodies that Matter 238). But in Rachid O.’s work, these inversions, these sites of disidentification, create possibilities for agency and resistance to the established social order, both in the Maghreb and in France, especially in the latter case with Rachid being Arab Muslim in a predominantly Catholic country when he lives in France and his defiance of stereotypes around his racial and religious differences, as opposed to his sexual difference. Rachid O.’s sense of agency seems to be better developed in Chocolat Chaud, in writing of desire for Noé, a young Frenchmen vacationing in Morocco, and his desire for France, where he also learns to accept who he is and see his ‘transgressions’ (sexual, gendered, religious, social) as transformative and liberating: ‘Du même coup, j’ai compris qu’il ne fallait pas être comme ceci ou comme cela, j’apprenais à connaître ma proper personne et à être davantage moi-même’ (71).18 Rachid’s declaration that he need not be like this or like that (comme ceci ou comme cela) implies a critique of the binaries around gender, active/passive homosexuality, secular and religious life, as well as a critique of the binary between Morocco and France, and thereby functions as an initial or primary catalyst towards decolonisation. EYET-CHÉKIB DJAZIRI Born in Tunis in 1957 to a French mother and Turkish-Tunisian father, EyetChékib Djaziri writes of his own sexual awakening in Tunisia through the

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character of Sofiène in his novels Un poisson sur la balançoire (1997) and the sequel Une promesse de douleur et de sang (1998). Unlike Rachid O., Djaziri does not use a pseudonym for any part of his name but writes in the first person through the protagonist-narrator of Sofiène. Even though there is not the closer identification between the author and/as protagonist and fictional narrator in the first person, Djaziri nonetheless writes openly and unapologetically about homosexuality in his work as his own story is inscribed in that of Sofiène’s. Both Djaziri and Rachid O. draw retrospectively upon their childhoods as feminine boys without repudiating their pasts as a way of understanding their pathway to queer difference; as with Rachid O., there is not a complete separation from femininity in the pathway towards masculinity for Djaziri, even though this leads to experiences of homophobia. And similar to Rachid O., a different type of masculinity is being articulated, one not obsessed with domination, sexual or otherwise. Through recalling his childhood through hindsight, Djaziri attempts to make sense of his difference as a feminine boy, which, according to Gibson Ncube, remains unarticulated, deferred and displaced during his childhood but remembered, decoded and reconstructed, that is, translated, from afar later as an adult through the act of writing (‘Troping Boyishness 149), which marks his works as autofictional, that is, as situated between the genres of autobiography and fiction. In his younger days, Sofiène did not have the discourse surrounding homosexuality and same-sex attraction and admits early on in Un poisson sur la balançoire that he had never before heard the word ‘homosexual’: – Frédéric, réponds-moi sincèrement. Tu aimes les femmes? Il fronça les sourcils. – Un peu, mais il faut reconnaître que j’ai une nette tendance homosexuelle. – Homosexuel? C’est quoi? – Tu ne sais pas ce qu’est un homosexuel? Tu es sérieux? – Je n’ai jamais entendu ce mot, je t’assure. Qu’est-ce que c’est? – Une personne attirée sexuellement par d’autres personnes du même sexe, hommes ou femmes. – Femme? Il y a des femmes aussi qui sont attirées par d’autres femmes? – Mais oui, mon bonhomme; pourquoi ça serait une exclusivité masculine? – Ainsi ça existe vraiment des hommes qui aiment d’autres hommes! Tu es sûr de ça? Et ça s’appelle des homosexuels? – Mais enfin, Sofiène, d’où sors-tu? Et que crois-tu qu’on ait fait l’autre jour? – Ce qu’on a fait l’autre jour, je l’ai déjà fait avec un autre garçon en Tunisie, mais je ne pense pas qu’il aime les hommes pour autant, ni qu’il soit homosexuel comme tu dis. (Djaziri, Un Poisson 42–43)19 On the one hand, this passage refers to Sofiène’s (and through him, Djaziri’s) coming to understand queer difference through becoming familiar with the

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term ‘homosexual’ as a specific identity category, albeit one that has its origins in Western culture, as he finds out about the meaning of the term ‘homosexual’ from his French lover, Frédéric, with whom he becomes acquainted when visiting his maternal grandparents in France. Yet, at the same time, Djaziri is referencing the difference of same-sex desire in Tunisia, and to some extent in Arab Muslim societies more broadly, in speaking of his sexual relations with other males, where, in the hegemonic imagination, at least, the active partner in same-sex sexual relations between men is not vilified and is often associated with male heterosexuality and virility rather than with degradation and feminisation as is typically the case with the passive sexual partner. This view inscribes Sofiène’s early understandings of sex between men in gendered terms; he does not see Khélil, with whom he has had a sexual relationship in Tunisia, as a homosexual but sees him as a ‘real’ man: Khélil était un vrai homme, prêt à assumer ce rôle et tout ce qu’il implique comme courage, force, virilité. Il s’était même battu pour moi. Il m’avait pris comme sa femme. C’est ça que j’aimais en lui. Il n’était pas attiré par les hommes. Il n’était pas homosexuel. (Un Poisson 43)20

The term homosexuel is further complicated in Sofiène’s encounter with Mohamed-Ali later in Un poisson sur la balançoire, whom Sofiène considers to be vulgar when he tells Sofiène that he could penetrate him from behind and easily persuade himself that Sofiène is a girl when a surprised Sofiène remarks that Mohamed-Ali is interested only in girls. Mohamed-Ali explains that the strict segregation of the sexes in Arab Muslim societies makes it difficult for young, virile men like himself to fulfil their desires since young women must remain virginal prior to marriage: – Oui, mais tu sais ce que c’est. Elles veulent arriver vierges au mariage. Elles allument comme des salopes et au moment de passer à l’acte, il n’y a plus personne. Mais moi je n’en peux plus. J’ai des désirs naturels qui ne demandent qu’à s’exprimer. Mon sang bouillonne dans mes veines, quant à mes couilles, je ne t’en parle pas! D’ailleurs, ça ne devrait pas te déplaire (Un poisson 156–57)21

In this regard, same-sex liaisons between men in the Maghreb are often rationalised through the social preservation of female virginity prior to marriage, thus revealing the multiple intersections (historical, religious, cultural) of gender constructions, patriarchal power and compulsory heterosexuality (Ncube, ‘Troping Boyishness’ 151–52). But it is important to recognise that these received readings of homosexuality, as substitutive sex, and of phallic masculinity rob women, as well as men who take sexually passive roles with other men, of sexual agency, and are referenced in Djaziri’s text as such but

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later resisted and challenged by his protagonist/fictional narrator. This returns us to Muñoz’s notion of emergent identities-in-difference, which depends on the negotiation of the very logic of phobic majoritarian public spheres and fantasies of normative citizenship, citing these, but neither assimilating nor wholly rejecting them, but finding a third, hybrid counter-public sphere as a strategy for survival (Muñoz 4), which Djaziri finds through the act of writing and in crossing gendered, sexual and geopolitical borders. Within the complicated terrain of confused gender borders, Sofiène negotiates not only what it means to be homosexual but his own crossings of the gender binary. Early on in Un poisson sur la balançoire, we learn that Sofiène is mistaken for a girl by an elderly aunt. His androgynous looks lead to further confusion as to Sofiène’s gender since he is often referred to as ‘Sofi’ for short, which sounds similar to the feminine name ‘Sophie’. As a matter of fact, when introduced to his Aunt Angèle by his grandparents, with whom he is visiting in Cherbourg, France, he is introduced as Sofi, but his aunt takes his name to be Sophie and refers to him in the feminine gender: La tante Angèle était très âgée et sûrement un peu gâteuse, car lorsque ma grand-mère me présenta, en criant, puisqu’elle était également sourde: – Sofi, le fils de Marie, notre petit-fils. Elle répondit: – Sophie? Qu’elle est jolie, elle ne ressemble pas à sa mère. Elle doit tenir de son père. Nous nous regardâmes avec mes grands-parents, gênés, et au lieu de faire comme si de rien n’était (après tout ça ne prêtait pas à conséquence), mon grandpère crut bon d’insister, toujours en hurlant à l’adresse de la sourde: – Non, tante Angèle, c’est un garçon. C’est Sofiène, mon petit-fils. – Ah! bon, approche, ma petite. Elle est vraiment très belle, et si grande! Mais quel âge a-t-elle? Ma grand-mère prit le relais pour répondre: – Quinze ans, en vacances avec nous pour un mois, se repose bien, profite du bon air de la mer et mange comme quatre. . . . Ma grand-mère n’osait plus dire, ni il ni elle en parlant de moi. (Un poisson 39–40)22

While Sofiène’s deaf and slightly senile aunt, the ensuing confusion of Sofiène’s gender by his aunt, and the grandparents’ efforts to convince her otherwise, can be read as amusing, it is also part of Djaziri’s claiming, similar to Rachid O., of a feminine past that resists the standard separation from femininity as crucial to full-fledged masculine identification (after all, the mistaken gender was of no consequence as stated by Sofiène parenthetically in the quotation above). Rather, a pattern emerges in the novel of not only trying to understand

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homosexuality and same-sex desire but gender, as Djaziri comes to understand gradually, through the act of writing and through memory, that the gender binary is insufficient for constructing identity. Thus, the gender binary is both simultaneously cited and resisted and enables a new (re)coding of masculinity without the repudiation of femininity as a precursor to masculine identification, and is simultaneously a site of disidentification. Even the grandmother reworks language to accommodate the hybrid space Sofiène occupies between binary structures of gender through her removal of gendered pronouns (or, indeed, any pronouns) in her last exchange with the aunt. As Ncube notes, Djaziri’s protagonist flows between the borders of masculinity and femininity (‘Le coming out’ 211), occupying the space of l’entre-deux. Sofiène’s sense of gender difference and gender dissidence is addressed on the very first pages of Un poisson sur la balançoire, where he wonders what he would have given to have been born a girl.23 A few lines down, he speaks of the development of his voice as ‘La voix féminine, qui s’envolait de ma gorge en notes cristallines . . .’ (6).24 But soon this childlike fascination with the ambiguity of his gender wears off in the broader social terrain. Gender confusion occurs later in the novel when Sofiène meets two boys on a street corner who notice him and say rather mockingly through the use of the French word ce, ‘Regard ce qui arrive! C’est un garçon ou c’est une fille?’ (30; emphasis added).25 Sofiène then reflects on this to himself: Je fis comme si je n’avais rien entendu, le regard fixé sur un point imaginaire devant moi. . . . Ce qui revenait à dire que je n’étais ni un garçon, ni une fille. En fait, je n’étais rien du tout. (Un poisson 30)26

‘Rien du tout’ or ‘nothing at all’ does not mean that Sofiène is nothing or non-existent but that there is a void in the available discursive matrices available to name his gender and his lived experience. Similar to Rachid O.’s desire for the naked body of his so-called uncle, Djaziri also writes of Sofiène’s sexual awakening and his attraction to other boys as he watches boys undress in the changing rooms before and after sports events at school: Le déshabillage de tous ces garçons dans les vestiaires était un véritable spectacle. Je regardai plus particulièrement Abdelwahab avec son corps mince, sombre, et ce filet de poils qui partait du nombril pour disparaître dans le slip. . . . J’étais très excité de le découvrir ainsi. (Un poisson 11)27

On the pretence of introducing Abdelwahab to a fictional sister who does not exist, Sofiène invites Abdelwahab to his house after school, where they exchange ‘un longue pratique du poisson’ (Un poisson 12), or a long practice of kissing, poisson (or ‘fish’ in English) being a code word for kissing

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between men to disguise its forbidden nature. This recalls the similar (re)coding of language in Rachid O. regarding the language used by the women in the hammam in speaking of their desires for men, which appears to reinforce heteronormativity, but which is then taken up and recoded, that is, translated, for queer purposes. Sofiène also takes the passive position with his Tunisian lover, Khélil, accepting anal penetration from him and taking delight, according to Ncube, in what Tunisians would classify as the passive and more contemptuous role (‘Arab-Muslim Masculinity’ 3). On the beach where they had sex, Sofiène tells Khélil he desires him and wants him to penetrate him, also remarking on the size of Khélil’s penis and how penetration was painful: – J’ai envie de toi. J’aimerais que te me prennes encore. . . . Le sexe de Khélil m’avais paru énorme lorsqu’il l’avait introduit en moi. J’avais eu l’impression qu’il me déchirait. . . . Pourtant, je ne m’étais pas plaint, préférant mordre l’oreiller et subir cette première pénétration dans l’entièreté de son déroulement. (Un poisson 29–30)28

One later learns that Sofiène’s thoughts of submission to Khélil also excite him, knowing that he is giving pleasure to his lover, revealing that when Khélil is about to ejaculate inside him, he masturbates so that he can also participate in their mutual pleasure. Sofiène comments that ‘l’intensité d’un tel plaisir, nouveau pour moi, où la douleur était extase, fit la différence avec la première fois’ (Un poisson 35).29 This act of anal penetration as pleasure represents metaphorically a breaking point, a queer rupture, for Sofiène as he realizes he no longer has to worry about changing his sex (from his earlier worry about what he would have given to have been born a girl) in order to desire a man. Djaziri is writing about breaking out of the received, heteropatriarchal codes of femininity and passive homosexuality as signs of emasculation and stigma in Sofiène’s affective and erotic relations with Khélil. The highly gendered roles of active/passive homosexuality, an embodiment and performance of social hierarchies, often deemed historically paradigmatic of sexual relations between Arab Muslim men in indigenous contexts, though reductively so, seem very much inscribed in Sofiène’s early relations with other boys and are also inscribed textually. This is particularly evident when Sofiène receives a severe beating from his father with a cravache (riding crop) who, upon returning home, finds Sofiène in bed in the dark with Khélil just after they have had sex: Nous étions lascivement allongés sur mon lit dans le noir. Nous venions de faire l’amour et, comme à chaque fois, nous prolongions cet instant magique par des caresses et des mots doux. C’est le bruit de la porte de la véranda qui nous fit sursauter. (Un poisson 63)30

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After several times demanding to know what the boys were doing in the dark and in their underwear, which they had managed to put on before Sofiène’s father entered the room and turned on the light, Sofiène’s father demands to know, during the beating, who played the role of the woman (64–65),31 obviously worried who the passive partner was in the sexual encounter (and if it was his son), as it is traditionally associated with stigmatisation. Later, after admitting he felt badly about beating his son, Sofiène’s father asks for his forgiveness, but worries that Sofiène is different and has put up a barrier between them: – Je te demande pardon. . . . Je ne sais pas ce qui m’a pris. J’étais hors de moi, peut-être l’idée que quelqu’un puisse te toucher. Je ne sais pas! Tu es tellement différent de ton frère. . . . Je ne te comprends pas toujours. Tu es secret. . . . Je suis là pour t’aider. Je t’aime, tu sais, ajouta-t-il après une brève pause. Mais tu a dressé une telle barrière entre nous. (Un poisson 66)32

The father claims that a border seems to have been erected between father and son, marked by a different rite of passage to the attainment of masculine gender, and as the norm is cited and enacted through recourse to corporal violence, which the father claims could not be helped or explained, this is often precisely the very justification, through the phallic masculinity represented by the father, for recourse to violence. Yet, the very border of which the father speaks is also reworked, recoded, translated and queered for new purposes, as Djaziri, through Sofiène, later writes, Il est vrai que les mentalités ici sont ainsi faites que celui qui a le rôle actif ne perd rien de sa virilité et peut même raconter ses exploits, il n’en sera qu’applaudi, encouragé. L’homme qui aura eu le rôle passif se verra, lui, traité de pédé et sera méprisé. D’où ma surprise de constater qu’une interversion des rôles existait sous d’autres cieux, avec Frédéric par exemple. (Un poisson 70)33

There is another rupture here, a disidentification, an intimation towards another kind of sexual relationship between men with an interchange of sexual roles not prescribed in advance through binary taxonomies of gender. While a Frenchmen, Frédéric, gives a name to Sofiène’s felt difference and desire in the present, a language which was not there in Sofiène’s (and quite possibly the author’s) past, thereby, as Andrea Duranti notes, opening up the possibility of an identity he had lived, but could not yet name or define (85), Sofiène eventually experiences a more non-hierarchical, more egalitarian, relationship with Kérim, though it is questionable as to whether his relationship with Frédéric can be read as egalitarian given their age differences, the fact that Frédéric is a product of the former coloniser’s culture, and given the history of the sexual exploitation of young Arab boys by Western gay male writers, especially from the late nineteenth

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century through the 1960s, though Frédéric does play an important transitional role in Sofiène’s sexual awakening. But more significantly, there are imaginative and actual crossings of borders in the work, between France and Tunisia (given that Djaziri’s mother is French and his father Tunisian and that he had learned to oscillate between both cultural worlds, having lived in both Tunisia and France), between masculinity and femininity, between active/passive and egalitarian homosexuality, between self and other, between past and present, as well as locations in the liminal spaces between these binary oppositions where agency and resistance reside in the struggle to (re)name one’s felt relation to the self and to the world. The oscillations between the cultural contexts on opposite shores of the Mediterranean are evident in Sofiène’s further experiences in France. In Une promesse de douleur et de sang, Sofiène brings up the code word poisson in relation to a male friend, Sébastien, at school to whom he is attracted. In his French class, students are studying Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire, and Sofiène works as Sébastien’s partner in order to perform a scene from the play. While rehearsing a scene, Sofiène observes Sébastien as he is reciting his lines from the play while homoerotically describing his desire for Sébastien and his body, and then he kisses him: Je n’écoute plus les paroles qu’il prononce. Seule sa voix résonne à mes oreilles tandis que mon regard s’attache à ses lèvres qui remuent. Il a retiré son pull. Le chauffage central dégage une chaleur élevée et les deux premiers boutons de sa chemise sont défaits. J’observe sa peau, blanche et fine. . . . Mes yeux remontent de nouveau vers ses lèvres au moment où, d’un mouvement de la langue, il les humidifie. Mon soudain silence l’intrigue. Il lève les yeux du livret et dit: – Qu’y a-t-il? Tu ne continues pas? Pourquoi me regardes-tu ainsi? Sans réfléchir, n’y tenant plus, je réponds: – Donne-moi un poisson! – Un quoi? – Un poisson, je répète patiemment comme si je m’adresse à un enfant ou à quelqu’un qui ne parlerait pas ma langue. – Comment ça, un poisson? réplique-t-il ahuri. – Comme ça! dis-je, en approchant mon visage, n’arrêtant mes lèvres qu’aux abords des siennes. (Djaziri, Une promesse 14–15)34

There seems to be a space of dissonance given Sofiène’s remark that he feels like he is speaking either to a child or to a foreigner who does not speak French, because Sébastien, a native French speaker, does not share the cultural code that aligns the French word for fish (poisson) with a secret,

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transgressive kiss between men as it is understood in the Tunisian context among Sofiène’s compatriots. But if we accept that translation is never a straightforward, linear operation of simple substitution or equivalence but an ongoing form of cross-cultural negotiation, new spaces are opened up for the renegotiation of dissident sexualities reducible neither to Western understandings of sexual identities nor to simplistic reductions of active and passive homosexuality, including Joseph Massad’s rather static embrace of non-identitarian, or even perfunctory, sexual bonds between Arab Muslim men.35 Here, the French term poisson cannot simply be translated as fish since the term is operating as a form of resistance to the social surveillance and social prohibitions of expressed homoerotic desire between men in Djaziri’s homeland, and this particular use of poisson makes no sense to Sébastien. Rather, understanding poissons as kisses exposes translation as a multidimensional site of cross-cultural correspondences upon which diverse social tasks are performed (Porter 6). Yet the shape of the lips in forming the French utterance poisson forms the shape of a kiss, or the connection can be to the shape of the mouths of some fish as they swim or feed, which resembles the shape and motion of a human kiss. Either way, a form of cultural translation has occurred determined neither by the linguistic code alone nor even by prevailing cultural codes but by the overdetermination of lips and mouths, which incites and symbolises homoerotic desire in this context. As Sofiène advises Mohamed-Ali in Un poisson sur la balançoire, it is important to learn to read between the lines (157) in order to decipher deeper meanings that may not be immediately apparent,36 which is the way Djaziri’s text and those of his contemporaries demand to be read. At the same time, as I have argued elsewhere, this location in the spaces in between is potentially transformative of fixed national and cultural hegemonies in the Maghreb and in the West and is neither a capitulation nor a surrender to the sexual categories of the West nor to the forces of globalisation but demonstrates that multiple, hybrid forms of same-sex desires can coexist within the same culture, both in the performative (active/passive) and in the discursive (sexual identity) sense, and come about relationally in the dialogical encounter between North Africa and Europe in both societies, rather than in the sense of progressive modernity, where one cultural model of sexuality is thought simply to replace a premodern or more primitive form (Spurlin, ‘Shifting Geopolitical Borders’ 76). It is thus a matter of not simply replacing one cultural model with another, which maintains problematic binary relations, but focusing instead on the struggle to renegotiate one’s sense of self through the subversion of dominant social categories. As Djaziri concludes, through his protagonist, it is not necessary to change one’s gender in order to desire a man but possible to love and be loved while maintaining one’s physical integrity and/as one’s gender,37 while finding both pleasure and agency in the passive sexual role. There is not

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a complete rejection of active/passive homosexuality but a resignification of the passive role as a site of agency and pleasure. The sexual struggles inscribed textually in Djaziri’s Un poisson sur la balançoire and Un promesse de douleur et de sang not only challenge hegemonic narratives and normative citizenship tied to the specificity of the nation-state or culture of origin but imply a radical (re)balancing act, captured in the title of the work itself (a kiss on the seesaw),38 between religious and nationalist condemnations of homosexuality as a Western decadence, on the one hand, and the lived experiences of struggles for new kinds of erotic autonomy beyond what is juridically and heteronormatively prescribed, on the other, while also implying a queering not only of sexual space but of social space, both in the Maghreb and in Europe, to the extent that the liminal spaces between and across national borders produce new thinking and counter-public spaces in the struggle to (re)name one’s felt relation to cultural identity, national belonging and the world as a broader praxis of decolonisation. ABDELLAH TAÏA Born on 8 August 1973 in Salé, Morocco, Abdellah Taïa studied in Rabat, went to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1998 on a scholarship to study French literature, and then registered for a doctorate in French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. Like Rachid O. and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri, Taïa writes of the difficulties of being gay in his home country in the Maghreb where it is not acknowledged, but describes his same-sex desires and sexual experiences in much more assertive and direct ways; unlike Rachid O., he uses no pseudonym, and unlike Djaziri, he does not use a fictional protagonist, but uses his own name and refers to himself directly in the first person. Not only is Taïa more militant in his representation of homosexuality; as Sophie Catherine Smith points out, he writes of engaging exclusively in gay sexuality by choice, as a consequence of identity (36), in contradistinction to Joseph Massad’s claims of non-identarian sexual relations between Arab Muslim men, while challenging the silences and taboos around nonnormative sexualities in the Maghreb and the restraints around making public the lived experience of sexual alterity at the expense of larger community life. Striving to make his sexual identity visible both to himself and to the larger social world, Taïa writes in Une mélancolie arabe in 2008, ‘Je n’ai qu’une seule idée en tête. Une obsession. . .’ (10).39 In solidarity with Rachid O. and Djaziri, Taïa similarly critiques phallic masculinity firmly entrenched in the heteropatriarchal cultures of Morocco and Tunisia. Yet, as Claudia Gronemann reminds us in her introduction to her book Masculinités Maghrébines, there is no monolithic Maghrebian ‘type’,

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that is, there is no invariant Arab Muslim masculinity. Rather, she argues, it is important to focus not on biological sex but on the construction of cultural codes, both Maghrebian and French, given the legacy of colonialism, that tend to define, translate and fix the idea of masculinity in North African societies (1–2). Masculinity in both the French colonial period and in the postindependent, postcolonial nation-state is the one constant that structures social relations hierarchically with gender difference marked as other; yet the process of decolonisation works to articulate the conflicts and traumas associated with regimes of masculine hegemony and thereby challenge them (Gronemann 3). But, in this sense, masculinity is not reducible to such simple binaries as male/ female or dominant/dominated but formed through sociocultural relations and norms, which can include the diverse ways in which societies become gendered through the institutions of marriage and family and through the treatment of women and children, minorities, immigrants, gay men and lesbians, and other social marginalities. One way in which masculinity has become structured in contemporary Maghrebian societies, as I have discussed earlier, is through same-sex sexual relations between men, where phallic masculinity, in opposition to homosexuality, is expressed as a form of substitutive sexual dominance of the male partner who is penetrated and thereby feminised, and marked as socially inferior, by his subordinate status. This form of social structuring, though this appears to be changing as the predominant narrative for samesex sexual relations between men in the Maghreb and possibly in other Arab Muslim societies, creates hierarchies between men, as did the colonial relation, and becomes an important site of inquiry in relation to understanding same-sex desire in the Maghreb, rather than defining masculinity only in opposition to women which remains based on the principle of the repudiation of the feminine that Rachid O., Djaziri and, to a greater extent, Taïa reject. Challenges to phallic masculinity become new forms of decolonisation that deconstruct it as the basis for state rule and for the arrangement of social relations. The critique of phallic masculinity is at first implied, similar to Rachid O., through Taïa’s close relationship with his mother, M’Barka, and his aunts Fatéma and Massaouda in Mon Maroc, and especially in Une mélancolie arabe, when describing his mother’s bodily smell and how his identification with femininity and the refusal of maternal separation remain with him as a significant point of reference, not only in his childhood but in his new queer life: Une odeur des origines, les siennes. . . . Je suis avec elle dans son corps. . . . Mais à travers M’Barka, ce monde d’hier, je l’ai palpitant en moi ce jour-là, durant cette course pour arriver chez moi et aller vers l’ailleurs . . . (10–11)40

When Taïa indicates above ‘Je suis avec elle dans son corps’ (I am with her in her body), the foundational semiotic phase in Kristeva’s signifying

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process is invoked, which is the preverbal phase of symbolic signification tied to bodily drives and gesticulations ‘oriented and structured around the mother’s body’ (Kristeva 95) at the stage of primary narcissism. While the semiotic phase is pre-Oedipal and pre-linguistic, and the child must eventually detach from dependence on, and imaginary fusion with, the mother in order to constitute objects as separate and signifiable and to posit the gap between signifier and signified as constitutive of language, semiotic processes do not simply occur as a prior or earlier stage in the acquisition of language as they continue as ‘a negativity introduced into the symbolic order and as the transgression of that order’ (Kristeva 118).41 Given that the symbolic order is gendered as patriarchal, some feminist work, according to Toril Moi, has associated the semiotic with the feminine, which would be a misreading (Moi 165). But if the figure of Abdellah’s mother ‘provides coherence to and a semantic anchor for his life’ (Provencher 171) as Taïa seems to claim through his felt close connection to his mother’s body through the link he feels between the strong pulsations in his own body to his childhood and to M’Barka, the transgressive potentialities of the semiotic seem to be at work in his refusal to separate from femininity, thus enabling a further critique of heteropatriarchal culture in the Maghreb from a position of marginality as an Arab Muslim gay man. At the same time, the border between past and present becomes blurred, as with Jarrod Hayes’s point that the narration of childhood is a backdrop to queerness whereby ‘the past becomes a living part of the present’ (‘Return of the Homopast’ 515) to the extent that the refusal of feminine repudiation is renegotiated as a new form of masculinity in Taïa’s work. The new space of masculinity is perhaps most pointedly negotiated in Taïa’s deliberate attempt to rupture the active/passive binary, which structures his sexual relations, initially with other boys, and then with other men, as a site of struggle for sexual identity. In the first section of Une mélancolie arabe, ‘Je me souviens’ (I remember), where he writes of his Moroccan boyhood, Abdellah meets a group of three older boys associated with phallic masculinity who greet him using a woman’s name ‘Leïla’. The leader of the group, whom Abdellah finds quite handsome and attractive, has propositioned him sexually by fondling Abdellah’s buttocks. Abdellah knows what the group leader wants and reflects to himself, ‘Et lui, le beau, l’homme, le patron, le chef, m’a indiqué, faussement gentil, le chemin’ (16; emphasis added).42 On the textual surface, Abdellah appears to be cast in the role of zamel (Moroccan Arabic for pédé passif), given that he has been propositioned to be penetrated by the gang leader, who is represented in highly masculinised terms through the deliberate use of French masculine nouns italicised in the quotation above, and all of this appears to set up and denote the active/passive binary opposition. But the reader soon learns that Abdellah’s thoughts, as opposed to what is happening on the level of the narrative plot,

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are not about merely submitting to phallic masculinity, and thereby being degraded and humiliated through the way in which the passive role in sexual relations between Arab Muslim men has been traditionally characterised, but fantasising instead about a more egalitarian form of same-sex sexual relations between them, both pleasuring and being pleasured through the bottom role. Through the purposeful use of reflexive verbs, Abdellah imagines the sexual encounter about to come as marked by mutual erotic pleasure, betraying his intention simply to submit to the sexual authority of the group leader (Smith 43): ‘Dans ma tête je voyais même déjà ce que nous allions faire, inventer. Se dénuder. Se découvrir. Se toucher’ (Une mélancolie arabe 16; emphasis added).43 Here there is a presence of a subtext that surfaces between the lines of the main text, the latter of which appears to set up and reflect the gendered active/passive binary. As Paul Bandia notes, the process of cultural translation, instantiated through finding an existence between two or more cultural worlds experienced simultaneously, ‘highlights the instability of cultural norms and disrupts claims to tradition and authenticity’ (279–80). Given that the title of this section of Taïa’s book is ‘Je me souviens’, it is important to note that the act of cultural translation occurs at the mediation of the memory of homoerotic sexual experience in Morocco alongside the lived experience of having migrated to France as politically transformative, whereas in Rachid O’s text, early formative memories of gender and gendered experience are translated into desire from the perspective of post-migration. When the sexual encounter begins, Abdellah refuses to be referred to as Leïla, and, in his thoughts, as his interlocutor begins to undress, he rejects the significance of the passive role traditionally associated with feminisation, submission and as a substitution for a woman: Je voulais lui dire et redire qu’un garçon est un garçon, et une fille est une fille. Ce n’était pas parce que j’aimais sincèrement et pour toujours les hommes qu’il pouvait se permettre de me confondre avec l’autre sexe. De détruire ainsi mon identité, mon histoire. . . . Devenir Leïla, non. Non. Jamais. (Une mélancolie arabe 22)44

After the older boy pleads with him during the sexual encounter, ‘« Ouvretoi, Leïla . . . Donnes tes fesses, elles sont à moi de toute façon . . . »’ (24), Abdellah replies defiantly, « Je ne m’appelle pas Leïla . . . Je ne m’appelle pas Leïla . . . Je suis Abdellah . . . Abdellah Taïa. » Il était surpris. Dans mes yeux, il lisait enfin autre chose que la peur et la soumission. (Une mélancolie arabe 24; emphasis added)45

