Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition 9781626373808

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MAGHREBIAN MOSAIC :

A Three Continents Book

MAGHREBIAN M OSAIC :

A Literature in Transition EDITED BY

M ILDRED MORTIMER

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2001 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2001 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maghrebian mosaic : a literature in transition / edited by Mildred Mortimer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-089410-888-4 1. North African literature (French)—History and criticism. I. Mortimer, Mildred P. PQ3988.5.N6 M34 2000 840.9'961—dc21 00-032856 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

∞

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

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Introduction Mildred Mortimer

1

Part One The Identity Quest

1 2

3

4

5

Inscribing a Maghrebian Identity in French Farida Abu-Haidar

13

Translation and the Interlingual Text in the Novels of Rachid Boudjedra Richard Serrano

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Modernity Through Tradition in the Contemporary Algerian Novel: Elements Toward a Global Reflection Gilles Carjuzaa

41

Rewriting Identity and History: The Sliding Barre(s) in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sacred Night Mustapha Hamil

61

Rescripting Modernity: Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Archaeology of Signs Lucy Stone McNeece

81

Part Two Interior Landscapes

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Mohammed Dib and Albert Camus’s Encounters with the Algerian Landscape Fawzia Ahmad v

101

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Contents

7 The Maghreb of the Mind in Mustapha Tlili, Brick Oussaïd, and Malika Mokeddem Laura Rice 8

The Absence of the Self: Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent Laïla Ibnlfassi

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151

Part Three Women’s Voice, Women’s Vision

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10

11

12 13

Voices of Resistance in Contemporary Algerian Women’s Writing Susan Ireland

171

Malika Mokeddem: A New and Resonant Voice in Francophone Algerian Literature Yolande Helm

195

Reappropriating the Gaze in Assia Djebar’s Fiction and Film Mildred Mortimer

213

Hélé Béji’s Gaze Sonia Lee

229

Tunisian Women Novelists and Postmodern Tunis Marie Naudin

239

Part Four Beur Fiction: North African Immigrants in France

14 15

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Family, History, and Cultural Identity in the Beur Novel Daphne McConnell

253

De-centering Language Structures in Akli Tadjer’s Les A.N.I. du Tassili Monique Manopoulos

269

Storytelling on the Run in Leïla Sebbar’s Shérazade Jean-Louis Hippolyte

289

Contents

Afterword Mildred Mortimer

Selected Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book

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309 313 317 325

Introduction

: Mildred Mortimer

A collection of essays on North African literature of French expression poses questions of cultural and linguistic legitimacy. Neither indigenous nor national, francophone literature of the three Maghrebian nations—Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia—entered the realm of francophone literature via the process of French colonial conquest. France defeated Algeria in 1830. Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881, and Morocco followed in 1912. Although colonial Algeria became an integral part of metropolitan France, as protectorates Tunisia and Morocco retained their political identity. More securely attached to its European colonizer than Morocco and Tunisia, Algeria alone waged a war to win independence. In 1956, during the seven-year period of violent conflict between France and Algeria, France granted independence to Tunisia and Morocco while fighting to keep Algeria French. On July 5, 1962, Algerian independence was granted; the French colonial era in North Africa came to an end. Throughout the colonial era, Algeria’s contact with the French colonizer was longer, more complex, and more violent. If we view the process of colonization as a wound—which many Maghrebian writers do—we must conclude that Algeria’s wound was deeper and more painful than that of its North African neighbors, Morocco to the west and Tunisia to the east. As the French arrived in numbers following the French conquest of 1830, a new mode of living was introduced in North Africa. It reached some, indeed a minority, of the indigenous population. North Africa conversely had a cultural impact upon metropolitan France as a new frontier to be visited, explored, and settled. Various French writers crossed the Mediterranean seeking exoticism, and North Africa soon became a subject of literary inspiration. Théophile Gautier, the Goncourt brothers, Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, and Guy de Maupassant 1

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each wrote a certain number of tales, sketches, or travelogues inspired by their travels. Most of this literature lies buried in the annals of nineteenthcentury literary history. The best-known work of the early era remains Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, written after Flaubert’s voyage to Algeria and Tunisia in 1853. The trend to depict the Maghreb through an Orientalist lens continued throughout the twentieth century with works of André Gide, Henry de Montherlant, Georges Duhamel, and most recently, J. M. G. LeClézio. The Tunisian novelist and social critic Albert Memmi has referred to this group as “écrivains-touristes” (writer-tourists), writers for whom the Maghreb has been a catalyst for escape from the quotidian and has led to self-discovery. It usually has not been a true encounter with the Other. Another literary tradition emerged as well, one born on North African soil. As a European population settled, a regional literature was created. In 1894, Auguste Robinet, using the pseudonym Musette, wrote the first tales of Cagayous. Clever, funny, brash, and adventurous, Cagayous survived by his wits in the streets of Algiers. Speaking a dialect that drew upon Spanish, Italian, and Arabic, as well as French, Cagayous reflected attitudes of the European urban poor of Algiers: poverty, racial prejudice against Arabs, broken families, and skirmishes with la poulice. At this time, Robert Randau and Louis Bertrand began their careers as novelists. Randau was extremely interested in creating and popularizing an authentic regional literature, one that would depict the lives of both the indigenous population and transplanted Europeans. It was through Randau’s efforts that Abdelkader Hadj Hamou, adopting the pen name A. Fikri, published Zohra: La femme du mineur (1925), one of the first novels written by an Algerian in French.1 In contrast to Randau, Louis Bertrand published texts that expressed a clearly racist ideology. Considering the colonizer to be the heroic descendant of the Romans, he chose to depict Algeria without its Arab and Berber populations. When in the 1930s a younger generation came upon the literary scene, writers such as Emmanuel Roblès and Albert Camus, they were often considered members of the “École d’Alger” or “École Nord-Africaine.” The extent to which writers of European descent were able to create a literature truly representative of the Maghrebian soul became a subject of heated discussion two decades later as the Maghreb sought its independence. It has been argued time and again that North Africa provided a landscape, an exotic geographical setting, and that the colonized North African appeared as a stereotype in the works of Camus. In Chapter 6 of this collection, Fawzia Ahmad explores the differences between Camus’s depiction of the land and that of Mohammed Dib. The critic finds that Dib expresses profound attachment to his native Algeria, whereas Camus reveals the detachment one associates with the écrivains-touristes. Camus did, however, express sympathy for Algeria’s native population in articles published in Algeria and France.

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Since the North African indigenous writer focused upon social conditions, in contrast to his or her European counterpart, the traveler or the pied-noir (the European born in North Africa) who foregrounded exoticism and the themes of social justice and nationalism quickly entered the emerging body of francophone Maghrebian literature. As the Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun explained: “Je crois que c’est surtout ce désir de faire connaître notre réalité qui m’a poussé à écrire” (Meade, “Le Roman,” 10) [I believe that what forced me to write was the desire to make our reality known]. Feraoun’s first novel, Le Fils du pauvre, a largely autobiographical text, was the first published work to emerge from the group of Algerian writers committed to the independence struggle that would claim the writer’s life in 1962. Poverty, colonial injustice, violence, and exile are themes that mark all the literary production—poetry, novels, plays—of the colonial period. Yet the novel is perhaps the most interesting form to study because, as a distinctly European literary form highly developed in French literature, it serves to illustrate the Maghrebian paradox. North African writers use the language and genre inherited from the colonizer to express anger and frustration with colonialism. Frustration is twofold. Not only is the writer angry because colonized subjects are treated as second-class citizens but because he or she is ambivalent toward the colonizer. Ambivalence was perhaps best expressed in the 1950s by the Algerian writer Malek Haddad, who wrote that he felt exiled in the colonizer’s language. Convinced that the future of Algerian culture would depend upon arabization and keenly aware that he as a francophone writer was cut off from the Algerian, Haddad saw himself as an orphelin de lecteurs—a writer without the public he desired—and decided to stop writing at Algerian independence in 1962. Ironically, a poem published in 1956 provides an epitaph to Haddad’s literary career: Misson accomplie Et la paix revenue La Colombe dira Qu’on me fiche la Paix Je redeviens oiseau (60) [Mission Accomplished When peace returns The dove will say Leave me in peace I’m just a bird again]

Many of today’s francophone Maghrebian writers echo Haddad’s sentiment of exile and question the legitimacy of the French language in North Africa without resorting to silence, as Haddad did. Unlike the writers of the 1950s and the 1960s, they now use the colonizer’s language as

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a revolutionary tool to express an ideology and aesthetics of difference. For example, the Algerian writer Assia Djebar has called the French language “la langue adverse.” It is the language that allowed her to enter the cosmopolitan world denied most of her Maghrebian sisters. Yet she, like Haddad, believes that French is her language of exile. When Albert Memmi’s Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française appeared in 1964, the Tunisian writer was convinced that literary production in the colonizer’s language would shortly disappear (146). After all, the three countries proclaim Arabic as their language and embrace Arabo-Islamic culture, a political situation that has forced Berber populations in Morocco and Algeria to struggle to keep their language and culture alive. Although Arabic-language literature has been growing in the Maghreb since independence, few Maghrebian Arabic-language texts have been translated into French or English. Beyond North African borders, francophone Maghrebian texts are better known than their Arabic-language counterparts. Ironically, works published in Paris, the former colonial capital, offer the writer greater distribution possibilities and therefore a potentially larger reading public than texts published in Tunisia, Morocco, or Algeria. Thus, more than three decades after Memmi’s anthology was published and despite the Tunisian writer’s dismal prophecy, francophone Maghrebian literature is still alive and well and “cohabits” with Arabiclanguage texts. Examining francophone Maghrebian literature, we can clearly distinguish two important periods: the era of anticolonial struggle and the postcolonial period. In the first, indigenous writers participated in the political struggle for independence from both within the colonized nation and from exile. The body of literature began as a description of daily life and then became a condemnation of colonialism before groping for a new identity. However, the realist texts of Mouloud Feraoun in Algeria, Albert Memmi in Tunisia, and Driss Chraibi in Morocco were joined by more symbolic texts, beginning with the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (1956) and Mohammed Dib’s Qui se souvient de la mer (1962). In both realist and symbolic texts, the colonial world of North Africa was depicted as a world closed upon itself, with colonized subjects caught in a circle of violence directed against the colonizer and also among themselves. Moreover, in these texts written primarily by male writers, woman appeared as either a mysterious femme fatale, such as Kateb’s Nedjma or as a pitiful figure broken by poverty and a rigid misogynist tradition. Oppression was twofold, originating in French colonialism and indigenous patriarchy. In the second phase, the postcolonial era, Maghrebian writers focus on unearthing the negative factors that erode Maghrebian society today. Though writers share common ground, they nevertheless project individual voices. Moreover, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco present historical, social, and cultural differences as well as affinities. Finally, a study of Maghrebian

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literature today is incomplete without considering the literary production of “Beurs,” Maghrebians living in France. Beurs seek their identity in relation both to the Maghreb, their cultural, historical, and geographical point of origin, and to France, the country they now inhabit. Hence, the theme that still dominates francophone Maghrebian literature is the identity quest. In postcolonial North Africa and the diaspora, descendents of the colonisé (colonized) grapple with the question that Feraoun, Memmi, Chraibi, and others posed in the 1950s: Who am I? Situated between East and West, drawing upon Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, the Maghreb as a geographical and cultural entity is capable of privileging cultural pluralism and multilingualism. Writers such as Abdelkébir Khatibi in Morocco, Abdelwahab Meddeb in Tunisia, and Mouloud Mammeri in Algeria have spoken for plurality of language and culture, an ideological perspective that sees beyond territorial boundaries. However, as Danielle Marx-Scouras warns, if the notion of national literature should be dismissed as being too restrictive, so should the more expansive one of a global French-speaking community if francophonie carries with it the trappings of cultural imperialism (“Poetics,” 8). The insistence upon bilingualism, the willingness to transcend monolinguism and homogeneity defines a cultural—and political—position that is very important to contemporary Maghrebian literature and culture. Yet it demands great courage, particularly in Algeria today, where fundamentalist extremism is responsible for the deaths of writers such as Abdelkader Alloula and Tahar Djaout, assassinated for embracing the ideal of cultural pluralism. The chapters that follow, a collection of sixteen essays, are divided into four parts: Part 1: The Identity Quest; Part 2: Interior Landscapes; Part 3: Women’s Voice, Women’s Vision; Part 4: Beur Fiction: North African Immigrants in France. A résumé of each section follows.

Part 1: The Identity Quest A great deal of controversy surrounds the choice of language of Maghrebian writers. As Farida Abu-Haidar explains in Chapter 1, French continues to be the primary medium of expression of a large number of North African writers. In their hands it is a flexible tool, unlike literary Arabic, with its rigid rules of grammar. Most important, francophone writers tend to breathe new life into standard French, inserting Arabic or Berber words and expressions into French-language texts and changing word order to resemble Arabic syntax. The colonial language also allows them to broach taboo subjects more easily than in Arabic. Richard Serrano’s study of Rachid Boudjedra’s linguistic trajectory in Chapter 2 reveals that the Algerian novelist is unique; he is the only Algerian

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writer to have successfully switched from French to Arabic and back. No matter what language they employ, his novels acknowledge the tension between the two. Serrano notes that Boudjedra’s use of Arabic script in his francophone texts is a way of alerting the monolingual reader that to understand the Maghreb fully, he or she must be able to communicate in French, Arabic, and Berber. Examining Algerian texts in Chapter 3, Gilles Carjuzaa finds that the clash between the notions of tradition and modernity is often at the core of collective conflicts and individual dilemmas. It results in provocative and violent texts such as Rachid Boudjedra’s La Répudiation (1969), a novel that traces a rebellious son’s struggle against a traditional autocratic father. Carjuzaa examines the hypothesis that the Algerian novel reassesses boundaries between tradition and modernity by depicting woman’s struggle for autonomy, portraying rebellious figures of Maghrebian folklore, foregrounding modernist achievements of the past, and refusing reductive interpretations of cultural nationalism. Linking history to identity in Chapter 4, Mustapha Hamil shows how the different barres (slashes) that conventionally stand between past and present, tradition and modernity, and dream and reality can generate new perceptions of postcolonial Moroccan identity. Focusing on Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sacred Night, the story of a woman raised as a man, he shows that the protagonist’s struggle for emancipation represents not only the individual attempt to reclaim a usurped identity but the collective struggle of a colonized people fighting for liberation from colonial domination. Hamil concludes that colonialism alienated Morocco not only from its tradition and history but from modernity as well. For the Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi, the challenge of postmodernism is to find a balance between past and present, personal freedom and collective good, and cultural specificity and openness to the world. It is, as Lucy Stone McNeece states in Chapter 5, the challenge of affirming humanistic values in an increasingly dehumanized, impersonal global environment. A strong advocate for pluralism, the Moroccan writer argues that Maghrebian cultural reality is inscribed in a range of cultural forms. By deciphering these cultural codes—signs, symbols, and images—Khatibi explains, Morocco will appropriate the tools necessary for rewriting Moroccan modernity.

Part 2: Interior Landscapes Spatial analyses of the Maghreb reveal closed spaces—the crowded Casbah of Algiers—as well as open space—vast expanses of the Sahara. Research has shown that the Maghrebian response to colonial occupation was

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to close in upon itself, creating what geographer Marc Côte calls “l’espace retourné” [space turned in on itself]. Examining two texts that deal with the colonial experience, Mohammed Dib’s La Grande maison and Albert Camus’s Le Premier homme, Fawzia Ahmad finds in Chapter 6 that Dib’s text reveals a direct, immediate connection with the land, whereas Camus’s does not. Probing Camus’s posthumous autobiographical text, the critic finds a sense on Camus’s part of pied-noir superiority and defines his ambiguous relationship to his land as a “difficult embrace” with the Algerian soil. Turning to the vast expanse of the Sahara in Chapter 7, Laura Rice acknowledges that most contemporary Maghrebian writers tend to view the desert as intellectually sterile; they turn away from it, looking toward the Mediterranean for inspiration. However, Mustapha Tlili (Tunisia), Brick Oussaid (Morocco), and Malika Mokeddem (Algeria) recreate a personal “geography of identity” in their texts by transporting their inland desert environment with them in their personal migration. The three works that Rice examines reveal that independence has brought economic hardship and cultural marginalization to the desert people. Tlili’s Lion Mountain condemns the new leaders in postcolonial Tunisia for bringing chaos to the desert. In the same vein, Oussaid’s autobiographical narrative, The Mountains Forgotten by God, shows the destructive impact of modernization upon desert nomads at the geographical and sociopolitical periphery, far from the centers of power. As Rice examines texts depicting the Sahara as a physical space and a spiritual refuge, Laïla Ibnlfassi (Chapter 8) studies Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent as a metaphorical journey to the Moroccan south, a symbolic search for the self. Ibnlfassi views this text as “antiautobiographical” writing, in which the author attempts to recreate a new life and fails primarily because of repressed memories. She explains that the Muslim prayer for the absent is performed on behalf of the dead whose bodies remain absent. Hence, the prayer’s intent is to reunite an errant soul with a lost body. In Ibnlfassi’s view, Ben Jelloun’s narrative represents the attempt to unite a body with its true self, a quest the Moroccan novelist considers unattainable in a society that does not allow for truthfulness of being.

Part 3: Women’s Voice, Women’s Vision In recent years, a growing body of literature by Maghrebian women choosing to write in French has emerged. This is particularly true in Algeria, where the government is pursuing a policy of arabization and where francophone women’s writing has become a literature of resistance. As Susan Ireland explains in Chapter 9 concerning new Algerian women’s voices,

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writing is equated with survival, and for the victims of militant fundamentalist violence it constitutes a form of remembering. She adds that in most of the texts she studies, the commemoration and mourning takes the form of “re-membering”—of putting together maimed and mutilated bodies. Two of the chapters that follow discuss Algerian women writers mentioned by Ireland: Malika Mokeddem and Assia Djebar. Studying Mokeddem in Chapter 10, Yolande Helm notes that she shares with many other francophone Algerian writers a bold denunciation of the Islamic fundamentalists’ program of dogmatism and violence. Yet Mokeddem’s depiction of the Sahara and its nomadic people, of which she herself is a descendant, adds a unique dimension to her texts. Helm, like Ireland, stresses the importance of writing as resistance and healing. Mokeddem’s protagonist Leila, in the first novel, Les Hommes qui marchent, transposes her grandmother’s rich tradition to the written page, thereby closing the gap between the living logos and the written sign. Mokeddem and her protagonist bring together Arab oral tradition and the French written word in a form of cultural métissage (blending). In Chapter 11, Mildred Mortimer’s study of Assia Djebar’s film and fiction focuses on the Algerian writer’s relationship to the patriarchal gaze. The critic explains that Djebar as filmmaker views her appropriation of the camera as a challenge to colonial and patriarchal domination, an important political and symbolic event in the liberation and empowerment of Algerian women. It is, for Djebar, the logical outcome of her rejection of the dominating male gaze. In her rejection of the controlling gaze, Djebar reminds her fellow Algerians that their nation must be committed to pluralism, to an open society. Turning to Tunisia, the Maghrebian nation that appears to offer women the greatest freedom of thought and movement, Sonia Lee shows in Chapter 12 how the Tunisian writer Hélé Beji uses a Proustian vision of the world as well as some of that French writer’s stylistic devices to examine the effects of decolonization on the former colonial subject. Beji, like Djebar and Mokeddem, is a modern, French-educated Arab woman, a product of two cultures. In L’Oeil du jour, she, like Mokeddem, presents female bonding in terms of a profound relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter that allows the young woman to find comfort in her grandmother’s piety despite the fact that she does not share the old woman’s religious beliefs. Finally, Marie Naudin’s study of a group of Tunisian women novelists in Chapter 13 reveals the relative ease with which the inhabitants of Tunis negotiate between traditional and modern values in a heterogeneous city where the new is superimposed upon the old without great shocks and conflicts. According to the critic, the sense of deterritorialization in modern Tunis is compensated for by the value Tunisians place upon work, family, and freedom from sexual taboos. She finds in the texts of four Tunisian

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women novelists a “well-tempered” individualism that keeps Islamic fundamentalism in check.

Part 4: Beur Fiction: North Africans in France Originating in French slang, “Beur” is an inversion of the word “Arab.” Beur artistic expression is found today in painting, music, theater, and film, as well as literature. The children of Maghrebian immigrants, Beur writers experience the present and envisage the future in terms of France. As the late Algerian writer Tahar Djaout noted in “Black ‘Beur’ Writing,” Beur writers share the worries and preoccupations of all “second-generation” young adults seeking a place for themselves within a unique community capable of contributing productively to the French society in which they live (218). However, as Leïla Sebbar reveals in Shérazade, the Maghreb remains an important symbolic as well as geographical presence in her protagonist’s life. Daphne McConnell notes in her study of Beur fiction (Chapter 14) that the protagonists in many Beur novels turn to writing and examine their parents’ stories in order to come to terms with their own issues of identity. Significantly, Tassadit Imache’s Une Fille sans histoire is characterized by a certain narrative instability, switching back and forth between first- and third-person narratives and signaling her unstable sense of identity and her alternating desire for closeness and distance. And, as JeanLouis Hippolyte shows in his study of Shérazade in Chapter 16, the young “Beurette” runs away from home in search of a hybrid space. On the road, she begins to construct the open, fluid identity she seeks, rejecting both her traditional family’s patriarchal values and the imprisoning Orientalist gaze of the Europeans who see her merely as an exotic Other. The desire for a hybrid or third space is also expressed linguistically. In Chapter 15 Monique Manopoulos studies Akli Tadjer’s Les A.N.I. du Tassili as a “multidimensional web” in which the use of multidimensional language structures reflects the Beur’s complex identity. The critic examines the ways in which glissements (semantic slides and hiatuses) are used by Beur writers to subvert the languages on both sides of the Mediterranean and to open up a third space that transcends binary opposition between France and the Maghreb. As the new millennium begins and the nineteenth century is suddenly “two centuries ago,” Maghrebian literature encompasses two geographical entities, historical nations of roots and origin, and new spaces of emigration, thereby reflecting the trend to globalization that marks our era. In conclusion, let me remind readers that most of the texts under study have been written by writers who are still alive and writing. However, Algeria’s undeclared civil war has taken a dreadful toll on young and old;

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men, women, and children; villagers and urban dwellers; rich and poor; and intellectuals and the illiterate. This collection of essays is dedicated to Tahar Djaout: novelist, journalist, and poet. Shortly before he was mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet, the victim of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, Djaout wrote: Le silence c’est la mort Et toi, si tu parles tu meurs, Si tu te tais, tu meurs. Alors, dis et meurs.2 [Silence is death And you, if you speak out, you die, And if you remain silent, you die. So, speak and die.]

May his words live on . . .

Notes 1. The first novel is believed to be Mohammed (Caïd) Ben Chérif’s Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier (1920), reprint Paris: Publisud, 1997. 2. See Dakia (1996, 38). In this text, Djaout’s verse appears on a banner carried through the streets of Algiers.

Works Cited Côte, Marc. L’Algérie ou l’espace retourné. Paris: Flammarion, 1988. Dakia. Dakia, Fille d’Alger. Paris: Castor Poche Flammarion, 1996. Djaout, Tahar. “Black ‘Beur’ Writing.” Research in African Literatures 23.2 (Summer 1992): 217–221. Haddad, Malek. Le Malheur en danger. Paris: La Nef, 1956. Marx-Scouras, Danielle. “The Poetics of Maghrebine Illegitimacy.” L’Esprit créateur 26.1 (Spring 1986): 3–10. Meade, Claude-Yves. “Le Roman réaliste nord-africain de 1899 à 1955.” Ph.D diss., Romance Literature, University of California at Berkeley, 1957. Memmi, Albert., ed. Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1964. Musette. Cagayous: Ses meilleurs histoires. Paris: Gallimard, 1931.

PART ONE

: The Identity Quest

1

: Inscribing a Maghrebian Identity in French Farida Abu-Haidar

In Le Blanc Algérie (1995) Assia Djebar pays tribute to well-known writers who lived in Algeria, among them Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus, Jean Sénac, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri, and Kateb Yacine. The book is dedicated to the memory of three distinguished Algerians, Mahfoud Boucebci, M’Hamed Boukhoubza, and Abdelkader Alloula. Boucebci, a psychiatrist, and Boukhoubza, a sociologist, were assassinated in 1993. Alloula, a playwright, was killed in 1994. Victims of religious fundamentalists, they died in what Djebar describes as “la ténèbre de luttes fratricides” [the darkness of fratricidal struggles] (Vaste est la prison, 345). What is particularly striking about Le Blanc Algérie is Djebar’s constant reference to the varieties of Arabic she hears spoken. She distinguishes between “un arabe littéraire d’élégance, de beauté” [a literary Arabic of elegance and beauty] that creates in her “une nostalgie . . . de cette langue maternelle que je n’écris pas, langue étincelant devant moi telle une fugitive en robe diamentée de poésie!” [a nostalgia for this mother tongue which I do not write, a language sparkling in front of me like a fugitive in a dress studded with diamonds of poetry!] (32) and the institutionally imposed, stilted Arabic “dit moderne, qu’on enseigne à la jeunesse sous le terme pompeux de ‘langue maternelle’” [so-called modern, which they teach to the young under the pompous title of “mother tongue”] (273). She describes the language spoken by Abdelkader Alloula as an “oranais” type of Arabic with a rural flavor (47), whereas the concierge who witnessed the execution of Mouloud Feraoun gave his testimony in a heavy southern Algerian dialect (115). As far as French is concerned, she simply refers to it as “langue de travail” [the language of work] (39). For Djebar, as for many other fellow Maghrebians, French is a functional language used in writing as well as in intercommunal discourse. Being globally more accessible than Arabic, it has allowed Maghrebian francophone writers to acquire a wide international readership. Yet, according to Djebar, francophone writers do not live in a world of “monolinguisme 13

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stérilisant” [sterile monolinguism] (274). Kateb Yacine, for instance, “est d’emblée entre deux langues: son écriture française côtoyant l’arabe maternel” [is between two languages, his written French running alongside his Arabic mother tongue] (180). Most francophone writers, moreover, live in an atmosphere that encompasses more than just Arabic and French. They are usually surrounded by different native and nonnative languages mingling with each other. In her tribute to Taos Amrouche, who grew up in Tunisia, Djebar says: “Taos baigne dès le début dans un bain de langues: celles de la rue, l’italien, le sicilien, l’arabe dialectal tunisois, celle de l’école, le français, bien sûr, qu’elle lit et qu’elle écrit, enfin celle de l’exil et du secret familial, le berbère kabyle” (202) [Taos has bathed from the start in a bath of languages: those of the street, Italian, Sicilian, the dialectal Arabic of Tunis, the language of school, French, of course, which she reads and writes, and finally the language of exile and of family secrets, Kabyle Berber]. Ever since Maghrebian francophone literature made its mark internationally almost half a century ago, debate and controversy have revolved around the type of language used by writers from the Maghreb. French continues to be the main medium of expression of a large number of Maghrebian writers. In their hands it becomes a flexible tool, unlike literary Arabic with its rigid grammatical rules and strictures, which many French-educated people from the Maghreb have yet to master. Most francophone writers, however, tend to breathe a new life into standard French by honing it and shaping it to approximate their own mother tongue varieties. In their efforts to give their writing a distinctly Maghrebian identity, writers resort to using Arabic or Berber words and expressions or changing the word order of a sentence to resemble Arabic syntax. This practice seems to have been begun by some of the first francophone writers and has continued until the present. In a number of works by Beur writers born in France, it is not unusual to come across Arabic or Berber terms and expressions, even whole sentences in the mother tongue. In several of her works, Djebar frequently introduces Arabic words, sometimes replacing a French term with what she feels is a more apt Arabic one. In Le Blanc Algérie, for example, she refers to those Algerians who have lost their lives as chahids (martyrs) and chouhadas, the latter term being the Arabic plural form. Djebar calls Algerian writers abtals (heroes, 122). There are also a number of Arabic terms in L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), Ombre sultane (1987), and Vaste est la prison (1995), the first three volumes of her Algerian Quartet.1 In Loin de Médine she delves into the annals of classical Arabic literature. Deriving the factual material from the work of the Arab historian Al-Tabari (836–923), Djebar recreates in French the Arabo-Islamic milieu of the time of the Prophet Muhammad and his successor the Caliph Abu Bakr (c. 573–634). In Vaste est la prison

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she celebrates the Berber language, “cette langue, celle de Jugurtha” [that language, Jugurtha’s] (145), the ancestral language of Algeria, with its varieties, including Touareg, which has a distinct script carved into stone and immortalized for posterity. There are times, however, when Djebar simply refers to an Arabic or Berber term in French translation, without mentioning it, as when she says in a poem, “L’œil qui dans la langue de nos femmes, est fontaine” [The (word) eye that in the language of our women means fountain (also)] (347), because in Arabic ‘ayn or ‘ain can mean both “eye” and “water source” or “fountain.” Djebar occasionally explains the meaning of a name, as, for example, in L’Amour, la fantasia, where she says that the male name Tahar signifies “le pur” [the pure] (47), while the female name Badra means “lune pleine” [full moon] (98). In Vaste est la prison she says that Aïchoucha means “petite vie” [little life] (272), and in Ombre sultane she claims that the names of the two central characters, Hajila and Isma, mean “petite caille” [little quail] and “nom” [name] (16), respectively.2 Apart from being a more flexible language than standard Arabic, French is also a medium in which writers can express themselves more freely than in their mother tongue. That is because, according to Mildred Mortimer, “Islamic culture is bound to the non-dire, or unspoken, in other words, to silence; it prohibits personal disclosure” (103). In a review of Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia that appeared in Le Monde (May 10, 1985), Tahar Ben Jelloun says that writing in French, Djebar has been able “to unveil.” Francophone authors do not feel restricted when dealing with taboo subjects or political issues criticizing the status quo, especially if their works are published in France. Those authors, both men and women, who write in French for the home market tend to toe the line and write material that the authorities deem suitable. Many of the novels and collections of short stories published in Algeria since independence provide a good example of this self-imposed censorship. That writers feel more liberated when writing works for an international rather than a national readership is evident in the works of the late Rachid Mimouni. His first novel, Le Printemps n’en sera que plus beau, published in Algeria in 1978 and glorifying the Algerian national struggle (1954–1962), is a far cry from the daring exposés angrily voiced in some of his later novels, including Le Fleuve détourné (1982), Tombéza (1984), and Une Peine à vivre (1991), showing his disenchantment with postindependence Algeria. The ability to express feelings more freely in French is also apparent in the works of bilingual authors. When Amin Zaoui lived in Algeria, he wrote fictional works in Arabic. Since he moved to France in 1995 he has published two books in French. The first, Sommeil du mimosa (1998), comprises two novellas, the title story and Sonate des loups, dedicated to Rachid Mimouni. The second work is a novel titled La Soumission (1998). These francophone works, in which Zaoui depicts the

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traumatic times Algerians are enduring and condemns the atrocities that he has witnessed, might never have appeared in print had he tried to publish them in Algeria. Perhaps the best-known bilingual writer from the Maghreb is Rachid Boudjedra, who began his literary career as a francophone poet and novelist in the late 1960s. Having written six novels in French, Boudjedra turned to writing in Arabic in 1981. By 2000 he had published six Arabic novels, each followed by its francophone version. Boudjedra’s Arabic novels have been rendered into French, mostly by the author himself or in collaboration with Antoine Moussali, his Lebanese mentor.3 In nearly all his novels and especially his Arabic ones, autobiography, fiction, and fantasy are almost indistinguishable. It is this fact/fiction/fantasy thematic structure that gives Boudjedra’s works their distinctive dynamism. His francophone novels stand out as individual creations, since their themes and plots are unconnected. His Arabic novels, however, characterized by the same events and people reappearing in each one of them, give the impression of being a cohesive whole. It is as if the author were weaving a large web linking together the various strands of his works. In an interview in the Algerian newspaper El Moudjahid (November 11, 1984), Boudjedra stated that all the subjects of his novels were the usual themes of life with its twists and complexity (“tous les sujets de mes romans . . . sont . . . les thèmes habituels de la vie . . . avec ses méandres, sa complexité”). Boudjedra’s novels define his own cultural position as a man of two worlds. He seems to have access to and firsthand knowledge of a FrancoEuropean universe, while at the same time celebrating his own Algerianness and his Arabo-Islamic roots. His pride in his cultural heritage injects into his works a deep emotional quality full of lyrical imagery. Having juggled with French syntax and lexis for more than a decade, Boudjedra came to Arabic as a mature and confident writer. Not afraid of taking liberties with the sometimes rigidly structured and rhetoric-ridden Arabic language, he began by coining new words and concepts novel to Arab experience. Throughout his Arabic works he shows an almost unique mastery in twisting words into far-reaching nuances and drawing on the different sounds of Arabic phonology to create the images he wants. Harshness and brutality are effected by using gutturals and back vowels and melancholia and tragedy by soft consonants and long vowels, which creates a dirgelike effect. Monotony is evoked by using a continuous string of syllables with short vowels. The two versions of each Boudjedra novel are a good example of how a Maghrebian author divided between two conflicting worlds—the AraboMuslim and the Franco-European—can direct each text at a specific group of readers. If one were to take a close look at the French versions of his Arabic novels, one would find that there are whole sections in French that

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do not occur in Arabic and vice versa. Dialogue in Arabic tends to be longer. It is frequently reproduced in colloquial Algerian Arabic and occurs as direct speech. In French the corresponding sections are usually shorter and are often rendered as indirect speech. Family matters are given in detail in Arabic but not in French. For example, in the Arabic text of La Prise de Gibraltar the narrator says that his Uncle Hocine divorced his wife, Warda, six months after he married her (13). In the French version there is no mention of any names, and the narrator merely says that his uncle divorced his wife a few days after marrying her (25). Another difference between the two versions is that names of wellknown Europeans—André Gide, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh—and titles in French are usually omitted in the Arabic. The French texts abound in such expressions as ce putain de livre, ce salaud de père, and mon oncle le bougre [this bitch of a book, this swine of a father, my uncle the rascal]. In Arabic the “offensive” word is omitted. References to drinking alcohol and getting drunk in the francophone versions are often left out in the Arabic. Popular Arabic sayings and ditties are not mentioned in the French versions. In La Prise de Gibraltar (1987), for example, the narrator merely asks, “Comment traduire un tel arabisme?”[How does one translate such an Arabic expression?] (25). Rhetorical questions and irony that have been introduced into the French versions are not found in the Arabic texts. The fluctuations of anger and fun lacking in the Arabic give the French versions a feeling of intimacy and confidentiality. It is as if the author, through his narrator, were interacting with his peers, siblings, or equals. The formality and politeness that characterize the Arabic texts create a feeling of aloofness and respect. Here it seems as if the narrator were addressing people he is in awe of. Most of the Arabic texts include anticolonial statements uttered with nationalist fervor. The words colonialist or imperialist, repeated in Arabic, are omitted in the French versions. Feelings of love or hatred are more freely expressed in French. Although Boudjedra is considered to be fairly outspoken when writing about matters relating to sex, he nevertheless appears to be more reserved in Arabic. In La Pluie, for instance, there is a lengthy description of the central character’s aunt’s lesbian affair that is not mentioned in the Arabic original. It was in his second francophone novel, L’Insolation, that Boudjedra first introduced readers of French to Arabic writing when he reproduced three short passages in handwritten Arabic script, including a short stanza in Algerian Arabic chanted by a blind storyteller who accompanies himself on the tambourine (156) and a verse in literary Arabic attributed by the author to a certain “Omar, le fou” [Omar the mad] (151). In later franco phone novels, Boudjedra began to assert his cultural heritage by referring to notable people from Islamic history and writers from the golden age of

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medieval Arabic literature, followed by a few words of explanation for French readers. In his Arabic novels, however, quotations from the works of well-known Arab writers are sometimes cited without the authors’ names being mentioned. It is as if the author, in his French texts, wants to assert his Maghrebian-Arab identity to a francophone readership, whereas in his Arabic works he feels he does not need to do that. Like Boudjedra, Tahar Ben Jelloun also introduces selections of handwritten Arabic verse in his novel La Prière de l’absent (1981), a work strongly influenced by the oral heritage of Morocco. This novel, together with Ben Jelloun’s other works, including L’Enfant de sable (1985) and its sequel, the 1987 Prix Goncourt winner La Nuit sacrée, have been inspired by Maghrebian oral fables, poems, anecdotes, and proverbs. In the former novel, the word sable (sand), besides symbolizing dearth and barrenness, evokes the Maghreb with its vast expanses of desert. The title of the latter novel implies the “holy night” from the twenty-sixth to twenty-seventh night of the month of Ramadan, on which the Quran was revealed. Ben Jelloun uses it to refer to the night on which the father reveals to Ahmed, the “enfant de sable,” who is a girl raised as a male, the story of her birth and upbringing. La Prière de l’absent also has an Islamic significance. It refers to the prayer for all those who died without their bodies being found and buried in consecrated ground. One of the selections of verse in Arabic script that Ben Jelloun includes is by the tenth-century Sufi mystic Al-Hallaj, an “absent” who was imprisoned in Baghdad in 922, tortured, crucified, decapitated, and eventually burned and his ashes scattered in the Tigris (193). Ben Jelloun goes on to say, “mais sa voix ne cesse de traverser les siècles et les déserts” [but his voice continues to travel across centuries and deserts] (194). Apart from verses from Al-Hallaj’s ode, Ben Jelloun has also reproduced short snippets in Arabic script, among them Islamic incantations and anticolonial, nationalist slogans. Feelings of pride in one’s origins and culture can also be found in preindependence francophone writing. They can be traced back to 1920, when Mohamed Ben Chérif’s novel Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier, considered to be the first example of francophone fiction by a Maghrebian, was published. Critics do not seem to give this work its due, dismissing it together with other fictional works that appeared between 1920 and 1950 as being of little literary merit. In his Littérature maghrébine de langue française, Jean Déjeux refers to Ben Chérif’s novel and other pre-1950 works as didactic and full of ethnographic and folkloric detail, describing events from the point of view of the colonizer (20). In La littérature algérienne contemporaine (1975), Déjeux goes on to say that pre-1950 novels are mediocre: “Il s’agit de montrer qu’on est capable d’écrire en bon français sans faire de faute de syntaxe” [They merely amount to showing that (their authors) are capable of writing in good French without making syntactic

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errors] (61). This may be true of some works that are now out of print. But to dismiss Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier as a “moralizing” work whose author is intent on currying favor with the French is to do Ben Chérif a great injustice. It is only recently, in 1997 to be precise, that this novel was reprinted, with an introduction by Ahmed Lanasri. Thanks to Lanasri, present-day readers can now form their own opinion of Ben Chérif’s autobiographical work. One should not forget that during the early decades of the twentieth century, it was very difficult for Algerians to express openly anticolonial feelings. In Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier, a first-person narrative, the author, an Algerian of the Ould Si M’Hamed clan who joined the French army in 1899, is striving for a kind of modus vivendi in which the two cultures, the French and the Algerian, can coexist peacefully. Although Ben Chérif seems to be resigned to the fact that he and his fellow Algerians are ruled by the French, at times he expresses feelings of utter dissatisfaction. Drafted into the French army, the central character, Ben Mostapha, is sent with a contingent to Morocco to quell a nationalist uprising. When a Moroccan shows him his travel permit, Ben Mostapha exclaims: “Tu as besoin de ce papier pour circuler dans ton propre pays?” [Do you need this paper to move about (freely) in your own country?] (67). Ben Mostapha mentions with pride the Algerian nationalist leader, Emir Abdelkader ( 1 8 0 8 – 1883), who led an uprising against the French colonial powers. Despite the fact that Ben Chérif’s central character seems to have studied French history and literature, which he admires, he is equally well versed in his own cultural heritage, language, and history. He is proud of being of nomadic descent, glorying in the way of life of the desert. He shows his love for Arabic literature by quoting lines from classical odes and recalling the names of pre-Islamic Arabian bards. Ben Chérif depicts Ben Mostapha’s French commanding officer as someone who also speaks fluent Arabic and has great respect for Islam and Arabic literature. Like the texts of later francophone writers, including Djebar, Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier is a novel full of Algerian and standard Arabic terms and sentences. Among the Arabic words the author uses are some that occur in contemporary texts, such as calam, “pen” (27); cheitan, “the devil” (60); Nasrani, “Christian” (65); djerad, “locusts” (80); kholkhal, “anklet” (126); and aman, “safety, security” (123). The words ouatan (homeland, referring to Algeria) and Moujahedines (those who die in a Islamic holy war) are used more than once. In later years these two terms came to acquire strong nationalist, anticolonial dimensions, with the latter being applied predominantly to those Algerians who took part in the war of independence (1954–1962). Descriptions of a nomadic life in the Algerian desert also characterize works published in the 1990s, including Malika Mokeddem’s first two

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novels, Les Hommes qui marchent (1990) and Le Siècle des sauterelles (1992). Some of the Arabic words used by Ben Chérif, including kholkhal and djerad, occur also in Mokeddem’s texts. Mokeddem’s second novel, which includes the French word for locusts in the title, describes a once relatively peaceful country ravaged by marauding locusts. The setting of the novel is the vast expanses of the southern Algerian desert where Mokeddem herself grew up. In her first novel, Les Hommes qui marchent, also set in the desert, Mokeddem presents her readers with two female characters, Zohra, an old, illiterate nomad, and her educated granddaughter Leïla, who later leaves her nomadic existence and goes to France, where she studies medicine, which is in fact what Mokeddem herself did. The events of both novels take place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the colonial period, which Mokeddem calls, in Les Hommes qui marchent, Algeria’s “longue fièvre française” [long French fever] (266). Mokeddem, like other fellow francophone writers, introduces characters from classical Arabic literature and Maghrebian legend into her texts. She constantly refers to her nomadic existence and Arab heritage, stressing the point that her Algerian experiences are an integral part of the Arab way of life. More than the works of any other francophone author to date, Mokeddem’s first two novels are interspersed with a large number of Arabic terms, for which she provides glossaries at the end of each work. In her later novels, where Arabic terms are reduced to a minimum, she gives their meaning in footnotes. Mokeddem’s sound knowledge of Arabic is evident throughout her works. In Des Rêves et des assassins (1995), she describes in detail the imaginative expressions Algerian women coin to describe types of material. The French-born Slim, one of the characters in the novel, is baffled by all the colorful terms he hears. He exclaims: “Tout le cinéma et la fantaisie qui manquent à leur vie, ils les mettent dans les mots. Même pour désigner des tissus!” [All the drama and imagination which is missing from their lives, they put into words. Even in the names they give to fabrics!] (189). 4 Mokeddem likes to give her characters names, which she invariably explains. In her latest novel, La Nuit de la lézarde (1998), for example, which is also set in the Algerian desert but in more recent times, one of her central characters is called Nour lumière [light] (12). She also includes a female character called Dounia monde [world] (91). She explains that the name Zbida, a shortened version of Zoubeida, means “petit beurre,” a diminutive for butter (132). Like Le Siècle des sauterelles, the title of this latest novel also includes the name of a creature that lives in the desert: the lizard. Names invariably give characters in francophone works a Maghrebian identity, and some writers tend to choose them carefully to convey certain meanings. One of the first Maghrebian writers to choose a name to describe a

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character in a novel is Albert Memmi. In his first novel, La Statue de sel (1966), Memmi calls his central character Alexandre Mordecai Benillouche as proof of the different cultures that can sometimes constitute the makeup of one single Maghrebian individual. At the root is his Maghrebian Berber origin, indicated by the name Benillouche. Added to that is his Jewish middle name, Mordecai, pinpointing his Jewishness. Finally there is his superimposed Franco-European first name, Alexandre, given to him no doubt by parents who wanted him to have a foothold in the dominant French culture of pre-independence Tunisia. Names also play a significant role in the titles of novels by writers of Maghrebian origin in Europe. In Autour du roman beur (1993, 57–59), Michel Laronde mentions eight titles of Beur novels that bear the first name of the central character, among them Leïla Houari’s Zeïda de nulle part (1985) and Ahmed Zitouni’s Aimez-vous Brahim? (1986) and Attilah Fakir (1987). Laronde says that an Arabic name appearing in a title “parle l’identité et signifie l’arabité” [speaks of identity and signifies Arabness] (59). Further on Laronde says that names in Beur novels have a symbolic function (88). Houari must have chosen Zeïda as an appropriate name for someone who is de nulle part [from nowhere]. Houari, a young woman of Moroccan origin, was living in Belgium when her first novel, Zeïda de nulle part, was published. The work describes the two conflicting worlds of the central character, Zeïda, who, like Houari herself, does not feel at home among the host community. Houari’s first language is Arabic, which created a barrier between her and the people in Belgium (Hargreaves, Voices, 17). Zeïda, like Houari also, no longer feels at home in Morocco where she was born, as she discovers on a visit to see her relatives. This results in her feeling unwanted in both countries and thus redundant. In fact, the name Zeïda means “extra,” “additional,” “appendage,” “appendix (anat.),” and hence “superfluous and unwanted.” It is the name sometimes given to yet another daughter born to a large family of mostly daughters when a son had been desired. Ahmed Zitouni, whom Laronde includes among Beur writers, is older than the average Beur. Unlike the majority of Beur authors who grew up in Europe, he was born in Algeria in 1949 and went to France as an adult. The title of his second novel, Aimez-vous Brahim?, is almost a word-forword reconstruction of Françoise Sagan’s novel Aimez-vous Brahms?, where the names Brahms and Brahim have five letters in common. By simply substituting Brahim for Brahms, Zitouni immediately creates in the minds of his readers a Maghrebian setting that is a far cry from the world of Western music and culture evoked by Sagan’s title. Attilah Fakir is Zitouni’s third novel. Here he also recreates a Maghrebian universe by introducing Arabic words and phrases into his text and referring to well-known writers, both classical and modern, the latter in-

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cluding Kateb Yacine. He bestows the title of Hadj (someone who has performed the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca) even on Western writers whom he admires, such as “Hadj Gogol,” “Hadj Dostoïevski” (32), and “Hadj Rainer Maria Rilke,” all of whom belong to “la grande confrérie des Hadj” [the big brotherhood of Hajjis] (38). Zitouni’s novel, as its title suggests, follows the events in the life of the eponymous central character, an Algerian immigrant living in Aix-en-Provence. He frequents the Royal Bar in Aix, where he encounters other immigrants like himself, all struggling to eke out a living despite poverty, deprivation, unemployment, and rampant racism. In colloquial Arabic Attilah means “handicapped,” “destitute,” “useless,” or “unemployed,” and Fakir in both standard and colloquial Arabic is the word for “poor.” The title of this novel, therefore, describes the eponymous character and his fellow Maghrebian immigrants who are “unemployed” and “poor.” “Je suis un Arabe et je peux le prouver” [I am an Arab, and I can prove it] (107), shouts the central character of Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du chaâba (1986) to taunts from his school friends that he is not an Arab. Begag, another Beur writer, chooses a title made up of gone, the local Lyonnais word for “lad,” and chaâba, an Arabic term signifying “of the people,” to pinpoint the Franco-Arab world of the first-person narrator of the novel, a young boy called Azouz, like the author himself. According to Samia Mehrez (“Azouz Begag,” 34), “on the linguistic level the title attaches Azouz, the protagonist, to two symbolic worlds and two systems of signification, both of which are on the margins of two official discourses: literary French, and literary Arabic.” The novel is semiautobiographical, charting Azouz’s early years in Chaâba, the name given to the shantytown on the outskirts of Lyons where a large number of Maghrebians live. In a lighthearted way, Begag sets out to describe the misunderstandings that can occur when people from different cultural backgrounds have to communicate with each other. Paying attention to detail, he recreates the varieties of language used by the different people he encounters. He produces verbatim the words that his parents and their generation mispronounce when they try to speak French, like “rizou” for “raison” [reason], “l’bomba” for “pompe” [pump], and “filou” for “vélo” [bicycle]. He also mocks the way members of his community use Algerianized French words to refer to certain everyday objects, like “li zalimite” for “les allumettes” [matches], “la taumobile” for “l’automobile” [car], and “le chiffoun” for “le chiffon” [rag] (213). The author provides an entertaining glossary of all these terms at the end of the book. In subsequent works, Begag continues to explain to French readers what it means to be an Arab or an Algerian in France. In his two most recent novels, Zenzela (1997) and Dis Oualla! (1997), he continues the humorous strand that characterizes Le Gone du chaâba, using Algerian Ara-

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bic words and expressions throughout. These are usually followed by their explanations, such as in Zenzela, where he says “yemma préparait du khobz ed’dar” [Mommy was preparing homemade bread] (124) and follows it immediately with “de la galette maison,” since khobz means “bread” in Arabic and ed’dar is “of the house.” The titles of these two novels are also carefully selected to present the Arabo-Algerian universe of the central characters. Zenzela is the name of an ogress who figures in a number of Algerian children’s stories, and Dis Oualla!, means literally “say by Allah” or “swear!,” which is what one usually says when wanting to make sure that the person speaking is telling the truth. Despite the fact that the latter novel describes the world of young people of different ethnic backgrounds all living in France, the Arabic in the title shows that the speech of people of Maghrebian descent continues to be under the influence of Arabic. According to Alec Hargreaves (Voices, 25), “the Beurs are in fact rediscovering the language and culture of their parents. Several Beur authors have dabbled in Arabic though none is able to write fluently in that language.” Of course, one should add that not only Beur writers but older writers born and bred in Algeria and schooled in French are also unable “to write fluently in Arabic.” The sociolinguist John Edwards distinguishes between the communicative and symbolic uses of language. In the former case, speakers are able to express themselves fluently in the mother tongue, whereas in the latter they incorporate terms and expressions from the mother tongue into their dominant language. Not being able to speak the mother tongue or to write in it fluently in no way diminishes their loyalty to their language of origin or their identity with their cultural heritage (Language, Society, and Identity, 16–18). Since the emergence of francophone literature, writers of Maghrebian origin have been influenced by their own linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Whether in the somber tones of Ben Chérif living in Algeria during its colonial period, the words of a French-educated intellectual like Assia Djebar, or the humorous jargon of Azouz Begag and some of his fellow Beurs, many francophone writers seem intent on stressing their Maghrebian identity. It is their way of defining themselves rather than allowing “Others” to define or label them.

Notes 1. For a thorough investigation of the Arabic terms used by Djebar in the first three volumes of her quartet, see Anne Donadey’s article, “Multilingual Strategies.” 2. Djebar says that Aïchoucha is a diminutive of Aïcha, which means “vie” [life]. Aïcha, in fact, is the word for vivante [alive]. Cf. Des Rêves et des assassins (187), in which Mokeddem explains in a footnote the meaning of Aïcha, “la

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vivante, celle qui est portée par la vie.” The name Isma, which is pronounced “Asma” in some parts of the Arab world, like Aïcha is a popular Islamic name and means “lofty” or “elevated.” 3. Some specialists in Algerian francophone literature express doubts about Boudjedra’s ability to write Arabic, claiming that his Arabic works are written by someone else, perhaps Moussali. This kind of comment, I feel, is mere speculation, particularly because those I have heard voice such an opinion are unable to read or write Arabic themselves and have based their conclusions on hearsay. Whether Boudjedra did in fact write his Arabic novels unaided forms the main theme of a paper I am preparing, entitled “Authenticity of Authorship: Rachid Boudjedra’s Arabic novels.” 4. During a visit to the French Institute in London on March 20, 1999, Mokeddem was asked to read a selection from her novels. She chose the pages in Des Rêves et des assassins (186–192) showing Algerians’ ingenuity in coining words to describe various fabrics.

Works Cited Begag, Azouz. Le Gone du chaâba. Paris: Seuil, 1986. ———. Dis Oualla! Paris: Fayard, 1997. ———. Zenzela. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Ben Chérif, Mohammed (Caïd). Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier. 2nd ed. Paris: Publisud, 1997. Ben Jelloun, Tahar. La Prière de l’absent. Paris: Seuil, 1981. ———. “Assia Djebar dans la crue de la douleur.” Le Monde. May 10, 1985. ———. L’Enfant de sable. Paris: Seuil, 1985. ———. La Nuit sacrée. Paris: Seuil, 1987. Boudjedra, Rachid. L’Insolation. Paris: Denoël, 1972. ———. La Pluie. Paris: Denoël, 1986. (Arabic version: Layliyyat Imra’a Ariq [The nightly journal of an insomniac woman]. Algiers: ENAL, 1985.) ———. La Prise de Gibraltar. Paris: Denoël, 1987. (Arabic version: Ma’rakat alZuqaq [The battle of the straits]. Algiers: ENAL, 1986.) Déjeux, Jean. Littérature maghrébine de langue française. Ottawa: Éditions Naaman, 1973. ———. La Littérature algérienne contemporaine. Que sais-je. 1604. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975. Djebar, Assia. L’Amour, la fantasia. Paris: Albin Michel, 1985. ———. Ombre sultane. Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1987. ———. Loin de Médine. Paris: Albin Michel, 1991. ———. Le Blanc de l’Algérie. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. ———. Vaste est la prison. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. Donadey, Anne. “The Multilingual Strategies of Post-colonial Literature: Assia Djebar’s Algerian Palimpsest.” World Literature Today 74.1 (Winter 2000): pp. 27–36. Edwards, John. Language, Society and Identity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Hargreaves, Alec G. Voices from the North African Immigrant Community in France: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction. Oxford: Berg, 1991. Houari, Leïla. Zeïda de nulle part. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985. Laronde, Michel. Autour du roman beur. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993. Mehrez, Samia. “Azouz Begag: Un di zafas di bidoufile or The Beur Writer: A

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Question of Territory.” Yale French Studies 82.1 (1993). Memmi, Albert. La Statue de sel. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. Rev. ed. 1966. Mimouni, Rachid. Le Printemps n’en sera que plus beau. Algiers: SNED, 1978. ———. Le Fleuve détourné. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982. ———. Tombéza. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1984. ———. Une Peine à vivre. Paris: Stock, 1991. Mokeddem, Malika. Les Hommes qui marchent. Paris: Ramsay, 1990. ———. Le Siècle des sauterelles. Paris: Ramsay, 1992. ———. Des Rêves et des assassins. Paris: Grasset, 1995. ———. La Nuit de la lézarde. Paris: Grasset, 1998. Mortimer, Mildred. “Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography.” Research in African Literatures 28.2 (Summer 1997): 102–117. Zaoui, Amin. Sommeil du mimosa. Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 1998. ———. La Soumission. Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 1998. Zitouni, Ahmed. Aimez-vous Brahim? Paris: Belfond, 1986. ———. Attilah Fakir. Paris: Souffles, 1987.

2

: Translation and the Interlingual Text in the Novels of Rachid Boudjedra Richard Serrano

Rachid Boudjedra is the only Algerian writer to have successfully switched his language of expression from French to Arabic and, in 1992, back to French. Boudjedra wrote one volume of poetry, three nonfiction books, and six novels in French before switching to Arabic in 1981 with Al-Tafakkuk, after which he wrote six other novels in that language. Apparently in reaction to the horrific violence of Algeria’s civil war and most likely due to problems in publishing within Algeria, Boudjedra returned to French with the nonfiction works FIS de la haine (1992) and Lettres algériennes (1995) and with his latest novel, La Vie à l’endroit (1997). All the novels, except for the latest, now exist in both languages. In this chapter, I examine the effect of straddling these two linguistic realms on Boudjedra’s francophone and arabophone writings. Most francophone writers in the Maghreb or those of Maghrebian descent in France or elsewhere live in bilingual, trilingual, or multilingual worlds, although the speaker equally at home in three languages remains rare. In Algeria, for example, modern standard Arabic is the sole language of instruction in public schools, whereas French is still spoken by the Western-educated elite. 1 In addition, there are several local versions of spoken Arabic that are not always mutually intelligible and various languages that have been grouped under the label “Berber.” Francophone writers in places such as Algeria find themselves attempting to represent or evoke worlds in a language they may speak as well as a native speaker from metropolitan France but that still remains foreign to at least some aspects of their lives. In the 1930s Algerian nationalist Abdelhamid Ben Badis declared the Arabic language central to Algerian identity: “L’Islam est ma religion, l’arabe ma langue, l’Algérie ma patrie” [Islam is my religion, Arabic my language, Algeria my fatherland] (Alleg, La Guerre d’Algérie, 189). Since postrevolutionary religious and linguistic policies have been based on this credo, what role, then, could French have in Algerian national culture? The 27

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poet and novelist Malek Haddad wrote in the 1960s: “La langue française est mon exil” [The French language is my exile] (Les Zéros, 21). Does that statement mean that Algerian francophone writers, even if they live in Algeria, are doomed to eternal exile? The Moroccan poet and novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun wrote in the 1960s: “L’écriture en langue française n’est pas un choix: elle est le résultat de la violence coloniale” [Writing in French is not a choice: it is the result of colonial violence] (La Mémoire future, 10). Nonetheless, even if writing in French has not really been a choice for most writers, the question of choosing between French and Arabic has continued to haunt Algerian francophone writers. The Algerian writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar considered writing in Arabic as well. She decided instead to direct La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, produced for Algerian television in 1979, which permitted women to speak directly to the camera in Algerian Arabic and Berber languages. The novelist and playwright Kateb Yacine also turned to spoken Algerian Arabic after his return to Algeria from exile in the late 1960s. We know today, however, that he actually wrote his plays in French and then had them translated for performance (Déjeux, Maghreb literatures, 183). Boudjedra chooses to use not spoken Algerian Arabic but modern standard Arabic and insists that, although written in what is often perceived as sacred language, the arabophone novel can be made a powerful vehicle for social criticism.2 Even before Boudjedra made his initial switch from French to Arabic in 1981, he was not entirely comfortable with French as his vehicle of expression. This does not imply that his French was substandard or deficient in any way but that he recognized that much of Algerian experience was being lost in translation. In the early 1970s he wrote a book about Algerian cinema in which he ridiculed the use of French dialogue by working-class Algerian characters: Employer le français est absolument indéfendable, sinon ridicule. Ali Ghalem, le réalisateur d’un film sur l’émigration algérienne en France, Mektoub, en a fait l’expérience. Faire s’exprimer en français des ouvriers algériens travaillant en France, cela donne au film un aspect tellement saugrenu que l’on évite difficilement le fou-rire en pleine action dramatique! Lorsqu’un paysan algérien débarque à Nanterre chez son cousin, il ne lui parle pas en français! Tout le film est un ratage extraordinaire à cause surtout de ces dialogues en français. (Boudjedra, Naissance, 63) [Using French is completely indefensible, even ridiculous. Ali Ghalem, the director of a film about Algerian immigration to France, Mektoub, is evidence of this. To make Algerian workers in France talk to each other in French is so absurd that it is hard not to burst into laughter in the middle of a dramatic scene! When an Algerian arrives at his cousin’s in Nanterre, he doesn’t speak to him in French! The entire film is an extraordinary failure because of, above all, the French dialogue.]