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The passive role is not being repudiated altogether but being embraced, that is, recoded or translated culturally and politically, as a site of intimacy, pleasure and, most importantly, as a defiant sense of agency and power that becomes inscribed in the bottom role that Taïa takes, along with a refusal to identify with phallic masculinity. Rather, Taïa not only attempts to elaborate and legitimate homoerotic desire in an Arab Muslim context through literary representation (Gronemann, ‘Le mâle/mal de la mélancolie’ 176–77) but also claims the legitimacy of masculinity in assuming the passive role in his sexual relations with other men; thus, he valorises the passive role and exposes relations of power within active/passive sexual relations between men in the Maghreb. This textual citation of the active/passive norm is not an assimilation to it, nor a complete rejection of it, given that Taïa maintains the passive sexual role, but creates a hybrid space of masculinity in homoerotic terms, reducible neither to phallic heteromasculinity, nor to emasculation from being sexually penetrated, through a narrative process of identity formation and disidentification à la Muñoz in order to propose a new meaning of masculine and queer difference. Through the evocation of autre chose in the passage above, reminiscent of Abdelkebir Khatibi’s idea of pensée-autre, or thinking otherwise, and the negotiation of the spaces between Western colonial heritage and indigenous inheritance in the Maghreb,46 there is a fracturing, a splitting towards a shift, and an imaginative desire for an opening to a slightly different kind of sexual relationship between men with interchanges of sexual intimacy not prescribed in advance through predefined, fixed gendered positionings as discussed previously in my discussion of Djaziri’s Sofiène. Taïa, in my view, takes this further, through first citing the norm through the actions of the character he refers to as Chouaïb, the gang leader, and then effectively rupturing the exclusive association of masculinity with the dominant act of penetration in Arab Muslim societies über alles, without regard for the specificity of the gender of the object of desire and the possibilities for mutual pleasure. In Part II of Une mélancolie arabe, ‘J’y vais’ (I’m Going There), Abdellah moves to Paris in an attempt to reinvent himself in the West, to repudiate the silence that he felt came with being gay in Morocco, only to find out that he is objectified in other ways by, for example, Javier, a Frenchmen of Spanish background, whom Abdellah meets in Marrakech while finishing a course on film production, after having had moved to Paris. Speaking of being the object of Javier’s gaze, Abdellah notes, ‘Il était devant moi jour après jour. Il ne m’a jamais salué. . . . Il était là, loin, loin, en permanence dans mon champ visuel, muet, opaque’ (41). ‘C’était lui qui avait décidé de notre lien’ (Une mélancolie arabe 40).47 Following their return to Paris, Javier becomes detached emotionally from Abdellah, who realises he was only a sexual distraction for Javier in Morocco, and

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nothing more, thinking to himself regarding Javier’s indifference: ‘Il avait le pouvoir’ (49), that is, that Javier, as the European, was the one with the power.48 Even though the active/passive binary does not usually structure sexual relations between men in the West in a fixed or determinate way (Smith 47), given his history, Abdellah feels somewhat dispossessed of subjective agency after his move to Europe, which exemplifies his continued and ongoing struggle to move beyond the objectifying gaze of others and the instrumentalisation of his erotic life imposed not only by his indigenous culture in Morocco but by contemporary postcolonial and post-immigration conditions through his racial difference in France, thus demonstrating the contingencies, the disidentifications, the intersectionalities, the variabilities, the splittings and the translative displacements that constitute queer postcolonial North African subjectivities. But what remains particularly important with Taïa’s work is the cultural translation of masculinity that is consistent neither with phallic masculinity nor with emasculation, but transforms thinking about masculinity outside of, or beyond, the terms of the gender binary. While his feminine boyhood and his later taking of the passive role sexually in his relationships with other males have both been traditionally stigmatised in Moroccan society as zamel, Gronemann argues that Taïa makes his desires public in order to reflect on the difference of his masculinity: Son œuvre littéraire . . . vise ainsi à élaborer une représentation légitime de l’homoérotisme dans une culture arobo-islamique. En fait, il est parmi les premiers auteurs – si ce n’est le tout premier – de la culture maghrébine à rendre public son désir [homoérotique] et à réfléchir « en chair » sur la sexualité masculine dans une société d’empreinte musulmane. . . . Taïa a éprouvé le besoin de créer un modèle de subjectivité, liée dans son cas à l’expression de son homosexualité, par les moyens littéraires. (‘Le mâle/mal de la mélancolie’ 176–77; brackets added)49

Taïa claims not only pleasure but power and virility in the passive sexual role and refuses to be feminised by Chouaïb in the passage from Une mélancolie arabe discussed above. As Judith Butler has argued, masculinity, particularly in Western culture, is buttressed by a repudiation of a desire for men and a rejection of femininity within the self. As she more specifically writes, ‘Heterosexualized genders form themselves through the renunciation of the possibility of homosexuality, a foreclosure that produces a field of heterosexual objects at the same time that it produces a domain of those whom it would be impossible to love’; she defines this as heterosexual melancholy, that is,

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the melancholy by which a masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love; a feminine gender is formed (taken on, assumed) through the incorporative fantasy by which the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love. (Bodies that Matter 235)

Taïa’s active sexual partners, such as Chouaïb, assert their masculinity through sexually penetrating and humiliating him without regard for Taïa’s sexual pleasure, and thereby assume to be divesting themselves of any trace of femininity as a result. But as Butler also explains, ‘The feminine as the repudiated/excluded within that system [of phallogocentrism] constitutes the possibility of a critique and disruption of that hegemonic conceptual scheme’ (Gender Trouble 37; brackets added), and this disruption, working in all three authors, is also a translation of hegemonic masculinity and the phallogo­centric system on which it is built, and from which it arises, I would argue, but in a Maghrebian or North African context. As Gronemann argues, Taïa does not reject entirely the sexually passive role, and this is quite key, but takes it on voluntarily, rejecting instead the symbolic devaluation of this position as non-masculine in contradiction to Arab Muslim tradition, that is, he rejects the binary thinking that assumes that the virilisation of one partner depends automatically and straightforwardly on the emasculation of the other (‘Le mâle/mal de la mélancolie’ 187)50 through rejecting the name of Leïla and the feminisation it entails. Here there is the citation of the masculine norm and a simultaneous, but dissident, translation that includes the incorporation of the feminine, rather than its repudiation, and a simultaneous claiming of a new kind of masculinity and ways of thinking about homoerotic relations between men not inscribed as coherent in received social categories and practices. Moreover, heterosexual melancholy, as Gronemann argues, becomes reconceived in Taïa’s textual inscription of Arab melancholia, not when femininity and sexual passivity in boys or men are not renounced as a condition for achieving normative masculine gender identification and heterosexuality, since the true melancholics are those who conform to the norms of gender. Arab melancholia, she argues, is represented in Taïa as an effect of cultural mechanisms (myths, prohibitions, taboos) that are palpable but can also be exposed and reinvented through literary representation in order to allow for other configurations of masculinity and sexuality to emerge (‘Le mâle/mal de la mélancolie’ 192)51 that do not associate femininity in men, and/or the passive sexual role in same-sex relations with other men, with weakness. More than merely claiming a feminine past, then, Taïa defiantly refuses the repudiation of that past and takes it on, along with sexual passivity in his relations with other men, and queers the conflation of active/passive homosexuality with binary conceptions of gender and as paradigmatic of same-sex sexuality between men in Arab Muslim societies, while simultaneously breaking the

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religious taboo, similar to Rachid O., by taking on a more public queer identity though his autofictional writing. Franco-Maghrebi writers Rachid O, Eyet-Chékib Djaziri and Abdellah Taïa use autofiction, a hybrid form of writing caught in the interstices between autobiography and fiction, comprising both, but never fully either, as a heur­ istic process and mode of discovery for understanding their lived experience of sexual difference, marking, at the same time, what is regarded as private and transgressive in Arab Muslim societies as public. Speaking to homosexuality as a transgression of the established social order in the Maghreb and as a site of agency, Sofiène, in Djaziri’s Un poisson sur la balançoire, reflects on his sexual relationship with Khélil: ‘Cette intimité partagée était un pas de plus dans la transgression de ces règles qu’il nous plaisait de bafouer. Les liens du plaisir nous rapprochaient plus sûrement que ne l’auraient fait ceux du sang’ (146).52 This is even a further critique of heteronormativity, given Sofiène’s insistence that non-heteronormative, non-familial and indeed, prohibitive bonds, are more intimate, which puts pressure on heteronormative sexualities and heterosexual familial relations alongside the pleasure of challenging the sanctity of what is prescribed as sexually and emotionally normative. Or, as Rachid O. claims in Chocolat Chaud speaking of his transformation through the transgression of sexual norms, ‘Désormais je devenais maître de moi, j’aurais ma propre assurance’ (58).53 Moreover, these works subvert the idea, both in the Maghreb and in the West, that homosexuality remains invisibly closeted or marginalised in the Arab Muslim world, and challenges the stereotype, again both in the West and in Arab Muslim societies, through Djaziri’s assertion of the term intimité partagée (shared intimacy), that sex between Arab Muslim men is non-egalitarian, non-identarian and reducible only to the gendered roles of the active/passive binary. Given that the texts are written after the emigration of their authors from the Maghreb to France, they cannot be reduced to the actual lived or literal transcriptions of their authors’ queer childhoods in their indigenous cultures, but are (re)creations of their pasts in order to make sense of their sexual subjectivities and struggles in the present through the act of writing as an encapsulation, concretisation and reimagining of the struggle itself. At the same time, as Ncube argues, these writings occur in diaspora, that is, in France, where the writers are able to detach themselves, if only contingently, from the culture of origin and interrogate sexual and other differences in a more fearless and unaffected way (‘Sexual/Textual Politics’ 486), though, I would add that the interrogation continues in France to the extent that the writers become marked more by their racial and cultural difference which also affects their sexual difference in varying ways, particularly in the ways in which they are eroticised by European male sexual partners in France. Their sexual struggles, then, are

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limited neither to dominant sexual practices between men in the Maghreb nor to those in France, but are located in the liminal, interstitial spaces between two different cultural worlds on either side of the Mediterranean where their identities cannot be fixed in either location. Likewise, the genre of their writing, as autofiction, cannot be fixed, but is situated between the autobiographical and the fictional as a space of agency and freedom to resist reductive or essentialised categories of gender or sexual identity and to create ‘identitiesin-difference’ in order to mark the contingencies of identity in relation to dominant ideologies and discursive practices that otherwise render sexually dissident positions unthinkable. Speaking specifically of the autofictional work of Rachid O., but certainly applicable to all three authors, El Achir writes, ‘Le roman permet à l’auteur de renouveler son identité, car c’est un genre qui permet une grande liberté de création. Mais on voit également qu’il est contaminé par l’autobiographie car il se situe entre le documentaire et la fiction’ (119).54 I would contend here that El Achir is defining autofiction as situated between the generic spaces of the fictional novel and the documented facts of one’s life given that actual events in the writers’ lives are represented, but also shrouded, in fiction, making the distinction between strict autobiography and fiction unclear. This similarly evokes Djebar’s approach on the recounting of history through the intertwining of hegemonic narratives of history and fragments of her own memoirs and lived experiences, and those of other Algerian women, under French colonialism in Algeria and in the newly independent nation-state as discussed earlier. This is the form that the writing of the self takes in the works by the authors I have just discussed, especially given that the author, narrator and protagonist are the same person. Even if the author/narrator takes on a different identity as the protagonist, the narrative point of view creates a blending of actual lived experience, memory and fiction as the point of view fuses the narrative voice of the protagonist with the perspective of what has been experienced and remembered from the past, though often reimagined, amalgamated, that is, translated, through the reflections on that past by the actual author in the moment of writing in the present day. The originary desire, captured though memory, vanishes at the point of translation into writing and becomes autre chose. Along these lines, autofiction, according to El Achir, is thus characterised by identic uncertainty, doubt, ambiguity, hesitation and the transformation of life in or through fiction (120),55 but subverts nonetheless, in my view, the normative borders of race, gender, sexuality, national origin, history and genre in the struggle for identity, particularly in interrogating the border between the privacy of sexual alterity, which is generally non-spoken (l’indicible; non-dire) in Arab Muslim societies, and its textual, and therefore very public, encryption through the act of writing. Returning to the texts themselves, Sofiène, in Djaziri’s Un poisson sur la balançoire, speaks of the struggle to be more content with himself and

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to live a more serene life not marked by stares, comments and accusations and being separated by his teachers from Kérim when they are in the same class together in secondary school. Sofiène speaks of the hope to develop an understanding of ‘certaines notions qui nous aideraient, plus tard, à vivre plus sereinement une différence qui, sinon, pourrait devenir un véritable handicap au quotidien’ (Un poisson 197).56 As Gibson Ncube points out, autofictional writing permits Taïa, Rachid O. and Djaziri to assume and live their difference and facilitates the process of making public what is marked as taboo or unspeakable, while qualifying that autofiction disturbs the border between fiction and actual lived events, and is a symbiosis of actual lived experiences of the writer transposed into literary form (‘Le coming out’ 200–01).57 In this sense, there is a (re)creation of queer subjectivity, that is, the autofictional texts under discussion do not merely mirror or reproduce the self, the past or the status quo, but translate, and thereby transform, all three. In his Une mélancolie arabe, Taïa uses the text to explore his so-called other life: ‘Je suis pressé d’aller dans mon autre vie, imaginaire, vraie . . .’ (10; emphasis added);58 it is interesting to note that this other life is both imaginary and real at the same time, thus subverting the opposition between what is lived and experienced and what is (re)imagined. Rachid O, in Chocolat Chaud, likewise indicates the need to rid himself of what he did not know (55),59 which is also performed through the act of writing. But speaking most precisely to the potential of the genre to transform the self and the world, Sofiène in Djaziri’s text reflects, Mon enfance était tout juste derrière moi; pourtant, quand je l’évoquais, j’avais l’impression de l’observer à travers des jumelles à l’envers tant elle me semblait vague et lointaine. Je me revoyais sur la balançoire, riant la tête rejetée en arrière, en train de cueillir mon premier poisson sur les lèvres de Khélil. Je ne m’étais pas douté que par ce geste. . . . J’avais perdu mes jeux d’enfant et toute l’insouciance qui s’y rattachait. (Un Poisson 131)60

This passage speaks to the act of seeing again, a re-visioning, that is, translating, the narrator’s childhood from the perspective of the present, which is simultaneously a distortion of the past, like looking at it through the other side of binoculars which would distort and distance, with the loss of childhood innocence and carefree play encapsulated in his first same-sex kiss, marked by the word poisson in French, as a significant turning point. Here, the past speaks, but as Stuart Hall reminds us, ‘it is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative, and myth’ (395). Finally, the authors considered in this chapter mark queer Maghrebian diasporic identity as never binary, but always already located in the space between, in the l’entre-deux of received categories between the Maghreb

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and Europe, between masculinity and femininity, between active and passive homosexuality, between past and present, as they theorise and position themselves in what Minh-ha refers to as a new ‘mode of dwelling’. This is similarly reflected in the mode of writing itself, that is, through the genre of autofiction, an aller-retour between experience that has been lived but is also (re)imagined and reworked, which thus allows for an opening up of discursive spaces of fluctuation and transfiliation, but also spaces of discontinuity and instability reflected in the texts through the constant back-and-forth movement between geopolitical, temporal, identic and generic borders. The idea that both the movement of migration and the pathways to signification are never ‘straight’, in both senses of the word, produces the articulation of new spaces of masculinity, sexual alterity and difference through a mode of writing, as described by Taïa in Le rouge du tarbouche, where ‘les mots prennent un sens autre pour révéler le secret et ses lumières, l’invisible et ses signes. . . . Écrire. S’écrire. S’ouvrir à soi-même et aux mots’ (58–59),61 which also describes the autofictional (re)writing of the queer, translated, decolonised, Franco-Maghrebi self. NOTES 1. Trans. Islamic homosexuality is made up of different forms and modalities from that of the West. For example, it does not occur in concentrated and visible forms (as in gay neighbourhoods in European cities), but takes the form of a ‘substitutive sexuality’ that is practised in a highly private place or is hidden. The space of Moroccan homosexuality is therefore a particularly private and symbolic site (a house, a hotel, a garden, a bath house) or clandestine and socially non-existent like an uncultivated field. For the term sexualité de substitution, Corbisiero credits Vincenzo Patanè, Arabi e noi, Amori gay nel Maghreb (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002), 94. 2. Article 338: ‘Tout coupable d’un acte d’homosexualité est puni d’un emprisonnement de deux mois à deux ans et d’une amende de 500 à 2000 DA. Si l’un des auteurs est mineur de dix-huit ans, la peine à l’égard du majeur peut être élevée jusqu’à trois ans d’emprisonnement et 10.000 DA d’amende.’ It is interesting these statutes that criminalise homosexuality in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia do not contain a uniform code number as was the case with laws criminalising homosexuality in former British colonies that have since been repealed, revised or still retained today. Except for Tunisia, the current laws seem to have been largely developed and/or reformed in the 1960s following independence from imperial rule. Of the three countries, Algeria has the strictest laws, and they are often reinforced through hate crimes and vigilantism in addition to legal penalties concerning public decency around samesex writings and images (Article 333). Articles 338 and 333 remain the same in the 2015 edition of the ILGA Report by Aengus Carroll and Lucas Paoli Itaborahy (49). 3. Trans. From: Mon Maroc: I live in the space between both: each of the two cultures pulls me towards their shore (there is also a struggle within me, in my body).

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From Une mélancolie arabe: I was about to take off, fly away, write about something different, live out my love in broad daylight, proclaim my love, become the person people weren’t even supposed to mention, the person who wasn’t even supposed to exist (Taïa, An Arab Melancholia 31; emphasis added). Unless otherwise noted, I will use the English version An Arab Melancholia for English translations of Taïa’s Une mélancolie arabe. 4. Trans. The women’s hammam is a space where women are close and enjoy each other’s company. I have translated intime in French as ‘close’ in English to the extent that ‘intimate’ might have sexual connotations in English usage, which may not describe accurately the pleasant ways women relate to one another in the hammam but does not discount the possibilities of homoerotic feelings and desires in the affectional bonds between them. Also, the verb rigoler, which takes the adjective form rigolo or rigolote, can be translated as pleasant, amusing or fun, or as strange, curious or quite possibly queer, referring perhaps to the close, affectional bonds between the women in the hammam, or to the actual context of the gender-exclusive space of the women’s hammam where Rachid O. feels more at home. 5. Trans. At the entrance of the hammam, there are two doors labelled ‘Men’ and ‘Women’. It’s a shock for a child no longer to go in on the side of the entrance he has used for so long. There was nothing special about the men’s hammam, it was very different from the women’s hammam; it was emotionally cold. There was nothing warm about it other than the heat and the steam. . . . When they [the men] wash their buttocks or genitals, they hide themselves. . . . It was frustrating for me to see nothing because I saw everything with the women (brackets added). 6. As Zekri explains, ‘L’interdiction d’accès au hammam des femmes signifie au jeune garçon qu’il est « devenu homme », avec toute la connotation culturelle qu’implique ce mot (virilité, vigueur et puissance sexuelles). . . . Le corps du jeune garçon devient assujetti, c’est-a-dire soumis à la loi de la distinction des sexes et produit comme sujet masculin. . . . L’expulsion du hammam des femmes et le passage à celui des hommes accorde au narrateur une identité sexuelle non négociable’ (269–70). Trans. The prohibition of access to the women’s hammam signifies to the young boy that he has ‘become a man’, with all of the cultural connotations that this word implies (sexual virility, vigour and potency). . . . The young boy’s body becomes subjugated, that is, subjected to the law of the distinction of the genders, and produced as a masculine subject. . . . The expulsion from the women’s hammam, and the transition to that of the men’s, grants the narrator a non-negotiable sexual [and, by implication, gender] identity (brackets added). 7. Trans. Little by little, when I was growing up, when the women spoke of a man, they spoke of him in feminine terms so as to deceive me, and I was okay because I could tell it was a man and that they took me for a child. . . . They weren’t leading double lives; they were only talking about their husbands in feminine terms. . . . At the time of the conversation, I understood that there were some things – a word – which could not be used for a man; . . . for example, when the women described [what were supposed to be] a young woman’s hands, I could easily tell that they were those of a man (brackets added). 8. Trans. I was with them [my aunt and sister] all the time. And with other women, the neighbours. I was always behind, behind or in front, but I preferred

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behind because when they were speaking of men among themselves and noticed that I was there, they said, ‘What are you doing there? Go play with the boys.’ I preferred to be behind, they couldn’t account for my presence, and I could hear everything. . . . And when they spoke of men, they reminded me that I was a boy and not a girl and that I shouldn’t be clinging to them (brackets added). 9. Trans. I became interested in men as they [the women of the hammam] were interested in them (brackets added). 10. ‘L’auteur [Rachid O.] déstabilise en même temps l’ordre politique qui assigne à chaque sexe son identité et à chaque individu le comportement correspondant à sa place dans la hiérarchie sociale. . . . Cette interrogation sur l’essence même de l’« homme », entendu comme sexe masculin, remet en question la naturalisation des pratiques hétéronormatives’ (Zekri 269, 271; brackets added). Trans. The author [Rachid O.] destabilises simultaneously the political order which assigns to each sex its [gender] identity and to each individual the [gendered] behaviour corresponding to their place in the social hierarchy. . . . This questioning of the very essence of ‘man’, understood as masculine gender, calls into question the naturalisation of heteronormative practices (brackets added). 11. Trans. I loved my uncle and I loved how the women spoke of him, most of them played with words to express desire for him, joking, because he was especially handsome, that they would have liked to marry him, to have someone like him around (emphasis added). 12. Trans. In a mocking tone, they asked me, ‘So, Rachid, what is going on now?’ because I still knew everything [from having] recently [been in the women’s hammam] (brackets added). 13. Trans. But in fact it was very beautiful to watch him wash himself, a sight I would watch for a long time, for a very, very long time, spending his time rubbing his big and massive body or [rubbing] the white soap on his brown skin. . . . And since that day, I like the bone that protrudes at the top of the furrow of the buttocks. I don’t know its name; with him, it was obvious and left an impression, a mixture of feelings that both struck and shocked me; it was sensual at the same time (brackets added). 14. Trans. When he came back, I no longer knew what I had done, I had shouted; Antoine took an old electrical wire that was hanging, pushed me into the bathroom and hit me. I was both happy and not happy: if he strikes me, it is because he is no longer gentle with me . . . this was normal in a paternalistic relationship. 15. As El Achir writes, ‘En effet cette image du « fil d’électricité » est dérangeante, quand on sait que les tortures favorites des Français durant la guerre d’Algérie étaient d’appliquer de l’électricité sur les parties génitales de leurs prisonniers. Et également la relation entre colonisés et colonisateur est une relation paternal­ iste’ (33). 16. Trans. I don’t like alcohol, but I like to eat pork; for me it is a question of taste and not one of religion. In France, the first thing one asks me is, ‘Do you drink alcohol?’; when I am invited to go for a drink, I sense that people place more importance on me not drinking alcohol because it is a question of taste and not because my religion forbids it. People, here (in France), it’s very odd; when I say, ‘I don’t like alcohol,’ they are relieved; one could say that they prefer that I don’t drink alcohol as a matter of taste rather than because of my religion.

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17. Trans. Rachid O. articulates a Muslim identity, one who embraces, instead of marginalising, his homosexuality. The incorporation of homosexuality into a Muslim self allows for the decolonisation of colonial clichés. 18. Trans. At the same time, I understood that I didn’t need to be like this or like that; I learned to be my own person and to be more myself. 19. Trans. – Frédéric, answer me truthfully. Do you like women? He frowned. – A bit, but you must know that I have distinct homosexual leanings. – Homosexual? What is that? – You don’t know what a homosexual is? Are you serious? – I’ve never heard that word, I can assure you. What is that? – A person sexually attracted to other people of the same sex, men or women. – Woman? There are women also attracted to other women? – Well, yes, my good fellow; why would this be exclusively for men? – So, this truly exists for men who love other men? Are you sure about this? And they are called homosexuals? – But really, Sofiène, where are you coming from? And what do you think we did the other day? – What we did the other day, I have already done with another boy in Tunisia, but I don’t think he likes men either, nor is he homosexual like you say.

20. Trans. Khélil was a real man, ready to take on this role and all that it implies like courage, strength, virility. He even fought for me. He took me as his wife. That is what I like in him. He wasn’t attracted to men. He wasn’t homosexual. 21. Trans. Yes, but you know how it is. They [young women] want to be virgins on their wedding day. They light up like sluts, and at the precise moment of the [sexual] act, they vanish. But I can’t stand it anymore. I’ve got natural desires that just want to be expressed. My blood boils in my veins; as for by balls, I won’t speak to you about that! Besides, it shouldn’t displease you (brackets added). 22. Trans. Aunt Angèle was quite old, and surely a bit senile, because when my grandmother introduced me, shouting, since she was also deaf: – Sofi, the son of Marie, our grandson. She replied: – Sophie? How cute she is; she doesn’t resemble her mother. She favours her father. We looked at each other, with my grandparents, embarrassed, and instead of acting as if nothing had happened (after all, it wasn’t of any consequence), my grandfather thought it worthwhile to insist, always screaming to address my deaf aunt: – No, Aunt Angèle, he is a boy. This is Sofiène, my grandson. – Ah, good, come here my little one. She is truly beautiful, and so big. But how old is she? My grandmother took over the replies: – Fifteen years old, on holiday with us for a month, resting well, enjoys the good sea air and eats for four people. . . . My grandmother did not dare to say anything more, neither he nor she, when speaking about me.

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23. Je ne sais ce que j’aurais donné pour être né fille (Djaziri, Un poisson 5). 24. Trans. The feminine voice that flew from my throat in crystalline notes . . . 25. Trans. Look at this who’s here! Is it a boy or is it a girl? (emphasis added). 26. Trans. I acted like I hadn’t heard anything, my gaze fixed on an imaginary point in front of me. . . . This meant that I was neither a boy nor a girl. In fact, I was nothing at all. 27. Trans. The undressing of all those boys in the changing rooms was a real spectacle. I looked particularly at Abdelwahab with his slender, dark body and that thread of hair that went from his navel to disappear in his underpants. . . . I was very excited to discover it as well. 28. Trans.

– I want you. I would like you to enter me again. . . . Khélil’s penis seemed enormous to me when he had put it in me. I had the impression that he was tearing me apart. . . . However, I didn’t complain, preferring to bite the pillow and submit to this first penetration in the entirety of its course.

29. Trans. The intensity of such a pleasure, new to me, where the pain was ecstasy, made the difference for the first time. 30. Trans. We were lying lasciviously on my bed in the dark. We had just made love, and, as usual, we extended this magical moment with caresses and sweet words. It was the sound of the veranda door that made us jump. 31. ‘Mon père revenait déjà, une cravache à la main. . . . – Maintenant, tu vas me dire ce que vous faisiez. . . . Qui faisait la femme? Réponds! Qui faisait la femme?’ (Un poisson 64–65). Trans. My father had already come back with a riding crop in his hand. . . . – Now, are you going to tell me what you were doing? . . . Who was the woman? Answer! Who was the woman?

32. Trans. I ask for your forgiveness. . . . I don’t know what happened to me. I was beside myself, maybe the idea that someone could touch you. I don’t know! You are so different from your brother. . . . I don’t always understand you. You are secretive. . . . I am here to help you. I love you, you know, he added, after a brief pause. But you have put up such a barrier between us. 33. Trans. It is true that the thinking here [in Tunisia] is such that the one who is in the active role [in homosexual sex] does not lose any part of his virility and can even recount his exploits; he will be applauded, encouraged. A man who has taken the passive role will be treated as queer and be despised. Imagine my surprise to find out that a reversal of roles existed under other skies, with Frédéric, for example (brackets added). 34. Trans. I no longer listen to the words that he is pronouncing. Only his voice resounds in my ears while I am watching his lips which are moving. He has pulled off his sweater. The central heating releases warm air and the first two buttons of his shirt are undone. I observe his skin, white and pure. . . . My eyes move up again towards his lips at the moment when the movement of his tongue moistens them. My sudden silence intrigues him. He lifts his eyes from the booklet and says: – What is it? You don’t continue? Why are you looking at me like that? Without thinking, no longer holding back, I reply: – Give me a fish [kiss]?

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– A what? – A fish, I repeat patiently as if I am speaking to a child or to someone who doesn’t speak my language. – How do you mean, a fish? he answers back, bewildered. – Like this, I say, approaching with my face, stopping only when my lips meet his. (brackets added)

35. See chapter 1 and Massad’s discussion of same-sex sexual relations between Arab Muslim men as ‘practitioners of same-sex contact’ (Desiring Arabs 162). 36. ‘Je te conseille d’apprendre à lire entre les lignes’ (Djaziri Un poisson 157; emphasis added). 37. Il était possible d’aimer et d’être aimer, tout en conservant son intégrité physique (Un poisson 43). 38. Un poisson sur la balançoire can be translated as A Fish [Kiss] On the SeeSaw or as A Fish [Kiss] on the Swing, but balançoire works better as a see-saw in terms of balancing or mediating the space between two cultural worlds and redefining homosexuality in new terms. Brackets added. 39. ‘I’ve only got one thing on my mind. One obsession. . . .’ (Taïa, An Arab Melancholia 10). 40. ‘A smell that comes from the same place we do [a smell of origins]. . . . I am with her in her body. . . . But through M’Barka, that world of yesterday pulses through me today, throbs as I race towards my home and outwards to the faraway . . .’ (An Arab Melancholia 10–11; brackets added). 41. See chapter 3, note 29, pp. 115–16, for a more detailed analysis of Kristeva’s discussion of the semiotic and symbolic as constitutive of the signifying process, the acquisition of language and the transgressive power of the semiotic within the symbolic system of language and culture. 42. Trans. And he, the handsome guy, the man, the boss, the leader, pretending to be nice, showed me the way. My translation here deviates somewhat from the published version of the work in English (see below) in order to emphasise the deliberate use of masculine nouns in French to describe the gang leader, which appears, in my view, to set up the active/passive binary in sexual relations between Arab Muslim men. See Taïa, ‘The handsome one, the man, the boss, the one in charge, pretended to be nice as he showed me where to go’ (An Arab Melancholia 15). 43. Trans. In my mind, I could already imagine the things we would do and come up with. Take off each others’ clothes, explore each other, touch one another. Again, I am deviating here from the published translation in order to emphasise the significance of the reflexive verbs, and Taïa’s desire for mutual pleasure, which is lost in the published translation: ‘I could already imagine the kind of things we’d do, the stuff we’d come up with, how we’d get naked. All that exploring. Touching’ (Taïa, An Arab Melancholia 16). 44. ‘I wanted to tell him repeatedly that a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl. Just because I loved men [sincerely] and always would, didn’t mean that I was going to let him think of me as the opposite sex, let him destroy my identity, my history [just] like that. . . . Letting him call me Leïla, [no,] forget that, no way’ (Taïa, An Arab Melancholia 21–22; brackets added).