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Several bilingual films coming out of both Algeria and the FrancoArab communities in the 1990s might cause Boudjedra to revise this criticism somewhat, but he was certainly correct about films of the early 1970s. Boudjedra apparently did not hold the novel to the same standard of verisimilitude as the cinema. In his francophone novels, not only Algerians in France but Algerians in Algeria speak to each other in French, with the occasional lapse into Arabic. Nonetheless, although Boudjedra never went so far as to call the use of French in writing Algerian novels indefensible, he did admit its limitations. In remarks at a 1992 conference on autobiography and the avant-garde in Montreal, he claimed that his writing in French was at first accidental and then was necessitated by the contract he signed with his publisher Denoël (Boudjedra, Autobiographie, 242). Because he was then an unknown writer, he had promised them multiple books in French in order to get his first novel published. This comment would seem to imply that he would have always preferred to write in Arabic. His latest novel, again in French, was published by Grasset and not by Denoël, which suggests that he recognizes a different set of obligations now that Algeria has been wracked by nearly a decade of civil war. Whether written in French or Arabic, his novels always acknowledge a tension between the two languages, whatever his francophone contractual obligations. It is not entirely clear that Boudjedra composes a francophone novel exclusively in French or an arabophone novel exclusively in Arabic, since he seems to work in both languages simultaneously. Even in his earliest novels the Arabic language sometimes breaks through the francophone surface. In his second novel, L’Insolation (1972), for example, the narrator recounts the moment immediately following his defloration of one of his students in a mausoleum under the gaze of an old black man and his spavined tom cat. Et elle encore, après avoir ahané, crissé de toutes ses dents, passait ses noirs cheveux autour de mon cou et se moquait du sang puisqu’elle était heureuse d’avoir rompu les amarres avec son féodal de père atteint définitivement par la honte et le déshonneur. Elle riait d’autant plus qu’elle avait longtemps douté de mes capacités à passer à l’action, me sachant engoncé dans mes idées et englué dans mes paradoxes. (Comment concilier—disait-elle—le suicide et la révolution politique? Des mots! Je n’avais même pas envie de lui répondre. Elle était dérisoire. Quel rapport entre la rupture avec le père et cet orifice rose d’où coulait lentement un sang pivoine?) Dehors, le vieillard semblait cloué sur place mais son visage n’exprimait rien! Je ne l’avais pas cru si indiscret. Il est fou disait Samia. (Mahboul! Mahboul!) (21) [And she still, after panting and grinding all her teeth, spread her black hair around my neck and made light of the blood, since she was glad to have broken from her feudal father definitively shamed and dishonored.

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She laughed even harder since she’d long doubted my ability to take action, pinned in my ideas and stuck in my paradoxes. (How do you reconcile—she said—suicide and political revolution? Words! I didn’t even want to answer her. She was laughable. What connection was there between rupture with her father and this pink orifice slowly leaking scarlet blood?) Outside, the old man seemed riveted to the ground but his face expressed nothing! I hadn’t thought him so indiscrete. He’s crazy, said Samia. (Mahboul! Mahboul!)]

In typical Boudjedrian fashion, the narrator tells this story over and over to the other patients in the asylum, as well as to the skeptical and equally mad nurse Nadia. Several interesting articles have been written about the symbolic value of blood in L’Insolation and La Répudiation, Boudjedra’s first novel.3 There is blood everywhere: at the loss of virginity, at circumcision, at childbirth, at rape, at menstruation and throughout the context for all these events, the bloodletting of the Algerian Revolution. But what does this blood here mean? The narrator questions the connection between the blood leaking from Samia’s orifice and rupture with her father. “Des mots!” one or both of them say in response, although we cannot be sure which. Is she mocking her question or is he? He is the teacher of philosophy, so words are his domain, even if the exclamation “Des mots!” might not be his. Our doubts about who speaks “Des mots!” echo Samia’s doubts about the narrator’s ability to act, perhaps even his ability to perform, since we know that he later proves impotent when he tries to seduce his nurse. Has Samia accused him of mere words in the past? Or is “Des mots!” in the imperative? Is the author demanding that the reader look more closely at the ambiguity of words, just before one of them turns up in Arabic? Finally, why does he translate from French to Arabic? Is it to indicate the Arabic original transliterated in the French translation? Why does Boudjedra have Samia say “Il est fou!” and then “mahboul! mahboul!”?4 “Il est fou” is not a particularly precise translation of the Arabic word in parentheses, signaling that Boudjedra may be playing games here. The word Samia uses for “fool,” mahboul, is, like all Arabic words, related to an entire group of words by virtue of a common triconsonantal root. Samia may intend mahboul to refer to the voyeuristic old black man, but among its close relatives is mahbal, meaning “orifice of the uterus,” too close to the object of the narrator’s concern to be coincidental. What, then, modifying the narrator’s question, is the connection between the orifice from which this blood leaks and Samia’s epithet for the old black man? Des mots! Boudjedra and the reader can pretend, like the director of the Algerian film he criticized in the 1970s, that everyone in the novel speaks French, can even pretend that a teacher and his student address each other

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in French immediately after their first sexual adventure. But what marks the rupture of this girl from her father? Not, certainly, the blood seeping from her vagina, but the narrator’s calling it an orifice rather than a mahbal, referring to it in the language of the recently departed colonizers. The mahbal can resurface only in approximate French translation or in distorted Arabic. No longer the property of her Arabic-speaking father, but not yet master of the French language, the girl can only turn a deformed version of the word for her own genitalia against a stranger who witnesses the act of defloration. The narrator can’t say vagin or any other French word yet more suitable to the occasion, only orifice, while the student cannot say mahbal, only mahboul. Although the girl’s genitalia cannot be translated directly into either language, neither can the French or Arabic words surrounding it avoid referring to it. Boudjedra plays similar sorts of word games elsewhere. The Arabic title of La Prise de Gibraltar (Arabic 1986, French 1987) can be pronounced either “Ma’rakat az-zuqaq” or “Mi’rakat az-zuqaq,” depending on the vocalization provided by the reader.5 Ma’rakat means “battle,” whereas Mi’rakat means “tampon.” This ambiguity is difficult to reproduce in French or in any other language, and Boudjedra uses neither meaning in his French title, rendering it la prise, or “the taking,” rather than la bataille. A sly allusion to tampon in the title makes sense, since the novel is in part about the narrator’s childhood refusal to repeat a verse of the Quran about the pollution of menstruation requiring purification. The narrator is beaten so severely by his teacher for refusing to recite the quranic verses that he bleeds profusely. He tries to complain to his mother about this while she, to her embarrassment, is hanging her undergarments out to dry. Her response is to slap him. The “battle” that drops out of the title La Prise de Gibraltar is as much a struggle over interpretation as it is about invading Andalusia. Such manipulations of language and movement between languages are, in part, Boudjedra’s response to claims that Arabic cannot be a vehicle for a modern, secular, critical discourse on Algeria. According to Boudjedra, there are some things that can be said in Arabic—and should be said—that cannot be translated into French. Nuances and ambiguities disappear during translation from Arabic to French. Boudjedra would certainly disagree with Jacqueline Kaye’s observation that “Classical Arabic, in its written form, is of an almost hallucinatory imprecision” (21), especially since his French is often hallucinatory as well. The language is not imprecise; it tolerates ambiguity. It is not that we do not know what the Arabic title of La Prise de Gibraltar means; we know it may mean two different things, each of which must be taken into account when we attempt to interpret the novel. Most of us would decide that “battle” is a

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more sensible translation than “tampon,” but the hermeneutical ghost of this word does not entirely disappear. The question, then, is, What can be translated and what cannot? It is an article of faith among Muslims that the Quran cannot be translated. Even for an unbeliever, the Quran is particularly difficult to translate because the point of the revelation of the Quran to Muhammad is that it transforms language. Words no longer mean what they used to but take on ethical weight not previously known. Boudjedra, however, blithely translates quranic citations into French without hesitation or comment. Since part of his own project as an arabophone writer is to transform the Arabic language into a vehicle of contemporary literary expression, Boudjedra mocks the way the language of the Quran has been rendered dead by rote memorization. In La Prise de Gibraltar, the narrator’s childhood refusal to repeat the verses about menstruation as pollution and his attempt to discuss them with his mother are meant to breathe life into them. The failure of all around him to treat quranic language as discourse, as living language, or as relevant means that it can be translated into French without loss of meaning, since it has already been emptied of meaning. Boudjedra has been accused of being anti-Islamic and, in fact, has lived under the threat of a fatwa (death sentence) since the early 1980s, but his irreverent use of the Quran would actually have Algerians again take the text seriously as language. Paradoxically, Boudjedra insists that it is not sacred but secular Arabic that cannot always be translated into French. In his second novel, L’Insolation, just after a group of tourists, presumably American, demands, “Hot! Hot! Hot dog. Chien chaud. Kelb!” the narrator switches to a description of an old, blind man singing a traditional song before a large crowd (154). Boudjedra then inserts several lines of traditional Arabic love poetry, untranslated and untransliterated. The nonarabophone francophone reader is put in the same position as the confused tourists treating the storyteller as little more than local color. This Arabic text translates as: “Oh Billarij long of leg / for seven years I did not pray / when about to pray I forgot the sura” (156). The singer’s recitation of these “beaux poèmes d’amour” [beautiful love poems] reminds the narrator of his own frustrating quest for the deflowered and disappeared Samia; indeed, the narrator insists on their identification by referring to the blind man not as a singer or poet but as a “conteur” [storyteller] (157). At least one critic believes that the insertions of Arabic “caractères” is intended to add an “enigmatic dimension” to the francophone text. The inserted Arabic text is not “insolite” [unusual], however, but clarifies the narrator’s gloss which follows (Ruhe, “Le moi macéré, 188): L’auditoire se ramollit à une telle flambée amoureuse (mais qui sait s’il ne veut pas parler de la guerre qui dura sept ans durant laquelle nous

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étions tombés dans un grand cri, les yeux éblouis, le coeur battant la chamade, avec la peur qui nous tenaillait au sein de la glèbe, à l’abordage du pays que nous découvrions soudain, à travers ses maquis protecteurs, ses plongées vertigineuses, ses failles épouvantables et ses sacrilèges dérisoires; à travers aussi, les balles et les boulets de ceux qui, non contents de nous cribler de plomb, s’amusaient à nous arroser de napalm du haut de leurs avions jaunes, frelons vrombissants, avec leurs ombres en forme de croix nette et bien tracée sur la terre brune, tachetée de zones rousses et vertes et ocre?). (156) [The audience was softened by such an amorous blaze (but who knows if he did not mean to speak of the war that lasted seven years during which we collapsed with a great cry at the breast of the land, eyes dazzled, heart thumping, with the fear which tortured us, at the taking by sea of a country we suddenly discovered through its freedom fighters, its plummeting falls, its frightening faults and its laughable sacrileges; as well as through the bullets and cannonballs of those who, not content to riddle us with lead, amused themselves by spraying us with napalm from the height of their yellow planes, droning hornets, with their shadows of crosses sharp and clearly traced over the brown earth speckled with zones of red, green, and ochre?).]

Certainly it is not the Arabic citation but the francophone text following it that is enigmatic and only makes some sense if the reader has understood the untranslated Arabic text preceding it. The nonarabophone francophone reader might think the Arabic text is about hot dogs or chiens chauds, when in fact it carries a coded reference—seven years—to the Algerian war. For the European reader, the Arabic citation is mere ornamentation, arabesque adding to the local color, just as the storyteller is merely picturesque for the Western tourists in search of hot dogs. But the storyteller is not just a textual oriental knickknack. He uses traditional Arabic forms in order to reach out to his contemporary Arab audience. He can make reference to lost loves and long wars—and thereby establish a connection between the narrator searching for his lost love and the listeners who have suffered the traumas of the Algerian Revolution. Unlike the francophone films Boudjedra criticized in Naissance du cinéma algérien, Boudjedra’s early francophone novels call into question their own verisimilitude and disturb the connection between the language of the novel and its reader. Boudjedra’s insertion of Arabic text at key moments undermines the reader’s belief that a francophone text can evoke Arabic lived experience without the sort of contradiction or absurdity he describes when discussing early Algerian film. Indeed, as might be expected, Boudjedra has not been called on to defend the language of his books but their content, which shatters taboos regardless of which language is employed to express them. In another example, Boudjedra inserts several lines of lyric invective by the eighth-century arabophone Persian Ibn Bashshar Burd into Le Démantèlement (1982), his own translation of his first arabophone novel,

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Al-Tafakkuk (1981). In a footnote he describes them as the most obscene of all Arabic literature, the apparent reason why he does not translate them into French. “Who would dare write such verse today?” asks the brother of his sister, the narrator: Love of matrimony, longing for probity— The Nabatean is not pious like this. Meet him and he’ll lie prone— Upon his back have men swum. Behold him get off fucking his son— Though disgraceful to speak so plainly. Wasn’t till he cohabited the groom That he married off his girl with glee. He’s one who bends over and can’t persist— The old man’s dick—can’t get it up to cum. (translation by Serrano)

Arabic poetry, perhaps any poetry, does not get much more obscene than this. There may be several reasons why one might not translate such a poem, and it does not seem to exist in French or English translation prior to my own, but certainly it is not completely untranslatable. From a foreigner’s perspective, it is no more difficult than translating the Quran. These verses, however, prove to be useful in contemporary Algeria, whereas Boudjedra does not find the Quran of much use. Boudjedra’s first woman narrator—as if to insist that Arabic does not have to be a merely patriarchal language and as if in apology for the apparent misogyny of his earlier, francophone novels—uses these lines to question her brother about the homosexuality of which she suspects him. Using several lines of antihomosexual invective more than a millennium old to probe a loved one about his sexual orientation may seem odd to the Western reader, but this is Boudjedra’s point. The verses would seem to have no place in contemporary Algerian culture, but they can be decontextualized and recontextualized so that they regain relevance when spoken between brother and sister seeking a vehicle to convey secrets otherwise left unspoken. Later in the same novel, a teacher berates schoolboys for scrawling in Arabic, “In the name of God, the compassionate and all-merciful” across their homework, treating language as nothing more than mere talisman. The boys think that by writing this sacred phrase on their homework they ensure themselves a good grade. Unfortunately, their teacher is not impressed. Arabic cannot be put to good use if its readers merely make fetish

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of it. Boudjedra does not want his readers to think that he writes in Arabic out of nostalgia for either the Abbasid Empire or the reign of the Prophet, but he also denies that Arabic is obsolete. He uses Arabic script in both his francophone novels and in the French translations of his arabophone novels to send jokes or other messages over the heads of the nonarabophone francophone reader. His insistence on placing chunks of Arabic script into the middle of francophone novels or French translations is his way of reminding nonarabophone readers that they miss something when they encounter Algeria or Algerians in francophone texts. Sometimes, however, the French versions of Boudjedra’s novels contain passages that do not exist in the Arabic. In La Prise de Gibraltar, for example, each section of the French version opens with an epigraph from the poet Saint-John Perse. Boudjedra seems to know Perse well, citing Éloges, Anabase, Exil, and Pluies, a subsection of Exil. Why were these epigraphs either omitted from the Arabic text or added to the French version? Boudjedra has said in an interview that when he translated AlTafakkuk into Le Démantèlement, he found himself rewriting and revising rather than merely translating (Gafaïti, Boudjedra, 151) and decided to ask Antoine Moussali to join him as collaborator in translating. Although Boudjedra calls Moussali his translator, the French versions of Boudjedra’s later works, such as La Prise de Gibraltar, do not read as translations but more as amplifications of the original Arabic text. The sentences of the French text, for example, are longer and involve more complex forms of subordination than the sentences of the Arabic text. The relative simplicity of Boudjedra’s arabophone texts does not mean that he has not fully mastered the Arabic language. Rather he has a different task in each language. Although his writing in French has evolved over the past three decades, the most recognizably Boudjedrian style is obsessive and repetitive and intentionally obscure. Without warning, he leaps from one character’s head to another or from one decade to another or suddenly confronts the reader with an unexpected intertext. Part of his task as a francophone Maghrebian writer is to make the French language foreign to the French reader, and Boudjedra is not alone in this endeavor. The Tunisian novelist Abdelwahab Meddeb, who writes in a style not unlike Boudjedra’s, believes the task of a francophone Maghrebian writer is to lose the French reader “in the Casbah” (Mehrez, “Subversive Poetics,” 269). The analogy has unfortunate suggestions of orientalist tourism, since the Casbah is the destination of most European tourists to the Maghreb anyway, but he nonetheless has a point. As an arabophone writer, Boudjedra’s task is not to strand his reader in the middle of a foreign land, but to distill an already obsessive, repetitive, and often obscurely archaic literary language into a vehicle for a modern sensibility. There is no political or poetic incentive for Boudjedra to confuse Arab readers with their own

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language. Nonetheless, the Arabic versions of Boudjedra’s novels are not “French-free” zones; the French language remains a part of lived reality in Algeria. In both versions of La Prise de Gibraltar, two boys argue about painting anti-French slogans on walls during the Algerian Revolution: “A bas la Fransse!” writes one. When the other boy corrects his spelling, the first boy accuses him of being a French sympathizer. What better way to attack the French than by misspelling the name of their country? The boy means to distort the French language, the French word for their country itself. So Boudjedra does not omit French epigraphs from the Arabic version of his novel in order to purify Algeria of the French language, French literature, or French culture. He feels quite comfortable with interjecting a French phrase here and there. What purpose, then, might an epigraph from SaintJohn Perse serve in a francophone text that it would not serve in an arabophone text? In La Prise de Gibraltar there are two epigraphs from Exil: Toujours il y eut cette clameur, toujours il y eut cette splendeur, Et comme un haut fait d’armes en marche par le monde, comme un dénombrement de peuples en exode, comme une fondation d’empire par tumulte prétorien ha! comme un gonflement de lèvres sur la naissance des grands Livres, Cette grande chose sourde par le monde et qui s’accroît soudain comme une ébriété. A la poursuite sur les sables de mon âme numide. . . . (9) [Always there was this clamor, always there was this splendor, And like a great feat of arms marching through the world, like a census of peoples in exodus, like a foundation of empire through praetorian tumult ha! like a swelling of lips on the birth of great Books, This great mute thing through the world and which suddenly grows like a drunkenness. At the pursuit over sands of my Numidian soul . . . ] (trans. Denis Devlin)

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Je reprendrai ma course de Numide, longeant la mer inaliénable. . . . Nulle verveine aux lèvres, mais sur la langue encore, comme un sel, ce ferment du vieux monde. (215) [I will take up again my course through Numidia, alongside the inalienable sea. . . . No verveine at my lips, but on my tongue still, like a salt, this ferment of the old world.] (trans. Denis Devlin)

Obviously, at least part of Boudjedra’s attraction to Exil lies in its references to Numidia. It is safe to say that for Saint-John Perse writing Exil on the coast of New Jersey during the German occupation of France, Numidia does not exist as a place outside the poem but instead takes on a universal value embracing any experience of exile. For an Algerian writer, however, Numidia has a local, specific, almost unavoidably ironic meaning.6 The word Numidia appears elsewhere in the novel as well, when early in La Prise de Gibraltar, the narrator’s father forces him to translate from Arabic to French Ibn Khaldun’s account of Tariq Ibn Ziyad’s invasion of Andalusia (20–23). The ensuing Muslim conquest of Spain resulted in a phenomenally rich artistic and literary tradition that was a high point in Arabic and Islamic history. With his father looking over his shoulder, the boy translates Arabic barbar into French berbère. His father berates him, insisting that the correct choice is numide. According to his father, berbère is a pejorative term invented by the Romans, who considered the native inhabitants of North Africa barbarians. But how does this dispute play out in the Arabic version of the novel, since there is no Arabic word corresponding to numide as barbar does to berbère? How can Boudjedra make the distinction between numide and berbère in Arabic if there is no word to distinguish one from the other? The entire exchange is missing from the Arabic text. Instead, the father berates the boy for translating amir as chef instead of prince (12). The argument still concerns translation, but here the meaning of a different word is in dispute. This difference between the French and Arabic versions leads to several conclusions. First, the epigraphs from Saint-John Perse were generated from the francophone exchange between father and son over barbar and berbère. Some of the epigraphs missing from the arabophone version can only have resonance as part of a francophone text with which it shares a key, disputed word. Second, Boudjedra believes that the arabophone dispute over the translation of amir has a resonance for the Arab reader that escapes the francophone reader. Third, Boudjedra believes that the dispute over how to translate barbar resonates for the francophone reader in a way that it might not for the Arab reader.

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In both instances Boudjedra calls into question the father’s position. In the arabophone version, Boudjedra seems to be criticizing Arab military leaders who confound their role as chef with the hereditary rule of a prince. The leaders of the Groupes Islamiques Armées (GIA) are called amir, although this organization came into being after the military’s cancellation of the second stage of the 1992 elections because the Islamic party won the first stage, so Boudjedra’s reference is not so much topical as prescient. In the francophone version, the father’s resistance to the barbarization of the Berber by the Romans while the Algerian Revolution rages around him might strike one as mindless obsession with ancient history. The father might instead have insisted that his son translate barbar as Amazight, the name present-day Kabyles prefer to call themselves. By translating barbar into berbère into numide, the father renders Tariq Ibn Ziyad and his military campaign increasingly abstract, transforms him into someone just as likely to turn up in Paris in 1998 or on a New Jersey beach in the 1940s alongside Saint-John Perse as to invade Andalusia in the eighth century. This also raises another question, never explicitly posed in the text: why does the father insist that his son translate an account of this great Arab victory, including one of the most famous speeches of the Arabic language, into French? Perhaps Boudjedra intends us to ask that very question about his own work. What if Boudjedra had included the epigraphs from Saint-John Perse in the arabophone version? Numide would have to be translated as barbar, meaning for Perse, Berbère. Perse in New Jersey imagining his specifically Berber soul and pining for the Numidian coast of Algeria would inspire a flurry of footnotes from scholars who knew him to have been born in Guadeloupe. Since in Paris today saying, “Je suis berbère” is a way for an Algerian to say, “Je ne suis pas arabe,” the translated Perse’s apparent assertion of a specific ethnic identity would give a whole new meaning to the burgeoning field of Berber studies. For the narrator’s father in La Prise de Gibraltar, numide is a way to circumvent the imperial label of barbarian. Since no one has ever believed Perse either Berber or barbarian, and since no one would think to call Boudjedra Numidian, we may permit Perse his universality and Boudjedra his twin, contradictory, and inseparable identities as francophone and arabophone Algerian novelist.

Notes 1. Modern standard Arabic, which is based on classical Arabic, the language of the Quran and the medieval literary language, is used throughout the Arab world by diplomats and journalists as well as by novelists and poets. 2. Francophone writers and their academic readers sometimes champion the continued use of French because it “accords” a certain “distance” to the writer.

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Modern standard Arabic, since it is no one’s mother tongue, would also seem to accord distance to the writer as well. In any case, both languages bear weighty historical burdens. 3. See especially Bouraoui, “Politique et poétique dans l’univers romanesque de Boudjedra”; Harrow, “Metaphors for Revolution”; and Pendola, “L’insolation de Rachid Boudjedra.” 4. Mahboul entered the French language not long after the initial French invasion of Algeria, but it is today spelled “maboul” and therefore pronounced somewhat differently from the Arabic transliteration provided in the text. Boudjedra is fascinated by French words borrowed from Arabic. In La Répudiation (1969), the narrator’s elder brother explains his alcoholism by noting that the word is Arabic in origin and “il n’y a pas à en être humilié” [there is no reason to be humiliated because of it] (101). 5. Most Arabic texts, with the notable exception of the Quran, have no vowels. The reader adds the vowels to the structure of consonants while reading. As this example demonstrates, determining which vowels to add is sometimes an act of interpretation. 6. Perse was not alone in preferring African sites in the abstract. Even Jean Amrouche, the francophone Kabyle poet and essayist, rendered his own homeland into an idealized pays intérieur when he translated its folksongs into French in 1939 in Chants berbères de Kabylie.

Works Cited Alleg, Henri, ed. La Guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Temps Actuels, 1981. Amrouche, Jean. Chants berbères de Kabylie. 1939. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986. Ben Jelloun, Tahar. La Mémoire future: Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie du Maroc. Paris: Maspero, 1976. Boudjedra, Rachid. Pour ne plus rêver: Alger: Editions Nationales Algériennes, 1965. ———. La Répudiation. Paris: Denoël, 1969. ———. Naissance du cinéma algérien. Paris: Maspero, 1971. ———. La Vie quotidienne en Algérie. Paris: Hachette, 1971. ———. L’Insolation. Paris: Denoël, 1972. ———. Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée. Paris: Denoël, 1975. ———. L’Escargot entêté. Paris: Denoël, 1977. ———. Journal palestinien. Alger: SNED, 1977. ———. Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie. Paris: Denoël, 1979. ———. Al-Tafakkuk. Al-Jaza’ir: Al-Mu’assasah al-Wataniyah lil-kitab, 1986. ———. Le Vainqueur de coupe. Paris: Denoël, 1981. ———. Le Démantèlement. Trans. Rachid Boudjedra. Paris: Denoël, 1982. ———. Al-Marath. Al-Jaza’ir: Al-Mu’assasah al-Wataniyah lil-kitab, 1984. ———. La Macération. Trans. Antoine Moussali and Rachid Boudjedra. Paris: Denoël, 1985. ———. Ma’araka al zuqaq. Al-Jaza’ir: Al-Mu’assasah al-Wataniyah lil-kitab, 1986. ———. La Prise de Gibraltar. Trans. Antoine Moussali and Rachid Boudjedra. Paris: Denoël, 1986. ———. La Prise de Gibraltar. Paris: Denoël, 1987.