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45. ‘“Open up, Leïla. . . . Give me your ass, give it to me, because I am going to take it anyway . . .”’ (Taïa, An Arab Melancholia 23); ‘“My name’s not Leïla . . . I’m not Leïla. . . . I’m Abdellah . . . Abdellah Taïa.” He was shocked. He’d finally figured it out’ (Taïa, An Arab Melancholia 24). At last, he read something else in my eyes besides fear and submission (my translation). Again, I am deviating from the published translation of the text in English in the last sentence of this quotation as it is important to translate the use of autre chose in French much more literally for reasons I shall elucidate, rather than ‘what he saw in my eyes had nothing to do with fear or submission’ as appears in the English translation of the text on page 24. 46. See Khatibi, Maghreb Pluriel 33–34 and 12, and chapter 2, note 27, p. 81. 47. ‘Day after day, he was right in front of me. He never said hello. . . . He was out there, right out there, constantly in my field of vision, mute, opaque’ (An Arab Melancholia 41). He was the one who had decided our bond (my translation). I have translated into English the last sentence myself. The published English translation reads, ‘He was the one who set up our little connection’ (40), but, for me, it is more about the power differential that Javier, a European, holds on Abdellah through the objectifying, (post)imperialist gaze. 48. I have translated the French ‘il avait le pouvoir’ to show the inequality in the relationship between Javier and Abdellah, sexually and racially, again transgressing the published translation in An Arab Melancholia as ‘he could do something like that’ (49) for the same reason mentioned in the preceding note. 49. Trans. His literary work . . . thus aims to develop a legitimate representation of homoeroticism in an Arab Muslim culture. In fact, he is among the first authors – if not, the first – from Maghrebian culture to make his [homoerotic] desire public and to think ‘in the flesh’ about male sexuality in a Muslim society. . . . Taïa felt the need to create a model of subjectivity, linked, in his case, to the expression of his homosexuality, through literary means (brackets added). 50. ‘Il ne refuse pas de jouer le rôle passif, mais il rejette toute réduction et dévalorisation symbolique de cette position, considérée comme non-masculine dans une tradition néfaste. Il remet en question l’idée établie que le masculin se constitue en relation à l’autre non-masculin, c’est-à-dire que la virilisation de l’un s’accompagne de l’émasculation de l’autre’ (Gronemann, ‘Le mâle/mal de la mélancolie’ 187). Trans. He does not refuse to play the passive role, but rejects any symbolic diminution or weakening of this position, considered to be non-masculine in a harmful tradition. He questions the established idea that the masculine is constituted in relation to the non-masculine other, that is to say that the virilisation of one is accompanied by the emasculation of the other. 51. L’individu mélancolique est donc le produit d’un ordre culturel des interdictions. . . . Par conséquent, les vrais mélancoliques sont ceux qui s’adaptent à la norme tandis que l’inscription littéraire du deuil, telle que l’effectue Taïa, permet de comprendre les mécanismes culturels de cette identification du genre en ouvrant une possibilité de s’en sortir’ (Gronemann, ‘Le mâle/mal de la mélancolie’ 192). Trans. The melancholy individual, therefore, is the product of a cultural order of prohibitions. . . . Therefore, the true melancholics are those who adapt to the norm, while the literary inscription of mourning, as that carried out by Taïa, allows us to understand

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the cultural mechanisms of this gender identification by opening up a possibility of getting out of it. 52. Trans. This shared intimacy was a further step in the transgression of these rules we liked to flout. The bonds of pleasure surely brought us closer together than would have those of blood. 53. Trans. Henceforth, I became master of myself; I would have my own self-confidence. 54. Trans. The [autofictional] novel allows the author to renew his identity, because it is a genre that allows great creative freedom. But one also sees that it is contaminated by autobiography because it is situated between documentary [of one’s life] and fiction (brackets added). 55. ‘Elle (l’écriture autofictionnelle) se caractérise par . . . l’incertitude indentitaire, . . . la transformation de la vie en fiction, le doute, l’hésitation . . .’ (El Achir 120; parentheses added). 56. Trans. . . . certain ideas that would help us, later, to live more serenely a difference which, if not, could become a real handicap in everyday life. 57. ‘L’autofiction s’offre à ces écrivains comme un atout important qui leur permet d’assumer et de vivre leur différence . . . [et] facilite un processus de mise en public d’un sujet tabou et indicible. . . . L’autofiction . . . [est] une symbiose des faits réels vécus par un romancier . . . qui sont transposés en œuvre littéraire’ (Ncube, ‘Le coming out’ 200–01; emphasis and brackets added). 58. ‘I’m in a rush to enter my other life, my imaginary, true life . . .’ (An Arab Melancholia 10; emphasis added). 59. ‘J’allais me vider de tout ce que moi-même j’ignorais’ (Chocolat Chaud 55). 60. Trans. My childhood was just behind me; however, whenever I evoked it, I had the impression of observing it through the wrong end of binoculars as it seemed vague and distant. I saw myself again on the see-saw, laughing with my head thrown back, snatching my first fish [kiss] on Khélil’s lips. I had not suspected that, through this gesture, . . . I had lost the fun of my childhood and all of the carelessness attached to it (brackets added). 61. Trans. . . . the words take on another meaning in order to reveal the secret and its lights, the invisible and its signs. . . . To write. To write (of) oneself. To open oneself to the self and to words.

Chapter 5

Nina Bouraoui Further Translations of Sexual Alterity through Embodiment and Intersectional Crossings of Identic, Geopolitical, Temporal and Generic Borders

Most of the writing from the Maghreb that has been discussed and analysed in this book thus far has focused predominately on writing by FrancoMaghrebian gay men and rewritings, or translations, of hegemonic masculinity and the gendered politics of active/passive homosexuality based on a fixed relation of sexual domination. The movement across geopolitical borders has created for more contemporary writers, who have emigrated from the Maghreb to France, such as Rachid O., Eyet-Chékib Djaziri and Abdellah Taïa, a space of deterritorialisation and the subversion of dominant ideologies of gender, sexual, national and ethnic normalisation in both the Maghreb and in France, which has enabled new articulations of sexual alterity reducible neither to the active/passive binary and substitutive sex, as male homosexuality is often assumed to signify in Arab Muslim societies, including in the Maghreb, nor to understandings of sexual identity in the West, given that the writers’ indigenous cultures in the Maghreb can never be fully reclaimed, nor entirely forgotten, when they move to France, and just as the writers themselves do not feel entirely ‘at home’ or assimilated fully in France. At the same time, it is evident that the autofictional texts produced by Rachid O., Djaziri and Taïa perform the fracturing of cultural, gender and sexual identity in diaspora through the fracturing of generic form as their texts shift between autobiography, memoir and fiction without being reducible to any of these singular forms as the texts rework the normative borders of gender, sexuality, race, gender and nationality alongside a reconfiguring of the very borders of textuality, genre and temporality in order to (re)create a sense of a queer childhood, and thereby provide a way for the authors to understand 161

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their sexual subjectivities in the present heuristically through the act of writing. Hence, the subversion of sexual norms is intimately entangled with the subversion of textual norms, and there appears to be an ongoing aller-retour between geopolitical, temporal, identic and generic borders that open up new spaces of transgression, fluidity, ambivalence, instability and queerness. However, new spaces of queer diasporic identity are certainly not limited to gay male writing from the Maghreb, and it is crucial, as I have argued ­previously, that a concern with sexual or queer difference not obfuscate or override the axis of gender, specifically lesbian existence, in analyses of fractured identity and displacement in the space of l’entre-deux, that is, between the Maghreb and Europe, between strategies of identification and disidentification, and in the search for new forms of writing in between the borders of literary genre. In many respects, the work of French-Algerian writer, Nina Bouraoui, develops further the negotiation of new forms of gender and sexual dissidence intimately imbricated within broader struggles around race, cultural identity and national belonging in the movement across geopolitical and temporal borders that invites a further queering of sexual and textual norms. Nina, née Yasmina, Bouraoui was born in 1967 in Rennes, France, as the second child to an Arab Muslim father from Algeria and a French mother, only five years after the Algerian Revolution, which ended French colonial rule in Algeria in 1962. She is thus second generation to feminists, such as Assia Djebar, discussed earlier, who experienced French colonialism directly and write about it in their work, though Bouraoui indicates in her writing that she still feels the effects of colonial domination and the war. Bouraoui’s family moved to Algeria from France when she was two years old, spending summers in Brittany, her mother’s childhood home, and the family remained in Algiers until they returned to France permanently when Bouraoui was fourteen years old because of racial tensions in Algeria, exacerbated by the fact of her parents’ mixed marriage, which, Algerian nationalists, in the years immediately after the war, saw as taboo, not only because the couple had met at the University of Rennes during the French-Algerian war but because the family’s subsequent move to Algeria from France raised suspicions regarding its loyalties to the former coloniser in the newly independent Algeria as it struggled to efface the traces of French colonial rule. While Bouraoui never returned to Algeria again, this early rupture, as Rosie MacLachlan notes, had significant impact on her later self (3) to the extent that her multicultural origins left her without a sense of belonging either in Algeria or in France. As a result, she lacked a single national or cultural group with which to identify; as Katharine Harrington points out, Bouraoui ‘is neither totally French nor entirely Algerian regardless of her country of residence’, and she is also marginalised from second-generation North African immigrants, or beurs, in France (77), though, at the same time, she does identify with them, being, as

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she claims in Garçon Manqué, ‘ni vraiment française ni vraiment algérienne’ (129). Similar, but not reducible, to the gay male writing discussed in the previous chapter, it is obvious that Bouraoui is writing also of the fracturing of identity while theorising new possibilities of gender, but the difference of gender is quite salient as she is not concerned with gendered, status-differentiated sexual roles in relations with sexual partners but more with the relationalities between racial and sexual identity. Bouraoui, somewhat similar, but not reducible, to Djebar, is also attempting to connect the double play of histoire, that is, history as a story of the past told through hegemonic frameworks that often excludes the experiences of women and minorities, and history as personal story or testimony that challenges, even interrupts, official versions. Djebar attempts to inscribe the forgotten history of women in collective memory through the use of women’s polyphonic and fragmented voices (intertwined with the referential, the fictional and the autobiographical) that subvert a univocal historical discourse through its interruption by multiple points of view, as Kirsten Husung argues in her comparative study of the two authors of different generations (247). For Bouraoui, however, the past acts through her own body (represented through the body of the first-person narrator of the texts I will discuss), and the biracial body is marked as witness to the French-Algerian conflict and thereby as a site of historical and cultural inscription and signification (Husung 247, 249).1 The early autofictional trilogy of work by Bouraoui that I wish to discuss and analyse in this chapter addresses the trauma of a forced separation from her childhood home in Algeria and Bouraoui’s attempt to reclaim an embodied past which she initially attempted to reject. Taken together, Garcon Manqué (2000), Poupée Bella (2004) and Mes Mauvaises Pensées (2005), the latter of which won the prix Renaudot, evoke her traumatic formative years and the struggle to articulate what has been silenced in her personal history in order to reclaim her embodied memory of Algeria, in which her early transgressions of gender norms, and her eventual sexual identity, are embedded. As with the gay male writing, there is an imaginative aller-retour between geopolitical and temporal terrains in Bouraoui, that is, between her Maghrebian childhood home and France, and an attempt to recreate a queer childhood in order to understand dissident sexual subjectivity through the act of writing alongside the intersections of race and gender. But with Bouraoui, as Helen Vassallo points out, there is a link between her personal history and the history of Algeria which are both experienced as a wound that bleeds, which metaphorically echoes the bloodshed of the Algerian Revolution (Body Besieged 77). Writing here, then, becomes a struggle to understand sexual difference, but is also an attempt to reclaim embodied memory and reject harmful binary paradigms that do not offer Bouraoui a recognisable identity (Vassallo, Body Besieged 79). The

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problematic binaries include the borders between being Algerian and French and being a child of a mixed marriage and negotiating its effects, as well as negotiating carefully the equally contested binary of gender through an ongoing struggle with hybridity and becoming, the fluidity of which, I shall argue, is similarly located in the narrative structure of her texts. The trilogy of autofictional works by Bouraoui addresses both historical and embodied trauma inherited from the Algerian Revolution and from the effects of her parents’ mixed marriage, the latter of which brings the historical trauma more directly to Bouraoui’s own lived experience since she was born after Algerian independence. Bouraoui’s difference in Algeria stands out in stark contrast to others in the early days of independence, given that she is arabisante and not a native speaker of Arabic while living in Algeria, thus alienating her from connections to the indigenous communities around her at a time when Algerian society was trying to efface the traces of French colonial rule: ‘Au lycée français d’Alger, je suis une arabisante. . . . La langue arabe ne prend pas sur moi. C’est un glissement’ (Garçon Manqué 33–34; hereafter cited as GM).2 Reflecting on this early experience of geographical displacement and sense of exile in Garcon Manqué that separates her from integration into local culture while living in Algeria, Bouraoui reflects, ‘Ici je porte la guerre d’Algérie. . . . Ici je porte la blessure de ma famille algérienne’ (30).3 The use of the French verb porter is significant here, given, as Helen Vassallo argues, the importance of historical memory for the next generation, who did not experience the violence of the Algerian Revolution directly, but still need to work through the inherited trauma through the reclaiming of historical memory and attempting to heal the wounds of the past through the embodiment of those memories in the present (‘Embodied Memory’ 191–92), which Bouraoui tries to accomplish through the act of writing. The crossing of geopolitical borders has created initially in Bouraoui a sense of disbelonging and anxiety in Algeria given the fact that she is the product of a mixed Algerian-French marriage, which, especially in the years following independence in Algeria, remained culturally loaded within a vexed colonial history of conflict and irresolution which she carries (porter), and of which Bouraoui herself is the embodiment. This, then, becomes the site of her struggle and the source of her split or fractured subjectivity, which is similarly represented in the fragmented style of her texts. Evoking Fanon’s revolutionary stage through a littérature de combat as part of the process towards decolonisation, Bouraoui claims that her silence is a form of combat, a form of non-compliance as a catalyst for writing, and implies that writing makes that combat legible: ‘Mon silence est un combat. J’écrirai aussi pour ça. J’écrirai en français en portant un nom arabe. . . . Mais quel camp devrais-je choisir? (GM 33; emphasis added).4

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Like Djebar, Bouraoui’s writing depicts the troubled past between Algeria and its former coloniser; Djebar in particular wishes to reclaim the voices of Algerian women that have been lost in standard narratives of colonial and postcolonial history, especially the strategic roles women played in the Algerian Revolution. Like Djebar, who has written about Algerian women, her conflicted relationship with Algeria as an expatriate, ‘female agency and the reappropriation of the gaze; . . . the ambiguity of being suspended between cultures and languages’, and the ‘intertwinement of history and memory’ as described in a special section of PMLA in 2016 dedicated to Djebar’s memory (Cazenave 141), Bouraoui, in Garcon Manqué, writes of how she has inherited the effects of colonial conflict and the war even though she did not experience them directly: ‘Je viens d’une union rare. Je suis la France avec l’Algérie’ (9),5 which not only locates her in the space between national borders but locates the specific historical conflict between coloniser and colonised within her writing. Yet at the same time, the historical trauma of conflict is not only located in her writing but embodied through her bicultural heritage, whereby the body becomes a site of social, cultural and historical inscription; as Bouraoui writes, ‘Je viens de la guerre’ (GM 32). While Djebar writes through the polyphonic and fragmented voices of Algerian women in order to interrupt a univocal historical narrative of Algeria that excludes them, the polyphonic becomes embodied in Bouraoui to the extent that she is not fully French, nor fully Algerian, but carries within her what Benjamin Stora describes as la guerre intériorisée, the collective amnesia surrounding the war, and the lack of an official remembrance, which turns its legacy inward (Vassallo, ‘Unsuccessful Alterity?’ 38; qtd in Stora, La Gangrène et L’Oubli 238). This internalised war becomes a site of personal struggle to try to name an individual subjectivity within a particular historical moment marked by women’s sociocultural erasure and effacement (Vassallo, ‘Unsuccessful Alterity?’ 39) in the years following the conflict and its ongoing legacy. Bouraoui herself acknowledges that Algeria is not in her language but in her body, and not in her words but within her,6 and she carries not only the effects of the historical conflict within her but the taboo of her parents’ mixed marriage as part of that historical legacy. As Kirsten Husung explains, the body is a product of cultural and discursive meanings, and therefore the bearer of particular memories both collective and individual. The protagonist’s subjective bodily experience bears the imprint of her family’s heritage which encapsulates the broader cultural heritage marked by the violence of FrancoAlgerian history (244).7 I italicise the verb porter, and its derivative porteur, in the endnote below in the original French text by Husung, and the participle en portant at the end of the previous paragraph (en portant un nom arabe) to show, as I discussed earlier, how Bouraoui, who did not experience colonisation and the Algerian Revolution directly, still carries the effects of the trauma, conflicts and contradictions from the historical violence between France and

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Algeria through her bicultural familial heritage. This embodied trauma, and the fraught relation between Algeria and France, continue in Bouraoui’s life as a result of the historical violence of French colonialism, the war, and ongoing struggles for decolonisation in Algeria. Part of the struggle, I would add, is an attempt to name this experience of difference at the intersections of embodied historical and personal trauma through translation into language in the act of writing. The physical and psychic internalisation of the Algerian Revolution and the continued historical conflict between Algeria and France do not lead to a mere reproduction of dominant historical narratives from either side of the geopolitical divide, nor to a retrospective of Bouraoui’s life, but to a fracturing of the borders not only between the two countries and continents but between past and present, a recreation of traumatic memory informed by historical and ideological conditions that are cited but reconfigured with personal meaning, so that both the past and the present acquire, for Bouraoui, a mode of exploration for finding a way of living with the past within the present. A more intensified and self-reflexive negotiation of split subjectivity and borders, geopolitical and otherwise, particularly around mediating the rupture between the country of her father’s origin and her childhood home (Algeria), and the country of her mother’s origin and of Bouraoui’s eventual settlement (France), is evident in Bouraoui’s writing, and somewhat similar, but not reducible, to the texts of the gay male writers discussed in the previous chapter, Bouraoui challenges binary thinking around national belonging, as she is also multiply positioned and living in France. As she remarks in Poupée Bella, ‘J’ai plusieurs vies. J’ai plusieurs corps sous mon corps’ (21),8 which not only confounds singular understandings and simplistic oppositions around ethnic and national belonging but also produces the body as a site of multiple inscriptions of cultural and discursive differences around gender and sexuality in addition to, and alongside, the bodily inscription of her biracial difference and its historical significance of irreconcilable differences in Franco-Algerian relations. Just as Bouraoui remains suspended in the space between two national and cultural identifications, feeling neither fully Algerian nor fully French, she is also suspended in the space between hegemonic distinctions of gender, which hints at dissident sexuality, as reflected in the title of the first work in the autofictional series I will discuss, Garcon Manqué (or Tomboy), where she elaborates: Tous les matins je vérifie mon identité. J’ai quatre problèmes. Française? Algérienne? Fille? Garçon? (163)9

Here, there is a linking and entanglement of cultural displacement with gender (and sexual) displacement and a (re)negotiation of geopolitical, cultural,

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racial, gender and sexual borders that drive the narrative of the three works through a simultaneous deconstruction and reworking of textual borders, given that Bouraoui’s comments above about the plurality of her identity and the plurality of her bodily inscriptions similarly suggest textual layers of multiple meanings beneath the narrative of the main text. Helen Vassallo sees Garcon Manqué as a struggle with the impossibility of Bouraoui’s selfexpression of her mixed Algerian/French identities along with her gender, and eventual sexual, dissidence, as all of these are marked as taboo in Algeria (Body Besieged 31); this is especially true given the way that Bouraoui links them both in the quotation above through twin pairings of française/ algérienne and fille/garçon. But earlier in the text, Bouraoui does remark, ‘Je reste entre les deux pays. Je reste entre deux identités. . . . J’invente un autre monde’ (GM 26),10 which cites both binary categories into which she cannot fit, while simultaneously hinting at the problematic nature of the binary pairs themselves in order to resist them, and linking the spaces between two identities in both pairs, while intimating a subversive, resistant space between both as un autre monde/another world. Garcon Manqué is told in the first person, and while the name of the author and the name of the narrator are the same and refer to Bouraoui herself, the work is neither strictly autobiographical nor chronological, but captures the memories and significant events in Bouraoui’s early life in a fragmented way. The narrative is told in bits and pieces, in clipped sentences, as Vassallo notes, cutting between Algeria and France and shifting in tone between narration and introspection (Body Besieged 25) as if the fragmented style of the narrative reflects the fragmented identity of its author. Writing of the intense alienation she experiences as a child growing up in Algeria (which also occurs when the family does not return from a summer holiday in Brittany and remains in France for good), and attempting to search for an identity that is not marked as taboo, Bouraoui writes, ‘Ici je suis une étrangère. Ici je ne suis rien. La France m’oublie. L’Algérie ne me reconnaît pas. . . . Ici je cherche ma terre. Ici je ne sais pas mon visage. Je reste à l’extérieur de l’Algérie’ (GM 29–30).11 By not knowing her face, by searching her ground(ing), Bouraoui initiates the possibilities for a new kind of alterity between national borders, as well as between the borders of gender, thereby linking and deconstructing these two essentialist categories as mentioned in the earlier quotation française/algérienne, fille/garçon. At the same time, Bouraoui takes on several masculine personæ in Garcon Manqué, which also fragments her subjectivity, which I will discuss momentarily, thus bringing to light the work’s title of Tomboy. For now, I would like to note that the binary categories of fille/ garçon are cited not only to indicate that gender is intimately interwoven with Bouraoui’s struggle in the space of l’entre-deux, that is, between two continents, cultures, languages and histories, but to indicate as well the limited and

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monolithic gender roles these terms designate in North Africa, whereby, as Helen Vassallo indicates, ‘girl’ denotes one who must remain invisible and stay at home and ‘boy’ is suggestive of freedom and empowerment given that public space in Algeria is gendered as masculine. In this sense, Bouraoui’s negotiations of identity are initially hindered by the gendered context of social and public space in Algeria and the taboo of female homosexuality. In other words, according to Vassallo, the binary oppositions are cited and linked in order to demonstrate the borders and tensions between women’s lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body that mediate women’s social experiences (Vassallo, Body Besieged 47), and this is part of the struggle for identity inscribed in Bouraoui’s writing, also upending the oppositions between the private and the public and the personal and the political. Because men inhabit public space freely in Algeria, thus masculinising it, Bouraoui’s father raised her to be a tomboy by teaching her to play football, to dive from the rocks, to defend herself in a country of men, even calling her Brio, a boy’s name,12 as a source of protection, as a way of positioning her resistantly, proactively, in a patriarchal world. But Bouraoui also says that she crosses gender and performs masculinity deliberately: ‘Je me déguise souvent. Je dénature mon corps féminin. . . . C’est un jeu’ (GM 49),13 and at one point, similar to Sofiène in Djaziri’s Un poisson sur la balançoire, who is mistaken for a girl by his aunt, Nina is mistaken for a boy by another woman, Paola, who says to her, ‘Tu es beau,’ the adjective beau being the masculine counterpart (handsome) for the more feminine adjective belle (pretty). Female masculinity is the other of two identities between which she rests, not only between being Algerian and French. In addition, Bouraoui takes on other masculine identities, such as Ahmed: ‘Je prends un autre prénom, Ahmed. Je jette mes robes. Je coupe mes cheveux. Je me fais disparaître. J’intègre le pays des hommes. Je suis effrontée. Je soutiens leur regard. Je vole leurs manières. J’apprends vite’ (GM 15).14 With Amine, her childhood friend and inner male twin, whom Nancy M. Arenberg describes, citing Beschea-Fache, as the protagonist’s mirror image through which she recognises herself because Amine symbolises her desire (6),15 Bouraoui engages in masculine performance as a way of dominating Amine, referring to herself as a fausse fille in the relationship, not a so-called real girl, someone whom Amine’s mother wants to keep separate from her son. Bouraoui is aware of the success of her gender performativity as she declares that for Amine, she invents herself, that for Amine, she has a man’s hands: ‘Pour toi je m’invente. Avec d’autres yeux. Avec d’autres gestes. Pour toi j’ai les mains d’un homme, fortes et serrées en coup-de-poing’ (GM 61–62).16 Yet, at the same time, she imagines herself desiring Amine, penetrating him sexually through her masculine persona, articulating that she loves him as a man, that she loves him

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(a boy) as if he were a girl,17 and we learn that she has borrowed a pair of Amine’s favourite trousers and refuses to return them, saying that ‘Je vis dans ton vêtement, là où précisément tu tiens ton sexe caché’ (GM 68).18 Ahmed’s claim to the masculinised public spaces in Algiers relates somewhat intertextually to the veiled women of whom Djebar writes in Femmes d’Alger, hidden from public view in one sense through veiling, but nonetheless claiming public space through not being recognised by other men, just as Bouraoui as a young girl can be mistaken for a boy through masculine performance. Similarly, Bouraoui’s attempt to recognise sexual alterity in herself, through gender dissidence and performing masculine sexual agency through feminising imaginatively one’s object of desire, recalls the masculine fantasy of boys like Chouaïb, the gang leader in Abdellah Taïa’s Une mélancolie arabe, who imagines Abdellah, the object of his desired penetration, to be a girl, even giving him a girl’s name, Leïla. These gendered, and generally received, notions of homosexuality are cited, but then translated by the protagonists of these texts into something autre chose, into another understanding that names same-sex desire differently. But, for now, Bouraoui’s protagonist recognises that her sexual fantasies towards Amine, her desire for him as a boy as if he were a girl (but who is really a boy), along with her refusal to return Amine’s favourite trousers, which expresses the pleasure of coming into contact with Amine’s penis, represents, as Arenberg notes, the gender and sexual identity that Bouraoui’s Nina longs to possess (Arenberg 6).19 In Bouraoui’s work, however, it must be made clear that crossing gender as a marker for queer childhood, as with the writing by Rachid O., Djaziri and Taïa discussed in the last chapter, does not simply mirror queer childhood in the West but is inscribed under a specific set of material, historical and ideological conditions pertinent to her growing up in Algeria, in a country previously colonised by France with the effects of the Algerian Revolution still felt in the late 1960s and the 1970s. To some extent, Bouraoui’s Algerian father encourages her masculine behaviour so that she grows up confident to inhabit and claim public space, where she can, in order to resist male domination. But it is Bouraoui herself who links, in her writing, her sense of geopolitical displacement with her gender dissidence, of being located in the space between France and Algeria and between the gender binary, of not fitting within predetermined social and political categories. This sense of dislocation continues when the family moves to France, to Rennes, later in Garcon Manqué; Bouraoui does not feel particularly French in spite of her having a claim to France given her mother is French, but postcolonial and post-immigration conditions in France mark Bouraoui racially as other, while her cross-gender identification marks her as primitive, thus re-inscribing the colonialist gesture. Therefore, it is important not to read Bouraoui’s masculinity only along the axis of gender (and implied sexuality) alone. In speaking

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of the importance of the intersectionality of gender with other axes of social positioning, Butler reminds us that gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical [or cultural] contexts, and . . . gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out ‘gender’ from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained. (Gender Trouble 6; brackets and emphasis added)

Writing of her experience of feeling racially objectified and othered while crossing the border into France at immigration at Orly airport in Paris upon her arrival from Algeria, Bouraoui recalls, Je porte ma valise à deux mains. Une énorme valise. . . . Ma vie algérienne et rapportée. J’aurai toujours une grande valise. Comme tous les Algériens. Comme tous ces étrangers qui descendent du train, du bateau, de l’avion, chargés. Une maison entière dans les mains. . . . Un jour, on fouillera ces valises suspectes. . . . Algériens, passagers très dangereux. Ces bombes humaines. Ces gens de la guerre. Ces terroristes par leur seul visage, par leur seul prénom, par leur seule destination. . . . Que faites-vous en France? . . . On fouillera pour la sécurité, diront-ils. Mais aussi pour salir et rabaisser. Parce que la guerre d’Algérie ne s’est jamais arrêtée. Elle s’est transformée. Elle s’est déplacée. Et elle continue. (GM 100–01)20

In France, with her large suitcase representing her Algerian life, Bouraoui becomes, once again, othered, this time subjected to the French gaze, once again invoking, now from the other side of the border, the troubled history between Algeria and France through referencing the legacy of the Algerian Revolution, which, as she indicates above, is not a mere historical event frozen in time but an ongoing effect of imperial power, given both the bitter memory of the war and the concomitant historical amnesia around it in France in the decades that followed the conflict, all of which constitute Bouraoui’s subjectivity in France, through racial epistemes, as a mirror image, perhaps, to the way in which she had internalised and embodied the war when living in Algeria through her bicultural heritage, though the war has had a different history in France.21 Queer migration, as I have discussed earlier in this book, is not necessarily a movement from repression to (gender/sexual) liberation but often one of continued, though restructured, experiences of marked inequality (Luibhéid 170). As with Abdellah Taïa, in particular, the crossing of borders by those moving from the postcolonies to former imperial centres is fraught with difficulties around penetrability despite the promise of more

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porous, open borders in a presumably more globalised world that is increasingly turning inward. The discrimination and objectification of which Taïa and Bouraoui write are experienced through racial and class differences in the process of translocation from the Maghreb to Europe. For Bouraoui, in particular, her masculinity and the suggestions of her latent homosexuality are regarded as taboo in Algeria; but in France, it is more her Algerian background, and its trace to the war, than her gender or sexual identity, that becomes the site of the taboo, of the inter-dit, the indicible, the forbidden or unspoken, thereby instantiating new negotiations of identity and embodiments of the historical trauma of Franco-Algerian relations in the broader struggle in Bouraoui’s work around what Kirsten Husung refers to as ‘un entrelacement des cultures’ (14), that is, an intertwining of cultures. In France, she has to try to fit in and assimilate, in ironic contrast to Algeria, where she was regarded as being too French, resented as being too close to the culture of the former coloniser, as she now must discipline, as Vassallo notes, the physical freedoms and more natural desires (‘Unsuccessful Alterity?’ 41) she had brought with her from Algeria. The suppression of her masculinity, injunctions not to eat with her hands, and to wear dresses and proper shoes are monitored strictly by her maternal grandmother after the family moves to Rennes. In Garcon Manqué, Bouraoui reflects back the commanding expectations she had internalised in order to fit in: ‘Faire semblant. Porter de vraies chaussures. Des chaussures qui ferment. Ne pas manger avec ses doigts. Dire bonjour et merci. Porter des robes. Se taire’ (95);22 yet, in attempting to fit in, she and her family nonetheless confront racism in France. Bouraoui imaginatively foresees overhearing a French woman waiting for a bus, while she and her father are present at the same bus stop, where, upon seeing Bouraoui’s Arab Muslim father, the woman would remark sharply that there were too many Arabs in France, and Bouraoui herself would be left unable to speak, unable to respond, calling attention to the silencing gestures of systemic racism in France.23 At the same time, Bouraoui comments on whiteness all around her in the Maurepas public garden in Rennes with its manicured lawns: Blanche. Comme un endroit qui n’existe pas. Un endroit inventé. Le lieu de mon absence. Je ne sais plus qui je suis au jardin de Maurepas. Une fille? Un garçon? . . . Qui? La Française? L’Algérienne? L’Algéro-Française? De quel côté de la barrière? Je reste une étrangère. (GM 141–42)24

Here Bouraoui is implying that even though she has crossed the border into France, there are still other borders with which to negotiate in terms of race and gender, and once again she draws together the problematic oppositions of française/algérienne with the borders of gender (fille/garçon) as intimately