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———. La Pluie. Trans. Antoine Moussali and Rachid Boudjedra. Paris: Denoël, 1987. ———. Workshop comments by the author. In Autobiographie et Avant-garde, ed. Alfred Hornung/Ernstpeter Ruhe, pp. 242–255. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 1992. ———. FIS de la haine. Paris: Denoël, 1992. ———. Timimoun. Paris: Denoël, 1994. ———. Lettres algériennes. Paris: Grasset, 1995. ———. La Vie à l’endroit. Paris: Grasset, 1997. ———. Le Désordre des choses. Trans. Antoine Moussali and Rachid Boudjedra. Paris: Denoël, n.d. ———. Fauda al’ashaya. Al-Jaza’ir: Al-Mu’assasah al-Wataniyah lil-kitab, n.d. ———. Layliyat ‘Imra’a ariq. Al-Jaza’ir: Al-Mu’assasah al-Wataniyah lil-kitab, n.d. Bouraoui, H. A. “Politique et poétique dans l’univers romanesque de Boudjedra.” Présence francophone 14 (1977): 11–29. Déjeux, Jean. Maghreb littératures de langue française. Paris: Arcantère, 1993. Gafaïti, Hafid. Boudjedra ou la passion de la modernité. Paris: Denoël, 1987. Haddad, Malek. Les Zéros tournent en rond. Paris: Maspero, 1961. Harrow, Kenneth. “Metaphors for Revolution: Blood and Schizophrenia in Boudjedra’s Early Novels.” Présence francophone 20 (1980): 5–19. Kaye, Jacqueline, and Abdelhamid Zoubir. The Ambiguous Compromise: Language, Literature and National Identity in Algeria and Morocco. London: Routledge, 1990. Mehrez, Samia. “The Subversive Poetics of Radical Bilingualism: Postcolonial Francophone North African Literature.” In The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Mortimer, Mildred. “Entretien avec Assia Djebar, écrivain algérien.” Research in African Literatures 19.1 (Spring 1988): 197–205. Pendola, Marinette. “L’Insolation de Rachid Boudjedra ou le refus de la communication.” Présence francophone 18 (1979): 19–27. Ruhe, Ernstpeter. “Le Moi macéré: Autobiographie et avant-garde selon Rachid Boudjedra.” In Autobiographie et Avant-garde, ed. Alfred Hornung/Ernstpeter Ruhe. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen, 1992. Saint-John Perse. Collected Poems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

3

: Modernity Through Tradition in the Contemporary Algerian Novel: Elements Toward a Global Reflection Gilles Carjuzaa

A prevalent mode of critical analysis of francophone Maghrebian texts operates from the opposition between tradition (what comes from within one’s culture) and modernity (what comes from external cultures). The clash between these notions is often the analytical backbone of collective conflicts and individual dilemmas. In this chapter, I propose to offer a few elements of reflection with a view to reassessing this one-directional approach in the contemporary Algerian novel. Indeed, quite often the demands of tradition, viewed as a set of cultural elements operating from within the formerly colonized space, clash with the demands of modernity, generally viewed as the epistemological system that has—more or less efficiently—been superimposed by the former colonizing power. My purpose here is not to deny the relevance of the “traditional” critical operating mode of conflict presentation. Countless examples of Maghrebian francophone works bear witness to the fact that such conflicts have often marked debates and issues in the Maghreb. Once they are labeled as “modernists,” intellectuals can be easily accused of betraying their community and pandering to colonialist ideology and interests that are now often negatively encapsulated in the symbolic expression “Hezb al Fransa” (the party of France) by traditionalists. Let us only recall the Maghrebian reactions that followed the publication of Driss Chraïbi’s Le Passé simple in 1954 or Rachid Boudjedra’s La Répudiation in 1969, both provocative novels staging the clash between reactionary fathers and rebellious sons influenced by ideals of modernist modes of social interaction. Many similar examples of the classic dichotomy can be found in the Algerian novel since its beginnings. One should not underestimate the perception that, too often, the French readers were delighted that Maghrebian intellectuals were engaged in what could be seen as a work of self-deprecation of their own cultures, 41

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especially as dissatisfaction with the political systems put in place after independence grew. As Abdelkebir Khatibi cunningly put it in La Mémoire tatouée (1970), it was as if readers were self-righteously congratulating the writers for their graceful self-deprecation: “Insultez-vous dans notre langue, on vous saura gré de savoir si bien la manier” [Insult yourselves in our language, we will be grateful to you that you handle it so well] (127). Here I want to highlight another paradigm of dialectical confrontation between the concepts of tradition and modernity, the perception of which has somewhat evolved in the public mind during the last decades in the wake of Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques. Increasingly, the technological and consumerist understanding of modernity seems too reductive if not plainly misleading and deserves a thorough reconfiguration. It should, for example, embrace a much more diverse set of overlooked contributions from non-Western cultures and should more clearly meet demanding environmental, ethical, and spiritual criteria. Having delineated my perception of modernity, I suggest that the contemporary Algerian novel reassesses fluctuating boundaries between tradition and modernity on different levels, by (1) reworking the representation of women’s fight for their autonomy, including a reclaiming of traditionally male forms of social rituals; (2) reconfiguring the traditional rebellious figure of Maghrebian folklore; (3) contrasting the presentation of past Arab modernist achievements with instances of misguided or ambivalent borrowings from technological modernity; and (4) claiming linguistic and cultural autonomy against reductive interpretations of cultural nationalism. In Algeria during the colonial era (1830–1954), from the onset the issue of women’s rights and women’s positioning within the different spaces of colonial society played itself out in a more confrontational way than anywhere else in the Maghreb, given the magnitude, depth, and ruthlessness of the colonialist project. Because Algerians were in theory destined to become assimilated one way or another into the French system, the issue of women’s autonomy became ontologically twisted in the framework of the global orientalist enterprise, with its most potent symbolic confrontation around the issue of the veil. Women were implicitly invited to unveil their faces, turn away from tradition, and embrace the colonizer’s values. Thus, they were placed in a very difficult position. As Mai Ghoussoub has observed about the inherent uneasiness of women in the Arab world at voicing their concerns within a colonial system, “The real difficulty was that to resist Islam was to struggle not just against an established political power (beneath the canopy of political rule itself), but also against profound popular attachments, in which the subjective identity of the majority of the population was at stake” (“Feminism,” 9).

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Nevertheless, it is not widely known that the contentious debate about the function and rights of Algerian women first emerged in Arabic literature, as Ahlem Mosteghanemi convincingly argues when she showcases the complex nineteenth-century figure Emir Abdelkader (1808–1883). The Algerian anticolonial leader’s persona and endeavors were promptly demonized by the French propaganda machine as backward, fanatic, and hostile to “progress” after the colonial power had utilized him against the former Ottoman rulers. It is not well known that this charismatic figure was also an accomplished poet who dedicated his work to his love by addressing her directly and acknowledging her power over him. Such an intimate sharing and exposure of one’s inner emotional persona by political figures is not an ordinary state of things in any given space or time. Of course, the set of images offered later to French schoolchildren in their history books about the conquest of Algeria and the “fanatical” resistance proffered by its people and its leader could not have incorporated any thought-provoking detail of this type. Later, in the 1950s, from a fringe position within the Ulama activist movement, the essayist Redha Houhou wrote short stories in Arabic containing bold statements calling for the liberation of Algerian women, “[ces] machines à procréer que nous gardons chez nous dans nos foyers” [(these) procreating machines that we keep within our homes] (Mosteg hanemi, Femme et écritures, 29).1 This message is not prevalent nowadays in the current Islamist literature about the rights of women in society, in which Islamists extol family duties and household tasks as the vastly preferable way for women to blossom in the community (see Bizri, “La Femme arabe,” 309–327). In retrospect, the example quoted above reminds us that even within the constraints of colonialism, there might have been room for a fruitful dialogue, if, as Jacques Berque has methodically pointed out, France had not been so blind, arrogant, and incoherent in dealing with the Algerian people and its culture. Especially after the French opted for a process of massive colonization by the end of the Second Empire, the colonial enterprise became less and less interested in nuanced analyses, which precluded any possibility for a reasoned and equal confrontation of viewpoints. The Algerian writer Assia Djebar, who has evoked throughout her work the interplay of feminist versus Islamist notions about women and their implications on her life and literary persona, has recently turned her attention to the interstices of a past that still informs the present-day situation in Algeria. The growing force of Islamist militancy, triggered by the antiregime riots of October 1988 in Algiers, compelled her to write Loin de Médine (1992), which sets out to reappraise the key feminine figures of the early times of Islam.

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Basing her critical inquiry on established but widely overlooked sources about the founding years of Islam, Djebar ventures into the domain of Islamic historiography. As a historian, she showcases one of the major origins of the present aporia, the one-sided deviation from the potentialities of a founding text whose polysemous dimension has been fossilized by dogmatic political figures bent on disempowering women. By combining the study of established sources such as the historian AlTabari’s chronicles with speculative and intuitive reconstitutions of the thought processes of the first women involved in the establishment of the Islamic city, Djebar makes a case that the lives of these key feminine figures deserve renewed attention. For example, by challenging her husband’s plan to take a second wife, the Prophet’s daughter Fatima reemerges as a more heroic figure than the mere faithful follower of the tradition that she is purported to have been. In Djebar’s tentative reconfiguration of an important and controversial moment, Fatima refuses polygamy, thus reconciling religious faith and quest for autonomy. Her attitude could have been grounded on religious rationale, for the parents of the bride-to-be were not Muslims. However, she says “‘non’ à Médine” (77) and rebels against the arrangement. As Clarisse Zimra states (“When the Past Answers Our Present,” 117) in Djebar’s text, Fatima’s refusal takes a larger dimension through the double meaning of the preposition “à”: Médine simultaneously becomes the recipient of the rebellious message and the locus of this refusal. She dares to say “no” to the town’s inhabitants and symbolically in the sacred space of Islam. By reaffirming the legitimacy of free discussion of Islamic history by women, Djebar contends that an Algerian woman writer should not be faulted and demonized as an alien relayer of Western feminist views. She challenges the validity of the tight seal that the guardians of the historiographic temple have affixed onto their field and states her right to intervene in the discussions of her adversaries by examining the context of events and characters of a seminal era whose complexity has been impoverished by reductive interpretations. By seeking to deconstruct the margins of religious texts that she claims are open to debate, if not plainly contradictory, and by reassessing elements avoided by a reductive idea of the initial religious goal of Islam, Djebar claims her right to participate in religious exegesis from her multifaceted gaze as an Algerian woman, a writer, and a researcher known to actively engage in unearthing women’s accounts of historical events regardless of the nature of the idiom they use. From a parallel perspective, the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi also claimed the necessary renewal of Islamic hermeneutics because of the frequent ambivalence of the founding text: “Selon celui qui l’utilise, le texte sacré peut être une aire d’évasion ou une clôture infranchissable” [depending on who utilizes it, the sacred text can become a liberating

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space or an impassable fence] (84). Beyond the question of interpretation, the availability and exposure of sources is also at stake here. Djebar mentions that she used restraint in the exposure of her findings: “I stumbled upon plenty of unbelievable details, anecdotes I might even call dangerous—what some might consider too sacrilegious to pass around. And yet, such anecdotes are there, in respected texts” (Zimra, “When the Past Answers Our Present,” 128). In her study of Assia Djebar’s and Fatima Mernissi’s concurrent forays into religious material, Winifred Woodhull invites us to reflect upon the complex implications of their work. Their inquiry into a domain so rigidly enclosed by religious leaders is propelled by intellectual curiosity and a sense of urgency, given the danger that the fundamentalist perspective poses to women’s rights. However, is there an inherent risk in Mernissi’s and Djebar’s approach? As Woodhull suggests, “their task now is to beat the traditionalists at their own game, perhaps at the price of compromising the secularist, cosmopolitan stance they had adopted in the past” (“Feminist and Islamic Tradition,” 34). Indeed, for some staunch secularists, their inquiry could be a step in the direction of the Muslim women who, although they seem subdued from a Western point of view, nevertheless claim to move things forward from within the Islamist symbolic order. Conversely, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (“Under Western Eyes,” 333–358) discerns traces of colonial discourses in Western feminist scholarship. She argues that compassion toward the fate of oppressed Third World women on the part of Western feminists can be a convenient pretext to avoid focusing on the politics of imperialism at large because these compassionate attempts are essentially flawed by their lack of understanding of the cultural depths of the issue. Other critics such as Rabia Abdelkrim-Chikh, while evoking the work of various groups of women struggling in their own way within the context of Muslim societies, have argued that it is important for defenders of women’s rights not to overlook some challenging forms of presence, even if these forms of struggle for emancipation emanate from women who appear to have accepted on the surface the symbolic order of fundamentalism. In other words, can there be a modernist use of the veil? For example, when Abdelkrim-Chikh examines the question of equality before law, she cites the case of young Islamist Algerian women organizing an autonomous video projection who have to confront the demands of a male group that intends to screen the film. The women refuse male censorship, and the group of men unplug the cable. However, the women manage to resist, replug the cable, and see the film (“Les Enjeux politiques,” 276). Are these women, as they attempt to defend the restricted sphere of their participation in public life, only reinforcing the symbolic order of the veil, or can they really succeed in subverting or reconfiguring some elements of

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Islamist ideology and practice from the inside and to their own advantage? This issue will remain highly contentious for a long time, since it so powerfully crystallizes the conflicting demands between claims for universal rights and claims for cultural autonomy. In any case, the most compelling feminine fictional figures in the Algerian novel exemplify the intricate interplay of tradition and modernity through their choices and attitudes, regardless of the way they are perceived by the gaze of other protagonists. For example, Rachid Boudjedra’s Le Démantèlement (1982) features the reworking of the representation of women’s fight for their autonomy through the figure of Selma, a bold young woman who expands her full-fledged rebellion by reconfiguring unexploited potentialities of a tradition she asserts to have the right to reclaim. The interweaving of notions is first played out through a revealing exchange between Selma and the family servant, Khadidja, during which traditional interactions are recast in unexpected ways. In the relative quiet of a family house, the two women experience intellectual intimacy and break diverse barriers. Both women release tensions through the sharing of coarse stories: “[elles] se racontaient des histoires salées et coulaient des heures délicieuses et complices, au nez de la mère qui ne se doutait de rien” [(they) would share juicy stories and enjoy delightful and conniving hours together, under the nose of the unsuspecting mother] (246). They create a locus of autonomy within a traditional space. Their complicity not only allows them to surreptitiously engage in a distinctly male ritual, telling dirty stories, but it also helps them break down class barriers. The servant even feels so empowered by the liberated exchange that she reveals that her deafness is fake and is only a stratagem to avoid being overburdened by work. Such a lighthearted passage in an otherwise somber novel highlights the lingering presence and expansion of ancient patterns of feminine solidarity within a male-dominated space. Furthermore, in two burial scenes in Le Démantèlement, the reinterpretation of religious rituals redeploys, subverts, and reinvents a stifling and restrictive tradition. In the first instance, the inquisitive Selma is told by her friend Tahar El-Ghomri, a withered and disillusioned former communist militant, about the circumstances of his friend’s burial during the anticolonial war. The imam, presented as a collaborator with the colonial army, first refuses to preside over the ceremony because of the deceased militant’s communist ideas. However, the mourners demand that, despite his misgivings, the imam read the prayer. They force him to concede under the direct threat of a gun pointed at his temple. This scene is a striking reconfiguration of a social ritual generated by the circumstances of anticolonial struggle. Later, in a quite similar mode on the occasion of Tahar’s burial, Selma “transgresse la loi formelle qui interdisait aux femmes d’assister aux obsèques” [transgresses the unflinching

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custom by which women were forbidden to attend funerals] (305). In an attitude reminiscent of that of the unyielding mourners, she reenacts the symbolic resistance when she slaps the face of the prayer leader after he refuses to recite the sacred ritual for her dead friend. By questioning the old constraints imposed by tradition, she reclaims part of her heritage, demands its expansion, and thus pleads for the reconstruction and reinforcement of its foundations. However, as much as Selma vehemently challenges the male infringements upon her freedom as she conceives it and in spite of her brazen attire and attitudes, she speaks out from a liberating perspective of identity construction. She blames her forefathers for their subservience to the colonialist project and abruptly challenges her friend to explain why history derailed into colonial oppression. The blurring of traditional feminine categories is a consistent textual strategy in contemporary Algerian writing. Instead of being depicted as secluded and demure objects dear to the orientalist vision, prostitutes are compassionate, intelligent beings who remain substantially free in their choices. In La Malédiction by Rachid Mimouni (1994), a prostitute and her male friend, a docker, live in a shack near the port of Algiers. Departing from the master-slave relationship, the text stresses their common status as seasonal workers helping each other in times of economic hardship. In the hospital of Mimouni’s Tombéza (1984), a nurse is engaged in a form of prostitution that emphasizes the therapeutic virtues of the release of sexual tensions in the dehumanized space of the hospital. She transcends her own life of suffering by generously negotiating with her isolated fellow workers what the text construes as her healing powers. The contemporary Algerian novel typically depicts protagonists who straddle conflicting spaces and lifestyles. In Le Démantèlement, for instance, the figure of Tahar El-Ghomri concentrates an intricate interplay between tradition and modernity. Raised in a devout atmosphere stressing the religious bond that unifies peasants, the young farmer-schoolteacher finds himself very soon at odds with the conservatism, hypocrisy, and class-based corruption of the members of the local chapter of the Islamic brotherhood to which he first belongs, before his Marxist readings lead him to communist militancy. Taken from traditional Maghrebian folklore, the figure of Djoh’a, the man with the donkey, had already been recast in 1972 in Boudjedra’s L’Insolation, with expanded functions corresponding to a more revolutionary role than the witty castaway of the folk tradition. In Boudjedra’s texts, he is very much a composite figure, as Jean Déjeux observes (“Djoh’a,” 58–62). Boudjedra’s Djoh’a reads the Quran and Vladimir Lenin’s writings in Arabic, deals and takes drugs, and organizes political agitation, but he knows how to be dismissed as simply a crank and how to pass for a devout Muslim to save his skin in case of trouble with the police or suspicious

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neighbors. In the more recent novels by Mimouni, such as La Malédiction and Le Fleuve détourné (1982), the cunning character pursues his mockepic struggle under various guises and, as a voice of dissent who fights for his survival, engages in irreverent social criticism with a libertarian attitude and directs his resourcefulness against exploitation, religious propaganda, or state-masterminded corruption. In Le Fleuve détourné, Djoh’a appears as an ingenuous and ordinary street survivor who uses the legendary donkey as a makeshift cab to get local folks in and out of the isolated, muddy, overflowing alleys of modern-day Algerian shantytowns. His cursory but astute meddling exemplifies the drive for economic expediency and entrepreneurship. However, in this largely Kafkaesque novel, his presence functions as an instance of dignified creativity and humor, set against an oppressive background where the military apparatus heavy-handedly pushes around the modern day Gavroches of the Algerian street, the petty entrepreneurs whose survival skills are too readily confronted by a misguided military coldly imposing its ruthless rationality. Here Mimouni seems to suggest that, after colonial rule and the further disruptions following independence, a way out of the current economic despair could partly lie in allowing the stifled creativity of the Algerian people to thrive again, across and beyond rigid notions of tradition and progress. In La Malédiction, Mimouni’s last novel, the story of another oldtimer encapsulates conflicting moments of Algerian history. Although his thick beard deceitfully gives him the features of a religious zealot, Si Morice, the former revolutionary, indulges in heavy drinking, blasphemy, and sharp anticlerical jabs. Intertextuality is clearly at work here. Resembling Mourad Bourboune’s enigmatic “Muezzin” and Kateb Yacine’s Si Mokhtar, Mimouni’s character reflects the contradictions of a country battling with itself while simultaneously needing all its political and ideological strands to fully investigate its troubled past. Mimouni’s texts are always concerned with the urgent need to reappraise the dynamic forces of his country against attempts to erase or rewrite historical memory. In Tombéza, Mimouni pursues this reflection on modernity by staging the deployment during World War II of U.S. military technology whose machinery lands near an isolated village that is the locus of the traumatic childhood of the narrator Tombéza. The text contrasts the commotion caused by the flattening of the ancestral land by an alien technological power with the story of Tombéza’s companion, an old hermit, with whom he witnesses the event with mixed feelings of awe and powerlessness. Tombéza learns the reason the old hermit was banished from his disenfranchised and isolated village. His “heresy” was in fact his attempt to spread the inner message of modernity that he had found in profane traditional scientific and medical works such as Ibn Sina’s Canon of

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Medicine, a medical treatise well known among scholars and scientists in Europe and the Middle East in the thirteenth century, ce livre fondamental qui a pendant longtemps contenu toute la science médicale du monde, que les mécréants avisés de l’Europe sont allés chercher, étudier, traduire et enseigner à leurs élèves, et cela a donné la médecine moderne, que nos intolérants bigots ignorent totalement, qui qualifient d’hérétique l’ouvrage de ce savant. (78) [the fundamental book that for a long time had contained the whole of the world’s medical science, that the wise scoundrels of Europe brought back, studied, translated, and taught to their disciples, and this has resulted in modern medical science, that our intolerant zealots totally ignore while they label as heresy this scientist’s work.]

The unheeded messenger, misunderstood and banished because he turns to the past to unearth its forgotten modernity, dies in solitude, surrounded by his books. In the same novel, an awkward use of modernity points to the uneasy dialogue of Algerian society with the ramifications of its colonial past. The text lingers at some point on men drinking in a crowded bar. Ironically, the last customers admitted must crouch on the floor in an involuntary posture of prayer that foreshadows the contradictions at work. Although some men engage in conversations, the crowding thwarts all creative and liberated social dialogue beyond predictable complaints about economic scarcity. In this bleak and uninviting environment, a misguided use of the trappings of modernity finally results in an atmosphere of frustration that builds to its highest level in the bathrooms, where “il faut éviter que se croisent nos regards, à aucun prix, on pourrait alors prendre conscience de notre condition, et ce serait la catastrophe” [we must avoid at all cost to look into each other’s eyes, for we could become aware of our condition, and it would be catastrophic] (212). The attitudes and social practices that should open a space of liberty in the context of an intolerant and repressive social order are here stripped of their subversive power because the conditions that would give them a genuinely modern spin are missing. The contemporary Algerian novel invites the reader to ponder the weight that an overwhelming religious discourse imposes on society. The irony is that the quranic call blasts everywhere with the additional power of imported state-of-the-art technology. The sound of the call to prayer stifles the sound of the street in an intrusive, if not totalitarian way. This presence is so potent and obtrusive that it becomes the backbone of the storyline of Bab-El-Oued by Merzak Allouache, where a young Algerian baker steals one of these megaphones and runs into deep trouble. In La Malédiction, the old schemer Si Morice directly addresses God by exposing its megaphone as media artifact: “[Dieu] est agoraphobe et aime le

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calme. Comme il a des oreilles sensibles, il ne supporte pas vos infernales sonos qui appellent à la prière” (85) [(God) is agoraphobic and appreciates tranquility. As his ears are sensitive, he cannot put up with your blasted loudspeakers that call for the prayer]. Beyond their comical aspect, these statements hint that the rediscovery of an individual approach to religious inquiry ideally could help defuse tensions and violence. Religion indeed enters the marketplace in an economy marked by corruption, posturing, and exchange of influence in Algerian society. Fundamentalists rake off profits from wealthy businessmen or state power brokers who are in search of respectability and take great pains to finance the building of minarets in a time of dire economic and housing scarcity, as in Tombéza, when one of these characters boasts of his generous endowment for such a project (256). In these novels it is often suggested that the Islamist version of modernity is essentially totalitarian, yet another variation of imperialism that is otherwise so readily vilified. Paradoxically, the acceptance of the material tools of modernity goes hand in hand with the refusal to embrace the underpinnings of these tools, as if technology could be siphoned off from the principles that have permitted its elaboration. The central question of what is and should be the place of Algeria’s past in all its dimensions is fraught with very tangible risks for the Algerians who ask the question in their own country, and it permeates the contemporary Algerian novel. Islamism is bent on imposing on Algeria a corpus of what has even been construed as a tradition extraneous to a culturally diverse society, as Kateb himself daringly observed in Le Poète comme un boxeur (1994) (31–32), and in fact, this attempt to shrink the historical texture of Algerian society to a set of reductive parameters is based on myth and collides with the diversity of Algerian history. This cultural struggle is forcefully illustrated in La Traversée by Mouloud Mammeri (1989), when the schoolteacher, recognizable by his Egyptian accent (87), strives to wrest the correct answer from his nomadic Berber students: Avant l’Islam c’étaient les temps d’ignorance. . . . Puis le Koran est venu, apportant la bénédiction, la science, la civilisation. Si vous restez comme vos parents, vous serez des Barbares et des ignorants. Allons, dites . . . Qu’est-ce que vous êtes? . . . Dites: des Arabes et des Musulmans. Dans le poing ferme du maître le long bâton de tamaris flagellait l’air. Quarante paires d’yeux, revulsés par la peur, cherchaient à échapper à la ferule, à la voix. (84) [Before Islam were the times of ignorance. . . . Then the Qur’an came, bringing blessings, science, and civilization. If you remain like your parents, you will be barbaric and ignorant. Then tell me, what are you? . . . Say Arabs and Muslims. In the schoolteacher’s tight fist, the long tamarisk stick was whipping the air. Forty pairs of eyes, rolled upwards out of fear, were trying to escape the baton, the voice.]

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The irony here lies in the Middle Eastern origin of the schoolmaster who tries to inculcate a superimposed Arab and Muslim identity upon populations of Berber ancestry, whose religious practice he deems substandard or lukewarm at best. In fact, the teacher’s attempt mirrors former colonial attempts to obliterate historical sources, when Algerian schoolchildren were taught in French colonial schools about their ancestors the Gauls. In this novel, Mammeri, a Berber from Kabylia, portrays a group of arresting protagonists who embody a form of resistance against reductive modernity. The journalist Mourad finds an echo of his own wanderings and struggles against the postcolonial Algerian regime in the independent spirit of the Touareg, the nomads of the far Algerian south. His attention is caught by the Targui teenager Ahitagel, who is expected to acknowledge the worth of sedentary life. In response, the young nomad holds fast to his dream of driving giant trucks across the desert. His defiant attitude is a way to synthesize “progress” with the ancestral call of nomadic life. Mourad, who is longing for a return to the ideals of the Algerian revolution, is also fascinated by the energy embodied by Ba Salem, an unyielding desert wanderer whose life centers on “Ahellils,” traditional rituals in which participants focus upon a whole gamut of artistic and aesthetic experiences and enter into mystical trances. He is one of a disappearing group of drifters who do not adjust to the constraints of sedentary life: Les racines, l’ordre, le travail ne font pas partie de leurs traditions. Un Touareg considère comme déshonorant de tenir un pic, une charrue, un marteau, mais il fait des centaines de kilomètres à dos de chameau pour aller écouter une femme jouer du violon dans un campement. (82) [Roots, order, and work don’t belong to their traditions. A Touareg thinks that holding a pick, plow, or hammer is not honorable, but he can travel hundreds of miles on a camel’s back to go and listen to a woman playing a violin in a camp.]