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intertwined in France as well. It is important to acknowledge here Bouraoui’s deliberate intersecting of gender and race through questioning their very borders since it would be an egregious error to focus on her masculinity and/ or her eventual lesbian desire alone. Judith (Jack) Halberstam points out how female masculinity has been portrayed historically as a site of misidentification, as an outcome of failed femininity or unsuccessful male mimicry, and how gender-ambiguous individuals today are read more along the lines of a contradictory site, as both a symbol for postmodernist gender flexibility and a legible form of embodied subjectivity (In a Queer Time and Place 17–18). This contradiction operates to some extent in Bouraoui’s work as she is constantly renegotiating and reconfiguring the contours of gender borders, engaging the space of l’entre-deux, but always connected to race, to her bicultural, postcolonial and biracial background, as the entreaties to assimilate and to conform that she has internalised in France regarding her gender (to wear dresses and proper shoes) are connected to whiteness (in addition to saying hello and thank you, not eating with her fingers, made to feel that she doesn’t belong) and not only to gender alone, that is, connected to what Fanon has labelled le monde blanc.25 As Sara Ahmed argues, whiteness is not reducible to white skin but is a regime, a ‘straightening’ device, in both senses of the word, an effect of what coheres, or of what allows certain bodies to move with comfort through space and inhabit the world as if it were home (135–37), while racialised bodies, especially given the legacy of colonialism when located in the former imperial centre, often remain disoriented by the familiarity and social reproduction of le monde blanc. What Bouraoui’s work suggests is that both gender normativity (wearing dresses, wearing closed shoes for girls, keeping quiet) and normative whiteness (not eating with hands or fingers, saying hello and thank you, etc.) are sites of performativity, so that being masculine or feminine, or French or Algerian, are identifications not reducible merely to the body alone, though nonetheless embodied, and that race, like gender, ‘is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any given juncture in time’ (Butler, Gender Trouble 22). Garcon Manqué concludes with the protagonist visiting Rome on her own where there seems to be a momentary sense of joy and self-realisation, but the struggle for identity and sense of self will continue in Poupée Bella and in Mes Mauvaises Pensées. But in Rome, Bouraoui is geographically removed from being either in Algeria or in France, the locations of which, as Adrienne Angelo notes, have been obstacles to Bouraoui’s quest for subjective voice (90). Bouraoui seems to celebrate being momentarily free of the constraining burden that the Franco-Algerian historical conflict, and its continued effects, have placed on her in both Algeria and in France. Bouraoui writes, almost defiantly, in Rome, ‘Je n’étais plus française. Je n’étais plus algérienne. Je n’étais même plus la fille de ma mère. J’étais moi. Avec mon corps. Avec ce

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pressentiment’ (GM 184),26 in an act of disidentification, which, as discussed in the last chapter, is Muñoz’s term to describe strategies of identity performance by minoritarian subjects both to resist the demand for assimilation in dominant ideologies and discursive practices, while similarly recognising the impossibility of escaping its hold, engaging in a ‘working on and against’ as a way of transforming the hegemony of cultural logic from within, and appreciating the significance and value of everyday struggles of resistance.27 In the Tivoli Gardens, near Rome, unlike the Maurepas Garden in Rennes, Bouraoui’s body is no longer possessed by an internalised war, but is now more like a blank canvas, as Arenberg notes (9), awaiting inscription. As Bouraoui writes: Je suis devenue heureuse à Rome. Mon corps portait autre chose. Une évidence. Une nouvelle personnalité. Un don, peut-être. Je venais de moi et de moi seule. Je me retrouvais. . . . Et je me possédais. Mon corps se détachait de tout. Il n’avait plus rien de la France. Plus rien de l'Algérie. Il avait cette joie simple d’être en vie. (GM 185; emphasis added)28

This turning point, this momentary affirmation and feeling of freedom from the historical and personal embodiment and lived experience of her familial heritage in Algeria and in France, which cannot be separated from her struggle with gender identity, and which will return, even as she tries to repress it when she moves to Paris on her own, works as a shift towards possibilities of asserting subjective agency through lesbian desire and through the act of writing. At the very end of Garcon Manqué, Bouraoui tells Amine, in the form of a letter written to him, that there will always be a trace of him, and of Algeria, in her skin, inscribed on the surface of her body, and she lets him know that, through his memory, he has given her the power to write. But what her body now carries, as italicised in the previous quotation, given that the historical wound of Franco-Algerian relations is now suspended, at least for the present moment, and where the French verb porter was used in relation to this wound in Garcon Manqué and referenced earlier in this chapter, is something else. When Bouraoui asserts ‘mon corps portait autre chose’, the ‘something else’ her body carries is what she describes as ‘the haunting novelty of desire’,29 with lesbian desire being suggested, or translated, by the queerness of autre chose, discussed in the previous chapter with reference to Taïa, though in a different context, and explored by Bouraoui in more detail in Poupée Bella. Poupée Bella (Bella Doll), published in 2004, continues Bouraoui’s struggle to reclaim her personal heritage on her own terms largely through the more specific negotiation of sexual identity where Garcon Manqué had left off. The protagonist-narrator now lives in Paris, a more culturally diverse

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city and a place more accepting, in her view, of her gender and sexual otherness than in Algeria or in Rennes. Poupée Bella is also narrated in first person and written in the style of a personal diary with dated entries running from 30 October 1987 through 21 June 1989. The entries do not form a coherent narrative but are written in bits and pieces, as disconnected fragments, more so than in the previous work, textually reflecting, perhaps, the impossibilities of forming a completely coherent self. Bouraoui’s translocation to Paris allows her to write more openly of her lesbian desire; early on in the work, she writes in very direct terms: ‘Je suis dans le temps de mon homosexualité’ (Poupée Bella 17; hereafter cited as PB), or I am [now] in the time of my homosexuality. There also seems to be a marked shift in Poupée Bella as compared with Garcon Manqué. Rather than being concerned so much with geopolitical location and her mixed cultural heritage through negotiating the French/Algerian split, she downplays her racial difference and works towards understanding her ‘other’ site of her alterity – her sexuality – through a recognition of herself in others in the lesbian bars and nightclubs of Paris. As Vassallo more succinctly differentiates, Garcon Manqué is a quest for identity, whereas Poupée Bella is a desire for identification (‘Unsuccessful Alterity?’ 48). Speaking of this desire for identification within the Parisian lesbian subculture, where she has found a new family within a world that speaks of and to her, Bouraoui writes, ‘J’entre dans une nouvelle famille . . . Je cherche un trésor. Je cherche un monde qui parlerait de moi’ (PB 13, 16),30 thus representing a further site of disidentification, this time away from taboo renderings of cross-gender identification, female masculinity and lesbian desire. Moreover, Bouraoui’s awakening lesbian desire enables her to move beyond the static binary categories with which she had struggled in Garcon Manqué, such as national and ethnic affiliation, française/algérienne; gender, fille/garçon; or race, noir/blanc, and incites new possibilities for subjective existence which she explores in Poupée Bella as she now does not want to forget who she is,31 and seeks to celebrate, as Vassallo claims, ‘the possibility of living in difference’ (‘Unsuccessful Alterity?’ 51). And therefore, not only does the fragmented style of the text, just mentioned above, reflect the struggles of a fragmented self, the close intimacy of the first-person narrative of the personal diary accentuates, according to Adrienne Angelo, the author’s/narrator’s sexualised identity in this text, that is, her desiring subjectivity (90). Poupée Bella, then, distinguishes itself from the earlier work Garcon Manqué to the extent that at this point Bouraoui accepts neither her race nor her gender as natural or originary, but explores their social constructions, their ruptures and their fragmentations, thus confounding borders and focusing more specifically on her lesbian desire and the fluidities of identity. Bouraoui seems to celebrate the reterritorialisation and navigation of desire in

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Paris, writing in the very beginning of Poupée Bella, ‘Je suis une femme, je suis un homme, je suis tout, je ne suis rien’ (7),32 thus collapsing the borders of gender, and by implication, geopolitical and ethnic borders given that she was convinced, both in Algiers and in Rennes, that she was nothing, because of her experience of being half French in Algeria, of being half Algerian in Rennes, and her experience of having had to repress her felt gender, and her awakening desire, in both locations, thus beginning in Poupée Bella to live out the autre chose and the joie d’être en vie experienced only briefly in Tivoli at the very end of Garcon Manqué. Desire here occupies a queer space not only because Bouraoui is in the time of her homosexuality, as stated earlier, but also because it enables her to engage the space between, and move out of, the fixed, either/or categories of française/algérienne and fille/ garçon that consumed her in the previous work until near the end. In Paris, there are no references to the Algerian Revolution and her internalisation and embodiment of it, which, as Angelo notes, allows Bouraoui to re-establish and reassert identity through self-expression (through the act of writing) and physical mobility (92). Unlike in Garcon Manqué, where Bouraoui claimed she didn’t know her face, she writes in Poupée Bella, ‘Je veux reconnaître mon visage, je veux reconnaître ma voix, je veux reconnaître ma main qui écrit’ (83; emphasis added),33 suggesting not only that the search for self continues but that it continues in new ways, highlighted by the repetition of the verb reconnaître, which also contains within it the verb naître, to be born, thereby suggesting a rebirth or renewal of identity. At the same time, the listing of the various recognitions to which she aspires are listed in a single sentence as quoted above rather than in the more staccato, separate, clipped sentence structure of Garcon Manqué, and her sentences therein around not knowing her face, about not being recognised by Algeria and being forgotten about by France repeat the same grammatical structure, but are each related in separate, short sentences, suggesting fragmentation of self in the former work, contrasted with a movement towards, or search for, a more holistic, fluid and desiring self in Poupée Bella, through translating her desires into a single flowing sentence, though this sense of wholeness to which she aspires ultimately will elude her. But equally important, the body, more specifically embodiment, as in Garcon Manqué, plays a prominent role in Poupée Bella, as suggested by what I have just said above, and by Bouraoui’s specific mention of wanting to recognise her voice, her face, her writing hand, and in her statement, ‘Je suis dans la seule vérité. La vérité de mon corps’ (PB 13).34 In addition to a noticeable shift here, from a concern with being located within particular geopolitical borders to the spatial location of her body and her embodiment of the highly sexualised terrain, or terre, of the lesbian bars in Paris that seem to give her voice, the body is also connected to the intimacy of the writing

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and to the first-person narrative voice mentioned earlier. It is the environment of the lesbian subculture in Paris, and of the written word, rather than personal and collective memory and her biracial heritage, that is embodied in Poupée Bella; as Angelo remarks, the written word is never independent of corporeal investment (92). Bouraoui confirms this, noting that writing is like love, passing through the body: ‘L’écriture est comme l’amour, elle passe par le corps, elle est dans cette force de vie-là’ (PB 57).35 And this is connected to her embodiment of her environment, the lesbian clubs of Paris, and its impact on personal and historical consciousness (Vassallo, Body Besieged 58) through this reterritorialisation, which seems, initially, more about sexual identity than about geopolitical location (Paris), and less about mixed cultural identity that haunted her in Algiers, and in Rennes, where she had first lived in France and also experienced alienation and racism. In an attempt to create a new history unencumbered by the colonial past and her personal history, Bouraoui celebrates simply being a body in the world and being lesbian (though she does not mention this word): ‘Je suis à Paris. Je suis en vie. Je suis heureuse. . . . Je suis un corps dans le monde. Je suis une fille qui aime les filles’ (PB 23),36 written with a sense of climaxing jouissance, while postulating that she is in the very process of creating in Paris her own history, in resistance to the history she has inherited through her body, by making connections with other female bodies, ‘Mon histoire se défait ici. Mon histoire se fait ici. . . . J’ai un prénom. J’ai un visage. J’existe’ (PB 15–16),37 clearly contradicting her statement in the earlier text that she had no face in Algeria and was nothing as she can now create and write a new (personal) history as experienced though the body and through desire. Also, it is worth noting, on the level of form, that very often sentences in Garcon Manqué begin with the term ici (here, in English) to place the emphasis on the specificity of the geopolitical space in which Bouraoui is located (e.g. ‘Ici je suis une étrangère. Ici je ne suis rien’ from Garcon Manqué), whereas in Poupée Bella, the term ici, when it does occur, is placed at the end of the relevant sentences, as in the quotation above (‘mon histoire se fait ici’), where the focus is less specifically on geopolitical location but on the lesbian subculture of the Milieu des Filles, and, more importantly, on her emergent or growing sense of (lesbian) self. After a period of intense disidentification with the confining structures of being French in Algeria and Algerian in Rennes, as well as with those of normative gender and the taboo of lesbian desire, and in looking for a world that speaks to/about her, the lesbian scene and bars in Paris, such as le Scorpion, le Studio A and le Katmandou or le Kat, seem more liberatory. In contradistinction from her approach in Garcon Manqué, where she focuses on her gender alterity in Algiers, which intimates her latent sexual alterity as well, and the difficulty of finding a place for her gender/sexual difference within the borders of Algeria, and in contradistinction to the strictures

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placed on her in Rennes to blend into whiteness and suppress her masculinity, her differences and her voice, Bouraoui seeks a world in Paris that already speaks about her and affirms, even constitutes, her subjectivity. She writes in Poupée Bella, for example, ‘Il y a un rêve homosexuel et je ne l’ai pas encore trouvé. Je veux un temps amoureux et unique’ (19).38 But at the same time, she tries to erase other parts of herself in order to fit into the Parisian lesbian subculture, which is predominately white, so there is a different, yet similar, sort of ‘strategic’ blending into le monde blanc, even as that so-called white world is queer. Earlier in Poupée Bella, before Bouraoui claims that she had a face in Paris, and later asserts that she wants to recognise her face and her voice, she writes, ‘Je n’ai plus de visage, je peux tout perdre ici. Ce que je suis. Ce que j’étais’ (10).39 In an attempt to claim one part of her identity, at this point she believes she must eclipse other aspects of self, such as her racial difference, in order to assert sexual difference without reference to her cultural past, which, she later learns, is not possible: ‘Trouver sa place dans le cœur d’une fille c’est enfin trouver sa place dans le monde’ (PB 19).40 But as Vassallo claims, Bouraoui’s attempt to lose her face in the lesbian clubs, and thereby become faceless and blend in through whitening the mark of racial otherness, is not a choice or a problematic capitulation to le monde blanc but a mode of survival driven by a need to exist on one’s own terms (‘Unsuccessful Alterity?’ 46) and (by a need) to negotiate the space between two cultural worlds. This is reminiscent of the work of African American lesbian writer Audre Lorde, who, in her book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, describes the difficulties of gaining acceptance and feeling at home as lesbian in the African American community in Harlem in New York, where she grew up, and her initial struggles to attempt to downplay her racial difference, along with other lesbians of colour, in the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Similarly, Gloria Anzaldúa writes of her new mestiza consciousness, of being bicultural, biracial, bilingual and queer, caught in the interstices between a variety of borders, as she negotiates the spaces between her Mexican/Aztec and Anglo cultural heritage; between the hegemony of English, with which she was socialised and schooled in the United States in Texas, and Spanish, the language spoken at home in the family; and between racial and sexual identity in her seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Finally, it is important to link, as Bouraoui does in Poupée Bella, her newly discovered lesbian identity that is brought into existence through the act of writing. As Bouraoui asserts, ‘Écrire, c'est rendre public le Milieu des Filles’ (PB 118).41 Because the narrator of Poupée Bella refuses to conform to dominant cultural expectations of gender and restrictive definitions of sexuality both in Algeria and in France, the act of writing, according to Rosie MacLachlan, provides a means of breaking out of imprisoning language and

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a way of resisting restrictive definitions and categories (27). In this sense, perhaps, there is a connection between the resistance to textual norms, given that Bouraoui’s text itself defies generic classification, as it cannot be classified under the rubric of a single genre, that is, it can be read as memoir, ­autobiography, fiction or as a treatise on subjectivity, though not as any one of these independently, and a simultaneous resistance to sexual norms, an intertwining of meaning and form. Moreover, if Bouraoui’s identity is produced discursively, as MacLachlan argues, through the very representation of the self in the writing (30–31), it is questionable if the (sexual) identity that emerges from the discursive representation of the self is a mere replication of the author herself to the extent that the form of (lesbian) identity that has emerged from Bouraoui’s text may be emerging for the first time (MacLachlan 7). Yet, I would add that if the self emerges discursively, as MacLachlan suggests using poststructuralist assumptions that one can only position oneself as subject through language, then the self that emerges from Bouraoui’s text would be a textual translation of self, given that the self can only be constructed in and through language. Developing this point Judith Butler argues, Where there is an ‘I’ who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that ‘I’ and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will. Thus there is no ‘I’ who stands behind discourse and executes its volition or will through discourse. . . . The ‘I’ only comes into being through being called, named, interpellated, to use the Althusserian term, and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the ‘I’. (Bodies that Matter 225)

Butler refers to the discursive constitution that takes place as prior to the ‘I’ as ‘the transitive invocation of the “I”’ (Bodies that Matter 225), but I would refer to this invocation as a translation because what is being invoked (i.e. translated) is not Bouraoui’s physical self or some ‘true’, originary, inner, pre-discursive, coherent self that precedes the discursive constitution of the subject, if, following MacLachlan’s understanding of Butler, ‘there is no “I” who stands behind discourse’, given that the subject is ‘produced within the practice of signification’ (MacLachlan 16). Rather, what is being translated, in my view, is a contingent, conceptualised sense of self that can only be accessed, and so conceptualised or conceived, through language, a self which is thus translated, through the act of writing, into the written word, in this case, into the text. Yet, this translation is never an exact repetition or equivalence, like all translation; but in the case of the self, its textual translation is not of an ‘originally’ conceived self as the point of origin that is simply reproduced or repeated textually since that very originality is called into question if the self can only be produced through the discursive conditions that precede

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its existence. A translation may be, to some degree, a repetitive act, but like gender performativity, it is always a repetition with a difference. Bouraoui’s text, in this sense, particularly in Poupée Bella, is thus a performative enunciation and translation of her identity, but only partially and contingently so, just as gender performativity can never encapsulate in a single performance the entire range of gender norms. It is this act of the performative enunciation of identity and translation into/as text, I would argue, that distinguishes her work from the gay male writers I discussed in the last chapter, and is a point to which I shall return later. Bouraoui comes to realise later in the text, however, that lesbian difference is insufficient in itself to constitute identity, but is only a constituent part, even as she struggles to reclaim it from its previous repression in her past. She eventually comes to understand the connection of lesbian desire to her writing and, nearly invoking intertextually Roland Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text, seeks pleasure, a jouissance, in the textual translation of her felt desires through the act of writing, noting that one can never stop writing, but that it would be possible to stop loving women. As Bouraoui herself explains, ‘Quand j’écris, je n’ai plus besoin du Milieu des Filles. Je prends possession de mon corps, de mon désir. . . . On ne s’arrête jamais d’écrire. Je pourrais m’arrêter d’aimer les femmes’ (PB 39, 42).42 Bouraoui finally learns the limits of the lesbian scene as a space for her to develop and understand her identity, and becomes attracted to the act of writing, seeing similarities between her desire for women and her desire for meaning through writing, yet seeing the associations of both: ‘J’ai peur d’écrire et j’ai peur d’aimer’ (PB 47).43 It is through her act of writing that Bouraoui, according to MacLachlan, produces ‘reiterations of her narrative self’ (74), which I think is slightly more accurate than assuming that Bouraoui merely represents or reflects her identity in her writing, since the self can only be narrated through language, and it is only a narrated self, that is, a translated self, that can be textually (re)iterated in writing, but never an exact reiteration of a sense of self as this is endlessly deferred, just as the translative relationship is not one of exact reproduction or correspondence but rather one of continued excess, hiatus, negotiation and struggle. The lesbian scene in Paris, while initially liberating, is also frustrating, not only in terms of making connections with other women but also because sexuality becomes another problematic, restrictive category that can also be confining, much like the categories with which Bouraoui had struggled earlier. Bouraoui comes to understand that utopian notions of lesbian existence and community are not straightforward gateways to agency, that human agency is neither completely obscured by power, on the one hand, much as she experienced the subordination of agency in Garcon Manqué, but found ways of resisting that subordination, nor is lesbian existence in the context of the lesbian scene in Paris in particular, or in the broader social world in

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general, synonymous with opposition to power and a simultaneous assumption of agency. As Judith Butler explains in her book The Psychic Life of Power, ‘Where conditions of subordination make possible the assumption of power, the power assumed remains tied to those conditions, but in an ambivalent way; in fact, the power assumed may at once retain and resist that subordination’ (13).44 This means that the geopolitical terre or grounding of the lesbian subculture and environment that Bouraoui comes to inhabit is not without the inescapability of the embodied past, both historical and personal (Vassallo, Besieged Body 72). But there is a movement towards a greater sense of agency from Garcon Manqué to Poupée Bella, not as a result of the mere articulation and enactment of lesbian desire and the embodiment of a lesbian community for which Bouraoui had hoped and eventually experienced, but through the very act of writing and/as the site of the simultaneous textual translation of (lesbian) desire and (lesbian) identity, which also performs the gaps, the aporias, and the contingencies of desire and identity through the text’s fragmented style.45 Mes Mauvaises Pensées (My Bad Thoughts), the third autofictional text in the series I will examine, published in 2005 and winner of the prix Renaudot that same year, is the most experimental of the three. Again, the text is written in the first person, suggesting that the narrative voice is that of Bouraoui as a young woman. The book takes place in the clinical environment of her analyst’s office in Paris and is written without paragraph breaks or chapter or sectional divisions; in fact, it appears textually as an extended, book-length monologue, very often with long sentences and sporadic punctuation. As MacLachlan notes, the text is narrated by a self-referential je to her unnamed analyst (4), represented as the interlocuter vous; this starts at the very beginning of the book, in the very first sentence, with Bouraoui speaking to her analyst: ‘Je viens vous voir parce que j’ai des mauvaises pensées’ (Mes Mauvaises Pensées 11; hereafter cited as MMP).46 Mes Mauvaises Pensées is even more fragmented stylistically than the previous two texts as the narrator’s thoughts seem to drift and go on and on; sometimes there are grammatical errors which show the immediate rawness of the discourse, of the stream of consciousness, of the free associations, that have not been edited for a wider social audience beyond the clinical context. Most of the text is written in the present tense, even though the events that are narrated have occurred in the past, in order to focus on the reflection and the significance of these events in the present, which is critical to the psychoanalytic process. Mes Mauvaises Pensées could be read as a confessional text, un romanconfession, as indicated on the back cover of the Gallimard edition, but perhaps it is more of an intimate ‘working through’ of the guilt, loss and complexities of her earlier family life divided between two cultures; hence, Bouraoui, as Katharine Harrington argues, tries to piece together a disjointed

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past and a fractured identity by including memories and reflections in an even more fragmented narrative (99–100) than was the case with Poupée Bella or Garcon Manqué. Early on in Mes Mauvaises Pensées, Bouraoui comments on the process in which she is engaging in her therapy: L’Algérie n’est rien, je ne suis rien, ce sont les nuages qui comptent, ce sont eux que je regarde, c’est là que j’aimerais être. . . . Je n’aime pas ma place, je n’aime pas les mots qui me désignent: la petite fille. Je pourrais écrire le roman de ma thérapie, je pourrais écrire sur nos rendez-vous, ce serait une histoire d’amour, ou une histoire de haine, je ne sais pas encore. . . . (MMP 31–32)47

Here there is an implication that if she is nothing and if Algeria is nothing, she can write and perhaps make herself legible textually and in the everyday material world. But despite losing herself in the lesbian scene in Paris and the (re)claiming and textual translation of her lesbian existence and lesbian desires through the act of writing, Bouraoui still experiences strong feelings of alienation in Paris as the negotiation of sexual identity, and the rediscovery of self, in Poupée Bella, has elided her other site of alterity, being FrenchAlgerian, so that there is a linking in Mes Mauvaises Pensées of both racial and sexual otherness to her ability to write (Vassallo, Body Besieged 58), that is, to write of the resurfacing, the re-emergence of the French/Algerian and girl/boy distinctions as the four problems first evoked in Garcon Manqué and now giving her bad thoughts. The problematics of the gender binary are now extended to sexuality, but gender is nonetheless implied, calling to mind Butler’s stipulation that sexuality remains ‘regulated through the policing and the shaming of gender’ (Bodies that Matter 238). Bouraoui comes to realise the difficulty of repressing the country and culture of her childhood, and therefore a significant part of her past, and, as Harrington notes, Bouraoui experienced a violent rupture from her life in Algeria in moving to France permanently as a teenager (79), in clear contradistinction, perhaps, to the rêve homosexuel she seeks in the Milieu des Filles referenced in Poupée Bella, a fantasy that temporarily suppressed the trauma of the sudden earlier rupture in her life. Speaking of her negation and effacement of her cultural past, which began when she first went to live in France permanently, and of the violent effects of this effacement of a part of herself and her paternal heritage, Bouraoui reflects in Mes Mauvaises Pensées: Je suis une étrangère quand j’arrive à Paris, le cinq octobre mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-un, je ne suis pas une étrangère comme les autres, je suis française, mais je me sens étrangère aux formes qu’on me propose, l’appartement, le collège, les gens, la chambre que je partage avec ma mère, il y a la disparition en moi de l’Algérie. Plus de traces, plus rien, je m’efface de l’intérieur, . . . il y a la

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négation totale en moi de l’Algérie: la renonciation à mon père, à ce qu’il est, à ce qui le précède, c’est d’une grande violence, c’est d’une grande injustice aussi. (96; emphasis added)48

Here Bouraoui acknowledges that she is a French citizen, yet still feels dislocated in France because of the alienating social configurations and conventions that are available to her. This reinvokes my earlier reference in my discussion of Garcon Manqué, when Bouraoui leaves Algeria for good and moves to France at age fourteen, to Sara Ahmed’s point about whiteness as being more than skin colour, but a straightening device that, in its social reproduction of le monde blanc, causes racialised bodies to remain disoriented as an effect of colonialism. But, at the same time, the articulation of the trauma in Mes Mauvaises Pensées concerning the renunciation of her Algerian past, which occurred in Poupée Bella with Bouraoui’s attempted erasure of the mark of biracial and bicultural difference and the losing of her face, or its attempted whitening, in order to craft a space of lesbian existence for herself rather than being determined by the geopolitical spaces she inhabits, initiates a process of healing. The suppression of the Algerian story embodied within her, and the attempt to erase her Algerian past in France, particularly as suggested near the end of Garcon Manqué, and more strongly articulated in Poupée Bella, generates, as Helen Vassallo notes, a state of pain and the need to seek psychiatric help (Body Besieged 74). As Bouraoui herself claims, ‘Je suis triste à cause de l’Algérie, je suis le cœur de l’Algérie, . . .’ (MMP 26; emphasis added).49 The analytic situation in Mes Mauvaises Pensées, the process of healing, to which I refer, occurs through a symbolic return to Algeria and her cultural roots, in order, as Vassallo claims, to reconcile the unresolved history the narrator has with her Algerian past (Body Besieged 58). Another way of conceiving of this third work is as a textual return to Algeria; Bouraoui’s own translation of the significance of Algeria to her. Mes Mauvaises Pensées is not merely a repetition of the struggles of biracial identity in Garcon Manqué, but, as MacLachlan explains, it encapsulates the personal memory of a safe, joyful childhood, the difficulty of leaving it behind so suddenly, and trying to understand the impact of her young experience on her broader adult identity (98); in this sense, Algeria can be interpreted psychoanalytically as a metaphor for the maternal body and the psychic trauma of separation. Given that Garcon Manqué can be read as a quest for identity, and Poupée Bella as a desire for identification, as I mentioned earlier, citing Vassallo, Mes Mauvaises Pensées can be read as a journey or a process towards self-acceptance (Vassallo, ‘Unsuccessful Alterity?’ 48). While Bouraoui claimed to feel like a foreigner in Algeria in Garcon Manqué because of her French background and the attendant hostilities towards her biracial, bicultural heritage when growing up there, and made

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her feel unable to decide on which side of virgule she belonged in the française/algérienne binary distinction, Mes Mauvaises Pensées is filled often with beautiful, evocative descriptions and longing memories of Algeria. Rosie MacLachlan refers to the book as a nostalgic return to Algeria textually through personal memory and a rather ambivalent identification with the Algeria of Bouraoui’s childhood (97), which is frequently invoked in the text as ‘la beauté et toute la solitude de l’Algérie, je suis triste à cause de cela, . . .’ (MMP 26).50 Her identity struggle continues to the extent that sexuality is only one axis of identity, though neither forgotten nor suppressed, but there is another desire which is making itself felt, one towards an imaginative recovery of her Algerian homeland and her biracial heritage in relation to it, while Algeria remains a place to which she does not ever return. Revisiting the française/algérienne fracture and its impact upon her in Mes Mauvaises Pensées, Bouraoui writes, ‘Il y a ces deux flux en moi, que je ne pourrai jamais diviser, je crois n’être d’aucun camp. Je suis seule avec mon corps’ (52).51 It is through the articulation and simultaneous translation of the trauma of the early rupture with Algeria as a young girl, both in the psychoanalytic context and via the act of writing, that Bouraoui is able to begin to grasp a momentary sense of self and a sense of the significance of Algeria to her personal and cultural past through what emerges in her analysis and through what appears on the written page.52 The two flows mentioned in the quotation above (as ces deux flux) suggest a movement away from a binary understanding of her relationship with France and Algeria to more of a relationship of fluidity between them within her own body, an intertwining of the two. It is through the act of Bouraoui writing herself into her autofictional work that instantiates the textual search for selfhood, as MacLachlan notes (159), to which I have been referring to as a textual translation, a rewriting of her personal history and of self, not a mere repetition of her childhood experiences in Algeria. Speaking of the connection of writing and self, Bouraoui explains, ‘Il faut de l’imagination pour vivre, pour avoir des mauvaises pensées, pour écrire sur soi, puisqu’on ne se connaît jamais vraiment; il faut de l’imagination pour se raconter, pour trouver la réponse à la question « Qui suis-je? »’ (MMP 59–60).53 Like the psychoanalytic process, then, writing about the self operates heuristically as a form of identity struggle and memory, and is translative to the extent that new understandings of the self, and the preceding and ensuing struggles, emerge in language, both in the context of the analytic situation and on the written page, and Mes Mauvaises Pensées links them in attempting to capture both as translative acts. At the same time, the act of writing does not merely operate to translate that which is not visible and give it a material existence through language, but writing, as Vassallo argues in Body Besieged, is the means through which Bouraoui works to reconstruct embodied memory that has been lost

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or severed and transfer it to the text. This reconstruction is not a negation of the actual past, which can never be recuperated completely or accurately, but a reclaiming, a reterritorialisation, of Algeria (78–79) not reducible to its geopolitical location in the world but reclaimable through its embodied memory materialised (i.e. translated) through the written text. The very act of writing helps Bouraoui to remember and to reconstruct the significance of Algeria to her, the country of her paternal heritage: ‘Et c’est dans les mots que je retrouve mon père, c’est notre pays je crois, ces lignes que je trace au feutre . . . ces mots que je relie les uns aux autres’ (MMP 176).54 This does not mean that the lesbian desire of which she writes in Poupée Bella is completely forgotten or becomes any less important; I cannot agree with Vassallo’s claim that there are very few references to sexuality in Mes Mauvaises Pensées (Body Besieged 68), as they are both explicit and connected meaningfully to Bouraoui’s reconstructed sense of self. In Mes Mauvaises Pensées, Bouraoui links writing to her body and to sexuality: Il y a de la sexualité dans l’acte d’écrire, il y a de l’exposition et de l’intime, et c’est si simple de comprendre aujourd’hui mes amours, . . . je sais mon corps près du corps des femmes, je sais ses façons de tenir ou de se retenir, il y a un lien entre les femmes, . . . je sais que j’écris par amour vous savez, je sais que j’écris dans cette forme de félicité, . . . et quand j’écris sur l’Algérie, je pourrais crier: « Je suis de retour! ». (MMP 176–77; emphasis added)55

Even with regard to her lesbian desire, Bouraoui comes to realise that the power of writing can help to vanquish bad thoughts through a naming of the world and her position within it and within her history. At the same time, she knows her body through its relational existence to other women, just as words have meaning in relation to other words, as intimated in the quotation just previous to the one above. Speaking specifically of her trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts, a gay and lesbian enclave at the tip of Cape Cod, Bouraoui says that through her own voice she is able to articulate, ‘« je suis, ici, chez moi »; cette phrase signifie aussi que je suis chez moi à l’intérieur de moi, vous savez . . .’ (MMP 177).56 But it is just not the environment of Provincetown that she hopes to embody so that she can articulate lesbian existence as she did within the lesbian subculture of Paris in Poupée Bella; it is the very act of writing that names and constructs the world from embodied memory and from a position of agency and lesbian existence: Je sais que je pourrais trouver ma place ici, un jour, parmi ces femmes, parmi ces filles, dans ce lieu mythique où séjourna Tennessee Williams; il y a des places amoureuses et je sais que je reviendrai à Provincetown, c’est mon paradis, . . . il y a une écriture qui se forme dans ce lieu, une écriture fine et pure, une

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écriture du cœur; je ne me suis jamais sentie aussi bien dans un pays, dans une communauté, je ne me suis jamais sentie bien en moi-même . . . je suis en paix, il n’y a plus de colère en moi, . . . je me retrouve. (MMP 185; emphasis added)57

Bouraoui is attempting to link in Mes Mauvaises Pensées both her Algerian/ French biracial and bicultural heritage without seeing them in binary terms while simultaneously disturbing the normative and causative borders between gender and heterosexuality by creating a space of lesbian existence. Thus, writing and subjectivity are irrevocably linked, as Vassallo argues, given that the narrative is a process of reconstructing the self (Body Besieged 79), though I would clarify, it is a process of translating the self through the text. As Harrington points out, Bouraoui pushes borders, refuses to be placed within received categories. Rather, she embraces the ambiguities of her positions being the daughter of French-Algerian parents and being lesbian, refusing the traditional distinctions of gender; this destabilisation of discursive categories is reflected in the fragmentation of the text and the refusal to pre­ sent a coherent narrative (Harrington 102–03), just as the (queer) postcolonised self is never coherent, never without splittings of difference. Bouraoui returns to her Algerian past in order to integrate its meaning into her present; she admits through writing Mes Mauvaises Pensées, and most likely through the psychoanalytic situation on which the text is based, that situating herself in relation to her Algerian past has taught her to write (i.e. to write the world and to write the self) and therefore to love, ‘J’aimerais revoir le pays où j’ai appris à écrire. J’aimerais revoir le pays où j’ai appris à aimer’ (MMP 252),58 given her descriptions, in the long quotation from Mes Mauvaises Pensées above, pertaining to her renewed sense of self amalgamated with the close connections she feels to other women and their bodies in Provincetown, feeling at home with other women there and with herself. As Kirsten Husung notes, Bouraoui creates a new space of alterity, that is, a space of l’entredeux, a space between two countries and between two genders, a space that nevertheless is both painful and creative, but which gives her the strength to write and to write the self (246).59 In this sense, she is always already other, always living in difference, as suggested near the end of Mes Mauvaises Pensées that there is a ground for everyone: ‘Il y a une terre pour chacun’ (265). Earlier in Poupée Bella, in writing of her lesbian desire, Bouraoui had written that finding a place in a girl’s heart was equivalent to finding one’s place in the world;60 yet, interestingly in Mes Mauvaises Pensées, the word cœur is used in relation to Algeria, as in ‘l’Algérie est dans mon cœur qui saigne’ (MMP 235; emphasis added; Algeria is in my heart which bleeds). This transposition, indeed translation, of the significance of the word ‘heart’ from marking her desire for other women as synonymous with her positioning in the world in Poupée Bella to the association of her heart

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with Algeria, both remembered and imagined, in Mes Mauvaises Pensées, suggests an emotional connection between the terre of her African homeland, the same terre for which she was searching in Garcon Manqué (‘Ici je cherche ma terre’), and her desire for women as not only interconnected but contingent upon one another: ‘Je marche dans le cœur même de la terre et donc de l’existence’ (MMP 124; emphasis added).61 The translation of cœur beyond the realm of lesbian desire alone is part of the reparative struggle with identity that Bouraoui has attempted to represent through the act of writing Mes Mauvaises Pensées, especially marking her heart not only as wounded (bleeding) to exemplify the painfulness of the struggle but as also connected to her writing (une écriture du cœur) through which she comes to realise the intersectionalities of her identity: ‘Il y a un lien,’ she affirms near the end of her text, ‘entre le cœur et la terre’ (MMP 225).62 The works of Nina Bouraoui, along with those by the gay male writers discussed in the previous chapter, inscribe the world from a position where two different cultures touch, caught in the diasporic space in-between, in the space of what Abdellah Taïa has named l’entre-deux in Mon Maroc, that pulls him towards both Moroccan and French cultures as a battle that is embodied within him, but is also a space, he acknowledges, that allows him to write otherwise, to write something different, to speak of his love, to be that which is not spoken and does not exist.63 The migration from the childhood homeland is one that is never complete, including for Bouraoui, who grew up in Algeria, and returned to France, but the link still persists in her through the two flows referenced earlier (ces deux flux), which can never be separated, a back-and-forth movement between a past life in the Maghreb and a present life in France, an emotional link which also persists, in varying degrees, in all of the contemporary queer francophone writing discussed. Thus, the Algerian homeland for Bouraoui, and the Maghrebian homelands for Taïa, Djaziri and Rachid O., can never be recaptured fully, but only remembered, in a fragmented sense, while never being abolished in the country of settlement, that is, in France. It is thus the imaginative aller-retour in the act of writing that mediates the negotiation of sexual alterity in diaspora, which can never be reduced to binary terms, as sexual alterity is complicated by intersecting and shifting differentials around race, class, gender, national belonging and migration. As Bouraoui writes about the limitations of the binary paradigms of française/algérienne and fille/garçon, with which she struggles in order eventually to think herself out of these limited categories, Rachid O. comes to the realisation in Chocolat Chaud that he need not think of himself any longer in binary terms as ‘like this or like that’ (comme ceci ou comme cela) but that it is more important for him to be himself (71). All of the writers put pressure on the gender binary; the gay male writers, for instance, recognise the gender binary as insufficient, alongside the attendant,

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yet problematic, gendering of active/passive homosexuality, whereas Bouraoui identifies with masculinity and in her youth identifies as a tomboy initially as a way of resisting a male-privileged society in Algeria, and ultimately hints at her latent lesbian desires in Garcon Manqué, which become more apparent and less suggestive in Poupée Bella. She thus realises, perhaps more pointedly than the male writers, that neither her struggles with gender identification nor with sexual dissidence can be separated from her struggles with her biracial and bicultural identity in Algeria and in France, though most of the writers experience racial objectification in one way or another in the country of their childhood homes, including, for some, with European sexual partners living there (Rachid O. with Antoine, for example), and when they move to France. The hybrid, fractured nature of identity in the contemporary queer writing from the Maghreb that I have discussed, being caught in the space between two different cultural worlds, is reflected in the autofictional form through the blurring of the literary borders between genres to the extent that the opposition between lived reality and fiction becomes deconstructed (Husung 250) as a way of performing textually the decentring of self. While it is true that autofiction is not reducible to mere autobiography but includes the personal experiences of the author as related by the protagonist-narrator, as Gibson Ncube notes (La sexualité queer au Maghreb 29),64 the autofictional texts being addressed here are not meant simply to represent the self in any essential way but are literary attempts by their authors to perform the fluidities, discontinuities and ambiguities in postcolonised queer selves through inscribing these with textual form and significance. The use of fictional protagonistnarrators, such as Djaziri taking on the character of Sofiène; Bouraoui taking on multiple selves, such as Brio and Ahmed; and the confusion between the fictional je, or I, of the narrative voice of the protagonists in recalling and living the past through memory, particularly Maghrebian childhood experiences, and the voice of the actual author in the moment of writing and narrating the text in the present day, and reflecting on the significance of his or her past, disrupt the linear, or ‘straight’, progression of the works from childhood through to adulthood. These sources of confusion and disruption occur through a continual aller-retour in the texts, interspersed movements back and forth between the past and the present, between the Maghreb and France, which obscure any stability of meaning in both temporalities/spatialities, to the extent that understandings of the past, and of so-called cultural realities in the present, along with understandings of the self, are discursive, and thereby, contingent constructions. These various sites of hybridity and métissage therefore create spaces of uncertainty and ambiguity around the narrative centre of the texts, which perform, in my view, the contingencies, instabilities and fluctuations of identic, geopolitical, temporal and generic borders through the autofictional form.

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Bouraoui’s writing, in many respects, takes further the struggle for identity insofar as diasporic subjectivity is always already in a process of becoming which cannot necessarily be captured in conventional literary forms or within a single genre such as autobiography. For Bouraoui, as Vassallo claims, there is not only a movement away from fixed notions of gender/sexual and cultural identity, to the extent that mobility and permeability keep the search for self open-ended (Body Besieged 81), but a continued recuperation, reconfiguration and repositioning of herself in what she describes in Mes Mauvaises Pensées as a process of finding her place in the world.65 Bouraoui’s place in the world no longer refers solely to finding her place in the heart of another girl, as she claimed in Poupée Bella, though that was a stage in her process of becoming as she turned away from her biracial identity and sought lesbian existence as a part of who she was. Trudy Agar-Mendousse points out that ‘le sujet autobiographique bouraouien est toujours en devenir . . . en métamorphose constante’ (231; qtd. in Vassallo, Body Besieged 81),66 and certainly this process of becoming is working in Poupée Bella when Bouraoui claims that ‘je suis en devenir homosexuel, comme je suis dans le livre en train de se faire’ (PB 49; emphasis added),67 comparing the process of becoming lesbian with, and occurring in, the process of literary production. Yet when Bouraoui writes in the later work, ‘ce que je suis en train de vivre – le dépaysement – est fondateur pour mon avenir’ (MMP 49),68 it is not only her lesbian desires that are in the process of becoming, both in her life and in the text as it is being written, where selfhood, as MacLachlan notes, is thus performatively enacted, contemporaneously with the act of writing (31), but Bouraoui’s broader recognition that both her lesbian desires and her desire for her Algerian homeland are intimately intertwined, and, along with ongoing forms of dépaysement – disorientations and dislocations – not only continue to form who she is but simultaneously unsettle, translate, reappropriate, rehistoricise and queer normativities pertaining to race, gender, sexuality and national affiliation alongside, and through, transgressions of narrative form and narrative coherence in her exploration of self through the autofictional form. Interestingly, it is this sense of dislocation, of dépaysement, of spatial displacement, of being dépaysée, or without a country or ‘territory’ (Vassallo, Body Besieged 81), performed in her autofictional text, that resists what Lee Edelman has referred to as reproductive futurism as an organising principle of social and communal relations and the logic through which the political itself must be thought (2). Touching only tangentially on Edelman’s thinking, Bouraoui’s queerness disrupts the idea of linear narrative, both textually and historically, and calls into question critically the idea of a logical, inevitable, brighter queer future which she initially, perhaps, believed was possible. Rather, as Rosie MacLachlan argues, Bouraoui’s exploration of her gender and sexuality can be read as a ‘queer form of anti-definitional

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practice, rather than advocacy for more conventionally affirmative LGBT identities’ (161; emphasis added) in her refusal to be categorised to a much greater extent than the gay writers from the Maghreb I have discussed earlier who are her contemporaries. Her remark early in Garcon Manqué is telling: ‘Je deviens i­nclassable’ (33) or ‘I am becoming unclassifiable’ insinuates futurity, through the verb devenir, in a queer mode of living invested not in purely affirmative politics, identic coherence or ‘futurism’s unquestioned good’ (Edelman 7) but in a diasporic context marked by biracial difference, gender and sexual dissidence, and the embodied trauma of postcolonial lived experience in Algeria accompanied by the persistent stain from the effects of the historical violence of Franco-Algerian relations. Yet resisting the affirmative turn and the social imperative of reproductive futurism in much of the history of queer studies and queer politics in the West does have some synergies with Bouraoui’s writing, and her assertion that she is becoming unclassifiable demonstrates the necessity of the queer dissolution of normative social classifications around race, gender, sexuality and ‘home’ for her very survival, resulting in a disruption or an excess that Edelman invites queers to embrace. But I do not see the overall complete rejection of the regime of reproductive futurity in the works by the queer Franco-Maghrebian contemporary writers I have considered in this, and in the previous, chapter as a way of comparing them or finding connections between them. I would concede, however, that there may be varying degrees of fluctuation, ambivalence or doubt towards futurity’s promise among these writers rather than an absolute, unadulterated rejection, which, to me, points towards an even greater degree of queerness, at least in a Mbembian, postcolonial sense. What I see as the more compelling link between Bouraoui and her gay male contemporaries is how they have all been constituted by historical injury, and engage more with the past without being completely overwhelmed or demolished by it, though an engagement with the past is more critical to Bouraoui’s psychic well-being and recovery. Heather Love, in her book Feeling Backward, points out quite rightly that, historically speaking, homosexuality has been marked by the recurring trope of compromised or wounded subjectivity, where forms of so-called gay freedom are produced in response to this history to resist that damage and thereby affirm queer existence (2–3), but always through a problematic disavowal of a damaged queer past. The three autofictional texts by Bouraoui considered in this chapter seem to work through feeling backward to heal the wounds of her family’s intense feelings of alienation and disbelonging in post-independent Algeria, her own sudden rupture from her childhood home in Algeria and, through being half French and half Algerian, the historical and cultural wound she carries from Algeria’s colonial past living in Algeria along with the pressures of assimilation upon moving to France permanently, one whose performance

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of masculinity as a child, as a tomboy, comes to be regarded not only as taboo, as it was in Algeria, but as primitive in France, through the injunction of cultural imperatives to wear dresses and closed shoes, and, in addition, to be silent, and to assimilate to le monde blanc. This is certainly quite a bit of trauma that Bouraoui has had to carry (or porter), not only around her sexuality but in its various intersections with race, gender and national affiliation. Rather than an affirmative turn forward, as she attempts in Poupée Bella by affirming lesbian existence within the Parisian Milieu des Filles, Bouraoui realises that she can no longer suppress her Algerian background and simply assimilate, just as she cannot suppress her lesbian desires, but must confront her Algerian heritage as a way of resisting whiteness and reposition herself both in the world and in her history through an ongoing process of becoming, thereby rendering the future uncertain. Love challenges queer work to address the ‘dark side’ of modern queer representation, exploring nostalgia, shame, despair, resentment and loneliness (4); it is precisely these very affects that bring Bouraoui to her analyst in Mes Mauvaises Pensées and is largely the point of the book. As Kirsten Husung argues, Bouraoui ‘retourne à son passé pour intégrer celui-ci à son présent’ (245),69 which is accomplished through her therapeutic analysis, and more importantly, through her act of writing. Backward feelings of shame and despair were once seen as a poison to be expunged from queer communities, but these can very well constitute an alternative mode of politics according to Love (13). If a fuller engagement with negative affect is needed in understanding queer genealogies, rather than a disavowal of the past, as Love contends through examining significant texts from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone canon, including those by Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall and others, this engagement seems already present in the contemporary queer francophone writing from the Maghreb I have been discussing with an emphasis on traumatic childhood, memory, melancholia and loss, though in varying degrees. What Love names as the ‘retrograde aspects of queer experience’ (146) is similarly found in the gay male writing I addressed in the last chapter, and not only in Bouraoui’s writing where it is much more direct, especially through the title of Mes Mauvaises Pensées. The refusals to neglect or overlook childhood traumas and early feelings of stigmatisation, and to look backwards in order to embrace the past however ‘damaged’ they may feel, not only are present in the blatant refusals of Rachid O., Eyet-Chékib Djaziri and Abdellah Taïa to cast away or deny their earlier identifications with femininity in their childhoods despite the concomitant risks, such as being mistaken for the other gender or being mocked by their peers in the Maghreb, but are also apparent through not omitting various forms of sexual abuse in their pasts. For example, Antoine, Rachid’s French lover for a time in Morocco when Rachid was still an adolescent, becomes physically abusive at times, especially when

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Rachid receives a beating from Antoine with an electrical cord, which also calls to mind the colonial relation, given that French colonialists often applied electrical torture to Algerian prisoners of war during the Algerian Revolution, thereby opening another wound of the legacy of colonialism. Mohamed-Ali explains to Djaziri’s Sofiène in Un poisson sur la balançoire that feminine boys, like him, can be taken for a girl by young heterosexual males who are unable to engage in sexual relations with women before marriage in the Maghreb, and in Arab Muslim societies more generally. This form of sexual substitution to preserve the value placed on female virginity before marriage places many gay and more feminine young men in the Maghreb at risk for being raped or sexually assaulted, even as the reduction of homosexuality to substitutive sex among Arab Muslim men is challenged in these works. Taïa writes of defying directly the mere replacement of his gender identity through feminisation by taking on willingly the passive role in his sexual encounter with Chouaïb, acknowledging, yet resisting, the shame and degradation that goes with being cast in the role of zamel, transforming the role into a site of pleasure and erotic autonomy while rejecting the assignation or appropriation of his gender through being given the name of Leïla in the sexual encounter. While Love is quite right in postulating that recent political advances in the West, such as gay marriage and the continued media visibility of middleclass, well-to-do gays and lesbians, can often overshadow the continued threats to, and denigration of, queer existence, particularly, I would add, in many parts of the postcolonial world and outside of the Western axis, and in areas of the world where homosexuality is criminalised, it is also important to note that so-called backward feelings of shame, nostalgia, loss and melancholia are intensified when intersecting with, and compounded by, other social positions, such as race, which is not addressed in Feeling Backward as Love analyses historical injury and negative affect in predominantly white, Western Anglophone writers. Her careful consideration of historical anxiety and longing in Willa Cather and Cather’s interruption of the progressive, linear history of twentieth-century sexuality in her collection of essays Not under Forty (1936) and her novel The Professor’s House (1925) is breathtakingly astute, but I wonder how the analysis might shift when race and the intersectionalities of other social positions are inserted into the analysis. Then the question that Love asks as to whether ‘the worst difficulties of queer life are behind us’ (32) can perhaps be more inclusively framed. Bouraoui’s historical injury is connected to her arabisante existence in Algeria as a non-Arabic speaker, and she says she carries with her the wound of her mixed heritage, through having a French mother, and the wound of the Algerian Revolution even though she did not experience it directly. Moreover, in France, she internalises racism when she imaginatively anticipates overhearing a French woman at a bus stop saying there are too many Arabs in France with her Algerian father present,

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as I mentioned earlier, and then imagines not being able to respond. Rachid O., after moving to France, needs to continue to explain to French friends why he likes to eat pork, but does not like alcohol, thus trying to break clichés and racial stereotypes of Arab Muslim men through also including his homosexuality as part of his Muslim identity. While this forms an important site of decolonisation, it is also a burden, in that he often feels compelled to explain or justify the intersectionalities of his identity, and feels subjected to the gaze of white middle-class French people, no matter how well intentioned they may be. Abdellah Taïa, after moving to Paris, meets Javier on a film set in Morocco, but rather than being seen as a potential partner of equal status in contradiction to the rigidity of the active/passive binary assumed to structure sexual relations between Arab Muslim men in Morocco, which he nonetheless tried to challenge when he was younger and living there through rejecting the passive sexual role as an emasculation, Abdellah experiences objectification, in this case, from the white gaze, for his racial difference. In Une mélancolie arabe, Abdellah seems very much aware of the image being created of himself as ‘un jeune terroriste marocain et musulman’ (40)70 as a result of postcolonial and post-immigration conditions in France via the gaze of Javier when they meet for the first time. The Arab melancholia of which Taïa writes is not based simply on the shame and degradation projected on to a passive sexual partner when penetrated by another male but emerges out of the inability to grieve for the loss and possibility of enacting masculinity and same-sex sexual relations with other men through recoding the significance and eroticism of anal penetration as pleasurable as Taïa does, and is melancholic to the extent that one often feels compelled to subscribe instead to predominant cultural myths, taboos, social mores, gender norms and orthodoxies in order to become a viable (masculine) subject, similar to Judith Butler’s notion of heterosexual melancholy, which Taïa himself resists. The work of the writers I have discussed does imply, I believe, the possibilities of a politics of the past that Love envisions in order to ‘do justice to the difficulties of queer experience’ (21), though I would suggest that this be qualified by a pluralisation of queer experience(s) and the contingencies not only of temporality in looking backwards in the historical record, or in individual lives, but also of spatiality in moving across cultural borders in order to explore the multiple layerings of feeling backward, addressing also what Denis Provencher describes as the residual shame that often occurs post-migration among queer FrancoMaghrebi subjects (281). At the same time, it would be critically important, in order to do this work, to detach the term ‘backward’ from its proximity to colonial tropes of primitivity as we critique the imbrication of Western conceptions of progressive modernity within postcolonial contexts, so as to avoid yet another reinvention of the imperialist gesture.

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Yet, does not the binary structure between affirmation and negativity require further deconstruction, rather than marking queerness as the ‘other’ side of politics à la Edelman, as ‘the side of those not “fighting for the children”, the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism’ (3)? To what extent does taking a side, or actually being on a side, reinscribe the problematic binary relation which queer theory tries to dismantle, when, in contrast, Bouraoui, for example, struggles with which side of the barrier she belongs? In fact, in Garcon Manqué, she inquires directly, though quite rhetorically, about what side she should choose, ‘Quel camp devrais-je choisir?’ (GM 33), without, in the end, ever belonging to one side or another, but occupying the space between, occupying the more fluid space of l’entre-deux. And can there be a material or discursive ‘space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears’ (Edelman 3)? Edelman admits that this is the space of the unthinkable, which does make his theory quite compelling. The contemporary queer francophone writing from the Maghreb I have analysed certainly seems to resist, in varying degrees, the absolute value of reproductive futurism in searching instead for what is autre chose. Indeed, for queer indigenous postcolonised subjects, the search for one’s place in the world implies neither an investment in reproductive futurity and heteronormativity nor being overwhelmed by the legacy, effects and wounds of colonialism. Rather, strategies of (dis)identification are at work in and through the contemporary queer writing I have discussed, and dépaysement specifically in Bouraoui, as a way to translate the self through the very writing, but only in the most contingent, contextual, exploratory and less absolute ways. Indeed, the works by Rachid O., Djaziri, Taïa and Bouraoui could be read as what Love would describe as ‘a fuller engagement with negative affects and with the intransigent difficulties of making feeling the basis for politics’ (14) within specific postcolonially queer frames, with Bouraoui’s Mes Mauvaises Pensées as itself a translation of an intense struggle with negativity, with bad thoughts, as the very title suggests, but not without, in any of these works, again, in varying degrees, the attendant ambivalences and suspicions around the possibilities of affirmation and discovering a fully present self, translated in the very act of writing as an autofictional self, which can only perform, in the end, the space of l’intraduisible, the untranslatable, at the level of the signifier, at the site of incoherence and fracture. But, for now, I would ask that while the borders between affirmation and negativity, between sociality and the asocial, are contested, antagonistic and tenuous, are not the spaces between these binary structures, the fluid movement within l’entre-deux and the refusal to settle, unless in the most provisional, momentary and resistant ways, even more queer, a self occupying a discursive or textual space that continuously oscillates between affirmation and negativity, and is thus what Bouraoui would

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refer to as 'indéfinissable’(MMP 21), or at least not quite yet definable? This may be why she resists using the term lesbienne as an affirming term in the texts analysed here to describe herself; though that aspect of her identity is there, the term would be insufficient in itself to address its intersectional, fluid, shifting and contingent alignments with race, gender, ethnicity, and national and cultural affiliation, producing not a narrative coherence of self but an ongoing sense of displacement, disorientation and struggle alongside a process of continual, yet slightly uncertain, becoming resulting from the collapse of such confining borders as French/Algerian and girl/boy.

NOTES 1. ‘Djebar . . . inscrit l’histoire oubliée des femmes dans la mémoire collective et dans la symbolique des signes; [c’est-à-dire] Djebar utilise la technique de la polyphonie pour subvertir un discours historique univoque, procédé narratif qui montre la diversité des points de vue. Différents fragments textuels qui entrelacent le fictionnel, le référentiel et l‘autobiographique forment, telles les pièces d’une mosaïque . . . (Husung 247; brackets added). Chez Bouraoui, le passé agit à travers le corps de la narratrice. Le corps est le témoin du conflit franco-algérien . . . [et] une surface d’inscription culturelle’ (Husung 249, 251; brackets added). Trans. Djebar . . . inscribes the forgotten history of women in collective memory and in the symbolism of signs; [that is to say] Djebar uses a polyphonic technique in order to subvert a univocal historical discourse through a narrative process which shows a diversity of points of view. Different textual fragments, which intertwine the fictional, the referential and the autobiographical, form like pieces of a mosaic. . . . In Bouraoui, the past acts through the body of the narrator. The body is the witness of the FrancoAlgerian conflict . . . [and] a surface of cultural inscription (brackets added). The idea of the polyphonic can be traced to Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s analyses of the works of Russian novelist F. M. Dostoevsky as ‘a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, . . . not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather, a plurality of consciousnesses, . . . not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse’ (Bakhtin 6–7). Djebar, it can be argued, takes the idea of the polyphonic further as a political mode of disrupting dominant historical discourses both in colonial and postcolonial Algeria with the voices of Algerian women, which signify historical events differently, with diverse points of view, resisting any simple unification into a single, thematic narrative. 2. Trans. At the French (secondary) school in Algiers, I am an arabisante. The Arabic language doesn’t stick with me. It slips away. 3. Trans. Here, I carry with me the Algerian War. . . . Here, I carry the wound of my Algerian family. Bouraoui’s Algerian family here refers to the family on her father’s side, specifically her paternal grandmother Rabiâ Bouraoui whose son, Amar,

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was killed in the Algerian war with France. This wound of her Algerian family will also be the wound of racism when her family later moves to France. 4. Trans. My silence is a combat. I will also write for that. I will write in French with an Arabic name. . . . But what side should I choose? I will discuss further in the next paragraph the significance of the emphasis added through italicising en portant in the original French in this quotation. 5. Trans. I come from an unusual coupling. I am France with Algeria. 6. L’Algérie n’est pas dans ma langue. Elle est dans mon corps. L’Algérie n’est pas dans mes mots. Elle est à l’intérieur de moi (GM 167; emphasis added). 7. ‘Le corps est un produit de significations culturelles et dicursives, par conséquent porteur de mémoires particulières, à la fois collectives et individuelles. L’expérience corporelle subjective de la protagoniste porte l’empreinte de l’héritage familial qui est le microcosme de l’héritage culturel marqué par la violence de l’Histoire franco-algérienne (Husung 244; emphasis added). Trans. The body is a product of cultural and discursive meanings, consequently carrying particular memories, both collective and individual. The protagonist’s subjective bodily experience bears the imprint of family heritage, which is a microcosm of the cultural heritage marked by the violence of Franco-Algerian history. 8. Trans. I have many bodies. I have several bodies beneath my body. 9. Trans. Every morning I check my identity. I have four problems. French? Algerian? Girl? Boy? 10. Trans. I remain between the two countries. I remain between two identities. . . . I am inventing another world. 11. Trans. Here [in Algeria], I am a foreigner. Here, I’m nothing. France forgets me. Algeria doesn’t recognise me. . . . Here, I search my ground. Here, I don’t know my face. I remain on the outside of Algeria (brackets added). 12. Mon père m’initie à l’enfance. Il m’élève comme un garçon. Sa fierté. La grâce d’une fille. L’agilité d’un garçon. . . . Il m’apprend le foot, . . . à plonger des rochers bruns et luisants. Comme les voyous. Il transmet la force. Il forge mon corps. Il m’apprend à me défendre dans le pays des hommes. . . . Il m’appelle Brio. . . . J’aime ce prénom. Brio trace mes lignes et mes traits. . . . Brio est la lumière sur mon visage (GM 24). Trans. My father initiates me into childhood. He raises me like a boy. His pride. The grace of a girl. The agility of a boy. . . . He teaches me to play football, . . . to dive from the brown and slippery rocks. Like the street-boys. He transmits strength. He forges my body. He teaches me to defend myself in a country of men. . . . He calls me Brio. . . . I like this given name. Brio depicts my lineage and my traits. . . . Brio is the light upon my face. 13. Trans. I disguise myself often. I denaturalise my female body. . . . It’s a game. 14. Trans. I take another name, Ahmed. I throw away my dresses. I cut my hair. I make myself disappear. I join the country of men. I’m cheeky. I hold their gaze. I steal their mannerisms. I learn fast. 15. See also Caroline Beschea-Fache, ‘The Métis Body: Double Mirror’, in Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility, eds. Cybelle H. McFadden and Sandrine F. Teixidor (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010), 113.