Placing value upon Ba Salem’s behavior subverts the Algerian authorities’ propensity to stifle pre-Islamic mystical drives, which they regard as lingering forms of archaism. Ba Salem’s pursuits exemplify the intractable creativity of nomads struggling for their cultural survival when confronted with the Algerian policy of uniformity under the Boumédienne regime of the 1970s. All this unmistakably points to the overall question of the nature of Algerian identity. As Kateb states, “la véritable identité est crainte, elle pourrait tout changer en Afrique du Nord” [true identity is feared; it could change everything in North Africa] (Le Poète, 32). Kateb himself often alluded to the haunting figure of La Kahena, a Berber woman, mostly presented as one of the Jewish figures (an irksome assumption for Islamists) who ruled over the Maghreb until the Arab conquest in the seventh century,

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The reluctance by Islamists to pursue the impartial and rigorous analysis of history that, for example, Ibn Khaldun had already undertaken as far back as the fourteenth century in the Muqaddimah, a seminal treatise of sociology underlining the power of tribal solidarities in Maghrebian life, can be illustrated in the way Islamists distribute labels of conformity. For instance, the Imam Al-Ghazali, an influential Egyptian fundamentalist preacher well respected by the Algerian media, once flatly declared that the impious Kateb (an Algerian writer) should not even be granted the right to be buried in Algerian soil (Remaoun, École, histoire, 89–90). And when cultural figures die, they cannot even be left in peace in their graves. Boudjedra, writing in homage to Rachid Mimouni in Lettres algériennes (1995, 7), reminds us that Mimouni’s body was exhumed and cut into pieces by Islamist militants following his burial. The critical unearthing of events of all dimensions, a unifying thread in the Algerian novel, also lies at the heart of Boudjedra’s Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie (1979). Beyond the burlesque form of a fantastic tale, this novel intertwines confrontations and encounters and displaces them across established boundaries of time and space. By juxtaposing fantasies reminiscent of the legendary Arabian Nights with reminders of real historical events and figures, the novel points to the fact that in the Arab-Muslim world, as anywhere else, enlightened individuals have always striven to disentangle myth from history, often at great risk. By doing so, the novel pursues the work of demystification that is such a distinctive feature in the contemporary Algerian novel. The title of Boudjedra’s novel closely mirrors the title of the celebrated Arabian Nights. Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie ushers in an introspection about preconceptions of the Orient and its myths. As Carys Owen observes, “Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie can appear to reflect the cumulative, encyclopedic practices of Orientalist writing with their covert purpose of denying the Orient’s capacity to evolve” (“Re-orientation,” 255). Beyond the smokescreen of the constantly de-centered and crisscrossing narratives, readers are invited to turn their attention to the rich complexity of the history of Arab and Muslim peoples. The names of, achievements of, and contribution to world research and technology of many scientists of the past appear regularly in a text that lingers on a set of confrontations largely based on conflicts of class between tyrants, fundamentalists, executioners of intellectuals, revolutionaries, mystics, poets of eroticism, critics of religious oppression, and dedicated drinkers. Along with the ghost of Ibn Khaldoun, the poet Al-Mutannabi’s2 powerful and thought-provoking writing is often mentioned: “Le plus grand. Le plus fou. Le plus visionnaire . . . Hérétique. Athée. Haineux envers tous les Dieux, envers tous les prophètes. . . . Il voulut démontrer que Dieu n’était qu’un épouvantail brandi par les puissants pour maintenir la racaille

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à distance” [The greatest. The maddest. The most visionary . . . Heretical. Atheist. Hating all the gods, all the prophets. . . . He wanted to prove that God was nothing else than a scarecrow brandished by the powerful to keep the riffraff at bay] (249–279). Indeed, the text alternately showcases repressive, authoritarian, and violent historical figures, as well as scientists and artists who struggled to leave their mark on their times. It particularly lingers on the episode of the revolt of the Zindjs, 300,000 slaves brought in from East Africa to domesticate the rivers and marshlands of Mesopotamia during the Abassid Caliphate in the thirteenth century. The Zindjs succeeded in organizing a pre-communist form of government that lasted for fifteen years before they were ruthlessly destroyed. The apparent paradox Boudjedra invites us to ponder is the fact that their revolt occurred with the decisive help of an Arab engineer, one of these demystifying twists of history that the author has repeatedly highlighted in his other novels, such as Le Démantèlement and La Prise de Gibraltar (in French, 1987). Boudjedra’s enterprise of de-sacralization challenges one narrow reading of the history of the encounters between “East” and “West” that overlooks resistance to the established orders, whatever these may be. Les 1001 Années suggests a new appraisal of Arabo-Islamic culture, the memory of which has purposefully been stifled and confiscated by rulers and ideologues. In my view, the burlesque here acts as a thinly disguised veil hiding the author’s forays into the realm of his paramount obsession, namely his search for the history that eludes him. Naturally, the ethnocentrist, selective vision of European historiography is challenged by the author’s focus on forgotten figures. Boudjedra’s evocation of the discovery of India by Europeans, linked in Western tradition to the name of the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, foregrounds with a devastating comical efficiency the major contribution of his Arab pilot Ahmed Ibn Majid, “qui n’avait fait que précipiter la catastrophe. . . . Le sort voulut que le Portugais recuperât seul le honneurs de la célébrité. . . . Sans l’autre, il serait encore en train de chalouper entre l’Amérique et le Détroit de Gibraltar” [who had only accelerated the catastrophe . . . By a twist of fate, honors and fame were bestowed on the Portuguese only. . . . Without the other, he would still be adrift between America and the Gibraltar Straits] (31–60). Conversely, some ways of imposing modernity in a ruthless manner inscribe colonial rulers along with a notorious list of oppressive figures. By the end of Les 1001 Années, the sudden landing of a Hollywood crew entrusted with making a new version of The Arabian Nights symbolizes the disturbances ushered in by the mindset of invaders who totally disregard the culture of the Other. The plethora of extravagant details about the film set sarcastically mirrors the wild expectations with which Western

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readers construct their imaginary Orient through Hollywood productions. After turning the whole place upside down and creating conflict among Manama’s residents, the project comes to an abrupt end when the film crew abandons the village overnight. The suddenness of changes, the irreality and artificiality that permeates all the film production scenes, and the final collapse of the Hollywood project—all are a metaphor for the vanity of the artificial superimposition of colonial or neocolonial projects upon other cultures. In this respect, Boudjedra metaphorically places into perspective the difficulties inherent in the reconstruction of a society subjected to the vicissitudes of history. Although Manama’s space is fictitious, references to the Algerian postindependence context are evident in the following passage, in which the new, honest, well-intentioned but bewildered governor requests the help of Mohamed SNP, Manama’s influential and leading figure, in reorganizing the troubled village, and receives advice in these terms: Il le consola: “Ce n’est pas de ta faute. Une mise en état, c’est très difficile! Relis Ibn Khaldoun si tu ne l’as déjà lu, et tu comprendras. Nous subissons une coupure de sept siècles pour ne pas dire dix, car l’Etat, dans cette région, avait déjà éclaté lors de l’affaiblissement des Abbassides. Tu ne vas quand même pas faire un saut de dix siècles en dix semaines!” (371) [He cheered him up: “It is not your fault. Putting things back together is quite a task! Re-read Ibn Khaldun if you haven’t read him already, and you will understand. We have suffered from a power failure for seven centuries, not to say ten, because the state had already broken up during the weakening of the Abbasids. You are not going to make up for ten centuries in ten weeks!]

Mohamed SNP’s name deserves scrutiny. It conflates the name of the Prophet with the colonial acronym SNP (sans nom patronymique/without identifiable ascendancy) given by default to illegitimate children in colonial Algeria. This reminder of a reductive form of colonialist human mapping is symbolic of the quest for an independent identity that Maghrebian history has rendered so difficult to achieve, a quest also dramatized throughout the novel by the character’s unrelenting quest for details about the alleged sojourn of his hero Ibn Khaldoun in Manama. By the end of the novel, in a humoristic reference to the urgent need for Algerian society to turn to historical analysis in order to regain full control over its potential and disentangle its many strands, Mohamed SNP finally discovers that his mother’s home is the place where his hero sojourned and that he himself is one of the descendents of Ibn Khaldun. This metaphorical dénouement clearly hints that the Algerian society would benefit from confronting and reconstructing its complex past with the tools

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of historical research, as it did for a brief period just after Independence (Remaoun, École, histoire, 92–93) before the authorities opted for a “dealgerianization” of history in the 1970s. The complex and thought-provoking dialogue between tradition and modernity is not restricted to the francophone Algerian novel. For example, the arabophone writer Tahar Wattar’s novel Noces de Mulet (1984) highlights how the force of tradition and the necessity of adjusting to colonial circumstances combine to transform a disempowered character into an autonomous agent who disentangles and reconstructs the conflicting aspects of his life and puts his wisdom to use in order to protect his community. In this novel, an intricate series of negotiations and rivalries takes place in a brothel where an entire microsociety plays out its rituals. In and around this locus, Wattar’s protagonist illustrates the strange interactions between tradition and modernity. The reader’s first encounter with the character takes place during one of Hadj Cayenne’s regular visits to the threshold of a cemetery where he indulges in hashish smoking. During these oneiric sessions, he imagines encounters with a whole Pantheon of famous Muslim figures. The strange dreamer’s name, Hadj Cayenne, is in itself an ironic conflation of terms. His pilgrimage name combines a reference to Mecca with his exile for twenty years as a convict in the infamous French prison camp of Cayenne for the murder of a pimp. He returns as a mystic and a confidant in the brothel. Later in the novel, we learn that before committing his crime he had been lured away by the brothel madam from a promising career as Islamic preacher. After the handsome and enthusiastic theology student fails in his ambitious attempt to redirect the brothel’s lost souls toward redemption, he falls into the sexual trap alluringly laid out by the madam with the expert help of her pensioners. As the narrative unfolds, Hadj Cayenne returns to the brothel after the completion of his sentence and devotes his energy to ensuring the protection of his women friends against the sleazy and brutal pimps. One of the logical inferences in the story is that the theology student’s dazzling apostasy highlights the fragility of his initial religious drive. The apparent ease with which the apprentice preacher’s “conversion” is recounted might easily point to a questioning of the psychological solidity and spirituality of religious careerism. However, in retrospect, Wattar’s terse statements following the assassination of the francophone journalist, poet, and novelist Tahar Djaout, which in his view was a family’s personal loss that did not entail any loss for Algerian literature, mark a significant departure from the earlier crossfertilization of ideas between francophone and arabophone writers.3 In the time it took Wattar to go from writing texts that were clearly irreverent toward the bent for proselytism and social conservatism and to making the notorious statement about the non-Algerianness of Tahar Djaout’s literary

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persona, one epoch has ended and another has begun. The heightened ideological conflicts and contradictory claims over the interpretation of Algerian history have now separated Algerian literary figures whose paths had often creatively intersected in the not-so-distant past. In Algeria, identities, language, and history are inextricably intertwined in the dialectical confrontation between tradition and modernity. The dilemma surrounding this identity quest has much to do with the linguistic issue and the problematic recognition of the cultural past in all its dimensions, as when Kateb writes about the Berber language, Tamazight: “Mais elle existe, elle vit et elle s’appauvrit, alors qu’elle est la base de notre existence historique” [But it exists, it lives and it becomes impoverished, although it is the basis of our historical existence] (Le Poète, 33). Indeed, the Algerian de facto quadriglossia presently creates more problems than new perspectives because it is not positively recognized. The contradictions that hamper the educational system and, by extension, the cultural identity of the country find their outlet in literature. By the end of Mimouni’s Le Fleuve détourné, the narrator finds his estranged son, who has left school and wanders the city streets. Although the narrator has himself been gravely marginalized by the system, he somehow retains a degree of trust in the school’s capacity to help young people find a way out of unemployment and despair. However, the son’s rejoinder is unequivocal: “De toute façon, on n’y apprenait pas grand chose. . . . On ne nous enseignait que l’exégèse du Coran, afin de faire de nous plus tard des imams de mosquée ou de pieux chômeurs” [Anyway we were not learning much there. . . . They only taught us quranic’ exegesis to turn us later into mosque imams or pious jobless] (206). In the early 1980s, starting with Le Démantèlement (Al-Tafakkuk), Boudjedra publicized his switch to Arabic as a language of literary creation, claiming that his move simply reflected his desire to write in his own language. Boudjedra does not refrain from de-centering the Arabic language, if only to legitimize the influence of Algerian dialectal Arabic into Algerian Arabic literature. Following the example set by Kateb, who promoted the use of dialectal Arabic in his work with popular theater, Boudjedra sets out to contribute to the reinforcement of Algerian culture and language. Egyptians have done this with a success proven by the influence of their cultural productions throughout the Arab world, and Kateb pursues a similar project in reaching out to large audiences of Algerians, moving beyond a clerical elite that accepts only the classic purity of form and theme, the adepts of the rigid limitations of “un ordre linguistique contraignant et ‘glottophagique’” [a constraining and “glottophagic” linguistic order] (Elimam, “Algérie,” 112). Through his interest in poetry, traditional but often quite profane, and from his atheist perspective, Boudjedra regularly contends in his writings

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that the sacred character of the Arabic language is more the result of arbitrary power games than the result of historical necessity and that, as for any other language, the contribution of dialects should be appraised and vindicated as a natural process of cultural diversity. With its bold themes, syntactic experimentations, and sharpness of denunciation, Le Démantèlement suggests that it is possible to express anything, even eroticism, in the “sacred” language. Boudjedra’s strategy of drawing from the corpus of dialectal popular culture to assert his contention is exemplified in the novel when Selma and Latif give free rein to their childhood memories during their emotional evening of mutual discovery. A bottle of whisky helps both of them remember the particular treatment to which a traditional song had been adapted by little girls. In the French edition, both versions (original and transformed) of the song appear in Arabic and French, perhaps in order to stress the blasphemous and playful or trivial intention. The innocent text “Souad est apparue et mon coeur s’est effrité / Devenu orphelin, il jappe, par la faute de son amour comme un chien entravé” [Souad appeared and my heart fell apart / Having become an orphan, it yelps as a chained dog because of its love] is quite dramatically twisted in the teenager’s imagination and becomes: “Souad a uriné et mon coeur s’est mouillé, ma bite brûlante, sous le coup, s’est ratatinée” (256) [Souad urinated and my heart got wet, my fiery dick, under the shock, shriveled up]. The salacious character of the scene is unmistakable, given the medium and the message. Through his iconoclastic work Boudjedra claims the right to regionalize and modernize the Arabic language as he moves toward a new appraisal of Arabo-Islamic culture whose memory has been stifled and confiscated by reductivist interpretation in postcolonial Algeria. The increase of cultural and political tensions in Algeria has led francophone Algerian novelists to reexamine established notions of tradition and modernity in their writings. Engaged in an attempt to provoke a dialogue between the postcolonial society and the former colonizer and in the midst of increasing tensions between Islamists and secularists on the one hand and between francophone and arabophone intellectuals on the other, Algerian francophone writers claim to avoid both a retreat into religious utopianism and subservience to the canons of a conception of modernity defined from a Western point of view. By undermining binary appraisals, they invite readers to reflect upon situations where the line separating these concepts becomes blurred and loses its essentialist cast. Against ominous threats to their physical existence, these writers counter the attacks made upon them, refuse to be expeditiously demonized, and struggle against marginalization. They assert that a thorough, multidimensional, and aggressive analysis of history is the only way to avoid what they see as entrapment or retreat into a mythical past, reconstructed as utopia by religious zealots bent upon stifling meaningful discussion about the roots of

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today’s seemingly intractable dilemmas. These authors make a case for the legitimization of their enterprise at home at a time when they are derided by their more ideological compatriots. They assert that an authentic rebirth of Algerian culture cannot be congruent with monolithic interpretations of fragmented moments of history. A liberated discussion and representation of the past is a prerequisite to the reconstruction of a community still deeply divided and in search of an inclusive interpretation of the notion of identity. Only an unfettered inquiry into different layers of history can lead to an understanding of the broad-based nature of Algerian culture, one that includes gender and ethnic and linguistic diversity. On another level, these writers engage Western readers to further question the validity of their own one-sided assumptions of modernity, a notion whose reassessment is crucial in the light of events in postcolonial Algeria, with the double function of secularizing historiography and engaging everyone in a logic of dialogue and, it is to be hoped, a peaceful resolution of conflicts.

Notes 1. This social and religious conservative movement is often considered to be a Maghrebian and Islamic form of Protestantism. Its leader Shaikh Ibn Bâdis and his followers set out, among other endeavors, to resist acculturation to the world of the colonizer, to rid Maghrebian Islam of its archaic forms, and to define an appropriate educational strategy for the Muslim population of Algeria (Benkheira, “Machisme,” 127–143). 2. The surname of a famous Arabic poet born in Iraq (915–965), Al-Mutannabi means the “Little Prophet.” A celebrated panegyrist, he was also known for his satirical poetry and his bold metaphors and statements. Al-Mutannabi was also involved in the Qarmats’ revolt. 3. When he was interviewed by a journalist of the ARTE channel during a program dedicated to the assassination of intellectuals in Algeria, Tahar Wattar answered that Tahar Djaout’s death was a loss for his children and for France but not for Algeria (Addi, “Les Intellectuels qu’on assassine,” 137).

Works Cited Abdelkrim-Chikh, Rabia. “Les Enjeux politiques et symboliques de la lutte des femmes pour l’égalité entre les sexes en Algérie.” Peuples méditerranéens 48–49 (July–December 1989): 257–278. Addi, Lahouari. “Les Intellectuels qu’on assassine.” Esprit 208 (January 1995): 130–138. Arkoun, Mohamed. “La Grande rupture avec la modernité: Le Maghreb face à la contestation Islamiste.” Le Monde diplomatique (November 1994): 40–43. Benkheira, Hocine. “Machisme, nationalisme et religion.” Peuples méditerranéens 52–53 (July–December 1990): 127–143.

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Benrabah, Mohamed. “La Langue perdue.” Esprit 208 (January 1995): 35–47. Berque, Jacques. “Les Horizons de la vision musulmane du monde: Le Maghreb face à la contestation Islamiste.” Le Monde diplomatique (November 1994): 46–48. Bizri, Dalal. “La Femme arabe dans le discours islamiste contemporain.” Peuples méditerranéens 48–49 (July–December 1989): 309–327. Bois, Marcel. “Au Fil des années 70, émergence du roman algérien de langue arabe.” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord 26 (1978): 13–34. Boudjedra, Rachid. L’Insolation. Paris: Denoël, 1972. ———. Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie. Paris: Denoël, 1979. ———. La Répudiation. Paris: Denoël, 1981. ———. Le Démantèlement. Trad. Antoine Moussali, avec la collaboration de l’auteur. Paris: Denoël, 1982. ———. La Prise de Gibraltar. Trad. Antoine Moussali avec la collaboration de l’auteur. Paris: Denoël, 1987. ———. Lettres algériennes. Paris: Grasset, 1995. Bourboune, Mourad. Le Muezzin. Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1968. Déjeux, Jean. “Djoh’a, héros de la tradition orale dans la littérature algérienne de langue française.” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1984): 27–34. Djebar, Assia. L’Amour, la fantasia. Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Lattès, 1985. ———. Loin de Médine. Alger: Editions ENAG, 1992. Elimam, Abdou. “Algérie linguistique et démocratie.” Peuples méditerranéens 52–53 ( July–December 1990): 103–120. Ghoussoub, Mai. “Feminism—or the Eternal Masculine—in the Arab World.” New Left Review 170 (January–February 1987): 3–18. Kateb, Yacine. Nedjma. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1956. ———. Le Poète comme un boxeur. Paris: Le Seuil, 1994. Khatibi, Abdelkebir. La Mémoire tatouée. Paris: Denoël, 1970. Mammeri, Mouloud. L’Ahellil du Gourara. Paris: Ed. des Sciences de l’Homme, 1984. ———. La Traversée. Alger: Bouchene, 1989. Mernissi, Fatima. Le Harem politique, le prophète et les femmes. Paris: Albin Michel, 1987. Mimouni, Rachid. Le Fleuve détourné. Paris: Seuil, 1982. ———. Tombéza. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1984. ———. La Malédiction. Paris: Stock, 1994. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2.12 (1984): 334–358. Mosteghanemi, Ahlem. Femme et écritures. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985. Owen, Carys. “Re-Orientation in Rachid Boudjedra’s Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 31.3 (July 1995): 246–258. Remaoun, Hassan. “École, histoire, et enjeux institutionnels dans l’Algérie independante.” Les Temps modernes. Spécial Algérie (1995): 71–93. Wattar, Tahar. Ez-Zilzel (Le Séisme). Trad. Marcel Bois. Alger: SNED, 1982. ———. Noces de Mulet. Trad. Marcel Bois et Bernard Guichoud. Alger: MessidorTemps Actuels, ENAP, 1984. Woodhull, Winifred. “Feminist and Islamic Tradition.” Studies on Twentieth Century Literature 17.1 (Winter 1993): 27–44. Zimra, Clarisse. “When the Past Answers Our Present. Assia Djebar Talks About Loin de Médine.” Callaloo 16.1 (1993): 116–131.

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: Rewriting Identity and History: The Sliding Barre(s) in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sacred Night Mustapha Hamil

In The Thousand and One Nights, Sheherazade managed to control discourse through redirecting desire. Little did she know that different writers would rival her control of storytelling in different ages and cultures. Her narration is a stratagem that she masters in order to fool the Sultan, Shahriyar, and postpone her death. As Malti-Douglas explains, three factors combine to make her narrative journey a memorable one: “woman’s speech or eloquence, the problem of ruse or trickery, and woman’s sexuality” (Women’s Body, 29). For the purposes of this chapter, I take Malti-Douglas’s three elements as reflecting on Tahar Ben Jelloun’s metaphoric discourse in his novel The Sacred Night (1987).1 I intend to demonstrate how the different barres (slashes) that conventionally stand between the protagonist and her self, the signifier and the signified, the past and the present, and reality and dream generate new perceptions of the self and of the world. Roland Barthes reminds us in his discussion of Sarrasine that the barre represents the “slash of censure, the surface of the mirror, the wall of hallucination, the verge of antithesis, the abstraction of limit, the obliquity of the signifier, the index of the paradigm, hence of meaning” (Sarrasine, 107). In most of his novels, Ben Jelloun makes use of narrative devices pertaining to the Western tradition of novel writing (especially the nouveau roman), to Arab letters (digression, repetition),2 and to Moroccan oral tradition (the Halka).3 The combination of such heterogeneous literary traditions celebrates, among other things, postmodern polyphony, intertextuality, and nonclosure. As a postcolonial writer, Ben Jelloun is also concerned with ordinary people’s “tactics” and “strategies” to resist and ultimately displace the different barres and frontiers, imaginary or real, that individuals and nations erect around themselves.4 Ben Jelloun’s choice of such marginalized characters as Harrouda in Harrouda (1973), Moha in Moha 61

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le fou, Moha le sage (1978), Yamna and Sindbad in La Prière de l’absent (1981), Ahmed/Zahra in L’Enfant de sable (1985) and La Nuit sacrée (1987), and Zina in La Nuit de l’erreur (1997) allows him to explore the gray areas between such opposites as the sacred and the profane, the poetic and the political, the private and the public, and, above all, the repressed and the expressed. One has to read these shaded zones as generative of new meanings and new visions of the self. Zahra’s famous phrase in The Sacred Night, “My story was my prison” (163), encapsulates the theme of the book: her imprisonment not only within a social, cultural, and political frame but also within the frame of representation. Her statement, as I show later, draws attention to the ways in which Zahra’s narrative cuts across spatial, social, and gender frontiers that partition the Moroccan and indeed Maghrebian space.5 It is interesting to note in this respect how Ben Jelloun reverts to Sheherazade’s narrative skills to stage a journey across prohibited territories, whether linguistic, cultural, political, or pertaining to the Name/Law-of-the-Father. Zahra’s personal search for self, words, and identity can thus be viewed as an allegorical rendition of the author’s own quest. Through the act of writing-thewoman, Ben Jelloun embarks on a triple journey: an ontological, linguistic, and historical exploration of his own voice and identity. When the woman speaks, her voice, like that of her author, sounds like her voice but not quite, and her desires and fantasies cast on the plane of writing function as a metadiscourse intended to disrupt the discourse of the Other/Father. In Ecrits II, Jacques Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language (112). In Lacan and Narration, Robert Con Davis argues that for Lacan, narration may be characterized by three fundamental propositions: (1) narration is structured like a (subject in) language; (2) “Narration’s manifest content is a product of the unconscious discourse that is both the precondition of narration and the site of its appearance”; and (3) the “unconscious discourse of language and its processes are revealed in the ‘gaps’ or ‘lapses’ (inconsistencies, failures of speech and signification, etc.) that appear in a narrative’s manifest text” (853–854). By insisting on reading the unconscious as language, James Mellard argues, “Lacan brings his analysis immediately into the domain of literary analysis” (56). Moreover, language—or literary texts, for that matter—not only structures our perception of ourselves and of reality but also determines how the subject becomes aware of itself as an independent entity. Because of its double implication, language functions at the same time as a screen and as a veil. However, this double implication of language allows the unconscious to interrupt and threaten the security of the ego and, as Juliet Flower MacCannell argues, liberates the self from the prison-house of language (Figuring Lacan, 14). In a culture in which the Name-of-the-Father is everywhere reinforced and institutionalized, literary narratives enact a double intervention on the

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levels of both the imaginary and the symbolic. As Lacan reminds us, it is the symbolic presence of the Name-of-the-Father—the figure of the law par excellence—in the unconscious that is responsible, in the early stage of the child’s development, for the repression of desire. Most Maghrebian novels by male writers reveal a pressing desire to “kill” the father, especially in autobiographical novels, as an attempt to liberate the fictive world from the Name-of-the-Father and the threat of castration.6 The symbolic “killing” of the father allows an intimate identification with the mother/ woman, either through the sublimation of her image as a protective madonna or through a displaced incestuous rapport with her through the act of writing. In both cases, the mother/woman emerges as an impossible object of desire, an idealized symbol, a prostitute, or simply as the Other (foreign) woman. While these writers symbolically destroy the Father, they also seek to come to terms with the repression of desire and their feeling of discontent. It is in this sense that writing-the-woman and woman’s body by male writers offers a privileged experience in which the conscious and the unconscious intersect and overlap. Although the writer usually takes the mother’s side against the patriarchal or neopatriarchal order, he also seeks to explore the shaded area of repressed sexuality, that which the language of the Quran does not tolerate.7 The transgression of the barre standing between the sacred and the profane is undertaken, unfortunately, through the other language or foreign woman or both.8 On the whole, the interruption of the Father’s discourse through the trope of the woman’s body and discourse serves a twofold function. On the one hand, it strives to displace the gap—the barre—that alienates woman’s discourse from her body; that is, it allows her repressed desire(s) to be visible in language. On the other hand, the text in which woman appears celebrates a body/desire that is not properly hers, in the sense that this projected body/desire represents the author’s own parole (utterance), which he manipulates in opposition to the Father’s language. In her discussion of the presence of the woman in the Maghrebian novel in French, Zohra Mesgueldi has noted the following: [Le corps de la femme] devient ici un instrument pour la création littérature. Métaphore à travers laquelle on dit tout le mal qu’on pense du pouvoir et de la société patriarchaux dénoncés par cette littérature, c’est à travers lui que tout le discours transgressif et subversif formulé par celleci à leur encontre et notamment par l’évocation de la sexualité, suprême tabou, la révolte des sens se transforme en révolte socio-politique. (Corps an féminin, 51) [(The woman’s body) becomes an instrument for literary creation, a metaphor through which (writers) communicate every evil (they) think with respect to patriarchal authority and society. It is through the woman’s body and the evocation of sexuality—supreme taboo—that Maghrebian literature’s subversive discourse is articulated. Thus subversion of meaning develops into a sociopolitical revolt.]

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One may wonder why “sociopolitical revolts” can only be launched from the site of the woman’s body and language. A desultory answer would be that the woman’s body provides a space where different religious, cultural, economic, sexual, and political discourses intersect. No displacement, then, of the Law/Name-of-the-Father can be better achieved than through the evocation of woman’s body. In Maghrebian culture, women are the first to be excluded by/from power relationships and structures. Thus through the use of a metaphoric language, authors aim primarily at displacing the Law/Name-of-the-Father within a regenerative dynamic of gender politics. Not only do writers denounce the different forms of women’s exclusion from/by the dogmatic word of the doxa, but also they propose strategies of resistance to patriarchal thinking, political marginalization, and the persistence of cliché-ridden attitudes of paternalism. By allowing woman to speak, they convert existing symbols and images into a new symbolic logic that proposes new articulations and new interpretations. In its postcolonial and postmodern configuration, writing-the-woman proposes ways to break away from fossilized structures of the past, thereby reconciling Maghrebian man and woman to themselves and to their history.

The Persistence of the Past Zahra appears in The Sacred Night as an “arch-storyteller” whose narrative aspires to release her from the trauma of her experience of a woman raised as a man. After the successive failures of different storytellers to disclose her story in The Sand Child (1985), she appoints herself—despite objections from her male audience: “And since when do women not yet old dare to flaunt themselves like that?” (13)—to be the storyteller of her own purloined story.9 Contrary to Sheherazade, who is aided in her narrative journey by her sister/shadow Dinarzad, Zahra relies on no “aide mémoire,” since she herself is the story to be told. Awakening in the deserted public square of Jama’ al-Fna, she feels possessed by a compelling desire to tell the truth she can no longer suppress: “I am an old woman now, with all the serenity I need. But I’m going to speak, for I feel encumbered. What weighs me down is not so much the years as all the things I’ve left unsaid, all the things I’ve hidden” (1). The choice of the famous square in Marrakech is not accidental: Jama’ al-Fna represents a popular space where ordinary people use storytelling as an everyday tactic of resistance to the hegemony and authority of official discourses. Moreover, it is a place where the “carnivalesque” offers an occasion for different voices—or “heteroglossia” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense—to relativize the dogmatic language system underlying the ideology

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of state discourses and literature (Dialogic Imagination, 301). It is also a postmodern arena where different languages and individual voices compete for what Michel Foucault has defined as the power of knowledge. The choice, therefore, of Jama’ al-Fna as the place where Zahra tells her story serves as a correlate to the novel’s resistance to the hegemony of the modernist notions of the unified subject and closure. Zahra’s story is not a common one: it is the story of her own life experience that develops, as it gathers momentum, into a symbolic representation of the story of women like her mother, who are excluded from the power system of language and crushed by figures of authority both during and after the colonial period. Commenting on the main issue in The Sacred Night, Ben Jelloun explains: Ce que j’ai voulu monter, c’est le processus d’une émancipation. Les épreuves que Zahra subit pourraient bien être celles d’un peuple en lutte pour sa liberté. C’est le combat d’une femme pour devenir ce qu’elle aurait pu être si elle n’avait pas été victime d’une agression contre sa sexualité et tout son être. (Jeune Afrique, 44) [What I wanted to show is the process of emancipation. The hardships that Zahra endures could also be those of a people fighting for its liberation. It is the struggle of a woman to become what she should have been were she not victim of an act of aggression committed against her sexuality and her being.]