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16. Trans. For you, I invent myself. With other eyes. With other gestures. For you, I have a man’s hands, strong and clenched in a fist. It is interesting that Rachid O. also writes of gendered hands in L’Enfant ébloui when listening to his female relatives and neighbours describe their desires for men, but recoding, in his presence, their descriptions of a man’s hands as if they belonged to those of a young woman. 17. ‘Je suis en toi, Amine. Tu es pénétré. . . . Je t’aime comme un homme. Je t’aime comme si tu étais une fille’ (GM 62–63). Trans. I am inside you, Amine. You are penetrated. . . . I love you as a man. I love you as if you were a girl. 18. Trans. I live in your clothing [your trousers], precisely where you keep your genitals hidden (brackets added). 19. As Bouraoui writes in speaking of the pleasure of wearing Amine’s trousers following the quotation directly above, ‘N’est-ce pas à cet instant, par ce geste, par ce vol, que prend l’homosexualité’ (GM 68)? Trans. Isn’t it at this moment, through this gesture, through this theft, that homosexuality takes hold? 20. Trans. I carry my suitcase with two hands. An enormous suitcase. . . . My Algerian life brought back with me. I will always have a large suitcase. Like all Algerians. Like all of these foreigners who get off of trains, boats, planes, loaded down. An entire house in one’s hands. . . . One day, one will search these suspicious suitcases. . . . Algerians, very dangerous passengers. These human bombs. These people from the war. These terrorists by their mere face, by their mere name, by their mere destination. . . . What are you doing in France? . . . One will search for security reasons, they will say. But also to smear and belittle. Because the Algerian War has never stopped. It has taken another form. It has shifted. And it continues. 21. For decades after the war, the Algerian Revolution or War of Independence was not recognised in France as a war, and certainly not as a war that won independence for Algeria from French colonial rule, but was regarded euphemistically for many years after as the Algerian ‘uprising’ or ‘dispute’, and there were no memorials for the French soldiers killed in the war until the 1970s. For a time, the Algerian Revolution was regarded as la sale guerre, or the dirty war, characterised by the use of electric shock torture, immersion in water and other brutal methods of the French to suppress the Algerian resistance and the Front de Libération Nationale, regarded as ‘criminals’, ‘terrorists’, ‘bandits’ or fellagha (road cutters literally, but associated or conflated with ‘throat cutters’) by the French press at the time (Dine 144–45). Fellagha has its origins in Arabic language to refer to armed militants fighting against French colonialism in North Africa, especially during the Algerian Revolution. The conflict was not recognised as a war in France until 1999 when the National Assembly allowed it to be taught as such in French schools. For more on the history of the Algerian Revolution or War of Independence, see the work of Benjamin Stora, who claims that there is still no coherent history of the war, especially his books Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History and La Guerre d’Algérie – 1954-2004: La fin de l’amnésie (with Mohammed Harbi). 22. Trans. Pretend. Wear proper shoes. Shoes that close. No eating with one's fingers. Say hello and thank you. Wear dresses. Keep quiet. 23. ‘Un jour, j’entendrai, à l’arrêt du bus numéro 21, une femme dire en re­gardant mon père: Il y a trop d’Arabes en France. Beaucoup trop. Et en plus ils prennent nos bus. Ses mots and mon silence. Cette incapacité à répondre’

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(GM 130). Trans. One day, I will hear at the number 21 bus stop, a woman saying whilst looking at my father: There are too many Arabs in France. Way too many. And, moreover, they are taking our buses. Her words and my silence. This inability to respond. 24. Trans. White. Like a space that doesn’t exist. An invented space. The place of my absence. I no longer know who I am in the Maurepas Garden. A girl? A boy? . . . Who? A French girl? An Algerian girl? An Algerian-French girl? Which side of the barrier? I am still a stranger. 25. There are numerous references to Fanon’s usage of le monde blanc to refer not merely to racial identity but to the regime of whiteness in the original French version of his Black Skin, White Masks – Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (1952) – but related specifically to the performativity or the mimicry of whiteness by non-whites, specifically by Antilles blacks, where Fanon indicates that Europeans have certain fixed notions of blacks, and when Antilles blacks speak French well in France, Europeans are surprised. Fanon writes, ‘Rien de plus sensationnel qu’un Noir s’exprimant correctement, car, vraiment, il assume le monde blanc’ (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs 53; emphasis added), which indicates that the so-called white world, like gender, can be performed, and is not reducible to the body, or, more specifically, to skin colour. In the English edition of the book, this is translated as ‘Nothing is more astonishing than to hear a black man express himself properly, for then in truth he is putting on [i.e. performing] the white world’ (Black Skin, White Masks 36; emphasis and brackets added). 26. Trans. I was no longer French. I was no longer Algerian. I was even no longer my mother’s daughter. I was me. With my body. With this intuitive feeling. 27. See Muñoz 11–12. 28. Trans. I became happy in Rome. My body carried something else. An obviousness. A new personality. A gift, perhaps. I came from me and from me alone. I found myself. . . . And I owned myself. My body detached itself from everything. There was nothing left of France. Nothing more from Algeria. Just this simple joy of being alive. Emphasis added for reasons to be discussed momentarily in the text. 29. ‘. . . la nouveauté qui hantait mon corps: le désir’ (GM 186). 30. Trans. I am coming into a new family . . . I am searching for a treasure. I am looking for a world that would speak about me. 31. ‘Je ne veux pas oublier qui je suis’ (PB 18–19). Trans. I don’t want to forget who I am. 32. Trans. I am a woman, I am a man, I am everything, I am nothing. 33. Trans. I want to recognise my face, I want to recognise my voice, I want to recognise my hand that writes. 34. Trans. I am within the only truth. The truth of my body. 35. Trans. Writing is like love, it passes through the body, it is in that life force. 36. Trans. I am in Paris. I am alive. I am happy. . . . I am a body in the world. I am a girl who loves girls. 37. Trans. My history is unravelling here. My story is being made here. . . . I have a name. I have a face. I exist.

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38. Trans. There is a gay dream and I haven’t found it yet. I need a time that is loving and unique. I have translated homosexuel as ‘gay’ in this context as in English ‘homosexual’ has a more clinical ring in contemporary usage and is a term of identification mostly applied in English to men, whereas ‘gay’ is slightly more amenable to both genders. Bouraoui does not use the term ‘lesbian’ to apply to herself, so I have likewise avoided that term in translating homosexuel here. Earlier when Bouraoui said that she was in the time of her homosexuality, I kept that term in the English translation as the term ‘gay’ would not work, and I did not use the term ‘lesbian’ for the same reason already stated. 39. Trans. I no longer have a face, I can lose everything here. What I am. What I was. 40. Trans. Finding one’s place in a girl’s heart is finally to find one’s place in the world. 41. Trans. To write is to make public the Milieu des Filles. Milieu des Filles refers to the lesbian scene/subculture/quartier of Paris and its bars and clubs. Earlier in Poupée Bella, Bouraoui equates the Milieu des Filles with ‘real’ life: ‘J’apprends le Milieu c’est-à-dire la vraie vie’ (21). 42. Trans. When I write, I no longer need the lesbian scene. I take possession of my body, of my desire. . . . One never stops writing. I could stop myself from loving women. 43. Trans. I am afraid of writing, and I am afraid of loving. 44. Butler develops this argument in The Psychic Life of Power pointing out that ‘the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power (but significantly and partially both)’ (17). This challenges both liberal-humanist assumptions, as well as those in some queer communities, particularly in the West, whereby it is often assumed that agency and resistance always operate in opposition to power, or that, as Butler claims, the subject/self derives its agency from the power it opposes (Psychic Life 17), without considering one’s implication in the very power dynamics – in the case of queer subjects through other privileged positions of race, gender, class, nationality or geopolitical location, for example. 45. I place 'lesbian' in parenthesis here to decentre it slightly from desire and from identity since both lesbian desire and lesbian identity are not reducible to their sexual aspects alone, but only partially so, as Bouraoui will explore these further in Mes Mauvaises Pensées and discover that her earlier struggles with race and nationality cannot be suppressed but intersect with lesbian desire and are part of her identity and her desires. 46. Trans. I am coming to see you because I have bad thoughts. 47. Trans. Algeria is nothing, I am nothing, it is the clouds that count, they are the ones I look at, this is where I would like to be. . . . I don’t like my position [in the world], I don’t like the words that refer to me: the little girl. I could write a novel about my therapy, I could write about our appointments, it would be a love story, or a story of hate, I don’t know yet . . . (brackets added). 48. Trans. I am a foreigner when I arrive in Paris on the fifth of October one thousand nine hundred and eighty-one, I am not a foreigner like others, I am French, but I feel foreign to the [social] configurations that are offered to me: the apartment, the college, the people, the room I share with my mother, there is the disappearance

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of Algeria in me. No more traces, nothing more, I erase myself from the inside, . . . there is a total negation of Algeria in me: the renunciation of my father, of who he is, of what precedes him, it is of great violence, of great injustice as well (brackets and emphasis added). 49. Trans. I am sad because of Algeria, I am the heart of Algeria, . . . (emphasis added). 50. Trans. The beauty and all the solitude of Algeria, I’m sad because of this, . . . 51. Trans. There are these two flows in me which I will never be able to divide; I believe I am of neither party. I am alone with my body. 52. Katharine Harrington points out that Mes Mauvaises Pensées is based loosely on actual clinical sessions with a psychiatrist for three years beginning in 1999 (99), citing an interview with Bouraoui, published in the French edition of Elle magazine, where Bouraoui herself recounts, ‘En 1999, j’ai entamé une thérapie qui a duré trois ans. Cela m’a aidée à ne plus être tétanisée par mes peurs, à me rendre compte que mes fragilités pouvaient même se transformer en force. C’est une expérience qui m’a beaucoup apporté. Je m’en suis même servie pour mon livre, « Mes mauvaises pensées » . . .’ (Interview by Soline Delos, Elle, French edition, see https://www​.elle​.fr​/Beaute​/News​ -beaute​/Beaute​-des​-stars​/Nina​-Bouraoui​-713146). Trans. In 1999, I started a course of therapy lasting for three years. This helped me to be paralysed no longer by my fears, to realise that my weaknesses could even be transformed into strength. It is an experience that has brought me a lot. I even used it for my book Mes Mauvaises Pensées. . . . 53. Trans. It takes imagination to live, to have bad thoughts, to write about oneself, since one never really knows oneself; it takes imagination to tell one’s story, to find the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’. 54. Trans. And it is in the words that I discover my father, it is our country I believe, [in] these lines that I draw with a marker . . . [in] these words that I relate to each other (brackets added). 55. Trans. There is sexuality in the act of writing; there is exposure and intimacy, and it is so simple to understand my loves today, . . . I know my body close to the bodies of women, I know its ways of holding or of holding back, there is a link between women, . . . I know that I write out of love, you know, I know that I write in this form of bliss, . . . and when I write about Algeria, I could shout ‘I’m back!’ (emphasis added). The ‘you know’ (vous savez) here is referring to Bouraoui’s interlocutor, her analyst, as discussed earlier. 56. Trans. ‘I am, here, at home’; this sentence also means that I am at home with myself, you know . . . 57. Trans. I know that I could find my place here, one day, among these women, among these girls, in this mythical place where Tennessee Williams stayed; there are romantic places and I know that I will come back to Provincetown, it is my paradise, . . . there is a writing which is formed in this place, a fine and pure writing, a writing of the heart; I have never felt so well in a country, in a community, I have never felt so good about myself . . . I am at peace, there’s no more anger in me, . . . I am finding myself (emphasis added). 58. Trans. I would like to see again the country where I learned to write. I would like to see again the country where I learned to love.

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59. ‘L’entre-deux, c’est-à-dire l’entre deux pays et deux genres, est pourtant l’espace à la fois douloureux et créatif qui donne la force d’écrire et de s’écrire’ (Husung 246). My translation into English appears in the main text. 60. ‘Trouver sa place dans le cœur d’une fille c’est enfin trouver sa place dans le monde’ (PB 19; emphasis added). 61. Trans. I walk in the very heart of the earth and therefore through [the very heart of my] existence (brackets and emphasis added). 62. Trans. There is a link between the heart and the earth. 63. See chapter 4 and Mon Maroc, ‘Je vis dans l’entre-deux: chacune des deux cultures me tire de son côté (il y a donc une bataille en moi, dans mon corps)’ (140), and Une mélancolie arabe, ‘J’allais . . . écrire autre chose . . . dire mon amour, être ce qui ne se dit pas, n’existe pas’ (31–32). The internal battle of which Taïa speaks in Mon Maroc intertextually references the internalised war of which Bouraoui speaks, though she is referring specifically to the ongoing wounds of the Algerian war with France and its continued legacy, whereas, with Taïa, it is more of a personal battle. But I would argue that in both cases the battles, of which Bouraoui and Taïa speak, are embodied, are legacies of colonialism and are addressed through the act of writing. 64. Ncube here is citing Marien Gouyon’s work in noting that ‘l’autofiction . . . permet aux écrivains d’inscrire leurs expériences personnelles dans leurs œuvres littéraires. Les écrivains maghrébins contemporains ne cachent pas le fait que leurs romans s’alimentent de leurs expériences personnelles’ (La sexualité queer 29). Trans. Autofiction allows writers to record their personal experiences in their literary works. Contemporary Maghrebian writers do not hide the fact that their novels draw on their personal experiences. See Marien Gouyon’s, ‘Abdellah Taïa et l’ethnologie de soi-même.’ Tumultes 41.2 (2013): 187. 65. ‘. . . que je peux trouver ma place dans le monde’ (MMP 63). 66. Trans. The Bouraouian autobiographical subject is still in the making . . . in constant metamorphosis. This makes the point adequately about the subject/self always being in process, though I would contest the idea of a Bouraouian subject as purely autobiographical as Bouraoui and her work are more complex than that as I have been arguing. 67. Trans. I am [in the process of] becoming homosexual as I am within the book in a process of being made. The emphasis added in the original French quotation in the main text, and the emphasis and brackets I have added here in the English translation, are mine, and they highlight the idea of the subject/self, and the process of writing and literary production, as always already being in a state of continual becoming in Bouraoui’s work. 68. Trans. What I am experiencing – a disorientation – is the foundation for my future. 69. Trans. [Bouraoui] goes back to her past in order to integrate it into her present. 70. ‘A young terrorist who is both Moroccan and Muslim’ (An Arab Melancholia 40).

Chapter 6

Migration and/as Translation Cultural Mediation and Negotiation as Ongoing Struggles for the Decolonisation of Queer Desire

This book has examined in the last two chapters the writing of contemporary francophone lesbian and gay authors who have emigrated from the Maghreb to France, after having first considered historical antecedents in representing same-sex desire and sexual practices in the Maghreb in the early Ottoman Empire and French colonial period, and in the period immediately following independence from French colonialism in Algeria and from French protectorate status in Morocco and Tunisia. A theme that has run throughout the various works I have examined in the two preceding chapters is one of translation as a heuristic practice of re-vision, of seeing again, or, as Djaziri reminds us, through his protagonist/narrator Sofiène in advising MohamedAli in Un poisson sur la balançoire, of learning to read between the lines, or ‘d’apprendre à lire entre les lignes’ (157; emphasis added), which is where translative possibilities and new sites of resignification, transgression and decolonisation reside. I shall return momentarily to the idea of translation as a heuristic mode of knowledge production, particularly in relation to migration, but another predominant theme this book has addressed is the tension between the ways in which geopolitical, identic, temporal, generic and disciplinary borders not only create and sustain norms and meanings that shape readings and interpretations of everyday life but how, through their various crossings and intersections, borders are subject to contestation, given that they are not natural divisions but social and political inventions, thus enabling alternative possibilities for understanding and inhabiting the world. I began with the paradox of geopolitical borders regarding the tension between their discrete tangibility as sites of demarcation and their permeability in a globalised world. As Vladimir Kolossov and James Scott contend, geopolitical borders can be 201

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studied as the marking and structuring of social spaces to protect territorial sovereignty and security, and as the physical outcomes of specific social, political and economic processes (1-2), on the one hand, while their objective existence is questioned through studying borders as socially constructed and invented, rather than as given, markers of difference that create socio-spatial distinctions between places and individuals and groups, and through theorising the conditions that give rise to border-generating categories (3), on the other, suggesting that processes of bordering are not finalisable but ongoing, especially since geophysical borders are not the only borders that organise social life. I then used this framework to argue for social and cultural borders, particularly around sexuality and gender, as constructed, and for rethinking the contours of the self through migration and through other kinds of reborderings, such as those between the past and the present and between literary genres as explored especially by recent queer francophone writers from the Maghreb who have since moved to France. Kolossov and Scott argue for the importance of considering everyday processes of border making and local negotiations of political and cultural boundaries by considering, for example, how borders may be markers of historical memory, particularly of life at or around the borders, that is, in the borderlands, and how everyday lifeworlds and identities may be constructed around or through borders, which takes us beyond a preoccupation with the fixity of geopolitical borders alone (8-9). This also enables us to understand how human mobility and the effects of historical processes, such as colonisation and migration, shift the significance of borders as discrete and static entities when they are crossed, engendering new forms of borderisation and configurations of self which are part of the framework of this study with a focus on (re)negotiations of borders as represented in literature. The book also considered a rebordering of postcolonial and queer relationality as a way to disturb further the binary logic between the two disciplines, advocating for the ways in which postcoloniality and queerness are mutually inflective, which is the way that I myself had begun theorising them in my earlier work in order to bring the two disciplines in closer relation in the midto late 1990s when there was more of a gulf between them; yet the binary assumptions linking the two disciplines, and their presumed geopolitical locations, still seemed stubbornly present. I have since developed my thinking about postcolonial and queer relationality further, thanks to the influence of African francophone studies scholars, such as Achille Mbembe and Ayo Coly, in order to theorise queerness as already embedded within postcolonial Africa given the continent’s history of fracture, contingency and cultural mediation, acknowledging, of course, that there are variations of queerness in specific postcolonial contexts in Africa. This is particularly salient with regard to the Maghreb given its own history of multiple cultural and

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linguistic crossings, imperial invasions and occupations, and shifting sites of geopolitical demarcation and signification, as well as historical and new uses of the French language by postcolonial writers from the Maghreb as a way to renegotiate the borders between tradition and modernity, between the colonial past and the postcolonial present, sometimes with the infusion of local forms of expression in the Arabic dialects of the Maghreb into the French language as a political strategy, as a form of métissage, to write themselves out of many of the received and entrenched borders of imperial inscription and representation. Then, with representations of same-sex desire in ghazal poetry from the early Ottoman Empire, the negotiation of borders occurs in distinctions not between hetero- and homosexuality, categories which, of course, were not in the available discourse as such in the early modern period, but between male poets writing of their desire for beautiful male youth and actual homoerotic practices, between what was tolerated and condemned, between liwāṭ, unlawful anal intercourse between men, and its relationship to zinā, or unlawful fornication between a man and a woman, the relationality of which varied in interpretation, and was differentially translated among juridical schools of the Empire as to whether liwāṭ was conflated with zinā, or whether there were degrees of variation between these borders of same-sex and opposite-sex phallic penetration in legal instruments at the time. Yet, interestingly, the differentiations in the law between liwāṭ and zinā do speak to the difference of the gender of object choice in sexual relations through having two separate terms for these offences, a difference of object choice upon which the hetero/homo distinction, which came out of medical discourses in nineteenth-century Europe, is based, though liwāṭ and zinā are not reducible to that distinction’s modern definition. Further, while only actual sexual practices were condemned as unlawful, rather than expressing same-sex desire in poetic form in the belletristic tradition of the Ottoman Empire from the early sixteenth century through the the end of the eighteenth century (1516-1798), French colonialism and Western medicine imported to the colonies from the nineteenth century medicalised all forms of homosexuality, including homoerotic desire, whether it was expressed or enacted, as well as non-penetrative sexual relationships between men. As Nour Abu Assab notes, homoerotic literature by Arab Muslim writers allowed European colonial power to assert its mission civilisatrice by marking Arab Muslim culture as decadent and in need of European refinement, while, at the same time, Arab Muslim places during colonial rule had provided save havens for white European travellers in pursuit of homosexual activity (26) during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century when it had been criminalised in most of Europe until the 1960s.1 This border between cultural decadence and cultural refinement has shifted in more recent discourses of a sexually licentious, decadent West in opposition to the strict religious and moral regulation of

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sexuality as confined to marriage between a man and a woman in Arab Muslim societies and supported through the strictures of Islam as the last bastion of resistance against Western encroachment (Massad, Desiring Arabs 195), and as a broader resistance to the universalisation of the West as synonymous with humanity (Massad, Islam in Liberalism 233). Yet, while the categories between cultural decadence and refinement have interchanged over time, the very border itself remains and requires further deconstruction as it still structures the Arab Muslim world and the West in oppositional terms, particularly in terms of homosexuality, a static border which the work of contemporary queer francophone writing from the Maghreb has contested. Dissident gender and sexuality appear in francophone post-independence writing from the Maghreb as part of a more general dissatisfaction with emergent and growing nationalist hegemony following the end of French imperial occupation. For writers such as Rachid Boudjedra, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Assia Djebar, writing about sites of gender and sexual alterity serves as a point of resistance to the homogenisation of the newly formed nation-state even though gender and sexual dissidence may not be uniformly central to all of the texts. But post-independence writers do contest the internal/external distinction which structures language as a system of differences, and indeed all binary dualisms, through challenging the narrow scope of national belonging following independence, especially what this meant for homosexual men, for women outside of their subservience to men, for those, who, in varying ways, and for different reasons, cross-gender identify, and for other racial minorities in the region, as anti-Semitism also comes across as a critique in Boudjedra’s La Répudiation. In Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, the proliferation of the polyphonic voices of women in fragmented narratives serves to rupture received accounts of Algerian colonial and postcolonial history, thus disrupting linear narrative and giving narrative space for articulating the continuation of the wounds from the past, particularly from the effects of the Algerian Revolution, into the present. Through writing about same-sex desire, cross-gender identification, or the close homosocial and homoerotic bonds between women outside of the realm of the male gaze, writers from the post-independence period address the slippages between a didactic nationalist pedagogy and actual everyday performances of the nationalist narrative.2 Finally, the book addresses the contestation of borders in recent queer francophone writing from the Maghreb by Rachid O., Eyet-Chékib Djaziri and Abdellah Taïa, authors who write openly of their desires for, and sexual experiences with, men, and by Nina Bouraoui, who writes of her lesbian desire, and where queerness is inscribed directly in their texts. All of the writers mentioned stage candidly, in varying ways, a life lived in the realm of the taboo and forbidden in their home countries (or in Bouraoui’s case, the home of her childhood), and their adjustments, particularly along the lines of

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racism, Islamophobia and immigration, in their settlement in France. The gay male writers contest the borders of gender through taking on and refusing to reject feminine identifications in childhood and through translating hegemonic masculinity by asserting and (re)claiming the passive role in sexual relations with other men as a site of erotic autonomy, agency and sexual pleasure rather than accepting the association of the passive sexual role with degradation, humiliation and stigma, thereby challenging the received significance of the active/passive dichotomy, and its conflation with specific gender roles, that are thought to structure sexual relations between men in Arab Muslim societies and cultures. While the active/passive split is residual in these texts, and not completely written out of them, it is the translation of the passive role that is key, not a replacement of one model of sexual relations between men (gender performative) with another (sexual identity as a discursive position), but the creation of a space of queer hybridity between sexual and geopolitical borders beyond what Edward Chamberlain describes as ‘preestablished cultural scripts’ (77) in his work on Latina/o and Latinx individuals who self-identify as LGBTQ and thereby depart from the normalised social identities of the United States, Caribbean cultures and Latin American nations (xi). Bouraoui contests borders further through citing the dualisms operating between Algeria and France, especially the historical trauma she has inherited and embodied from the Algerian Revolution, Algeria’s historic, violent war with France for independence, and the dualism between the genders, in order first to show the seemingly oppositional and constructed nature of both dualisms and how they have structured her earlier life in painful and problematic ways, and her subsequent struggle to contest and reconfigure them as intersectional and contingent so that she is able to live in the available world, as both being of Algerian heritage and living in France as lesbian regardless of the seeming incommensurability and uncertain futurity of being what she refers to, and indeed what all of the queer writers experience, in varying degrees, as dépaysé(e), as being disoriented and dislocated in the space inbetween. In all of the recent queer francophone writing discussed, the self is (re)negotiated and translated through migration and the crossing of geopolitical borders and through an act of writing that works to challenge not only the borders between the received genres of writing but those between the past and present, between the private and the public, between self and other, and between the gender dualism, to the extent that the writers themselves become transformed as autre chose, where their gender, sexual and cultural identities are reducible neither to the culture of their Maghrebian homelands nor to that of their European settlement, but become blended, hybrid identities that move back and forth in the space between these and other identificatory borders, thus enabling new articulations and productions of gender and sexual alterity, struggle, and continual becoming.

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Migration, then, plays a critical role in understanding the work of recent queer francophone writing from the Maghreb. Moira Inghilleri recognises that the experience of migration varies significantly between individuals and cultural groups, but acknowledges that, generally speaking, migration can involve maintaining strong attachments with the country of origin and/or creating distance between a new and prior self (2). Both of these descriptions seem to be operating in the migrational movement of Rachid O., Djaziri, Taïa and Bouraoui across geopolitical borders to the extent that there are strong connections in their writing to their Maghrebian childhoods and adolescences, particularly in terms of early articulations of gender and sexual alterity and the attendant struggles surrounding these, as well as a sense of distancing and ambivalence in new negotiations of self in France through reframing their Maghrebian pasts reflecting their post-migrant experiences in France as their experiences of immigration and various forms of subtle and blatant racism challenge European fantasies of social cohesion and cultural integration within its borders. These spaces of interstitiality through the aller/retour one finds in the writing of all four writers create what Inghilleri refers to as nonoriginary locations of identity unencumbered by territorial borders or ethnic absolutism and are a disruption to the historic, yet invented, European centre/ periphery binarism that narrates individuals from once-colonised countries (18). I mark this deterritorialised space in-between as queer not only because the writers concerned have struggled with sexual alterity marked as taboo and with same-sex affectional and physical bonds as restricted, when they might occur, to the private realm in their Maghrebian homelands, which was then further complicated by racial difference and immigration when they moved permanently to France, but also because this space is a threshold, a brink, a shift, if you will, that challenges the homogeneity and fixity of cultures, identities and social relations both in the country of their ancestral home in the Maghreb and in Europe.3 The emphasis, then, is on the processes of cross-cultural negotiations of sexual identity as it intersects with other axes of social positioning, negotiations that are captured narratively and textually in the autofictional writing of the authors, and the ways in which they have struggled with translating their desires into new ways of being positioned in, with and against the world in the continual process of becoming, rather than in the sense of identity as stable, self-evident or already made. Questioning notions of African diasporic identity as necessarily associated with displaced victimhood, though acknowledging the history of African diaspora as linked to the slave trade and to the effects of imperialism, Simon Gikandi has argued that younger generations of Africans who are living in diaspora have embraced what he refers to as Afropolitanism, which would include the queer writers from the Maghreb I have been discussing, as they, too, are ‘connected to knowable African communities, nations, and

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traditions’, but also ‘live a life divided across cultures, languages and states. It is to embrace and celebrate a state of cultural hybridity – to be of Africa and of other worlds at the same time’ (9; emphasis added). This navigation of the spaces between cultures unanchors the homosexuality of the writers from its received configurations in North Africa, but also in the West, as all of them struggle, in various ways, to create new, fluid, hybrid spaces of sexual subjectivity influenced by, but not reducible to, specific cultural or geopolitical locations. Diaspora, in this regard, according to Delphine Fongang, becomes the material condition that produces particular literary creations to the extent that writers across different cultural locations capture the ways in which subjects rooted in their homelands (in Africa) grapple to meet the demands of the new (European) culture in which they find themselves, and search for space and place in disputed borders and locations in the West, which is complicated further by systemic racism (6). But, in addition, Fongang acknowledges that queer bodies in particular are challenged further by the problematics of cultural integration and different forms of patriarchy and homophobia both in Africa and in the West, and that queer African diasporic subjects therefore reconfigure their subjectivity in shifting contexts and locations (8), resisting the identities prescribed or expected of them as immigrants in the country of arrival, which resonates clearly in the recent queer autofictional writing I have described and considered in the previous two chapters as new forms of bordering are instantiated through having crossed geopolitical borders. The fragmented, interstitial, reconfigured, hybrid, yet contingent, identities that emerge and are formed in diaspora, then, do not merely assimilate wholly to European culture, nor do they emerge as a simple blending of cultures, where one culture is simply brought to another, but rather speak to the often unbridgeable differences that exist between cultures, resulting, as Fongang argues, in a struggle to rethink and redefine identity in new and varied ways through the transformations experienced through migration (153–54), and, as Gikandi reminds us, speak to the challenges surrounding the specific displacement of Africans abroad and ‘the difficulties they face as they try to overcome their alterity in alien landscapes, [and] the deep cultural anxieties that often make diasporas sites of cultural fundamentalism and ethnic chauvinism’ (11). I appreciate Gikandi’s warning neither to romanticise diaspora and interstitiality, nor to downplay the effects of systemic racism on (queer) Africans abroad, in addition to being subjected to various forms of homophobia and Islamophobia if they are Muslim and from the Maghreb and now living in France, but I would argue that sexual, racial and gender alterity are not positions to be ‘overcome’ in diaspora, but, rather, are critical sites of struggle and decolonisation that enable new forms of self-determination and identity, the subversion of lingering imperialist modes of representation

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rooted in colonial history, and the living out of various forms of difference, including sexual dissidence, within new cultural settings. Closely related, if migration is not simply a matter of a simple once-and-forall movement in a single direction, but has always involved ‘a combination of diffusion, appropriation, assimilation, resistance, and enduring ambivalence’ (Inghilleri 34), given the imaginative aller/retour I referenced earlier with regard to the writers who have emigrated from the Maghreb to France, translation, similarly, is never a mere straightforward transfer of meaning from one language or culture to another, but like migration and the space between geopolitical borders, the space between languages and cultures is also a threshold, one that is mediated and negotiated, and always already constituted by diffusion, difference and ambivalence. Translation, regarded simply as a transparent form of equivalence between languages (particularly when translating into English) and cultures (as when attempting to translate indigenous cultures into Western notation), supports, as Baer notes, ‘the opposition of the west as original to the rest [of the world] as copy’ and the consolidation of the global hegemony of English (64; brackets added). But, at the same time, translation is not only comparable to migration, as a space between, in a parallel relation, but is intimately intertwined within, and is part of, it, since, as Waïl S. Hassan notes, translation is an essential component of cross-cultural contact (1436). I have been particularly interested in the ways in which cultural translation, in taking and extending interlinguistic translation as its metaphor, incites strategies of agency, resistance, negotiation and struggle in the overlapping spaces between cultures as it attempts, as Paul Bandia notes, to bridge geographical distance (from the Maghrebian homeland in the context of this book) while negotiating new identities alongside the pressures of a foreign space in the culture of settlement (275–76). Both migration and cultural translation, in my view, also serve as metaphors for queer in their oppositional potential to disrupt and diffuse master discourses and hierarchies of centre/periphery relations and fixed, essentialised notions of origins. Migration and translation flow together as mediating between hegemonically defined spaces, identities and cultural practices where alternative modes of perception and seeing the world are negotiated, while, at the same time, they are both not only parallel and relational but intersectional as migrant communities translate themselves into the local terrain (Inghilleri 34), but not without the indigenous cultures they bring with them, as is particularly the case in Bouraoui’s writing, though not exclusively so, since the gay male writers also write about re-visioning, (re)writing the self, all of which are acts of translation through migration, that is, through rereading, in the act of writing, their Maghrebian pasts through the experience of migration and living in diaspora. In other words, what emerges in migration is not a mere assimilation to the new culture, nor a mere reproduction of the indigenous culture, but a hybrid identity reducible neither to one nor to the other, given that,

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as Henry Schwarz points out, referencing Bhabha, the physical and social act of immigration transition is already an act of translation (183),4 just as new meanings emerge in the translative space where various cultural systems and languages intersect, converge and transform. Migration and/as translation speaks to the iterative aspect of symbolic systems, such as language and culture, where one signifier both replaces and displaces another through the endless play of signification, yet remains constituted by a residue of difference, a slippage, a deferral, that refuses domestication, equivalence or complete integration, given that both migration and translation are mediating, yet interminable, processes, always subject to acts of continual rethinking and renegotiation. Given the intersections of migration and translation, it is useful to think of translation not only as a linguistic, textual and transcultural practice but as a mode of being for writers living in diaspora. Critiquing traditional views of translation as reducible to a sacrosanct original and a derivative, even deficient, copy, translational literature, according to Waïl Hassan, challenges such dualistic thinking around original and copy through the idea of translational literature written by writers living in diaspora where acts of translation are staged and performed within the text itself, whose language is both alien and familiar at once, a hybrid, which harbours the other within it, and participates in the (re)formulation of cultural identities while performing and problematising acts of translation. In this sense, translation operates as a mode of being and as a heuristic practice as writers ‘find their creative impulses in exile as a fundamentally translative condition’ (Hassan 1436) through their writing as they negotiate the shifts of meaning in moving between two different cultural worlds. Indeed, the queer francophone writers whom I have discussed in chapters 4 and 5 can be considered as translational writers whose texts engender new, translated articulations of self, particularly around sexuality in relation to other identificatory sites, in their very acts of autofictional writing. Similarly bringing the idea of translation as central, rather than as incidental, to a text, Rebecca Walkowitz has theorised the idea of born-translated literature, speaking more to the mode of the literary work, rather than to the condition of migrant writers per se, where translation is established as medium and as primary, and not as secondary, to the work. In born-translated literature, translation is not simply a subsequent textual practice performed on the work but imbricated within it as its defining hermeneutic principle. Walkowitz goes on to suggest that such works are written for translation and written as translations to the extent that they pretend to take place in a language other than the one in which they have been composed (3–4). The autofictional writing of Rachid O., Djaziri, Taïa and Bouraoui performs translation to the extent that it seems caught between distancing itself from the culture of a childhood homeland spent in the Maghreb, while also struggling strategically to reclaim it, though in varying degrees, while simultaneously moving towards another