Zahra’s struggle for “emancipation” is the struggle of a(ny) woman whose identity and language have been usurped by any form of authority. Her struggle is also a symbolic representation of collective resistance, the struggle of a people fighting for its liberation from the yoke of political domination. Two things are at stake here. First, Zahra’s story is presented as a historical allegory; second, as a woman, she is a victim of a paternal decision beyond her control. In both cases, Zahra appears subordinated to two metadiscourses—historicist and paternalist—that she needs to dislocate in order to recover her identity. Born a girl and turned into a man, her father names her “Ahmed.” Ahmed becomes the male construct through which she perceives the world around her. At times, she seems to embrace this male signifier, despite her awareness that it is an empty one: Ma condition, non seulement je l’accepte et je la vis, mais je l’aime. Elle m’intéresse. Elle me permet d’avoir les privilèges que je n’aurais jamais pu connaître. Elle m’ouvre des portes et j’aime cela, même si elle m’enferme ensuite dans une cage de vitre. (50) [Not only do I accept my condition and live it, but I like it too. It is interesting. It allows me privileges that I could never have known. It opens doors for me, and I like that, even if it then locks me in a glass

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cage.]

Zahra’s identification with the masculine signifier defeats the father’s phallocentric scheme by turning it (the father’s scheme) against itself. Despite her imprisonment within a “glass cage,” she poses a permanent challenge to her father’s system of signification. When, for example, she performs the roles of the “husband” and the “male” heir in the family in L’Enfant de sable, she remains the whole time aware of their psychological implications, an awareness that spares her aphanisis, the fear of losing sexual desire.10 The male construct neither offers her a real “phallus” nor compensates for the lack of one, yet it gives her access to the masculine world, which in turn permits her to challenge the security and authority of its patriarchal discourse: “I was a woman gradually taking her revenge on a society of spineless men. . . . As I bent down low I couldn’t help thinking of the animal desire my body, especially in that position, would have aroused in those men if they had only known that they were praying behind a woman. Not to mention the ones who start playing with themselves the moment they see any rear end thus presented, male or female” (36). Having crossed over the barre that links and separates the male and female signifiers, Zahra can now look at the world from both sides. Her imprisonment progressively turns into liberation from symbolic as well as social enclosures. She is able to successfully challenge the supremacy of the symbolic order precisely because she is inside rather than outside it. Freud’s association of the gender “male” with an active state and “female” with a passive condition proves inadequate to describe Zahra’s experience in the novel. Later, when her father, just before his death, renames her “Zahra,” he expects to liberate her from the signifier “Ahmed” by restoring her gender as woman. Little does he know how his decision will further complicate the metaphysical “presencing” of what is de facto absent. Ahmed becomes Zahra. In this reconfiguration of her identity, Zahra has become Ahmed and Zahra, and even as Zahra, she is no longer what or who she once was or at least who she thinks she was. The unity with her self, the world, and history has been damaged beyond repair. The text implies that she has become two things at once, Ahmed/Zahra; that her two selves, male/female, occupy the same space; and that her origin is irreducibly composite and hence impure. For Jacques Lacan, the signifier constitutes the subject. In Zahra’s case, however, both Ahmed and Zahra operate as her signifiers, though one supersedes the other in time. Even after the barre is removed—that is, after Zahra is “grafted” onto Ahmed—the pronominal shift continues to destabilize not only her identity but also the reader’s conventional mapping of identity. Names may imply difference; indeed, there is a difference

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between Ahmed and Zahra. This suggests that identity is like a dune of sand or a “pillar of salt,” to borrow Albert Memmi’s title, whose construction and deconstruction are a matter of purely cultural and political considerations. When biological manifestations—menstruation, growing breasts—impose on Zahra a definite female identification, they nonetheless remain as alienated from her as she is from the male construct she embodies. Despite the fact that they take a specific signifying form, they are immediately perceived in relation to the preexisting signifier “Ahmed.” Her narrative gives the impression that after her renaming she becomes autonomous, but in reality, the more she relives the different moments of her story/life, the more the real agency—the I who is in command of the story—gradually slides towards her composite self. Even after she has gained her right to be a woman—that is, to speak her language—her story does not necessarily say what it means or, more accurately, what she consciously means. Hence she remains suspended between—or rather implicated in—two chains of signification and two temporalities: Ahmed/past and Zahra/present. Thus radically de-centered, Zahra’s subjectivity can no longer be “grounded,” to borrow Martin Heidegger’s term. Her subsequent search for her lost origin/identity turns into a pure illusion, given the fact that that origin/identity has already been contaminated by the presence of a foreign episteme. The barre that conventionally distinguishes Ahmed from Zahra and past from present no longer holds. Zahra is the figure of a body-nation literally possessed by an Other; she has become the emblem of colonized space. Her story as a woman raised as a man may symbolically stand for the experience of her country, in the sense that France, the colonizer, imposed upon the Moroccan subject a foreign language, a sundered notion of identity, and a double estrangement from both past and present. As Abdullah Laroui argues in L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine, France’s colonial presence in the Maghreb alienated the colonized from both tradition and modernity. By disrupting the traditional references of society—mainly its language and religion—the French colonialist policies led to a general retrogression of the dominated society toward a “zero degree of historic existence” (369). Because of their double alienation from past and present, tradition and modernity, Maghrebian societies were forced to turn inward in search of alternative frames of reference. On a sociological level, they have become more and more oriented toward the East and its distant traditions. On a geographic level, they have opted for exile in their deserts and mountains in a symbolic southward journey to the back country. According to Laroui, the major problem Maghrebians faced in the wake of independence was/is “how to get out of ourselves, how to escape from our mountains and sand dunes, how to define ourselves in terms of ourselves and not of someone else, how to stop being exiles in spirit” (384).

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In The Sacred Night, Ben Jelloun charts, though metaphorically, the same trajectory from domination to liberation. Zahra’s life, which she defines as “a moment of inattention,” is representative of the lives of those “sand children” of the postcolonial world. Like Salman Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children (1980), Zahra is herself a child whose birth coincides with that of her nation. The name Ahmed, loaded with religious and patriarchal significance, is the name/prison that the father has chosen for her. The act of naming—that is, of enforcing a particular genealogical affiliation upon the child—is ironically associated in The Sand Child with a fabricated identification, as the father, Hajj Ahmed Souleimane, decrees that his eighth child be a male. Hajj Souleimane, a nationalist and a patriarch, jumps on the occasion of his daughter’s birth to declare the birth/ independence of the whole nation. The slogan “Long live Ahmed! Long live Morocco” that the father publishes in a national newspaper assimilates the birth of Ahmed, who is after all a mere “circus freak” and a “monster,” to that of the country. Like Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, Zahra is herself condemned by a perforated gender/hole to a life of fragments and dispersion. Ironically, the father, a vehement defender of his country’s sovereignty, is the same one who condemns his own daughter—read as nation—to a long life of repression and deprivation. Instead of adjusting the barre that stands between the two periods of colonization and liberation, the father deliberately blurs it, since by this act he secures for himself social and economic privileges that continue long after the departure of the French colonizer. Embodying the two roles of liberator and incarcerator, the father stands for a patriarchal/nationalist ideology that has appointed itself savior of a whole nation, just he gives himself the license to decide the “biological” gender of his children, even if his choice violates the laws of nature. The father initiates his child/nation into life through a wound—the wound of the name and of the body. Negating his daughter’s biological gender represents a premature abortion of woman’s/nation’s right to gain full access to “independence.” Zahra’s subsequent mutilations and wanderings are closely tied to this initial disruption within the system of signification in her story. Ironically, it is the father who renames his daughter “Zahra.” Hence the violence of the colonial past will continue into the present even after the departure of the colonizers. Zahra’s story may be described in terms of a historical allegory in the sense that, once subservient to the flux of history, Zahra’s present/independence can no longer be separated from her past/colonization. Hence her deliberate acts of forgetting: “To be reborn and live I needed to forget, to roam, to find grace distilled by love” (128). After her father’s death (Chap. 2), Zahra wanders, a soul at large, in search of a definition of her self. Freed from the father’s authority—“he emancipated me as slaves were freed in olden days” (17)—she finds herself suspended between the specter

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of the past and the shapeless vision of an unknown future. She manifests a pressing desire to negotiate her past and to free the present from its traumas. In a macabre scene, she disinters the corpse of the dead father in order to give him a second burial. Grotesque in its details, the highly symbolic scene reveals how much Zahra fears the resurrection of the dead father/past. In order to make sure that all her ties with the past are cut, she reburies with her father’s corpse all the objects relating to her old identity: a man’s shirt, a piece of birth certificate, a photograph of the circumcision ceremony, an identity card, a marriage certificate, a ring of keys, a packet of letters, and a belt. But the most dramatic gesture of all is when she unfastens the white cloth she had used to keep her breasts from growing and wraps it around the dead father’s neck. This second burial of the father by his daughter reveals a persistent fear that the dead may return. Killing them twice may finally disempower them and keep them inside their graves. It is only after this macabre burial that Zahra thinks she is finally a free woman: “Farewell, fictive glory, and may we both live, naked and blank, the soul virginal and the body new, however old words!” (51). Zahra’s suspension between past and present reminds us that The Sacred Night remains a book mostly concerned with the historicity of the self. Through his heroine’s ambivalent attitude toward the present, Ben Jelloun addresses the cultural and historical uncertainties germane to the postcolonial moment; that is, the postcolonial subject’s inability to form and formulate an objective historical consciousness of its present condition.11 This lack is apparent in Zahra’s own narrative, which unfolds in the confluence of fragments and debris of her past experience, in the projected images of a future as much desired as it is feared, and in a present that has no real presence. The indefiniteness of chronological and spatial references that accompany her (re)construction of events emphasizes the absence of a stable and coherent system of social and psychic subjectivity. There is not much to be gained in describing The Sacred Night as “postmodern,” since the term frequently implies rehearsals in pointless self-reflexivity that are worlds apart from the fervent historical imagination at work in Zahra’s story. What Ben Jelloun seeks to convey through Zahra’s story is, indeed, the interpretation of a present history continually assaulted by and from the past. The notion of history as a violent intrusion of the past that we witness in The Sacred Night is completely different from the postmodern idea of “pastiche” that appropriates the world through nostalgia. Zahra’s narrative presents the repeated intrusions of the paternal/ colonial past as a refiguration of present history along the lines of a psychic temporality for which memory is less a question of cultural implication than of trauma. From this point of view, Zahra’s present identity is better understood as an identity that does not come after Ahmed—the paternal/colonial signifier—but rather as an interaction between Ahmed and

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Zahra. Both Zahra/present and Ahmed/past occupy the same conceptual and historical moment. Throughout The Sacred Night, we are constantly reminded that individual identity is illusory without recognition of the past that serves to clarify the present and support the self in the formation of a lucid vision of its future. In other words, in order for Zahra to live her womanhood totally—which appears, after all, to be a delightful illusion—she needs to accept the “violence” of the first signifier, Ahmed/colonizer, since it is that signifier that has structured her personality in the first place. Ben Jelloun seems to suggest that the acceptance of the violent intrusion of the past into the present becomes the only possibility for Zahra’s acquiring some form of agency. When she relates her life experience, she is less concerned with the discovery of hidden content than with elaborating a network of meaningful relations that integrate in the present. The decision to tell her story allows her—and her audience as well—to confront the past as a wounded memory in order to exorcise its ghosts and to derive a certain meaning out of it. Because of the impossibility of retrieving a preAhmed—that is, a pre-colonial/pre-symbolic subjectivity—the present can be lived and appropriated only when the past is set free from its fixity, when it is no longer phantasmal or obsessive but becomes one that carries the promise of a future. As John Forrester puts it in his discussion of Freud’s idea of Nachträglichkeit—“belatedness” or “deferred action”— “the past dissolves in the present, so that the future becomes (once again) an open question, instead of being specified by the fixity of the past” (Seductions, 206, his italics). In this sense Zahra, after her hopeless attempts “to forget the past, to stop being guilty, to stop being hounded by rats and spiders” (114), finally recognizes the impossibility of completely blotting out the past. This recognition frees her imagination: “So it was that I emerged from a heavy nightmare as the Consul cast off the pain racking his head. We were (the Consul and herself) both emerging from the same ordeal, which reminded us that we were both cursed. That freed us. We felt freer just because we knew the ghosts of our past would catch up to us in the end” (114). In telling her story—which involves a repetition of its different moments with a time lapse—Zahra is not so much interested in repossessing what is lost as in coming to terms with the awareness that the past will always inhabit the present in different guises. Thus Zahra’s act of telling the story becomes a deliverance from the excesses of her experience: “I’m an old woman now, with all the serenity I need. But I’m going to speak, for I feel encumbered. What weighs me down is not so much the years as all the things I’ve left unsaid, all the things I’ve hidden. . . . I am happy to be here at last. You are my deliverance. . . . I have conquered violence so as to

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earn passion, and to become an enigma. I have long walked the desert; I have paced the night and tamed my pain” (1–2). Zahra’s confession, which occurs in the opening paragraphs of the book, places the audience/reader in the position of her analyst, thus making it/him/her a partner in her retrospective journey. Moreover, the liberation from the traumatic effects of her past life becomes a shared deliverance for her audience/reader as well. As she tells her story and as we read it, we realize that she does not so much intend to relive her memories—for most of them are nightmarish—as appropriate them into the present. Viewed within the context of (her) postcolonial history, Zahra, like her author, does not go back to the past in order to retrieve from it stable images or to invent new ones in order to cover up the de-centeredness of the present. On the contrary, by way of telling and showing her story, she gives form and immediacy to the tension created out of the collision between the past and the present in the formation of a new/other identity. What is more, when reconstructing the events of the past, she not only looks at them retroactively, but she also puts order in their chronological progression and interferes with them, either through a deliberate forgetting or simply by inserting imaginary events. By so doing, Zahra asserts her perspective by subjecting the supremacy of the past to the control of the present. In other words, her objective is to reshape the present—her present identity and history—according to the “uncanniness” (to use Michel de Certeau’s word) of the past that she thinks she has expelled. Jacques Derrida argues in this respect that the “past has never been present,” in the sense that it is only through its reconstruction that the subject becomes aware of its effects (Writing and Difference, 66). Ben Jelloun seems to suggest in turn that it is only through the recognition of the continued existence of the past as a “trace” that one comes to terms with the present. When Zahra adopted her woman’s name, she simply pushed the masculine name, Ahmed, to the background of her memory without erasing its “trace” completely. As mentioned earlier, Zahra’s strategic identification with the masculine construct is intended to disrupt its authoritative discourse. As historical allegory, Zahra’s story captures the tension between the colonial past/trace and the postcolonial present. Symbolically, the pursuit of a precolonial “authentic” and pure origin turns into an illusion since, borrowing François Lyotard’s words, the past has already fortified its quarters within the precincts of the present, modifying the ontological and structural architecture of the subject. Pulled in opposite directions, the postcolonial self inhabits a site of enunciation where neither the past nor the present has a complete presence. Since the emergence of the present depends for its representation on some strategic limitation within the authoritative dis-

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course itself, the self remains perpetually threatened by the return of the repressed. Zahra’s story offers an alternative to essentializing appeals for a pre-Ahmed and pre-colonial subjectivity. Instead of trying to fix the present identity and the identity of the present within a prefabricated construct, Zahra, like her author, seems to displace the authority of that construct by living and assuming her de-centeredness as a “privilege” rather than as a lack. It is true, though, that this privilege, especially if it is not politically and socially justified, may turn into a shallow mimicry of what we were and what we cannot be.

Social Reality Versus Fictive Reality Zahra’s story is not only a story of a past that refuses to die; it is also that of a repressed desire that keeps returning. Despite the background of the Halka that confers on Zahra’s story a fictive nature, the opening sentence of the Preamble—“The truth is what matters”—places the reader into a realist mode of enunciation. The use of the present tense throughout this section and the narrator’s strong desire to reconstruct the “authentic” elements of her story are intended in the first place to frame it within a specific social reality. Interestingly, Zahra’s narrative gathers momentum only through its repeated displacements of established boundaries between the real and the fictive, the “now” and the “then,” and the “here” and the “there.” The transgression of boundaries, which undermines the ideology of realism and the idea of closure, is largely due to the fact that Zahra herself, caught within the conscious/unconscious or, to use Ben Jelloun’s wording, the Zahir/Batin opposition, lives reality as dream and dream as reality. In Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Tzvetan Todorov argues that dreams enable readers to suspend disbelief in order to live within the fantastic as though it were true (30). In The Sacred Night, the more Zahra withdraws from reality—the conscious/Zahir—and lives the dream—the unconscious/Batin—the closer she feels to her “true” self. Throughout, she seems to be caught between reality and dream, which makes it altogether difficult for the reader to attain intelligibility as to what she is experiencing, with the result that what is staged there invites different, sometimes contradictory interpretations. Whenever one tries to pinpoint the locus of her subject(ivity), one simply gets lost in a discursive labyrinth. In a society in which the Name-of-the-Father is so powerful and so omnipresent, recourse to a fantastic style—whether in the form of delirium, dreams, or fantasies—allows Zahra to live in harmony with her desires and fantasies. Ben Jelloun, who is a social psychiatrist by profession, seems to suggest that dreams may offer a way to defeat life’s contradictions and beguile the watchful eye of the Father. One such dream takes places in “The Perfumed

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Garden” chapter. The episode is preceded by a significant transitional chapter, “A Beautiful Day,” which marks the end of Zahra’s spatial confinement within the paternal house and the beginning of her outward journey, a beginning that is fraught with sexual undertones. While still in the cemetery, after her father’s burial, Zahra is abducted by a stranger: I sat behind him, wrapped in the burnoose, my arms around his waist. The mare’s motion made my crossed arms stroke his firm belly up and down. I felt strange, and abandoned myself to the feeling, asking no questions. It was like one of those dreams that continue when you’re awake. . . . I had never been on a horse before. Emotion rose within me in an inner freedom that warmed my body. Adventure is first of all that sense of strangeness of which pleasure is born. . . . I dozed, dreamed, and forgot. (35–36)

The stranger, the horse, the up-and-down motion, the strange sensation she now feels are all expressive of a sexual desire that Zahra has repressed for almost twenty years. This resurgence of desire is given ample expression symbolically in “The Perfumed Garden.” The Perfumed Garden is a privileged space for sexual emancipation precisely because it is a protected mini-utopia—a dream—that lies outside social and cultural strictures. The boundless libidinal indulgence in which Zahra is now immersed can finally sever her from the past. She washes her body in the waters of the secret spring in order to purify herself from the “monster” that she once was: “A wild desire came over me. I took off my saroual, then my underpants, to please the wind, to please myself, to feel the cool, light touch of the morning breeze on my belly, rousing my senses. I was in a wood. . . . I was dreaming. I was happy, delirious, all new and alert. I was life, pleasure, desire” (41). This experience of the Perfumed Garden represents Zahra’s “real” birth. It is intriguing to see how Zahra’s first moments of freedom are expressed through sexual emancipation, outside patriarchal and social laws. We may discern in this correlation between sexuality and space the idea that social emancipation appears possible only through sexual emancipation. It is nonetheless true that sexual liberation may prepare the way for a larger social liberation from the bonds and constraints that morality and tradition impose on the self.12 The language of the body, stripped of the falsehood of its social and cultural trappings, may supplant the language of morality and provide a locus for a disillusioned search of/into the self. From a postmodern perspective, the Perfumed Garden episode is a counterinscription of the fifteenth-century booklet on eroticism, al-Rawd al-‘Atir [The Perfumed Garden] by the Tunisian theologian Sheikh AlNafzawi. Despite the sexual freedom that is granted in Islam, Sheikh AlNafzawi’s cultural conservatism structures this freedom according to cer-

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tain rigid norms and regulations. Since then, sexuality has often been linked to feelings of frustration and repression. Zahra’s momentary erotic jubilation represents, as it were, an ironic interrogation of the dogmatic discourse on (female) sexuality in the Arabo-Islamic world. The freedom that she feels now in the Perfumed Garden may be read as a projection of a repressed collective desire. The scene appears unreal because it is detached from Zahra’s reality, but it is real because it communicates libidinal impulses (her) social ego does not generally tolerate. Since the Perfumed Garden evokes the marvels of nature as celebrated in romance and fairy tales, the reader may accept it as an attempt to rescue Zahra’s subjective consciousness from its social and historical determinism. The reference in this chapter to a “Republic” of children living “outside time” suggests, however, that Zahra can repossess her body only in mythic time. Her subsequent discovery of her feminine sexuality immediately launches a historicizing process that leads to her expulsion from the garden. In other words, the moment she becomes aware of her sexual difference, she enters into linear time, since this awareness involves a subjective temporality that conflicts with mythic and circular time. Zahra’s ephemeral (sexual) liberation is ironically undercut by the simple fact that it occurs outside real history. And since The Sacred Night is no Wonderland, reality is just a hairbreadth away. As she herself admits: “The dream had been too beautiful; now the nightmare was on its way” (43). Immediately after the short-lived euphoria of liberation—read as independence— reality imposes its laws with no less violence than in the past. In the chapter entitled “A Dagger Caressing My Back,” Zahra experiences a “real” rape, the first one, the twisting of her gender, being symbolic. Occurring in the wake of the dream of liberation, the rape scene calls for contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, the rape represents the return of the Name/Law-of-the-Father. The faceless rapist accompanies his act with religious incantations; the rape for him is an act of selffulfillment. Zahra’s experience epitomizes that of Arab women and nations who silently bear the wounds that different figures of authority—whether colonialist, nationalist, or neocolonialist—inflict on their bodies. On the other hand, Zahra submits to the rapist; she even refrains from crying out or struggling: “I had neither the strength not the desire to resist. . . . For the first time another body was mingling with mine” (56–57). Zahra’s attitude may be interpreted as a deliberate vengeance on the patriarchal mentality that enslaves woman’s body within an exacting principle of virginity. In this sense, the rape offers Zahra an occasion to defy the code of chastity and to reclaim her female identity. Just as the scene of circumcision in L’Enfant de sable reinforces the Name-of-the-Father through the celebration of an absent phallus, the rape becomes Zahra’s strategy to return to a No-Father world of signification. Through her willingness to accept the

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wound of the rape, she appears capable of appropriating any other strategy that will allow her to disrupt the cultural and moral authority of the Father’s discourse. Examining these two chapters, “The Perfumed Garden” and “A Dagger Caressing My Back,” we may wonder why scenes of Zahra’s physical mutilation occur on the level of the conscious, whereas those depicting her intermittent liberation happen only in dreams. Such a concern acknowledges the subversive relationship Ben Jelloun establishes between the real and the imaginary, between the discourse of the doxa and his own. In almost all his novels to date, Ben Jelloun’s metaphorical discourse focuses on woman, both as fictive body and as sexual object, an obsession that offends many of his Arab (female) readers. Ever since his first novel, Harrouda (1973), Ben Jelloun has opted for an idiosyncratic way of approaching reality through a sort of metarealism, where notions of plausibility and verisimilitude are turned upside down. Such a metarealism shifts the old notion of mimesis and replaces it with a sort of “magic realism” that displaces the conventional barre between the representational code of realism and that of fantasy and the fantastic. For example, “The Perfumed Garden” gives free vent to a repressed sexual desire, whereas the rape scene enforces the harsh reality of Zahra’s confinement within a patriarchal mentality. Through the juxtaposition of these two experiences, Ben Jelloun seeks to oppose desire to repression, freedom to imprisonment, and femininity to masculinity as a strategy to create a tension between them that forces them in the direction of a synthetic resolution. Within this context, he posits a battle between oppositional systems, each working toward the invasion of the other, each losing a part in that conquest. Zahra’s decision, therefore, to tell her story in public to a male audience is intended to make this audience aware of the psychological and social pressures germane to the experience of a woman raised as a man and of the possibility of transforming these pressures into a regenerative cultural and gender politics. One such possibility is implied in Zahra’s love affair with the Consul. Both the Consul and Zahra suffer from a physical infirmity: the former is deprived of sight, the latter of her (body) language. During her stay with the Consul and his sister, Zahra gradually liberates the Consul from his sister’s authority and from their perverse relationship. She also becomes his guide inside the brothel and ultimately his favorite “prostitute.” Through him, Zahra discovers, though by proxy, the secret language of sexuality. Even if the Consul is deprived of basar (sight), he nonetheless possesses an extraordinary gift of basira, or insight into the language of the female body. Contrary to the strange sensation Zahra felt when she was “raped,” she now experiences a genuine sexual pleasure: “In a brothel with a blind man I was discovering pleasure for the first time in my life” (118).

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In the company of the Consul, Zahra indulges in an inhibited jouissance (enjoyment) of her body, beyond the male gaze and the false pretensions of society. But even here she does not really attain the truth about herself, since in the sexual charade in the brothel she deliberately performs the part of the prostitute, a role that reinforces once more the duplicity of her identity. However ephemeral her experience with the Consul, it nevertheless teaches her that her search for a pure identity is but a sheer chimera. Through the blind Consul, Zahra gradually discovers that truth lies beyond the visible and the apparent. Such a mystical understanding of reality is emphasized by the constant references to the genius of Arab mystic poets, especially the blind poet Al-Ma’rri, for whom “appearance” is the most perverse mask of truth (124–125). The discovery that reality is illusive becomes crucial to Zahra’s (re)construction of her identity and informs her decision, later in prison, to wear a blindfold in order to obliterate immediate reality and attain internal knowledge. She welcomes complete darkness, not only because she wants to be in permanent communion with the Consul, but because blindness has become for her the ultimate “way,” in its Taoist significance, to know the secret of the self, its truth. Her previous experiences have taught her that the world of appearances—Zahir—does not necessarily reveal the reality of things and beings. That is why, in their conversations, the Consul stresses the limits of sight and privileges hearing and touch in knowing reality. He teaches her that “blindness” is not an infirmity but a revelation of the “virtues of the obscure” (125) and that the truth is closer to the shadow than to the tree that casts it (125). Like the episode in the Perfumed Garden, the romantic episode with the Consul does not last: “My brief but intense happiness would be violently interrupted” (129). The paternal/colonial past visits upon Zahra under the guise of one of her uncles. Zahra shoots and kills the uncle, for which she serves a fifteen-year sentence in a “real” jail. Thus, the paternal past never lets go of Zahra; it keeps haunting her, unsettling the tranquility of the present. As in Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, the dead father continues to visit upon his children long after he has disappeared: “Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead” (3). Zahra’s murder of the uncle recalls the second burial she gave to her father and thus the impossibility of keeping the past where it belongs: “With my uncle’s death I had liquidated the past (or so I thought)” (144). Her fifteen-year imprisonment brings back images of the crippled and ruined body and the seclusion of the paternal room from which she thinks she has escaped. The harsh treatment—excision—which she receives at the hands of her sisters in prison represents yet another violent visitation of the past. This time the visitation takes the form of a vengeful and “twisted religion” (128), which she has so far disregarded.

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Contrary to Nawal Al-Saadawi’s heroine in Woman at Point Zero (1975), Firdaws, who pays with her life for having killed a pimp, Zahra leaves the prison resolved to make good use of her power as a storyteller to control and redirect her audience’s/reader’s desires. Unlike Al-Saadawi, who depicts a world where women seem to be inexorably stuck at “point zero,” Ben Jelloun grants his women protagonists the possibility of challenging the patriarchal laws and restrictions imposed upon them. After her experience of internment, the Consul’s love and advice again save Zahra from her state of decrepitude. This time, the search for her true “self” is instigated not by the power of darkness but by the splendor of light that is capable of diffusing the illusion of appearances. Zahra becomes obsessed with the idea of a supernatural light from the sky, a “light so strong it would make (her) body transparent, cleanse it, restore to it the pleasure of astonishment, the innocence of knowing the beginning of things” (164). If blindness obliterates the apparent and makes it indiscernible, light provokes the opening of the self onto a transparency that effaces all physical or imaginary barres. Implied in this metaphor of light is the mystical experience of transcendence. It is the Consul who, in his last letter to Zahra, indicates its gifts before he disappears in the light, where the phantoms of the past and of the apparent vanish one after the other (175). In his last letter, the Consul gives Zahra a sort of road map indicating the direction to the south, a mystic land par excellence toward which she walks after her release from prison. A “nomad space,” to use Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s terms, the south opens onto a limitless expanse.13 The final chapter, the “Gate of the Sands,” stands in sharp opposition to the different closed gates and spaces through which Zahra’s story has progressed. Implied in the metaphor of the desert is the idea that life—civilization—begins and ends there, in the south. Reaching this ultimate point of no return in her life, Zahra aspires to shed her old self; that is, her Father’s multiple linguistic, cultural, and national(ist) constructs. Through the last image of the novel, she probes toward a tragic immortality, a sort of sainthood. At the end of her journey, she reaches the top of a hill that stands between the desert and the sea. Given the limitlessness of the desert and the ocean, Zahra may at last begin a new journey, beyond all the barres that have alienated her from her language, body, country, and history. The narrative closes on a mystical note; in order to join the Consul in the desert, Zahra must get through/into light and beyond the transience of life into death.