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culture, though never embodying it completely, similar to Trinh Minh-ha’s theorisation of migration discussed in chapter 4. Walkowitz’s point about born-translated literature being written for, and written as, translation is pertinent, given that the queer writers whose works I have analysed are writing in French, but they do not simply mimic the language and culture of the former coloniser. Rather, they use the French language to transgress, rework and rehistoricise, that is, to translate and (re)name their lived experiences, in order to produce alternative modes of insight and meaning through the processes of translocation and transcultural negotiation, all of which speak to Walkowitz’s point about the pretence of the text to be taking place in another language rather than in the language in which it has been written. At the same time, however, the mere writing of the texts in French queers and puts pressure on the geopolitical, yet problematic, divide often erected between French literature, reduced to literature produced in France, and francophone literature, as produced elsewhere or d’outre-mer, particularly referring to literature produced in French from Africa and the Caribbean, which reinscribes colonial hierarchies. The mediation of cultures in translational literature and its impact on established geopolitical imaginaries indicates that power does not flow from a single direction, and helps to forge a critical link between what Epstein and Gillett refer to as the oppositional stance of both queer and critical translation studies (4), as well as a more productive, mutually interrogating relationship between them (Baer 3), while inciting new thinking on the relation between French literature and literature written in French beyond colonial epistemologies. While the experience of migration may allow a somewhat fuller exploration of sexual dissidence not entirely possible in the Maghrebian childhood homelands of Bouraoui, Rachid O., Djaziri and Taïa, the act of migration is never complete in itself or resolved fully since further and ongoing acts of translative work remain in terms of the writers reconfiguring their (sexual) selves imaginatively in their work, in France, thus linking migration, translation and sexual identity formation as largely indeterminate and interminable processes. This form of translational literature captured in the autofictional form contests not only the negative tropes of immigration and diaspora as uprooted or unsettled displacement (Inghilleri 5), on the one hand, or as simple acculturation and assimilation to the host culture, on the other, but also queers the binary thinking evident in dominant Western stereotypes of homosexuality in Arab Muslim societies as repressed, invisible and apolitical, and therefore in need of Western liberation, while challenging nationalist imaginaries in many Arab Muslim societies, where homosexuality is frequently interpreted as a Western, decadent import if it strays beyond the structured active/passive paradigm and/as a substitutive form of sex for the male taking the active sexual role, and if it includes lesbian existence. The

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translational, translocational autofictional writing of Bouraoui, Rachid O., Djaziri and Taïa rearticulates queerness as reducible neither to its stereotypical portrayals in the Maghreb, nor to queer identity and queer politics in the West, but allows what Robert Young refers to as a hybrid critique, where binary, static, fixed systems of representation can be displaced through new and unforeseen modes of identification, understanding and hitherto unthought-of positions (‘The Dislocations of Cultural Translation’ 190), which, Young claims, referencing Bhabha, involves, on the part of subaltern migrants, ‘an agential process of intervention and interaction within the power dynamics of conflicting contemporary cultures’ (‘Dislocations’ 192; emphasis added).5 The mode of agential cross-cultural intervention and negotiation taken up by the contemporary Franco-Maghrebi queer writers through translative processes in their autofiction, particularly around gender and sexuality, enables the production of new hybrid spaces of difference. The ‘trans’ in translation works within, and not only between, languages as well; as Epstein and Gillett note in their introduction to the collection Queer in Translation, translation points to and parodies the constitutive incoherence of the totalitarian thinking through which dominant ideologies assert themselves, interrogates categories, and exposes operations of power in structures of thought (3–4). The struggles toward new forms of identity in Bouraoui’s translation of embodied trauma around her Algerian/French difference, and that of her gender and sexual alterity, into language through her writing, and in translations of hegemonic masculinity that include feminine identifications not rejected, and the translation of passive homosexuality into a site of sexual agency and pleasure in the work of the gay male writers from the Maghreb, cannot be reduced to identifications solely with the Maghreb or with Europe alone, but are steps towards decolonisation, ways of thinking oneself outside the fixed inheritances of imperial and nationalist legacies around race, gender, sexuality and national belonging, challenging these on both sides of the Mediterranean. This connects to Gikandi’s idea mentioned earlier that Africans living in diaspora embrace and celebrate a state of cultural hybridity, a deterritorialisation of borders, being both of Africa and of other cultural worlds at the same time, but not without the risk, I would add, of other unforeseen sites of oppression that hybridity and migration may produce. It is important to note, for example, that the socalled more liberal laws around LGBTQ equality and protection in Europe and the West tend to privilege white, middle-class forms of recognisable queerness and homonormativity thereby creating more precarious positions for queers of colour, particularly those who have emigrated from postcolonial locations, given that their sexual struggles must also be understood as intersecting with other simultaneous struggles concerning, for example, racism, Islamophobia and the politics of immigration.

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I wanted to note that my analysis of the fragmentation of subjectivity, the challenging of binary categories around race, gender, sexuality and national affiliation through migration, and the translative practices of the contemporary Franco-Maghrebi writers I have discussed in chapters 4 and 5 is neither a mere mimicry of queer theoretical orientations in the West nor an imposition of Western frames of reference onto postcolonial identities and cultures. Somewhat similar to Mbembe’s subsequent theoretical elaborations that speak more specifically to Africa, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin reminded us in the very early days of postcolonial theorising that postcolonial writing is always already mediated and that postcolonial experiences are uncentred, pluralistic and multifarious; that is to say that subjective agency has emerged in postcolonial writing from its beginnings through an ongoing resistance to singular and fixed notions of identity and culture imposed under colonialism and has remained part of the broader tradition of postcolonial writing from the colonial period until the present (12). I mention Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s seminal text The Empire Writes Back because one must not assume that the decentring of subjectivity and an emphasis on postmodern indeterminacy with regard to identity and cultural authenticity belong simply to the parameters of recent Western theory. The imperialist gesture lies not in the theorisation of this decentring and emergent sites of difference and heterogeneity in postcolonial contexts through challenging the hold of geopolitical and discursive borders, but, I would argue, the imperialist gesture lies in the hubris that assumes that the indeterminacy of identity and cultural authenticity has emerged strictly out of the history of European thought alone. As Mbembe aptly reminds us, subjects in the postcolony ‘have to have marked ability to manage not just a single identity, but several – flexible enough to negotiate as and when necessary’ (104). The fracturing and negotiation of multiple sites of identity, which has been a feature of the contemporary queer work from the Maghreb generally, particularly as these intersect with sexuality and gender, are encoded in the queer francophone autofictional writing I have been discussing as sites of struggle, perhaps even more explicitly so in Bouraoui’s writing. In writing this book, and especially in reading the selected works I have discussed by Rachid O., Djaziri, Taïa and Bouraoui, it has been refreshing to examine how their translations of sexual subjectivity shift, and how it is possible for the gay male writers to identify with femininity and sexual passivity in their homoerotic attachments and simultaneously claim agency, or for Bouraoui to work out and reclaim her Algerian heritage in France and to assert her love of women at the same time, and how all of these individual multiple positions and struggles, captured in the writing, occupy the same textual space, in a relational, but intersectional, manner, while challenging binary categorical thinking around sexuality, race, gender and geopolitical

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spaces. Translation, understood in this way, allowing new forms of identification to occur, offers, according to Robert Young, a move away from the politics of polarity and offers an ongoing, interactive, dialogic operation, negotiating between competing positions while, at the same time, enabling forms of recognition that challenge the terms of what are assumed to be incommensurable positions (‘Dislocations’ 190). Rather than a mere shift from one signifier to another, which brings about straightforward and resolute translatability, acts of translation work in these texts by occupying a space ‘where all the original elements continue to operate together according to their diverse, heterogeneous terms’ (Young, ‘Dislocations’ 190), producing forms of hybrid identity and meaning, but also requiring further revision and translation, and, therefore, always already implying spaces of untranslatability, given that what is produced is constructed and dependent upon a remainder of difference that exists between disparate cultural worlds. This is what Gayatri Spivak means in speaking of the ever-present persistence and proliferation of l’intraduisible, where she argues, citing Barbara Cassin, that the untranslatable does not refer to that which simply cannot be translated but to ‘something one never stops (not) translating’ (‘Translating in a World of Languages’ 38),6 thus exemplifying the contingency of translation, both interlinguistic and cross-cultural, and the need for ongoing (re)translation. If, as I have been arguing, and as Paul Bandia more succinctly notes, subaltern migrant writers ‘seek ways of representing themselves within the matrix of metropolitan modes of representation . . . [but also] exploit the literary forms and themes of the dominant culture’ (Bandia 276), the hybrid spaces of difference that result from translation, the disruption of what is assumed to be constitutive coherence in identity, language and culture, will always be marked by the space of unassimilable indeterminacy, the space of l’intraduisible, that challenges and complicates any normative idea of straightforward, untroubled translatability. As Emily Apter argues, this means foregrounding, rather than glossing over, opacity and highlighting areas of linguistic and cultural difficulty and translational failures; that is, like queerness, reading against the grain of a global monoculture that insists on the equivalence of meanings as a disciplinary mechanism without recognising ‘forms of non-negotiable singularity that are negotiated nonetheless’ (‘Untranslatability’195–96). According to Apter, the untranslatable involves a kind of ‘decolonial unlearning’ (196), an epistemological pause, which, I would argue, is performed in the recent autofictional queer writing I have examined, where translations of self and Maghrebian cultures in the new homeland in France rest on a radical contingency, leaving open ‘points of departure and destination’ (Bandia 283), through the imaginative aller/retour, implying acts of ongoing struggle on the part of the writers to rename the world and their position within it. At the same time, it is important that, as readers, we work against the impulse to

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translate these works into our own familiar idiom and cultural references so as neither to foreclose the possibility of discordant textual encounters nor risk obscuring reconfigurations of Western dominance (Apter, ‘Untranslatability’ 196–97). But in occupying the space between two different cultures and in refusing to live by binary categorical thinking, or privileging constructions of cultural origins, the contemporary queer francophone autofictional writing from the Maghreb I have discussed deconstructs and fragments notions of sovereign selfhood and nationhood and places the authors, or their fictional protagonists who represent them, in discourse, in the narratives of the texts themselves, instantiating (re)translations of self alongside the reconfiguring of sexual, racial and gender identity and geopolitical, temporal and generic borders. If translation is understood as a mediating, interminable, yet heuristic, practice rather than as a direct, instrumentalist transfer of meaning from one language or culture to another, or as a mere reproduction or repetition, I would also like to comment briefly on my own translations of the primary sources for this book from French into English, especially regarding the more contemporary queer autofictional writing which, I would argue, is even more translational than the earlier work examined, given that it is produced at the juncture between the borders of North Africa and Europe, and given that translative conditions are incited through the process of migration and imbricated within the writing as part of the struggle to create a sense of identity and cultural belonging through negotiating new sites of non-binary difference. But as Baer argues, translation is not only performed by subaltern subjects in their texts, as is the case here, but must also incorporate the positionality of the translator (2). While I generally quote the French from the source texts and give the English translations in endnotes as a way of also helping to make the French texts, particularly the primary sources, available to Anglophone readerships, the translations, admittedly, also support my arguments about representations of same-sex desire in francophone writing from the Maghreb. In some cases, I simply quote the translation in my endnotes from the published English translations of the primary texts written in French, where available, such as from Djebar’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment or Taïa’s An Arab Melancholia. But, most of the time, I offer my own translations as contingent, as possible interpretations of the texts concerned, or as possible alternatives to the already published versions of some of the works in English as I indicate in the relevant endnotes. My translations often include explanations in the endnotes to describe why I have translated in a certain way; I also have used italics for emphasis, and brackets in the original French and/or in my translations, in order to highlight certain nuances of meaning, all of which perform textually, and queer, translation as contingent, varied and heterogeneous as I have been arguing throughout this book that

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translations, both between and within languages, stage, as Baer argues, ‘a clash of epistemologies and serve as a site of cultural negotiation’ (14). It is the site of cultural negotiation that is key, both through the ways in which the writers negotiate meaning through various forms of translation and also how I negotiate meanings in my reading and framing of their works, which would, of course, include my own translations, and which may open up certain pathways of reading, close off others and subject my own translations to retranslation. I have also kept some words or expressions in French when they work better than English translations, such as autre chose, aller/retour, l’entre-deux and dépaysé to convey the idea of alterity, more so than their so-called equivalents in English, as the French terms are more demonstrative of the interstitial space ‘in between’ that the queer francophone authors who have emigrated from the Maghreb inhabit. At the same time, translative crossings and the emergence of contradictory meanings have created new linguistic terms. In an interview with Marc Endeweld in Minorités, Taïa observes that there has been a shift in the Maghreb, particularly in Morocco, from the use of the Arabic term zamel, to indicate the passive role in sexual relations between men in a pejorative sense, to mathali, a more neutral, but invented, term to designate a gay man in Arabic without reference as to whether he occupies the active or passive sexual role.7 Taïa speaks of this word in a letter written to his family, particularly to his mother, about his homosexuality published in the Moroccan journal TelQuel in 2009, and republished in the journal Asymptote in 2012 from which I quote: Je rêve qu’un jour si quelqu’un m’insulte devant vous, en disant: ‘Ton fils, ton frère est zamel . . .’, vous répondiez: ‘Non, il n’est pas zamel, il est mathali.’ Un mot, un petit mot tout simple et qui change tout. Un mot-révolution.8

The translative use of the word mathali, unlike the Arabic term shudhūdh jinsī, discussed in chapter 2, which condensed all forms of male homoerotic expression into a single category, including, but not limited to, the differentiation of active/passive roles in sexual relations between men, is an attempt to remove the pejorative aspect of passive homosexuality (zamel) as always already feminised so as to enable a rethinking of the relation between masculinity and homosexuality, without the gendered hierarchy that stigmatises the passive sexual role, and as a way of decolonising queer desire. One needs to be careful in translation, then, not to override the sense of struggle in these highly political texts written by sexual dissidents who have emigrated from the Maghreb to France. This is also why I have left some expressions in the original French, to the extent that they defy precise translation into English, and the writers themselves have interspersed such Arabic words as zamel, mathali, and nouiba in their writing deliberately, in my

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view, to foreignise the French language, and because translation into French, without comment or notation, could potentially skew the notion of struggle to rename the self and the world, through being positioned in the space inbetween, which is so central to these works. As Lawrence Venuti reminds us, The ‘foreign’ in foreignizing translation is not a transparent representation of an essence that resides in the foreign text and is valuable in itself, but is a strategic construction whose value is contingent on the current target-language situation. Foreignizing translation signifies the difference of the foreign text, yet only by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language. (‘Translation as Cultural Politics’ 69)

This is especially important when the target language is English as the issue is not simply to make texts written in another language intelligible to English speakers, which reproduces the geopolitics of knowledge production with traces of Western imperialism that remain in a globalised world, but also to point out, more honestly, perhaps, sites of translative failure. To what extent should translation promote frictionless communication to be used in business and technology and act as a facilitator of global English, as a tool for monolingualism (Apter ‘Untranslatability’ 199)? Is this even possible, given the political stakes in writing about the non-dire, the unspoken, around taboo subjects, such as gender and sexual dissidence, which makes writing in French more suitable than writing in Arabic, on the one hand, while not forgetting that the Maghreb has historically been marked by a métissage of languages and cultures, on the other? This implies once again that the francophone writers discussed in this book are not simply mimicking European French, though writing in French may give them greater international access to readers, but are also foreignising French in variant ways in their writing, through the interjection of Arabic words into their texts, and through putting French in dialogue with Arab Muslim and Maghrebrian cultures to capture and translate struggles of identity and its fragmentation. For example, in speaking of mastering ‘la langue française . . . [in order] to make it my own’, Abdellah Taïa remarks in the same interview with Alberto Fernández Carbajal, cited in the introduction, that writing creatively in a language has nothing to do with mimicry. Although I speak French and live in France, I simply come from a very different part of the world. Luckily for me, I have all these memories, experiences, tastes, hauntings and possessions that hail from poor Morocco, where I first met life, and it’s that which I put into French. (brackets and emphasis added)9

Taïa’s deliberate use of French drawn from his lived experience in Morocco, rather than the use of standard French spoken in the metropolitan centre of

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the former coloniser, is not a capitulation to the legacy of colonial rule but subverts and deterritorialises the lingering authority of French as a colonial language. Speaking more generally of French writing from the Maghreb, Jane Hiddleston describes it as an ongoing encounter between languages that unsettles assumptions about the purity and hegemony of European languages (‘Writing World Literature’ 1389). If contemporary queer writers from the Maghreb write about sexual dissidence and resist narrow forms of national cultural hegemony and belonging in the Maghreb, while, at the same time, situate French in the everyday experiences of having lived both in the Maghreb and in diaspora, and are connected cross-generationally, in some ways, to the post-independence writers discussed in chapter 3, for instance, by simultaneously using French to continue to express ongoing dissatisfaction and unrest in the years following anticolonial struggle (Hiddleston, ‘Writing World Literature’ 1387), any translation of their works into English must take into account this polyphonic and intercultural complexity as well as its own contingency and subjection to ongoing retranslation. Otherwise, we unwittingly undo what the francophone writers from the Maghreb are attempting to perform through their writing while continuing to marginalise them under the rubric of francophone literature instead of a broader, more inclusive notion of world literature written in French. These forms of cross-linguistic contact and hybridisation make straightforward translation from French into English at times challenging as prohibitions surrounding personal disclosure around sexuality and the influence of the non-dire in Arab Muslim societies and cultures may still be operating, creating the need to read carefully between the lines, to look for what is ambiguous, what is possible, what is absent or even for what is left unsaid. As Gayatri Spivak claims, referencing Raymond Williams, it is important to bear in mind that ‘the dominant ceaselessly appropriates the emergent and rewards it as part of the thwarting of its oppositional energy, channelled into a mere alternative’ (‘Translating in a World of Languages’ 41),10 which potentially undermines and diminishes the agency, referenced by Young earlier, of the cross-cultural interventions and negotiations taken up by, in this case, the contemporary queer francophone writers, accomplished through their own intralinguistic translative struggles in their autofictional writing and their production of new knowledge about same-sex sexuality, shaped by personal history, race, gender and migratory movement instead of merely reproducing the sexual epistemologies and economies embedded either in the Maghreb or in the West. African diasporic texts, as Fongang stipulates, cannot be read solely as emerging from a specific national, cultural or geographical origin, but are fluid texts that capture broader, global concerns in geographically varied spaces (6). The cross-cultural negotiations and interventions around sexual dissidence formulated especially in the work of contemporary queer

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writers from the Maghreb unsettle the binary opposition between centres and peripheries; they are not writing in a tokenistic sense about mere alternative sexualities but are in fact contributing to global circulations and debates around queer knowledge, unmooring it from its Eurocentric and Anglophonic biases, and intervening in important global conversations around migration, diaspora, cross-cultural negotiation and struggle, and systemic social injustices and inequalities. In conclusion, I concede that it would be rather utopian to assume that prevailing sexual, racial and gender hegemonies will necessarily be displaced, challenged or ruptured simply through the mediation of cultures. While it may very well be within the interstitial spaces between geopolitical, social and identic borders that new sites of queerness can take shape and produce new configurations of sexual and gender differences, race, class, and citizenship or sense of national belonging, this does not imply that the mere crossing of borders will guarantee sexual liberation or freedom from the confines of binary gender, as the crossings can produce continued and restructured experiences of power and inequality that need to be continually (re)negotiated. But these sexual struggles and negotiations with power, be it imperialist, nationalist, religious, neo-colonial, or heteropatriarchal, have been inscribed narratively in literature, even in the relatively small sample of texts I have examined here, and across the historical trajectory, from the early and fragmented utterings in the early Ottoman Empire, through the struggles with French colonial and nationalist power in more recent times in North Africa and alongside postcolonial conditions in the Maghreb and in France, although the forms of power and resistance obviously differ according to specific historical contexts. This book is by no means an attempt to write a history of same-sex sexualities in the Maghreb, as this has been done admirably elsewhere, but is an attempt to examine some of the historical antecedents to more contemporary queer writing from the Maghreb in order to demonstrate that the representation and negotiation of same-sex sexual desires and expressions have had a long history in literature from the Maghreb. Rather than a definitive or conclusive study in itself, I prefer to see this book as a set of possible reflections collected in a single work about gender and sexual struggles from the Maghreb as connected with broader struggles towards decolonisation and as a contribution to possible pathways for future work, such as through widening the corpus of texts I examine here and through not limiting the corpus to conventional forms of textuality, such as literature or printed text, but extending it to include digital forms of textuality, such as Facebook, messages and profiles in dating apps online, chatrooms for gay men and lesbians from the Maghreb, and other social media which would enable further analyses of negotiations of gender and sexual dissidence in the Maghreb in virtual spaces and open

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up an even a broader range of queer performativities, queer intimacies, queer hybridities and queer transfiliations within and across its borders. It is also important to note that the queer writers in this study who have crossed geopolitical borders and have migrated to France bring to the foreground class and education privilege, which, according to Mengia Tschalaer, also citing Luibhéid, potentially undermines anticolonial and anti-imperialist projects, and creates a false sense of ease by which geopolitical borders can be crossed by subaltern subjects, to the extent that LGBTQ individuals, who appear homonormative by Western standards and cross borders into Europe, are able to (re)produce the cultural hierarchies of the West by submitting their bodies and desires to transnational liberal discourses and queer complicities with dominant neoliberal logics, and are thereby able to perform sexual identity in ways recognisable in the West. The inscription of homonormativity in the immigration policies of the West, Tschalaer argues, may continue to silence LGBT migrants from various parts of the world, who, for a variety of reasons, may be less visible, especially those who may find it difficult to articulate their sexual alterity within their own communities, let alone with unfamiliar immigration officers (Tschalaer 1271), thereby raising important dilemmas for queer migration and asylum claims, a conclusion similarly raised by Dhoest’s study of LGBTQ forced migrants entering Belgium discussed in chapter 1. The gay male writers I have examined crossed into Europe for the purposes of education initially, or through having a French parent or family members living in Europe, which facilitated their actual border crossings, though, not without the attendant racial perils as Bouraoui demonstrated in Garçon Manqué in her own memories and reflections of leaving Algeria and arriving at Orly airport in Paris in referencing the ways in which Algerian arrivals into France have been read and interpreted racially by immigration and customs officials, as well as by the general public, as potential terrorists. This similarly calls to mind a broader critique I made in the first chapter of this book regarding the so-called permeability of borders in a globalised world through citing Spivak insofar as the degree of permeability very much depends on who is crossing which borders. Another shortcoming of the present work, and perhaps in the scholarship on gender and sexuality on the Maghreb more generally, is that more substantial work needs to be done on transgender. We see gesturings towards female masculinity and transgender identification in Bouraoui’s Garçon Manqué, for example, through the protagonist-narrator taking on the identity of Brio, a nickname given to her by her father as a source of protection in a patriarchal world, and through her self-identification as Ahmed, a more deliberate attempt to perform masculinity, throwing away her dresses, cutting her hair, eschewing the accoutrements of femininity and becoming more emboldened, after being mistaken for a boy as a younger Brio, by holding

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the gaze of men and invading and occupying public spaces in Algeria traditionally marked as masculine. Similarly, in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novels L’Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée, where a father’s daughter is raised as a boy and given the name Ahmed, and where the father imposes masculinity violently on the body of his daughter, who is then renamed as Zahra by the father before he dies, there is a deferral of any restoration to an ‘original’ or ‘natural’ gender when Zahra begins to live as a woman. It is through Zahra telling the story authoritatively in the first person living as a woman in La Nuit sacrée, but maintaining the trace of masculine gender performance in defiance of norms around femininity, that the hierarchy of the gender binary, as well as the pretensions of a naturalised hegemonic masculinity, premised on biology alone, is disrupted in the postcolonial nationalist imaginary. But while the representation of cross-gender identification experiences erodes, to some extent, orthodox gender paradigms and points to the fractures ‘in the making of the heteronormative postcolonial nation-state to the point of transing the nation’, as Chantel Zabus claims (‘Transing the Algerian NationState’ 70), I agree with the premise, but I am wary of a claim to transing the nation as part of new vocabularies associated with what Zabus refers to as ‘transgenderism’ in her article (71). What exactly is the comparison between transgender and ‘transing the nation’; what new hybridities or new forms of being come into existence that cannot be reduced to one gender or the other, to one nation or the other? I would like to see this theorised particularly, as Halberstam suggests, through elaborations on how texts construct and sustain the deployment of the transgender gaze, keeping us focused on the seriousness of transgender presentation and performance rather than on the elements of masquerade (In a Queer Time and Place 83, 89), but within the specificity of postcolonial histories and contexts. Halberstam’s notion of trans* with the asterisk ‘modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity’ (Trans* 4; emphasis added). This deferral is also relevant to translation as transitional and in process rather than as stable or final, and Halberstam warns that while it is not feasible to reduce transgender existence to complete unintelligibility, ‘we should be wary of overly rational narratives about lives filled with contradiction and tension’ (In a Queer Time and Place 54) to the extent, I would add, that such narratives are already translations constituted by spaces of incommensurability, undecidability and difference, allowing for spaces of untranslatability so as to avoid what Halberstam refers to as the stabilisation, rationalisation and trivialisation of transgender lives (54–55), especially important in postcolonial contexts where so many other sites of discursive colonisation may be at work. More important for future work, Halberstam’s notion of trans* creates a space for theorising transgender existence as a further site of decolonisation

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through debunking postcolonial nationalist fantasies of binary gender and its conflation with cultural authenticity and origin. Inhabiting the world from a position where various cultures, identities and temporalities touch, being located in the liminal space between various borders, that is, being on both sides of the border but never fully on either side, or in a third space somewhere in between, creates points of glissement or sliding, blending, rupture and fragmentation, thus enabling possibilities for heterogeneity and the negotiation of new modes of perception and meaning through translation as a form of resignification. For the contemporary francophone writing from the Maghreb I have examined in this book, though arguably with its antecedent in post-independence literature, this space in-between works as a queer space that diffuses and ruptures entrenched cultural meanings and produces transformative new thinking in the struggle to name one’s shifting and varied relation to North African cultural identity, regional and national belonging, and the world. The importance of struggle is quite key here, captured in the idea of translation and migration as interminable, and as part of ongoing processes towards erotic autonomy and felt gender expression as viable praxes of decolonisation. Also addressing the contradictions in queer lives that resist stabilisation in a manner somewhat similar to the issue raised by Halberstam with regard to transgender existence, when asked if there is any resolution or closure in debates and struggles, this time around contradictions between Islam and homosexuality, in the same interview I mentioned earlier, Abdellah Taïa reflects on this in examining his own writing: I don’t think I write books because I want to be free. I write books because all the contradictions within me, including contradictions about homosexuality, are still unresolved. When you experience multiculturalism and different geographical borders – Morocco, France, Europe – the problem becomes bigger. You don’t only live your original contradictions as a Muslim person living in a Muslim country; now you are living another set of contradictions, because people in the country you live in want you to be something you cannot be. The contradictions become so much more complex. I would argue that freedom, as an artist, is not in what you express, but in the fact that you can write. However, all I can express is something that is not, and never will be, resolved, at least not in my books. . . . The debate is not restricted to Islam’s position regarding homosexuality. It’s still a problem for many gay people in Morocco, and it is very important that someone like me speaks. I do it, and I will keep doing it, but the problem doesn’t merely stop here. There are other things to be discussed: postcolonialism, secularism, the rights of women, inheritance law, individual freedom, all at the same time.11

Here there is a queering, perhaps, of the comparative relation itself, a refusal to resolve the differences and contradictions between two seemingly

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incommensurable perspectives, those between Islam and homosexuality in this example. Because postcolonial literature is always haunted by the spectre of its own comparatism, historically located in relation to European literatures, and because postcolonial literature always already occupies the space between borders, postcolonial literature, according to Robert Young, seeks to uncompare the comparative relation by speaking back and reversing the power relation by decentring, by recomparing, on its own terms ‘rather than being assimilated into its globalized form’ (‘The Postcolonial Comparative’ 688–89), which would reinforce comparison with the literature of the former coloniser as in the case of the problematic distinction between French literature and francophone literature mentioned earlier. Taïa’s uncomparative gesture in the interview quoted above serves as an example of translative failure, of l’intraduisible, perhaps evoking the so-called wounded or retrograde side of modern queer representation that Love addresses in Feeling Backward, as discussed at the end of the last chapter, though with the wound pertaining not to queer existence in this instance but to failed queer methodological and theoretical approaches, aided perhaps by the contingencies, contradictions, paradoxes and ‘chaotic pluralisms’ that Mbembe argues constitute African postcolonies (108) that defy straightforward comparison or translation. Looking towards the future of comparative queer studies as articulated by Paola Bacchetta, in an interview in the journal Interventions in 2020, is the need to move beyond what she refers to as the white queer theory that dominates the global North in epistemological terms – that is, white queer theory’s presuppositions, categories, and historical and general elisions of the effects of colonialism, racism, Islamophobia and other relations of power (576), such as Western immigration policy. Bacchetta advocates for what she refers to as the importance of a decolonial queerness that embraces oversights and forms of amnesia through developing a set of analytics and practices that addresses a broader range of power relations and conditions of subalternity, where the idea of the border, as articulated by Gloria Anzaldúa, signifies political markings not only of geographical space but of cultural, symbolic, and internal or psychic space as well (576–77). The contemporary queer francophone writing from the Maghreb, which addresses both a broader range of conditions of subalternity and the contestation of borders demarcating geopolitical, cultural, symbolic and identic spaces, is, perhaps, one significant move in the direction towards a more decolonised queerness. Gender struggles and struggles for erotic autonomy in, and coming out of, the North African postcolonies of the Maghreb intersect with broader struggles for more dynamic forms of decolonisation and new kinds of freedom, while unsettling our assumptions about sexuality in the West and demanding new and reframed forms of critical queer analysis.

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NOTES 1. Though not the subject of this book, travel writing by homosexual or homosexually inclined European men, such as by André Gide in Tunisia and Algeria during the period of French colonial domination, for whom North Africa’s status as part of the developing world made local male youth ‘more readily available as sexual partners for favors or pay’ (Boone, Homoerotics of Orientalism 223), I do not mean to imply, with my primary focus on literature from the Maghreb written in French, that the period of French imperial occupation in the Maghreb is devoid of homoerotic representation. Boone, for example, has studied the representation of homoeroticism not only in literature but in visual art, such as painting, photography and film, from the Middle East and from the Maghreb. For example, Glyn Philpot’s painting Aprèsmidi Tunisien, painted in 1922, when Tunisia was still a French protectorate, hints at homoerotic flirtation between two Tunisian men, though with an orientalist flare, the men lying back and facing each other within the niche of a recessed wall, with suggestive body postures, the younger male wearing a flower behind his ear, possibly a gift from the slightly older man. But more interesting than the painting’s orientalist appeal, Boone proffers another reading – that the scene represents a subversion of the topos of harem master and female odalisque that is reframed in the painting as a male homoerotic exchange (Homoerotics of Orientalism 354). But homoerotic readings are often misread as invisible, according to Boone, as a result of the tendency of Western scholars seeking signs of homoeroticism common to Hellenistic and European aesthetics that glorify the male nude body (Homoerotics of Orientalism 306). 2. I rely here on Bhabha’s notion of the double-writing of the nation and to the tension he identifies between ‘signifying the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory “present”’ (‘DissemiNation’ 298–99), which disrupts the process of signification through which the sovereignty of the pedagogical narrative and the binary division between what is internal and external to the nation-state are set up and articulated. This means that the repetition and pulsation of the national sign, of the image of the people as it circulates in culture, resists totalisation under pedagogical fantasies of national cohesion and belonging as it is continually (re)translated through the performative, through the ways in which the sign is taken up, embodied and performed by particular social groups and individuals, exposing the gap of the signifier, given that the repetition in translation (like gender) is never an exact repetition, but punctuated by difference, thus opening up the possibilities of other narratives of the people and other sites of subaltern difference (‘DissemiNation’ 300). 3. While the work of the contemporary gay and lesbian francophone writers from the Maghreb I have discussed challenges nationalist views on homosexuality in the Maghreb that place sexual dissidence on the constitutive outside of national belonging, it also challenges the broader myth of culture as homogenous and whole, which comes out of the rise of the nation-state system in eighteenth-century Europe, and which, as Inghilleri points out, informed nativist views of culture ‘as biologically transmitted, fixed complexes of behavior’, enabling Europe to assign inferior

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cognitive traits to those whom it colonised, and to particular groups of immigrants based on their race and ethnicity (22). 4. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture 321. 5. I find Young’s reliance on Bhabha helpful here, especially The Location of Culture, in terms of Bhabha’s theorisation of postcolonial forms of agency through cultural hybridity and/as resistance that shifts power relations and enables sub­ altern translations not only of indigenous subjectivities and cultures that challenge misrepresentations as part of colonialism’s legacy, while also enabling new translations of Western modernity and history by foregrounding questions of race, slavery and imperialism in narratives of European history (see Young ‘The Dislocations of Cultural Translation’ 188). But while I am making use of Young’s discussion points on Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity and subaltern migrant agency, I must acknowledge the context of Young’s argument where he is actually questioning how much value we place on cultural hybridity and the newness that emerges in the intermingling of cultures, ideas, politics and people through immigration, especially in his critique of Bhabha’s defence of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and the controversy surrounding the book’s publication through the burning of the book by a group of Muslims in Bradford, England, for its purported defamation of Islam, and the subsequent fatwa that was declared on Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in 1989. In articulating cultural translation as an innovative third space, Bhabha conflates, according to Young, the newness of cultural translation with blasphemy which incited a global movement by Muslims in Britain and in other parts of the world that challenged the precepts of Western thinking, taking the idea of cultural translation as another form of discursive imperialism ‘symptomatic of the West’s habitual claims to cultural supremacy, of the West’s unequal, disrespectful, and patronizing relations to the non-West’ (Young, ‘Dislocations’ 194), a critique not completely dissimilar from concerns about the imperialist tendencies of the West raised by Joseph Massad, which I discussed earlier. Defending or critiquing Islam is beyond the scope of this book and my own expertise, though I would not perhaps have used as provocative language as Bhabha in claiming that ‘cultural translation desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy’ (The Location of Culture 327) in his critique of objections to Rushdie’s book coming from different parts of the Muslim world. But if cross-cultural encounters, translations and migration shift cultural norms, those pertaining to religious doctrine and its interpretation may also shift insofar as religious institutions function also as social and political institutions and exercise varying degrees of influence and power in the everyday world in different contexts. This does not imply a reduction of religious precepts to relativism or to the vagaries of personal whim, but is a recognition that particular meanings may shift, or translate, as they adapt to other cultures in their movements across the globe. Though these shifts may be rejected vehemently in the home cultures of those who have emigrated elsewhere, operating as a form of resistance to Western cultural imperialism, gay and lesbian Muslims, for example, are also changing what it means to be Muslim in the West and in the Arab Muslim world, thus enacting new forms of cultural translation that they do not intend to be blasphemous but nonetheless function as a site of conflict in the processes of cultural negotiation and exchange. See, for example, essays by

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Farid El Asri ‘Homosexualité de l’Homo-islamicus’ and by Ludovic Mohamed Zahed ‘Corporalités et islamités LGBT radicalement alternatives au Maghreb et au sein des diasporas arabo-musulmanes’ in Monia Lachheb’s collection Être homosexuel au Maghreb. 6. See also Barbara Cassin, ed., Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris: Seuil, 2004). 7. See Marc Endeweld, ‘Abdellah Taïa, une colère marocaine’, Minorités 11, 16 November 2009. 8. Trans. I dream that one day if someone insults me in front of you, saying, ‘Your son, your brother is zamel . . .’, you would answer, ‘No, he is not zamel, he is mathali.’ One word, a simple little word that changes everything. A word revolution. Taïa’s letter was originally published in Morocco in TelQuel (367) in April 2009. I refer to the reprint of the letter in French ‘L’homosexualité expliquée à ma mère’ republished in the online journal Asymptote in its July 2012 issue accessed as follows: https://www​.asymptotejournal​.com​/nonfiction​/abdellah​-taia​-homosexuality​ -explained​-to​-my​-mother​/french/. 9. See Alberto Fernández Carbajal, ‘The Wanderings of a Gay Moroccan: An Interview with Abdellah Taïa’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53.4 (2017): 495– 506, https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/17449855​.2017​.1327966. 10. Spivak here is referencing Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–27. 11. Carbajal, ‘The Wanderings of a Gay Moroccan: An Interview with Abdellah Taïa’, https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/17449855​.2017​.1327966. Emphasis added in the text of the quoted interview.

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Index

Page numbers followed with “n” refer to endnotes. Abbas, Hakima, 42 Abu-Haidar, Farida, 109 Abun-Nasr, Jamil M., 55–57, 65, 77nn2–3, 79n18 Achmat, Zackie, 53n14 active homosexuality, 8, 17, 58, 74, 77n4, 78n9, 122, 131, 135, 138, 139, 148, 156n33 African diaspora, 13, 206–7, 211 African Palimpsest (Zabus), 50 African Studies Review, 26–27n13 Afropolitanism, 206 Agadir Crisis of 1911, 112n1 Agar-Mendousse, Trudy, 188 Ahmed, Sara, 172, 182 Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), 15, 18, 23n2, 44, 66, 83, 84, 88–89, 92, 99, 101–3, 106, 112n1, 131, 163–66, 169, 170, 191, 196n21, 204, 205 Algiers School of French Psychiatry, 15, 66–67, 69, 71, 92 Allan, Michael, 110, 115n25 Altink, Henrice, 30 Anderson, Benedict, 91 Andrijasevic, Rutvica, 29, 36 Angelo, Adrienne, 172, 174–76

Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française (Memmi), 109, 117n46 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 5, 177, 222 Apter, Emily, 49–50, 213, 214, 216 Arab conquest, 56, 57, 74 Arenberg, Nancy M., 168, 169, 173 Arendt, Hannah, 65 ars erotica, 70, 79–80n21 Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 52n7 Article 23 & 24 of constitution, Tunisia, 121 Article 230 of the penal code, Tunisia, 121 Article 338 of the penal code, Algeria, 121, 152n2 Article 489 of the penal code, Morocco, 120–21 Arvas, Abdulhamit, 92 Ashcroft, Bill, 212 Assab, Nour Abu, 203 Attridge, Derek, 39 autofiction, 47, 49, 150, 151, 187, 200n64 autofictional writing, 6, 10, 45–49, 149–51, 209, 214, 217

239

240

Index

Bacchetta, Paola, 222 Baer, Brian James, 10, 208, 210, 214–15 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 41, 194n1 Bandia, Paul, 6, 145, 208, 213 Barnard, Ian, 26–27n13 Barthes, Roland, 179 Bauer, Janet, 1–2, 30 Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame (Stockton), 88 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 15, 16, 86, 95–98, 100, 101, 103–6, 111, 126, 129, 130, 204, 220; L’Enfant de sable, 16, 98, 104, 111, 220; La Nuit sacrée, 16, 98–99, 104, 106–7, 111, 220; La plus haute des solitudes, 97; La Prière de l’absent (The Prayer for the Absent), 16, 95–97, 103, 105, 107, 111, 129 Berbers, 12, 56–57, 65, 77nn2–3 Bersani, Leo, 88 Bhabha, Homi, 2, 5, 49, 84, 91, 97, 100–101, 209, 211, 223n2; third space, 124, 224n5 biomedicine, 68, 79n20 The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault), 67–68 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 15, 84, 112n2, 197n25 Bodies that Matter (Butler), 133, 148, 178 Body Besieged (Vassallo), 9, 163, 167, 168, 176, 181–84, 185, 188 Boone, Joseph, 24n3, 41–42, 48, 59, 60, 64, 70, 71, 74, 77n7, 80n22, 87, 223n1 border: crossings, 3, 6, 18, 21, 43, 56, 57, 59, 70, 74–76, 170–71, 205; delocalisation of, 38; permeability, 29–30, 40, 124, 201, 219 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Anzaldúa), 177 Boudjedra, Rachid, 15, 16, 52n8, 92–95, 97, 100, 101, 111, 125, 130, 204; La Répudiation, 16, 52n8, 92–94, 97, 111, 204

Bouraoui, Nina, 3, 6, 8, 9, 18–21, 23n2, 35, 44, 46, 48, 96, 105, 162, 163, 194n1, 198n38, 200n63, 204–6, 209–12; Algerian family, 194–95n3; Algerian heritage, 9, 10, 18–19, 189–90; Garçon Manqué, 9, 18–19, 163–73, 187, 189, 193, 219; lesbian desire, 19, 174–76, 179–81, 184–88; masculinity, 19, 171–72, 177, 187; Mes Mauvaises Pensées (My Bad Thoughts), 9, 18, 19, 163, 180–86, 193, 198n45, 199n52; Poupée Bella, 9, 18, 19, 163, 166, 173–80, 181, 182, 187, 188 Boyarin, Daniel, 83 British colonialism, 53n10, 65, 72 Butler, Judith, 49, 50, 54nn15–16, 91, 115n23, 133, 147, 148, 170, 172, 178, 180, 181, 198n44; heterosexual melancholy, 147, 192 Carbajal, Alberto Fernández, 10, 216 Carjuzaa, Gilles, 94 Cassin, Barbara, 213 Cather, Willa, 190, 191 Cazenave, Odile, 165 Chabot, Sean, 11 Chamberlain, Edward, 205 Chari, Hema, 70 Chatterjee, Partha, 113–14n9 Cobham, Rhonda, 38 colonialism, 17, 32, 36, 39, 43, 64, 67, 70, 71, 85, 90, 92, 95, 172. See also British colonialism; French colonialism Colonizer and Colonized (Memmi), 110 Coly, Ayo, 40, 48, 202 compulsory heterosexuality, 115n23, 135 Corbisiero, Fabio, 12, 120, 131, 152n1 cultural translation, 6, 7, 26n13, 141, 145, 147, 208, 224n5 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 2, 31 Currier, Ashley, 43, 51

Index

Death of a Discipline (Spivak), 30, 38 decolonial queerness, 222 decolonisation, 15, 16, 18, 38, 39, 48, 51, 64, 75, 83, 85, 91, 92, 95, 100, 110, 122, 133, 142, 143, 192, 207, 211, 218, 220–22 Delacroix, Eugène, 102, 104, 105 dépaysement, 188, 193 Derrida, Jacques, 50 Desiring Arabs (Massad), 10, 12, 14, 18, 21, 26n8, 31–35, 52n3, 53n9, 59, 64, 71, 72, 80n22, 86, 90, 157n35, 204 deterritorialisation, 11, 110, 123, 161, 211 De Toro, Alphonse, 31 Dhoest, Alexander, 37–38, 219 diaspora, 36, 124–25, 186, 207, 209, 210; African, 13, 74, 206–8, 211; Arab, 26n8, 33, 52n3 disidentification, 123, 126, 132, 133, 137, 139, 146, 162, 173, 174, 176, 193 ‘DissemiNation’ (Bhabha), 5, 91, 100, 101, 223n2 Djaziri, Eyet-Chékib, 3, 6, 9, 17, 19–21, 23n2, 47, 122, 125, 133–42, 143, 149, 151, 161, 186, 187, 190, 193, 201, 204, 206, 209–12; Une promesse de douleur et de sang, 134, 140, 142; Un poisson sur la balançoire, 18, 134–39, 149–51, 157n38, 191 Djebar, Assia, 6, 15, 16, 89, 92, 94, 101–11, 115n25, 126, 130, 131, 150, 163, 165, 169, 194n1, 204; L’Amour, la fantasia, 101, 105, 115n25; Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment), 15, 16, 89, 101–9, 113nn7–8, 115nn25–28, 116nn30–41, 117nn42–45, 126, 130, 169, 204, 214 Duranti, Andrea, 87, 139 Duyvendak, Jan Willem, 11 A Dying Colonialism (Fanon), 84, 102

241

Edelman, Lee, 188, 189, 193 egalitarian homosexuality, 18, 86–88, 93–95, 140 Ekine, Sokari, 42 El Achir, Khadija, 121, 130–33, 150, 154n15 El Feki, Shereen, 63 Ellis, Havelock, 24n3, 73, 74 El-Rouayheb, Khaled, 4, 14, 56, 58–63, 73, 74, 76, 77nn4–6, 78nn8–9 ‘The Empire of Sexuality’ (Massad), 25n7 The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin), 212 Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick), 25n7 Epprecht, Marc, 21, 26n13, 42 Epstein, B. J., 210, 211 Fabre, Thierry, 43 Fanon, Frantz, 66, 83–85, 90, 102, 112n2; le monde blanc, 172, 197n25; littérature de combat, 15, 83, 85, 90, 100, 103, 164 Fassin, Eric, 122 Feeling Backward (Love), 189, 191, 222 female masculinity, 9, 19, 98–100, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 177, 187, 190, 219, 220 feminine identification (as resistance in gay men), 17, 18, 126–28, 133, 134, 136–38, 140, 143–44, 147–48, 152, 205 feminism, 30, 88, 90, 113n3 feminist nationalism, 88–89 Ferchichi, Wahid, 121 Fongang, Delphine, 36, 37, 207, 217 Foucault, Michel, 23n3, 41, 48, 53n14, 67–68, 70, 79n21 France, 44, 47, 65, 88, 112n1, 122–25, 131, 140, 149, 162–63, 165–67, 169– 71, 182, 191, 196n21, 205, 206, 210 francophone autofictional writing, 35, 45–48, 187, 190, 193, 206, 210, 212, 214

242

Index

French colonialism, 3–4, 15–17, 45, 53n10, 57, 63, 65, 67, 72, 74, 89, 92, 101, 126, 150, 166, 196n21, 203 French imperialism, 44, 63, 65–66 French language, 16, 20, 43–45, 48, 65, 74, 98, 109, 110, 203, 216–17 Gay International, 11, 33, 41 Geesey, Patricia, 105 gender, 54n16; alterity, 46, 48, 176, 207; dissidence, 100, 137, 169, 204; embodiment, 17, 91, 121–22, 127; identity, 37, 98–100, 129, 153n6, 154n10, 173, 191; intersectionality of, 170, 172; norms, 49, 54n15, 91, 97, 121–22, 172, 179; performance, 39, 91, 179, 220; and sexual alterity, 204, 206, 211; and sexual dissidence, 4, 15, 17, 20, 45, 57, 75, 90, 91, 95, 100, 101, 109, 110, 112, 119, 123, 124, 162, 204, 216, 218; and sexuality, 12, 38, 44, 74, 85, 87, 100, 219; and sexual norms, 17, 110–11, 133; and sexual politics, 63, 87 Gendering Border Studies (Altink and Weedon), 30 Gender Trouble (Butler), 54nn15–16, 115n23, 148, 170, 172 geopolitical borders, 1, 2, 6, 10, 11–13, 19, 29–30, 37–38, 41, 49, 76, 119, 124, 201–2, 205–6, 208, 219 Gikandi, Simon, 206, 207, 211 Gillett, Robert, 210, 211 Glissant, Édouard, 110, 117n48 Gopinath, Gayatri, 124–25 Gouyon, Marien, 200n64 Griffiths, Gareth, 212 Gronemann, Claudia, 91, 121–22, 142, 143, 146, 147–48, 158nn50–51 Halberstam, Judith (Jack), 172, 220–21 Hall, Stuart, 151 Hamil, Mustapha, 98, 99, 100 Hanafi, Hassan, 43, 53n10, 53n12, 65, 78nn15–16

Ḥanaf ī school, 78n9 Harrington, Katharine, 162, 180–81, 185, 199n52 Hassan, Waïl S., 20, 208, 209 Hayes, Jarrod, 4, 15, 21, 24n4, 34, 48, 49, 71, 73, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92–99, 102, 104, 109, 113n4, 122, 126, 129, 131, 144 hegemonic masculinity, 99, 100, 148, 205, 211, 220 Helem, 35 Herzog, Dagmar, 23n3 hetero/homo: distinction, 11, 23n3, 25n7, 32, 33, 35, 57, 58, 61, 203 Heterosexual Africa? (Epprecht), 21, 26n13 heterosexual melancholy, 147–48, 192 Hiddleston, Jane, 45, 106–8, 217 Higonnet, Margaret, 21, 49 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 24n3 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 23n3, 53n14, 68–70, 79n19, 79n21 homoeroticism, 16, 60–61, 73–74, 92, 130, 158n49, 223n1 Homoerotics of Orientalism (Boone), 42, 48, 59, 60, 64, 70, 74, 77n7, 87, 223n1 Husayn, Taha, 14 Husung, Kirsten, 163, 165, 171, 185, 187, 190, 194n1, 195n7, 200n59 Ibnlfassi, Laïla, 95–97, 114n17 immigration, 29, 37–38, 124, 206, 209, 210, 219 Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa (Spurlin), 39, 53n14, 58, 79–80n21 Impossible Desires (Gopinath), 124–25 In a Queer Time and Place (Halberstam), 172, 220 Inghilleri, Moira, 206, 208, 210, 223n3 Ireland, Susan, 90, 113n9 Islam, 32–34, 56, 64, 77n3, 81n29, 120, 131, 204, 224n5; and feminism,

Index

88; and homosexuality, 221–22; sexuality and, 33–34, 76 ‘Islam and Homosexuality’ (Kramer), 70 Islamic law, 61, 73 Islam in Liberalism (Massad), 32–35, 52n3, 52n9, 204 Islamophobia, 11, 20, 205, 207, 211, 222 Johnson, Barbara, 50 Jolly, Rosemary, 39 Jordan, Sharalyn R., 37, 52n4 Jordan, Shirley, 6 Julien, Isaac, 69 Kamal, Hala, 34, 52n2 al-Karmī, Mar‘ī ibn Yūsuf, 60 Kateb Yacine, 113n4 Keller, Richard, 43, 44, 62, 66, 67 Kelly, Debra, 44–47 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 46, 55, 64, 75, 81nn26–29, 146 Kolossov, Vladimir, 1, 201–2 Kramer, Max, 70, 119 Kristevan semiotic/symbolic, 103, 107, 108, 115–16n29, 143–44, 157n41 Laroussi, Farid, 65, 66, 71 La sexualité queer au Maghreb (Ncube), 27n14, 187 ‘Le coming out’ (Ncube), 132, 137, 151 ‘Le mâle/mal de la mélancolie’ (Gronemann), 146, 147–48, 158nn50–51 le monde blanc, 172, 177, 182, 190, 197n25 l’entre-deux, 17, 21, 124, 126, 151, 162, 167, 172, 186, 193 lesbian, 8, 9, 12, 19, 32, 35, 38, 76, 108, 109, 162, 176, 177, 179, 188, 198n38, 198n45; desire, 10, 19, 173– 76, 179–80, 184–86, 198n45 LGBTQ migrants, 37, 219 Lionnet, Françoise, 110, 117n48

243

littérature de combat, 15, 83, 85, 90, 94, 96, 100, 103, 110, 164 liwāṭ, 14, 15, 61–62, 73, 76, 78n9, 79n21, 203 The Location of Culture (Bhabha), 49, 124, 224nn4–5 Lorde, Audre, 177 Love, Heather, 189–91, 222 Luibhéid, Eithne, 29, 170, 219 Mack, Mehammed, 69, 88 MacLachlan, Rosie, 47, 162, 177–80, 182–83, 188 Maghrebian Mosaic (Mortimer), 3, 41 Maghreb Pluriel (Khatibi), 55, 64 Mahfūz, Najīb, 70 Mālikī school, 61, 78n8 Marouf, Nadir, 65 Masculinités Maghrébines (Gronemann), 121–22, 142–43 masculinity, 6, 17, 18, 60, 121–22, 125–26, 128, 131, 133–35, 137, 139, 140, 142–48, 152, 192, 215 Massad, Joseph, 10, 11, 14, 18, 21, 25n7, 26n13, 31–35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 52n9, 59, 63, 64, 72, 86, 141, 142, 204, 224n5 Mbembe, Achille, 5, 12, 13, 36, 40–43, 48, 69, 202, 212, 222 McClintock, Anne, 16, 84, 86, 102 McCormick, Jared, 35–36, 41 Memmi, Albert, 109, 110 Mercer, Kobena, 69 métissage, 110, 117n48, 187, 203, 216 Migraine-George, Thérèse, 43, 51 migration, 6, 12, 19–20, 37, 47, 124, 186, 202, 205, 206, 208–12, 214, 219, 221. See also translation Minh-ha, Trinh T., 124, 125, 152, 210 mission civilisatrice, 15, 43, 44, 65, 72, 121, 203 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 30, 85, 89, 92, 104, 113n3 Moi, Toril, 144

244

Index

Mortimer, Mildred, 3, 41, 43, 44–45, 55, 75, 89, 102, 109 Mosse, George, 68 Mugabe, Robert, 24n5 Muñoz, José Esteban, 85, 123, 136, 173 Munro, Brenna, 17, 27n13 Murdoch, H. Adlai, 105, 110 Murray, Stephen O., 60 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 52n9, 81n25 Nationalism and Sexuality (Mosse), 68 Nation and Its Fragments (Chatterjee), 114n9 Nation and Narration (Bhabha), 2 Nawās, Abū, 14, 59 Ncube, Gibson, 22, 27n14, 122–26, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 149, 151, 187, 200n64 neo-colonialism, 32, 45, 71, 85, 90, 125 North Africa, 3, 30, 38, 43, 48, 49, 67, 72, 74, 75 Not under Forty (Cather), 191 Nyanzi, Stella, 43 O., Rachid, 3, 6, 9, 17, 19–21, 23n2, 35, 122, 125–33, 138, 143, 145, 149–51, 153n4, 154n10, 155n17, 161, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 204, 206, 209–12; Chocolat Chaud, 133, 149, 151, 186; L’Enfant ébloui, 127–31; Plusieurs Vies, 129–30 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 50 orientalism, 71, 79–80n21, 80n22 Orientalism (Said), 71, 80n22 Ottoman Empire, 3, 4, 14, 38, 56, 58–62, 74, 76, 87, 92, 120, 121, 203, 218 Ottosson, Daniel, 121 Out of Algeria (Hiddleston), 106–8 Palekar, Shalmalee, 42 Parker, Andrew, 68 Pasquier, Wilfried, 91 passive homosexuality, 8, 17, 74, 94, 111, 113n6, 133, 138, 142, 148, 152, 211, 215

Patel, Geeta, 42 Patton, Cindy, 3, 80n23 pederastic love poetry, 4, 14, 15, 60, 62, 63, 69, 77n6 phallic masculinity, 17, 126, 135, 139, 143–47 ‘Philosophical Translation’ (Apter), 49–50 Pleasure of the Text (Barthes), 179 Porter, Catherine, 141 ‘The Postcolonial Comparative’ (Young), 222 postcolonialism, 31, 38–41, 44, 75, 119, 221 postcolonial nationalism, 90–92, 95, 98–101, 102, 113–14n9, 119, 132 The Professor’s House (Cather), 191 Provencher, Denis, 125, 144, 192 psychiatric medicine (colonialism), 66, 67 The Psychic Life of Power (Butler), 180, 198n44 Puar, Jasbir, 30 Queer Diasporas (Patton and SánchezEppler), 3 ‘Queering Translation’ (Spurlin), 20, 26n13 Queer in Translation (Epstein and Gillett), 211 Queer Nations (Hayes), 4, 15, 24n4, 34, 48, 71, 73, 85, 88, 91–95, 97–99, 102, 104, 109, 113n4 Queer Race (Barnard), 26–27n13 ‘Queer Resistance’ (Hayes), 87 queer theory, 27n13, 36, 40, 42, 101, 193, 222; and postcolonial theory, 38–41, 71, 202, 215, 222 racism, 11, 39, 65–66, 78n16, 171, 176, 191, 194–95n3, 204, 206, 207, 211; colonial, 15, 66, 85 ‘Reappropriating the Gaze’ (Mortimer), 89–90, 102

Index

‘Repenser la construction transméditerranéenne’ (Ncube), 123–24, 125 reterritorialisation, 19, 43, 174, 176, 184 ‘Return of the Homopast’ (Hayes), 122, 126, 129, 131, 144 Rich, Adrienne, 108–9, 115n23 Roscoe, Will, 60 Rushdie, Salman, 224n5 Russo, Mary, 68 Said, Edward, 2, 31, 38, 71, 80n22 Salhi, Zahia, 101 Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno, 3 Sans Voix (Zinaï-Koudil), 90 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 224n5 Schwarz, Henry, 208–9 scientia sexualis, 70 Scott, James, 1, 201–2 Sebbar, Leïla, 113n4 Section 377 (colonial anti-sodomy statute), 8, 72, 80n24 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 25n7, 57–58 Serhane, Abdelhak, 87 sexual inversion, 73–74, 133 Sexual Inversion (Ellis), 73–74 Sexuality in Europe (Herzog), 23n3 ‘Sexual/Textual Politics’ (Ncube), 122, 149 Shāfi’ī school, 78n9 shari’a law, 90 ‘Shifting Geopolitical Borders’ (Spurlin), 12, 141 shudhūdh jinsī, 73–74, 215 Smith, Sophie Catherine, 142, 145, 147 SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity), 37 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 29–30, 38, 50, 213, 217, 219 Spurlin, William J., 12, 20, 26n13, 40, 53n14, 58, 79n20, 141 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 88 Stora, Benjamin, 165, 196n21 substitutive sexuality, 12, 120, 122, 123, 135, 143, 152n1, 161, 191, 210

245

al-Ṭahṭāwī, Rifā’ah, 63, 78n10, 78n12 Taïa, Abdellah, 3, 6, 9, 10, 17–21, 23n2, 35, 122, 124, 125, 142–49, 151–52, 158n51, 161, 170, 171, 186, 190–93, 200n63, 204, 206, 209–12, 215, 216, 221, 225n8; An Arab Melancholia, 153n3, 158n45, 158nn47–48, 214; Une mélancolie arabe, 10, 124, 142–47, 151, 153n3, 169, 192; Mon Maroc, 124, 143, 152n3, 186, 200n63; Le rouge du tarbouche, 152 Terrorist Assemblages (Puar), 30 Tiffin, Helen, 212 Toward the African Revolution (Fanon), 83, 85 transfiliation, 125, 152, 219 transgender, 25, 37, 111, 219–21 ‘Transing the Algerian Nation-State’ (Zabus), 220 ‘Translating in a World of Languages’ (Spivak), 213, 217 translation, 5, 6, 19–20, 26n13, 34, 46, 49–51, 63, 64, 129, 141, 148, 150, 178–79, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 193, 208–11, 213–17, 220, 221, 222, 223n2. See also migration ‘Translation as Cultural Politics’ (Venuti), 50–51, 216 Translation Studies Reader (Venuti), 63 Traub, Valerie, 11 Treaty of Fès, 112n1 tribalism, 56–57 ‘Troping Boyishness’ (Ncube), 134, 135 Tschalaer, Mengia, 219 ulama, 57, 73 ‘Under Western Eyes’ (Mohanty), 89 ‘Unsuccessful Alterity?’ (Vassallo), 165, 171, 174, 177, 182 untranslatability, 7, 10, 20, 50, 193, 213, 220, 222 ‘Untranslatability’ (Apter), 213, 214, 216

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Index

‘Vacation Cruises’ (Boone), 24n3, 64, 70–71 Vanita, Ruth, 9, 10 Vassallo, Helen, 9, 163–65, 167–68, 171, 174, 176, 177, 180–85, 188 veil, 88–89, 104, 116n34 Venuti, Lawrence, 50–51, 63, 216

127–29; hammam, 108–9, 126–30, 153nn4–6; shari’a law for, 90; veil, 88–89, 104 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 15, 66, 83 ‘Writing World Literature’ (Hiddleston), 45, 217

Walkowitz, Rebecca, 20, 209, 210 Watts, Richard, 105–6 Weedon, Chris, 30 Western medicine, 15, 33, 68, 73, 76, 92, 133, 203 Williams, Raymond, 217 Wittig, Monique, 115n23 Wolf, Mary Ellen, 101–2, 104 women: in Algeria, 84–85, 89, 90, 101– 4, 106, 107, 111; coded language,

Young, Robert J.C., 211, 213, 217, 222, 224n5 Zabus, Chantel, 50, 220 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde), 177 Zekri, Khalid, 127, 129, 153n6, 154n10 Zimra, Clarisse, 103, 107 zinā, 61–62, 78n9, 203 Zinaï-Koudil, Hafsa, 90

About the Author

William J. Spurlin is professor of English and vice dean in the College of Business, Arts & Social Sciences at Brunel University London where he holds the portfolio for teaching and learning. A specialist in comparative literature, he has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexual dissidence across English, French and German language contexts; he is widely known for his work in postcolonial queer studies and for examining sexuality as a significant vector of social organisation and cultural arrangement, as well as a strategy for agency and resistance, in colonial and postcolonial Africa. His previous books include Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa (2006), the research for which was funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities; Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009), funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC); and the co-edited volumes Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities across Time and Cultures (with Jarrod Hayes and Margaret R Higonnet, 2010) and Écritures du Corps: Nouvelles Perspectives (with Anne Tomiche and Pierre Zoberman, 2013). He has also published widely in modern and contemporary comparative literature and culture, queer translation studies, and medical humanities, recently in such journals as Research in African Literatures, Comparative Literature Studies and the Journal of Medical Humanities. For the recognised contribution of his research in comparative queer studies to social science scholarship, Professor Spurlin has been named Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences as well as Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy/ Advance HE in the United Kingdom for excellence in teaching and for strategic pedagogical leadership in higher education.

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