Conclusion Like her author, Zahra remains an “evasive” subject(ivity). After her

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southward journey, she reappears in the public square of Jama’ El-Fna in order to communicate her (hi)story. By bringing her back from the south to Jama’ El-Fna, from mystical enlightenment to reality, from the far end of the narrative to its beginning, Ben Jelloun seems to suggest that only through the narrating of (hi)story may one redeem the violence of the past and appropriate its “traces” into a positive vision of the future. “At last, you are here!” is the last phrase of the novel, the end of Zahra’s journey, and it may be the beginning of a new nomadic (hi)story. Like Sheherazade, Zahra has yet another story to tell . . . the story of how other social, economic, and political barres that partition the postcolonial Moroccan space may be removed in their turn.

Notes 1. Tahar Ben Jelloun, La Nuit sacrée [The Sacred Night], trans. Allen Sheridan. All references are to this edition. All other translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. Ben Jelloun refers to The Sacred Night as an “oriental novel,” a description through which he intends to assert his idiosyncratic identity and style. The Sacred Night, which was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1987, is a sequel to The Sand Child. 2. I am thinking here of the use of istitrad (digression) by Al-Djahid in his famous allegory, Kitab al-Hayawan [The Book of Animals]. For an extensive discussion of this narrative technique in the Moroccan novel in French, consult Abdellah Memmes, Littérature maghrébine de language française. 3. Halka involves a storyteller sitting on the floor with the audience standing around him or her in a circle. The most popular place for storytelling in presentday Morocco is Jama’ el-Fna in Marrakech. 4. For a definition of these “tactics” and “practices,” see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. 5. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau shows how “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across” (129). 6. One may consider Driss Chraïbi’s first novel in French, Le Passé simple (1954), as an example of a revolt against the father, ironically called the Lord. The scene of the knife leaves no doubt that Driss Ferdi, the protagonist, is seriously considering killing his father. For a related discussion of this issue, see Mohamed Boughali, Espaces d’écriture au Maroc. 7. This concerns more particularly written literature. As for everyday life, the Maghrebian space remains highly sexualized. In fact, one basic tenet of Islam is the integration of sexuality into everyday experience. 8. In Rachid Boudjedra’s La Répudiation (1969), for instance, Rachid, the narrator, is able to communicate the inexpressible—his incestuous impulses, his mother’s sexual repression, and his erotic fantasies—only through/to his French mistress Céline. For further examples of the representation of the mother in Maghrebian literature, see Hedi Abdel-Jaoud’s article, “‘Too Much in the Sun’: Sons, Mothers, and Impossible Alliances in Francophone Maghrebian Writing.” Though I do not subscribe to Abdel-Jaoud’s opposition between the oral and the

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written, the article provides an interesting debut to a serious reflection on postcolonial Maghrebian literature. 9. In “Breaking Up/Down/Out of the Boundaries,” Mustapha Harrouchi sees in the dispute opposing Zahra to her audience an example of how “a subversive narrative can disrupt the euphoria that traditionally characterizes the narrative pact and it can disappoint listeners who are seeking no more than a mere entertainment” (73). 10. According to Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, Ernest Jones first introduced the term in a 1927 essay dealing with “Early Developments of Female Sexuality.” They explain that for Jones, aphanisis means the fear of losing all sexual desire, which is common to both sexes and more intense than the fear of castration (“The Language of Psycho-Analysis,” 40). See also Regis Durand’s “On Aphanisis.” 11. In his seminal work on contemporary Arab ideology, Abdullah Laroui discusses the example of his native country, Morocco, and concludes: “Our consciousness in Morocco drifts between the determinations of the past and the call of the future. . . . Neither our present, nor our past, nor our future are real or experienced as such” (L’Idéologie, 66). 12. For a discussion of the erotic dimension of The Sacred Night, see Marguerite R. Zappala, “Les Erotismes dans La Nuit sacrée.” 13. In A Thousand Plateaus, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari make a distinction between “sedentary space” and “nomad space.” Whereas the first is “striated” by walls, enclosures, and roads, the second is flat, marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory (381).

Works Cited Abdel-Jaoud, Hedi. “‘Too Much in the Sun’: Sons, Mothers, and Impossible Alliances in Francophone Maghrebian Writing.” Research in African Literatures 27.3 (1996): 15–33. Bakhtin, Michael. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Ben Jelloun, Tahar. The Sand Child. Paris: Seuil, 1985. ———. La Nuit sacrée. Paris: Seuil, 1987. ———. The Sacred Night. Trans. Allen Sheridan. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. ———. Jeune Afrique. 1404 (December 1987): 44–45. Boudjedra, Rachid. La Repudiation. Paris: Denoël, 1969. Boughali, Mohamed. Espaces d’écriture au Maroc. Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 1987. Davis, Robert Con, ed. Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

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Durand, Regis. “On Aphanisis: A Note on the Dramaturgy of the Subject in Narrative Analysis.” In Lacan and Narration: The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, ed. Roger Con Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983, 860–870. Forrester, John. The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Harrouchi, Mustapha. “Breaking Up/Down/Out of the Boundaries: Tahar Ben Jelloun.” Research in African Literatures 21.4 (1990): 73. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits II. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Laroui, Abdullah. L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine. Paris: Maspero, 1967. MacCannel, Juliet Flower. Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa. Women’s Body, Women’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Mellard, James. Using Lacan, Reading Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Memmes, Abdellah. Littérature maghrébine de language française: Significance et interculturalité. Rabat: Editions Okad, 1992. Mezgueldi, Zohra. Corps au féminin. Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1991. Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Zappala, Marguerite R. “Les Erotismes dans La Nuit sacrée.” Francofonia (Spring 1989): 99–113.

5

: Rescripting Modernity: Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Archaeology of Signs Lucy Stone McNeece

The approach of the millennium brings into focus cultural tendencies that have evolved quietly over several decades. In the postcolonial and postmodern world, the role of the writer and intellectual is currently the subject of a debate tied to the changing function of signs and images in the global community. The uncertain status of the writer reflects larger developments in contemporary culture that have dramatically altered familiar conceptions of history, nationhood, and identity, even the notion of “culture” itself. These developments include the emergence of transnational capitalism and the increasing dominance of Western interests and ideas on the world market, as well as the impact of that market upon developing cultures. The accompanying transformations of modes of exchange have resulted in globalization, the worldwide dissemination of ideas and products, which tends to reflect the hegemony of Western values. The situation is exacerbated by the contradictions arising from the encounter between societies with strong oral traditions and those that have become highly industrialized, where influence has taken the form of an accelerated and often incoherent modernization of the developing nations that leads to the effacement, distortion, or commodification of their traditions. The controversy surrounding the postcolonial writer and intellectual, therefore, derives in part from the necessity for the writer to interpolate between different language systems but also between different systems of thought and belief, to conjugate questions of meaning and value according to disparate epistemological and metaphysical traditions in a situation of unequal power relations. An observer from within, the writer is also asked to assume an ethical task in a world where ethics—indeed, questions pertaining to the social good—have been subordinated to other concerns and classified as either outdated or idealistic. Furthermore, the postcolonial writer is asked to address the emotional consequences of centuries of his81

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torical injustice to awaken the deadened sensibilities of oppressed peoples. Asked to play the role of “conscience,” the writer has also become a scapegoat for frustrated dreams. Poised at the intersection of conflicting imperatives issuing from the paradoxical relations that obtain between Europe and its former colonies, writers and intellectuals, many educated in Europe and writing in the languages of empire, are asked to demonstrate their solidarity with their own people while acting as agents of outreach and dialogue and are obliged to affirm “native” ties, often from the position of exiles. For the Moroccan writer and intellectual Abdelkébir Khatibi, the writer’s “ambiguous” status is crucial to his or her function as translator, as mediator between what he would call “dyssemetric” cultural systems but also between alienated elements of a single culture. The writer is also often charged with interpreting the silences of history, filling its blanks, and deciphering cultural inscriptions embedded in traditions that have too often been indentured to abstract ideals of nationalism or religion. Nonetheless, laboring alone, the writer’s highest task, Khatibi suggests, is neither to reassure nor to confirm desires for unity, identity, and closure in an unstable world but to disrupt the forces of complacency and certitude, to interfere with the entropic pull toward rootedness and solidification: “une Pensée qui ne soit pas minoritaire, marginale, fragmentaire et inachevée, est toujours une pensée de l’ethnocide” [a thought that is not of the minority, marginal, fragmented and unfinished, is always a thought of ethnocide] (Maghreb pluriel, 18). While the international academic community strives to legitimate postcolonial literatures in relation to the European canon, certain postcolonial writers are faced with a different, less academic task: that of negotiating the passage to modernity without either surrendering a fragile autonomy or simplifying complex realities. Very few writers, such as Khatibi himself, have embarked on ambitious projects of both theoretical and practical dimensions that concern the very bases of civil society as well as the function of literature and the role of the writer in contemporary postmodern culture. For Khatibi, the postcolonial writer’s ambiguous position between Europe and Africa, West and East, affords him or her an unusual perspective on how aesthetic and literary discourse operates with respect to ideological and political structures on all shores of the Mediterranean. Rejecting the modernist notion of “literature” as an activity divorced from other cultural productions, writers such as Khatibi have attempted to restore the act of writing to its place as an integral component of social and political life and to expand the conception of “writing” itself to encompass a range of signifying practices. Refusing the notion of art as a refuge removed from ethics and other social acts, they recognize that artistic production, even though it may attain universal validity, always reflects

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as well specific investments and conflicts in the social, economic, and political spheres. When Khatibi speaks of de-colonization as a process of deconstruction, he is referring to the need to discern beneath the rhetoric of authority the ideological—and arbitrary—bases of Western logocentric paradigms.1 Referring to the writer’s balancing act, Khatibi says that he or she “est cette être double, dédoublé . . . tant qu’il se maintient dans cette exigence de se critiquer en s’effaçant dans l’objet d’analyse à déconstituer” [is this double being, doubled . . . so long as he holds himself to the task of criticizing himself while effacing himself in the object of analysis he aims to dismantle] (Maghreb pluriel, 50). Khatibi has adamantly eschewed the prevailing discourses that polarize East and West, North and South, Europe and its Other(s). He has chosen another discrete and more arduous archaeological approach to intercultural understanding, one that is controversial because it threatens the institutional investments that govern the writing of cultural history and demands analytic reflection of all citizens. His approach is one in which the writer-researcher must embark like a solitary voyager upon a quest that he or she knows will never lead to any “grail.” Suspending personal affinities and affiliations, the writer must become a kind of “orphan,” not a “ward of the state” but an exile in his or her own land. Ironically, this choice may be interpreted as a form of betrayal by his or her contemporaries, but it is the author’s need to observe both more broadly and more in depth than is possible from a position of enracinement (rootedness). Khatibi calls himself un étranger professionel, by which he stresses the importance of distance for the writer with respect to his own culture and to others: “Le voyageur qui passe dans ce pays saisit spontanément un secret, qui lui demeure cependant voilé (toute civilisation est un ensemble de voiles), alors que le séjournant—ou le naturel du pays—ne peut se voir de l’extérieur comme élément transfiguré de la nature” [The traveler who comes into this country spontaneously grasps a secret, which nevertheless remains veiled (all civilizations are an ensemble of veils), whereas he who stays here—or a native of the country—is unable to see himself from the outside as an element of nature transfigured] (L’Oeuvre, 72). Because his commitment to his culture is oriented precisely toward discerning those elements of his culture that tend toward invisibility, Khatibi is sometimes criticized by those impatient for either magical solutions or explicit support for a narrow concept of Moroccan identity. It is but one of many risks he must take. Convinced that cultures are constructed in a manner analogous to languages, Khatibi has approached contemporary problems hermeneutically by studying the dynamics of the past, but less the distilled past of official history than the complex derivation of forms and traces embedded deep within the practices of both scholarly and popular culture. Khatibi’s La Blessure du nom propre (1974) demonstrated the now-familiar idea that

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the ontological schism resulting from the experience of foreign occupation was tantamount to a physical mutilation occurring through the suppression of forms of language; it was a wound that revealed the degree to which personal identity, writing, and the body are inseparably bound and that, even if not literally tattooed in the flesh, the network of sensory values woven into language are inalienable because they are inscribed in the body’s memory. In trying to write about this unusual text, the writer Claude Ollier speaks in poetic terms of the way the culture imprints itself on the imaginary: “travail de la lettre sur le corps, dévolution des parties du corps aux composantes des proverbes, inscription symbolique des graphes tatoués, métaphorisation des noms du sexe dans l’érotique des conteurs, agressivité labyrinthique des calligrammes” [the labor of the letter upon the body, the way the parts of the body evolve into the elements of proverbs, the symbolic inscription of tattooed marks, the metaphoric names given to sex in the erotic style of storytellers, the labyrinthine aggressiveness of calligraphic letters] (L’Oeuvre, 140). Cultures, Khatibi believes, carry with them material vestiges and echoes—tattoos—of a history that is quite literally inaccessible until subjected to a process of transcription or translation. In the same way that languages carry hidden grafts acquired in their exchange with other languages, cultures often hide signs of their evolution inscribed into the heterogeneous forms of their material practices. Unlike certain philological projects undertaken for nationalistic reasons, Khatibi’s work does not have as its object any essentialist affirmation of Moroccan or Maghrebian identity, nor does it seek to celebrate a return to any idealized tradition. In fact, his work systematically indicts the very notion of ideal or absolute origins, revealing that all ideas, forms, and practices are infinitely receding, nomadic figures that have at intervals been trapped by monological discourse. Khatibi’s research reexamines his people’s historical relations to signs, figures, and forms, hoping to discern in them principles of translation that may mediate between the dissonant voices and disparate spaces of contemporary culture. As the Maghreb’s foremost writer and intellectual devoting creative and critical energies to an archaeological project of such dimensions, Khatibi’s work affords the reader a privileged view of the issues that affect all areas of Moroccan culture. As director of the Institut de Recherches Scientifiques near the University of Mohammed V in Rabat, Khatibi is charged with the task of overseeing a broad spectrum of research on Moroccan history and language, social institutions and urban development, artisanal production and technology, art, and literature produced both in Arabic and European languages. He is also responsible for integrating local research and production into international developments. He must tread a delicate path between nationalist agendas and transnationalist concerns,

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reconciling literary and scientific discourses and articulating questions of scientific method and those of poetic value. His position as head of the research institute has placed him in a relation of responsibility to the state, but it has also afforded him the opportunity to work collectively on a range of subjects with specialists in many fields and thus to move between the different “languages” of scientific research that too often speak in isolation. It has also, unquestionably, forced him to reevaluate his personal relation to the political process. As an early member of the radical review Souffles, founded in 1966 by Abdellatif Laabi, Khatibi’s early literary career was tied to developments in the public sphere, to politics in the largest sense.2 After the review was closed down in 1971—and even before—Khatibi’s career entered a phase that led him toward individual reflection and a more personal exploration of his own past in relation to foreign traditions. Khatibi’s La Mémoire tatouée (1971) challenged the conventions of autobiography, explored diverse forms of subjectivity, and incorporated a range of scriptural practices and heterogeneous narrative conventions. A chronicle of his personal decolonization, Mémoire also introduced Khatibi’s preoccupation with cultural deconstruction and anticipated some of his subsequent stylistic experiments. The text illustrated his conviction that style is basically the form of thought rather than an adornment for preconceived ideas or an embellishment for anecdote. In many ways a seminal text, Mémoire anticipated the logic governing the close relationship that obtains between the critical and creative acts in Khatibi’s work. Narrative and linguistic forms function as cognitive agents in Khatibi’s writing, shaping ideas and altering perceptions. The conventional—largely European—opposition between imaginative activity and intellectual or critical activity has little validity for him. Just as in certain cultures parables or fables traditionally organized experience in ways capable of changing habits of thought, Khatibi uses narrative and poetic forms to effect changes in the readers’ understanding of the realities underlying their experience. In Mémoire, Khatibi’s narrator is a traveler who inhabits a variety of forms, ideas, and ways of being-in-the-world, assuming personae and voices as diverse as teacher and student, Islamic leader and disciple, visionary and madman, Frenchman and Moroccan, Jew and Muslim, male and female, doctor and patient, and exile and host. After a prolonged journey that takes him to distant parts of the world, the narrator returns like a swallow to Morocco to discover neither a homeland nor a lost paradise but rather a complex, syncretistic cultural space that has yet to be awakened to the reality of its hybrid history, of which he, the narrator, seemingly so alienated from his origins, is a living trace. Khatibi’s writing, though internationally acclaimed and translated into many languages, has also raised controversy because it is considered to be

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hermetic and intellectually elitist. He is criticized for writing in French and for embracing French poststructuralist theories and poetics. Both accusations are in part true but equally misleading, in that Khatibi’s use of French is strategic as well as mimetic and subversive as well as respectful. Like his use of both modern and historical principles to analyze contemporary culture, writing in French is ultimately a conscious choice that allows him to perform a “double critique,” an analysis of Western metaphysics and that of his own traditions. Khatibi is an acknowledged disciple of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Arthur Rimbaud, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida but also of the Andalusian Sufi masters, Ibn Khaldun, and other Arabic scholars as well as Asian poets. His work may be described as a sort of “plural genealogy” in which he stages the confrontation of West and East, Europe and the Maghreb, and self and Other in order to expose their respective points of suture. Deforming stereotypes persist because knowledge concerning each culture—even in one’s relation to one’s own—can only be dislodged by examining the epistemic forms of history. Only by viewing each culture’s concepts and ideals in their material forms can one hope to uncover their contingency, their derivation, and the hidden scars that speak of broken dialogues and forgotten histories. Remarkable in its formal diversity, Khatibi’s writing moves restlessly between the domains of fiction, poetry, history, anthropology, aesthetics, linguistics, literary criticism, and philosophical reflection. These boundaries are redefined even within individual texts. His writing is haunted by a passion for the trans-semiotic, for the processes by which forms are translated across boundaries of time, space, and culture. Very broadly, Khatibi’s work may be divided into three areas: the writing of fiction and poetry; essays on society and culture, both popular and scholarly; and commentaries on the visual arts, often done in close collaboration with artists or photographers. These three areas reflect his analysis of the interlocking modalities by which Maghrebian culture expresses itself but also his theory of culture generally. I would argue, furthermore, that these areas are all always present for Khatibi, to the extent that his fiction is permeated with reflections on society and culture, his essays are replete with imaginary or poetic figures, and in all his writing there is a creative tension between the verbal and the visual, between the sign as symbol and the sign as figure. In fact, ideas are born in Khatibi’s writing as figures rather than formulas, as parables rather than arguments. In an essay on the mosaic and the rosace, he indicates the power of visual designs to orient thought, which occurs through the sensory experience of principles that may be termed geometric or architectural. The mosaic of the rosace, the stylized reinscription of nature’s most highly charged symbol, the rose, mirrors the paradox of humanity’s double destiny, its paradoxical death-inlife in which it inhabits at least two worlds or two systems simultaneously:

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the mosaic captures the beauty of the rose in its ecstatic release that is haunted by death. So do individuals live within dyssemetric worlds of space and time ruled by different rhythms, just as they inhabit different languages and cultural systems governed by contrasting uses of signs. The spaces between different uses of language, as between different functions of the sign, are the spaces of freedom for Khatibi, of risk and discovery. Exploring those interim, liminal spaces allows him to undermine all types of orthodoxy, whether political or religious, even as it may also threaten those identifications that protect the psyche from suicide or madness. The protean character of Khatibi’s work, however, is far from the production of a madman. And despite its diversity, neither is it that of a dilettante; it is rather a felicitous consequence of his fascination with the interstitial and the intra- and intercultural, of his uncanny grasp of the paradox of difference that leads the mind to seek its “double” or rather an “other” by which, with which, and against which the self can explore both its private and collective truths, that is to say, its mysteries. In Khatibi’s work, however, the elegiac longing for unity and identity that so often besets the postcolonial individual yields to the incessant pursuit of—and delight in—the intractable distance that separates. For Khatibi, as I have suggested, the space of that difference is indispensable to the productive life: it is the condition of self-knowledge, creativity, and cultural survival. The challenge of postmodernity is precisely to find ways to translate potentially conflicting imperatives: to mediate not only between the demands of science and technology and those of the spirit; between personal freedoms and the collective good; between personal memory and official history, between the values of tradition and those of modernity; and between public rhetoric and private realities; but also between different ways of writing and different notions of the holy and between loyalty to cultural ideals and the tolerance of different beliefs. Khatibi’s eclectic approach to the contradictions of contemporary culture leads him further than many of his fellow writers and intellectuals in an attempt to establish a dialogue with the liberal democracies of the West as well as with the nations of the East. Although many Maghrebians categorically reject the rigidity of orthodox Islam and also scorn the prevailing model of capitalist modernity as one more imperialist “gift,” Khatibi reaches simultaneously back into the pre-colonial past and toward the transnational future, turning “tradition” against itself, identifying the sources and tensions in the evolution of Moroccan beliefs, but also advocating dialogue with other cultures that have no obvious relevance for Maghrebians. This “exotic” impulse is evident in Ombres japonaises (1989), a text inspired by Roland Barthes but more immediately by a text written in 1933 by Junichiro Tanizaki entitled L’Eloge de l’ombre.3 Hence Khatibi’s text is

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a kind of palimpsest or “translation” of another’s text and therefore a most eloquent expression of Khatibi’s own “poetics of the trace” as well as of his discovery of Asiatic culture and language. Intrigued by Japan’s paradoxical relation to an ancestral past and its technical transformation into a modern state, Khatibi explores the ethics and aesthetics of the invisible links between stylized visual representation and writing. He is almost hypnotized by features that remind him—differentially—of his own culture, such as the importance of absence and silence to the articulation of meaning, the beauty of oblique or indirect representation, the mystic power of the material sign, and the magic of calligraphy. Attempting to transcend exotic fantasies, Khatibi interrogates the figures that govern the Japanese imaginary, finding, to his surprise, that Japanese culture shares certain features with traditional Arabic culture: a passion for stylization as a type of spiritual exercise, a kind of writing that hovers between icon and symbol, and a close relationship between the aesthetic and the social. Such a relationship between the rules of life and those of art is inscribed within the semantics of the Arabic language itself, in the double connotation of the word El Adab, signifying “literature” but also courteous or civilized behavior. Refinement and precision are to be found in the codes of each. Khatibi is enchanted by the ritualized complexity that governs human interaction and artistic practice in Japanese culture, seeing in this distant society a use of form and a relation to signs similar to—while different from—that which once prevailed in the cultures of the Maghreb. Ombres japonaises demands of the reader, according to Khatibi, an elaborate ritual of courtship composed of seduction and receptivity, assertion and repose, and engagement and self-reflection that has become emblematic of Khatibi’s theory of the relation to the Other. His notion of hospitalité, a concept that suggests the ambiguity of the term hôte, which in French designates both “host” and “guest,” is predicated on ceremonial courtesy that, unlike the vain hypocrisy of many social conventions, is egalitarian and reciprocal. The related concept of aimance, as Khatibi intends it, is an ethico-aesthetic protocol for negotiating the shifting terrain of the cultural encounter. Reminiscent of medieval courtoisie (chivalry), it suggests far more than simple obedience to social imperatives. Demanding the highest level of intuition and intelligence, it embraces the paradox of identification and distance, reveals the necessity for empathy and self-knowledge, and defines the nature of civility as a kind of dance inspired by reserve and compassion occurring within the limits of a particular moment in time. A mode of responsiveness that becomes the basis of responsibility, it recalls T. S. Eliot’s celebrated refrain in Four Quartets: “To care and not to care.” Khatibi’s gestures toward difference include his eagerness to entertain the necessity of actively implementing the discoveries of modern technology

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and science. For Khatibi, discoveries in technology and science, although historically vehicles of Western rationalism, potentially offer occasions for reinvention and transcription according to a different ideology, a possibility that depends upon Maghrebians’ capacity to undertake the process of adaptation themselves. Technology has been in some ways analogous to a foreign language for the Maghrebian, yet although a carrier of alien meanings, it may be tempered to another purpose in much the same way that North African writers, like those of other former colonies, have been “rewriting” the discourses and the ideology of colonialism. In a special issue of the review Signes du présent, founded by Khatibi, entitled “Culture et temps techniques,” (Signes du present, 7), Khatibi states his objective as one of exploring the intersections of the traditionally disparate notions of mythic or sacred time and modern, secular time, using poetry, drawings, charts, graphs, and philosophical texts from distant cultures and periods to demonstrate astonishing correspondences and reversals. Khatibi marvels at the miracles of technology, at the possibilities for intercontinental communication, for example. He recognizes the importance for Morocco to participate in technological progress and to use the technology available for its own ends. In the end, Khatibi grasps its poetic as well as humanistic value and, far from resisting the advances of science, recognizes basic correspondences between the creativity of science and that of religion and art throughout cultural evolution. Khatibi realizes, however, that the “translation” or transformation of technology into forms that reflect Moroccan ideals and culture is absolutely necessary if Maghrebians are to become authors of their future rather than having it written for them. Although this position may seem paradoxical, Khatibi has grasped something crucial to the destiny of North African cultures that he is at pains to express in a variety of ways. His unorthodox position is organically derived from his premises concerning the differential function of form across cultural boundaries. Khatibi’s formal diversity, his literary “inconsistency,” as it were, may be understood as an attempt to attract attention to the epistemological function of form, to the way it shapes experience and produces knowledge of the world. Khatibi has understood that the misunderstandings and entrenched prejudices that persist in the minds of both Moroccans and foreigners concerning the nature of Moroccan and Maghrebian culture generally are complicated by the vast differences between European and North African aesthetic and epistemological traditions, as well as by the “discontinuities” of their history. These seemingly disparate traditions are not merely questions to tempt the specialist or the scholar of art or history: they concern all citizens, for their confrontation and interference have had a determining effect upon contemporary culture and upon Maghrebians’ vision of themselves and others.

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As Europe evolved from a predominantly oral culture in which only a very few had access to writing, it altered its way of interpreting—reading—orally derived forms such as parable, fable, and allegory, just as it codified its language and later altered its conception of writing with the advent of the printed medium. Despite the prolonged French colonial presence in the Maghreb in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, forms typical of an earlier era, such as riddles, fables, and allegory as well as other popular forms of expression, remain vital in the Maghrebian imagination and continue to organize experience and shape Moroccans’ vision of the world. This does not mean that the Moroccans live in a world of fable or that their culture lacks rationality; rather it refers to the persistence of traditional forms within the conventions of modernity. Khatibi reminds Europeans that they tend to forget the process of codification that rendered the French language “universal,” a process that necessarily marginalized numerous dialects and forms of expression. Writing in the Maghreb today cannot be understood apart from its complex history. The “realist,” or mimetic, concept of representation imported with European colonialism was adopted readily and has been practiced by the community of francophone Maghrebian writers and artists, but it has remained in some ways an extrinsic or borrowed form because it orders experience according to different principles than those organically rooted in their experience. Khatibi notes that the conventions of literary autobiography became appropriated readily by Moroccans because they previously had few conventions for subjective discourse, and written selfexpression became an integral part of the process of both personal and collective discovery. The North Africans’ relation to signs reflects a dislocation or asymmetry that some, like Khatibi, have described as “schizophrenic,” resulting in part from the disglossia between written and spoken languages, a situation exacerbated by the imposition of French but also by the proximity of other languages such as Berber and Spanish within Morocco, particularly. Maghrebians retain a heightened sensitivity to the plastic or graphic forms of writing and inscriptions as well as to the musical sounds and rhythms of words that inevitably conditions their interpretation of language. The primacy of signifiers is also evident in the prevalence of abstract decorative forms that circulate and adorn the spaces and objects of daily life. The attention to forms as the primary vehicles of meaning is further evident in Maghrebians’ use of narrative, where, even when writing in French, they often combine structures typical of oral literature with European rhetorical conventions. The result is frequently a text that oscillates, quite literally, between disparate and irreconcilable types of reading: between a naturalistic or psychological reading and an allegorical one, between a three-dimensional and a two-dimensional story. For Khatibi, the question of reading, or

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decoding, is central to his project in that it conditions Moroccans’ interpretation of the representations of their own history. For Moroccans and other North Africans to enter the third millennium in full possession of their diverse cultural heritage, they must “re-read” their own history in la langue (de l’)autre [in another(’s) language] than that of either Islamic dogma or Western idealism, in which events and anecdotes have been charged with value according to abstract theological or ideological values. They must learn to recognize their heritage in terms of its specific relation to signs and images, for this is the language that encodes their real history. They must, therefore, learn to separate the experience of oppression, humiliation, and dispossession, which occurred and has been recorded in a discourse formed in the West, from their own experience, which does indeed express itself in another language, a language that, because repressed, has become “foreign” to them. We may call this language la langue maternelle [the mother tongue]. It must be rediscovered, however, for it is nowhere and everywhere, embedded in places and sounds and fleeting gestures, in the motifs on a bowl or a carpet, or in the smell of spices, jasmine, or the sea. To be decipherable, this language must find material “support,” forms of expression through which it may be intuited. Like the Merovingian legends of Marcel’s magic lantern in Combray, whose forms assumed fleeting life as they moved across the objects of his room, the maternal dialect is disseminated across myriad objects in Moroccan life, persisting only as echo and trace. Paradoxically, the French language, despite its historical function as a “colonial tool,” in many cases has afforded writers a “third way” out of the binary impasse between either assimilation or exclusion, between identification with the cultures of Europe, negation as a part of Africa, or even assimilation into the Middle East. In L’Amour bilingue [Love in two languages] (1983), Khatibi elaborates a theory concerning language that he expresses in terms of the bi-langue, a notion akin to the idea of an interlangue or intersign that must be understood as a linguistic process rather than a fixed state of linguistic duality. In fact, the bi-langue more accurately translates as “two languages” as in the English title of the text, but it may also be that Khatibi is crossing over into Arabic, where the prefix “bi” means “in” or “by means of,” as in “I write with a pen” or “I’m traveling by train.” The novel’s title, therefore, might read in translation, “Love in or by means of two languages,” in which case language itself would indeed be the proverbial “food of love,” a means for understanding others and deciphering difference even as it also differentiates. The title may also suggest that it takes at least two languages for love to be born or that love is possible only when one has dared to leave home. Khatibi’s bi-langue is quite removed from the narrow, politicized notion of bilingualism currently under debate in the United States and Europe.

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Khatibi’s concept has a broad social and ethical dimension. It is a process that leads beyond the contact with another individual to yield an ethical intuition of what it means to be a part of human society. For Khatibi, “love” does not mean romantic fusion or “identity”; venturing into another’s language opens up previously unknown differences—truths—in oneself as well as others. An adventure so risky that Khatibi once described it as “suicidal,” the voyage toward another language and culture provokes a crisis in which everything is thrown into question, everything is at risk. Love is clearly an ontological and epistemological adventure as well as a sentimental one. The “intractable” differences between cultures and languages yield a charged space of exchange, an entre-deux [in-between], that Khatibi considers “perilous and fertile” because it is a dynamic space within which each culture’s values and concepts are constantly being redefined. It is a place of reciprocal negotiation that transforms each of the actors and therefore is never composed of only two elements but is always producing a third. It transforms the partners and in so doing alters the energy and the nature of the space between them. Khatibi’s interest in the “third dimension” is reflected in a later novel, Triptyque de Rabat (1993), in which the author returns to a more realist style, one that initially distances the reader from the allegory. A tale about murder, political corruption, and individual conscience, Triptyque is particularly “deceptive” in that its ostensible meaning is exactly what the novel is not about: the either/or of guilt in the narrow sense. The tale, I believe, ultimately concerns ways of thinking ethically and challenges the reader to abandon binary reasoning. The real insight of the novel concerns a “third eye” that is outside and inside at once but is identified with neither position. The narrative “transcribes” its idea into the spaces of the city of Rabat, each harboring its special secrets, codes, and dangers, in and out of which the narrator moves on his voyage to self-understanding. Emerging from his arcane passage, the narrator begins to distinguish between illusions. He passes to the “other side” of the mirror, where he sees his city mysteriously transformed. Khatibi operates an inversion typical of Jorge Luis Borges when he endows the narrator with the vertiginous perception of himself as a character within another’s vision, that of the Faucon magique, a powerful but sinister symbol rooted in the popular imagination: Loin de nous le temps des villes où les dieux venaient se reposer, où les anges y construisaient les jardins, et les djinns: labyrinthes et souterrains. Maintenant qu’il est informé par satellite et qu’il s’approche de la ville à basse latitude, puis à vol d’oiseau, le Faucon magique retient entre ses mains tous les minarets et leurs trois boules, pendant que le phare . . . demeure posé au bord de l’eau, comme une mouette sans ailes. Il ajuste de nouveau les pierres, les immeubles, les rues, les places, par une

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surimposition éblouissante. . . . Montage où l’habitant semble marcher, travailler, aimer, dormir, rêver sans qu’il sache d’où proviennent sa fragilité actuelle, sa perte de mémoire et son trouble d’identité. Idris est une tache, une image, dans cette carte, ce nouvel ordre. Saura-t-il déchiffrer cette histoire où ce sont les lecteurs qui sont pris pour personnages? (Triptyque, 139) [Far from us is the time when the gods would come and seek respite in our cities, where angels would build gardens and the genies labyrinths and underground passageways. Now that he is informed by satellite and approaches the city at a low altitude, then as a bird flies, the Magic Falcon holds in his hands all the minarets and their balls, while the lighthouse . . . remains poised at the edge of the water, like a swallow without wings. He readjusts the rocks, the buildings, the streets, the plazas, by astonishing superimposition. . . . A stage where the inhabitant seems to walk, work, love, sleep, dream without knowing the source of his current fragility, his loss of memory, or his identity troubles. Idris is a blot, an image, on this map, this new order of things. Will he know how to decipher this story in which the readers are taken for characters?]

The text performs a “differential” transposition, dramatizing the principle of the “double critique” described earlier. Several other writers of Khatibi’s generation have used French differentially, not merely to revise the legacy of French linguistic imperialism but to turn the mirror around— to pass through the mirror to the other side—to discover their suppressed relation to their own language, and to gain an altered vision of their own indenture to hidden powers within their culture. Like Triptyque de Rabat, all of Khatibi’s fictional texts are in some sense allegorical and make use of metanarrative. The texts’ self-reflective function, sometimes referred to as their “metadiscourse,” is basic to their modernity, and to their postmodernity for that matter, but their metanarrative dimension is not merely a postmodern affectation: it is a form inherited from the Maghreb’s hybrid history. Moroccans’ capacity to discern formal relationships and meanings from diverse contexts is endemic to their traditions but also related to their experience of occupation by foreign peoples, with whom they have exchanged ideas as well as products, altering others and becoming altered. “Moroccan identity” is an oxymoron. In fact, the ability to think critically, Khatibi seems to say, is contingent upon the experience of being “altered” or displaced from one’s familiar world: mental tasks such as the apparently simple shift from one level of discourse to another and the ability to perceive analogies so as to make distinctions and transpositions may be rooted in one’s ability to move out of one’s language, to leave home. Khatibi has been one of the strongest advocates for a multilingual Maghreb, going so far as to assert that “inhabiting” other languages is necessary for developing the critical vision indispensable to self-knowledge

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and cultural evolution, but also, I would argue, for acquiring the ability simply to think independently, to survive. His own experiences abroad as well as his mastery of foreign languages such as Swedish and English have been crucial to his understanding of his own linguistic past and that of Maghrebian culture. Khatibi’s concept of la pensée-autre [a thought-other] refers to the paradoxical movement toward another language and culture that requires not only the suspension of disbelief but becoming alert to other networks of associations that speak to the senses, demanding a kind of magical reincarnation into the unknown. We might describe Khatibi’s undertaking as both an inter- and an intrasemiotic project that seeks to uncover the secret—sacred, material, and mystical—knowledge of signs that can give people access to and command of their future. Rereading history, therefore, is far less a question of retrieving historical events from oblivion than of recovering—uncovering—a forgotten relation to signs. For modern Europeans, signs are conceived primarily as instruments or vehicles of preexisting meanings or at most as aesthetic accessories to the transmission of a privileged content. Hence the role of language in the West has tended to become an instrumental one, neutralized or transparent and secondary to meaning. Poetry, of course, resists this tendency, and it is not at all accidental that the literary tradition of the Maghreb was for centuries one of poetic discourse. The Maghreb sensitivity to signifiers is one that is loosely linked to abstract referents rather than one that seeks strict equivalents between signs and meanings. This relationship to signs adduces meaning from associations engendered by the plasticity and music of the forms themselves rather than emphasizing their denotative function as is the tendency in more technically oriented societies. As suggested earlier, a similar discrepancy occurs in the realm of spatial decoration in the way that formal design is foregrounded in Maghrebian culture at the expense of figurative representation. Although Khatibi argues against the myth of the “image taboo” in his tradition, he asserts that his culture possesses a strong “plastic identity” and affirms that representation functions differently in European and Maghrebian cultures. He finds this lack of correspondence in some ways fertile for knowledge of both traditions, precisely because some of these differences may be ascribed to the discontinuities of history rather than to essential traits of either culture. In medieval society in Europe, for example, the separation between sign and image was far less categorical than it is at present, and the illuminated manuscripts reflect a use of writing analogous to that of calligraphy. For the erudite few, the elaborately scripted letters acted on the imagination as visual forms infused with sensory associations instead of speaking directly to the intelligence or being tightly bound to a specific referent. Rather than interpret such differences in the way signs operate hierarchically as marks of progress or regression, Khatibi reconnects them to

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their original social function and hence restores their historical “logic,” confirming the degree to which styles of representation are rooted in the economy of social and political investments. He studies with interest the West’s classical legacy and its valorization of explicitness over oblique or indirect expression as well as its respect for visual verisimilitude and rationalist discourse as the sanctioned vehicles of truth, recognizing them to be evidence of different ideological “needs” that produce particular ways of organizing experience. For Khatibi, a culture’s diversified modes of expression can be seen as “symptoms” or archaeological traces of forgotten historical encounters, signs of the manifold digressions, conflicts, compromises, desires, losses, and revivals that make up a culture’s hidden cartography. A large part of Khatibi’s work has been devoted to bringing these realities to the surface of public consciousness. Khatibi’s passion for signs and images leads him to explore the way signs and various types of figures and images travel, interact, and are transformed through the exchange of elements, as in a dialogue. Because his own culture is in some ways suspended between verbal and visual representation, between sign and figure, he treats calligraphy and images and designs on carpets, textiles, pottery, wood, and metal as linguistic phenomena rather than purely visual elements, alerting us to what degree we tend to read cultural artifacts according to our own systems of reference, which too often code unfamiliar phenomena as “negative” or invisible. For example, Khatibi declares that “il faut regarder un beau tapis avec la même intention que nous lisons une page d’Aristote” [we ought to contemplate a beautiful carpet with the same intensity we apply to reading a page of Aristotle] (“Intersignes,” 72), encouraging us to view the abstract play of forms and patterns in textile design as a serious intellectual and moral exercise. In a book he wrote on Moroccan carpets, Khatibi says, “Nous parlerons de l’intersigne, de l’intervalle qui migre d’une marque à l’autre, d’une trace à l’autre. Selon cette approche, comme toute oeuvre d’art—et toute oeuvre est hautement théorique aussi—le tapis est une surface intersémiotique” [We will speak about the intersign, about the interval that moves from one mark to another, from one trace to another. According to this approach, like every work of art—and every work of art is highly theoretical as well—the carpet is an intersemiotic surface] (Du Signe, 62). For many modern Europeans, the “play of forms” is too easily associated with idleness, dilettantism, dandyism, narcissism, and other supposed signs of cultural decadence. But Khatibi asks us to revise our convictions by demonstrating the ways in which poetic figures are forms of thought, such as metaphor or the rhetorical figure of mise-en-abîme, for example, which encode a type of knowledge that works according to different principles than those of abstract logic. Often ordered according to a precise

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geometry, they lead the imagination toward a recognition that has serious social and ethical implications. Metaphor might be termed a “master trope” of this kind, in that it leads the reader to make unexpected associations, often across distances or boundaries that defy common sense, demonstrating that the very principle of difference is essential to the creation of meaning, enlightenment, and understanding. Metaphor demands that the reader abandon what he or she knows, imagine the unexpected—the absent, the invisible, the Other—as the only means of seeing the obvious. Considered to be a basic linguistic mechanism, metaphor is a figure for the act of translation as well, which, according to Khatibi, never involves finding exact equivalents but rather requires exploring differences that reveal unrecognized dimensions of both languages. The very figure of mise-en-abime, or endlessly mirroring images, a trope common to both narrative and the visual arts, functions cognitively to underscore the illusory nature of origins as well as the implication of the seer within the seen, revealing the determining role of the reader in the construction of meaning in the text. The European’s tendency to associate the play of forms with aestheticism or decadence offers Khatibi the occasion to perform an astonishing epistemological reversal. He surprises his readers by asking them to consider periods of decadence not only as inevitable stages of decay but as “positive” stages in cultural evolution. As provocative as it may sound, this statement is neither irrational nor irresponsible: it reflects careful consideration of the ways in which periods of social decadence throw into relief the deepest forms of a culture precisely because forms become detached from their function as from their original referents and hence appear to subsist merely as affectations or vanity. The cultural aphasia as well as the social dis-integration typical of periods of decadence, then, may provide occasion for discovery, allowing for the revelation of what may have been buried but indispensable to cultural renewal; it can permit a kind of x-ray vision for identifying hidden principles of a culture’s itinerary. The keys to the future, Khatibi argues, are encoded in forms of the past that subsist as unrecognized traces, analogous to the way in which metaphors “die” or become literal and therefore invisible in language over time, losing their evocative power and their capacity to express complex experiences. Interestingly, Khatibi sees both Europe and the Maghreb in various stages of actual decadence. Decadence, for Khatibi, is one way of describing a culture’s self-estrangement rather than a truly morbid state of decay. If it leads to a process of archaeological “translation,” it can become a time of renewal. Khatibi’s research and writing in areas as diverse as poetry, novels, essays, and art criticism, on topics as varied as urban topography and mo-

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saics, Islam and sociology, calligraphy and carpets, and language and politics, are all deeply interconnected. Khatibi is convinced that the languages of storytelling, proverbs, artisanal production, urban space, textiles, mosaics, and other forms of decoration are modes of cultural transmission that can offer clues to the understanding of an invisible history. He begs us to entertain the possibility that deciphering these apparently “foreign” traces can provide the Moroccans with the tools—the language—necessary for (re-)writing their modernity. To understand the potentially revolutionary implications of Khatibi’s archaeological project, Western readers might begin by inverting Khatibi’s earlier proposition concerning the carpet: they might try to read a page of Aristotle with the same sort of sensitivity as they would bring to the contemplation of a beautiful carpet.

Notes 1. It is interesting to note that Khatibi and Derrida have a reciprocal friendship that has translated into a number of writings, the most recent of which is a text by Khatibi entitled “La Langue de l’autre,” to be published as a kind of echo and response to Derrida’s text Le Monolinguisme de l’autre. 2. As a student, Khatibi was also more directly exposed to actual politics surrounding the Algerian war. Studying in Paris for a degree in sociology in 1958, he became a member of the North African Students Association (AEMNA), through which he met Algerian refugees and was once mistaken for one and imprisoned overnight. He says his studies in sociology were conceived as an “arme critique et de dénonciation” [weapon with which to criticize and denounce] (Penser le Maghreb, 115). 3. Barthes wrote a now-famous postface to Khatibi’s La Mémoire tatouée entitled “Ce que je dois à Khatibi” [what I owe to Khatibi], in which Barthes states his affinity for Khatibi’s writing and declares that he can teach the occidental a lesson in independence.

Works Cited Derrida, Jacques. Le Monolinguisme de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1996. Idiomes, nationalités, déconstructions: Rencontre à Rabat avec Jacques Derrida. Casablanca: Toubkal Editions, 1998. Khatibi, Abdelkébir. La Mémoire tatouée. Paris: Denoël, 1971. ———. La Blessure du nom propre. Paris: Lettres Nouvelles, 1974/1986. ———. L’Amour bilingue. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1983. ———. Maghreb pluriel. Paris: Denoël/Rabat: SMER, 1983. ———. “Intersignes.” Imaginaires de l’autre. Presentations from a colloquium held in Geneva by the CNAC, April 1986. ———. Signes du présent, no. 4. Special issue on “Culture et temps techniques.” Casablanca: Sochepress, 1988. (A scientific review published by the Institute of Scientific Research, of which Khatibi is director.)

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———. Ombres japonaises. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, and Rabat: Al-Kalam, 1989. ———. Penser le Maghreb. Rabat: SMER, 1993. ———. Triptyque de Rabat, Paris: Noël Blandin, 1993. ———. Du Signe à l’image [Moroccan carpets]. With Ali Amahan. Casablanca: Lak International, 1995. ———. L’Oeuvre de Abdelkébir Khatibi. Extracts of Khatibi’s writings, bibliography, and commentary. Rabat: Marsam Editions, 1997. ———. La Langue de l’autre. New York/Tunis: Les Mains Sales, 1999. Proust, Marcel. Combray in Du Coté du chez Swann. Paris: Gallimard (Folio), 1988.

PART TWO

: Interior Landscapes

6

: Mohammed Dib and Albert Camus’s Encounters with the Algerian Landscape Fawzia Ahmad

C’est en [les paysages] que s’élaborent jour après jour, notre sensibilité et notre métaphysique du monde. Et c’est par eux que l’écrivain, plus tard, retrouvera ses sources et ses repères, au point que chaque fois qu’il décrira un paysage, que ce soit en son nom ou par personnages interposés, il fera sans s’en rendre compte son auto-portrait. (Pélégri, Ma Mère, 10) [Our sensitivities and the metaphysical understanding of our world flourish in the landscape around us. And it is in such landscapes that the writer will at a later time, find his inspiration and his touchstone, to such an extent that each time he describes a landscape, in first person or through his characters, he will render his auto-portrait without realizing it.]1

In his book, the Algerian-born French writer Jean Pélégri expounds the importance of the presence of first experiences of physical surroundings in an author’s creative life. Pélégri acknowledges this vital link when he underlines the correlation between self-portraiture and landscape. The Algerian links of another pied-noir are better known: Albert Camus’s undisputed love for his birth land’s sun, wind, mountains, and sea is evident in his early works Noces (1965) and L’Été (1965) and the posthumous publication of his notes, Le Premier homme (1994). Thirty-four years after his death, Camus’s last work was published under the supervision of his daughter, Catherine Camus, who “wanted to present the text in its raw state, without any interpretation. . . . In it he [Camus] has no mask, he is defenseless” (quoted in Noiville, “Long Journey”). It is not surprising, then, that the pied-noir often talked about Algeria as his patrie de chair [notion of homeland through birth]. All things being the same as far as literary inspirations go, Algeria’s land is equally significant to pieds-noirs and indigenous writers such as Mohammed Dib. This concept is deceptive in its simplicity, as evidenced 101

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by a recent letter written by Mohammed Dib. After reading my dissertation, he was politely amused by the fact that I decided to position him on the same grounds as Albert Camus in my graduate work on North African writers. Perhaps distance has certain advantages, and I took the liberty of availing myself of them. From this side of the Atlantic, Dib’s watan [homeland through land as defined by national bonds to a larger group] is just as ensconced in Algerian landscape as Camus’s patrie. My argument stems from the fact that if Algeria’s land is the referent, then surely the two writers should be put on the same ground—both spatially and figuratively. What had initially interested me personally was the authors’ differences regarding notions of the same land and that this difference ultimately set them apart in the manner in which they positioned their identity. A personal memory of images internalized as a child in a former colony was my impetus for searching for the differences in perception of the same land. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim lived in Lahore, Pakistan, my watan and patrie. Every time we passed by the big gun mentioned in Kipling’s novel, it did not seem plausible that the object, which had a military appearance in our eyes, was the venue of Kim’s antics. The incongruity of the specific detail was typical of other instances of a lived difference: we were subjected to images of another life in our readings that had no bearing on our immediate worlds. There is, then, a dichotomy in what is written about and what is experienced in a colonized or a postcolonized setting, for the colonized and the colonizer share no common cultural experience. Ultimately, a colonized author and, by default, a reader must retain his or her own turf on the creative terrain, which can be subjected to one or the other cultural standards. The significant influence of Algeria in Camus’s work spans from his early writings, which celebrated the country’s physical aspect, to his later, more philosophical renditions of the land’s contrasts. Since his death, much has been written about the author’s attachment to and detachment from his birth land. From the early 1960s, Philip Thody, Germaine Brée, and later Adèle King, among others, have offered excellent interpretations of the one consistent touchstone in Camus’s literary career: Algeria. Yet it is worthwhile to underline the difference in the level and direction of contact between the pied-noir’s vision of himself in his patrie de chair and Dib’s self in what constitutes his watan. Patrie is essentially a father-son connection, whereas watan centers on the national and cultural bonds between individual and group. Camus qualified Algeria as his patrie de chair because his connection to Algeria is autobiographically linked through his mother. However, Dib maintains his connection to the land of his birth as his watan, and this, in turn, as we will see, will determine his Algerianness. For Camus, attachment to and experiences with the Algerian milieu remain one-sided, for he appropriates its physical character for himself but does not project his own feelings/sentiments onto it. He maintains an equilibrium

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for himself between the contrasting physical elements, such as the scorching sun and the cool relief of shade in the Algerian landscape. The affinity to Algerian land and milieu in question in Camus’s works is on a vertical level. Ultimately, Camus’s standing in the Algerian environment was a choice of his own ontological experience of the land and his position, silenced by his unwavering solidarity to his own political stance. The author clearly places his own identity above any other exigencies of land or social environment. He may have benefited from the Algerian landscape, and its place-memory will forever remain in his psyche; however, it cannot be overlooked that this is not a mutual relationship. Camus’s solidarity remained with his own position as he conceived it as a French Algerian. His links to his birthplace did not produce any indication of fraternity with either the Arabs or the French, though they remained an intricate part of the dual consciousness he claimed as his own. This dichotomy in the physical and social milieu that surrounds him is one leitmotif of his Algerian writings. Despite the links to Algerian land, which were a “natural” and undisputed aspect of Camus’s consciousness, the lack of solidarity with any side was the outcome of the author’s stance on equilibrium between opposing forces. Ultimately, Camus’s standing in Algerian environment was a choice made from his own ontological experience.2 For Mohammed Dib, the interdependency of an Algerian experience and an attachment to land and physical surroundings is a given in the Algerianness of his trilogy Algérie. The first semiautobiographical novel of his series, La Grande maison, lays the groundwork upon which the author’s Algerian identity is built throughout his subsequent work. Jean Déjeux’s study of Dib recognizes that the themes in La Grande maison are revived in later novels: “L’univers de La Grande maison est certes réduit mais tous les problèmes y viennent se répercuter. . . . L’horizon s’élargit toutefois avec les deux romans suivants. L’auteur aurait voulu que les critiques trouvent dans son premier livre l’écho de tous ces problèmes” [The universe of La Grande Maison is a concise one and yet all problems are found in it. . . . The two subsequent novels have a broader horizon. It is as if the author would have liked his critics to hear the echo of all these problems in his first novel] (Littérature maghrébine, 148–149). In Dib’s text there is a progression from an Algerian auto-portrait to an Algerian experience. His text is directly immersed in his culture, reinforcing the commonality of Algerianness and land. In Algérie, Algerian life is a lived phenomenon and not merely a portrait, as Mouloud Feraoun left for his readers. To create a portrait, one remains at a distance from the subject in order to present it. In giving up the distance, the writer enmeshes himself or herself in the subject. In addition, Dibian narrative representations have a consistently changing and live presence. The Algerian landscape’s multiple facets are not only mirrored in Dib’s characters’ reactions to it and through their

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multifarous actions, they become one with the land. Homi K. Bhabha has referred to such acts of identification as a changing and growing process that allows the subject to infuse his or her own pattern of relating to another: “the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity—never a self-fulfilling prophecy—it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image” (Locations of Culture, 45). Thus, first, the salient steps in identification in a cultural sense require that the process must not circle back onto itself, as was the case in Camus’s Algeria. Rather, it must reach out to what surrounds it. Second, the transformation of the subject bespeaks its mutable character. In other words, cultural identification is a powerful process that must acknowledge its changing and thus live force. In La Grande maison, the Algerian specificities provide the cultural force of Dib’s narrative. These specificities mark the foundations upon which Dib’s identity is built. Whether it is Omar’s familiarity with his family’s poverty or his sisters’ secondary roles in the household, Dib’s text reconciles such experiences so that they converge on his Algerianness. Because these experiences remain intrinsically Algerian, they are not explained to a European reader, nor are they aggrandized by the Algerian writing them. Instead, they are textually lived by the author because they remain rooted in the author’s sense of place. If Dib is able to reconcile the medium of his literary creation— French—and the subject of his text—his identity—it is due to his ability to understand the depths of his Algerian life on his own terms. He does not allow his text to compare itself with European standards, nor does he use his narrative to illustrate any dogmas. Instead, he probes into his group’s conditions, hence the penetrating gaze on his culture. Albert Memmi calls this textual ability to penetrate “une dynamique objective” [an objective dynamic] (Portrait, 146), which must continue in spite of the dual influences on a colonized or formerly colonized writer. It is such a textual penetration by the author into his narrative that allows his je to mesh with Omar’s character. In the following passage, as he frees himself from his mother’s strong grasp, Omar has the task of diminishing her anger and at the same time saving himself. Dib’s je takes over his character’s responses, and the author’s previously omniscient presence is brought openly to the surface: Evidemment Aïni . . . avait produit [les enfants], personne ne disait le contraire, encore qu’elle ne leur eût pas demandé leur avis. Mais, moi, je n’ai rien demandé. Il est vrai que je ne pouvais guère parler alors. Maintenant c’est fait, je suis ici; qu’elle nous fiche au moins la paix. J’entends ne pas me laisser marcher sur les pieds, serait-ce par celle qui m’a nourri du lait de sa mamelle. Omar, résolut, d’attendre dehors. (102, emphasis added; all quotations from Dib in this chapter come from La Grande maison unless noted otherwise)

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[Evidently Aïni . . . had produced (the children), no one disputed this, although she had not asked their opinion. I did not ask anything. Of course, I could not talk then. Now that it is done, I am here; at least she should let us be. I mean not to be walked on, even if it is by the one who gave me life. Omar decided to wait outside.]

Omar’s reactions in the face of an adverse situation at home are first rendered in the third person in keeping with the rest of the narrative, but without any forewarning, the author inserts his je at this juncture. The author’s will to enter his text is at the same time decisive and subtle. Although it is clear that Dib’s text has made the transition from a third-person to a first-person account by an unmistakable change from il to je, the author’s presence, as announced by the swift inclusion of je, is indicative of the quiet manner of inclusion of his presence so that its appearance remains unobtrusive. The transformation from il to je and back again is done swiftly, for the author’s ontological je and the character’s je are not distant from each other’s realities. Their closeness remains constant in Dib’s text. For the reader, the swiftness in change of pronouns is representative of the depths that the author’s literary creation enters when relating an Algerian reality. The infiltration of Dib’s je in his text is also an inward movement from one reality to another. The transition from the outer reality to an inner state is a textual movement that leads to a consciousness of identity throughout Dib’s work. This movement is indicative of the inner journey present in Dib’s realistic prose. On different levels in his text, Dib duplicates the movement of sliding easily—hence, glisser—in the following passage from an outer to an inner sphere: Omar s’endormit peu à peu, éventé par le souffle ardent et léger de la faim. Dans son inconscience, il fut averti du jour qui s’approchait, et un immense soulagement l’envahit. Son corps se détendit, apaisé et confiant. C’était l’instant de la délivrance. Il s’abandonnait au sommeil à présent. Il n’avait qu’à se laisser glisser et dormir, dormir dormir. (146–147) [Little by little, Omar fell asleep, lulled by the pangs of hunger. In his unconscious mind, he was forewarned of the day that was approaching, and he was overcome by a sense of relief. His body relaxed, appeased and confident. It was the moment of deliverance. He let himself be taken over by sleep. All he had to do was let himself slide and sleep, sleep, sleep.]

From the discomfort of the pangs of hunger to the appeasement of approaching rest, Omar’s transition is an example of the movements from one state to another, which are indicative of the fluidity in Dib’s Algerian text. As his protagonist slides into sleep, the author’s text approximates the lulling cadence that brings slumber by the repetition of “dormir, dormir, dormir.” Thus, Dib’s passage illustrates the absence of frontiers between

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different realities, which facilitates the movement from one sphere to another and allows the author to plunge into the very core/depths of the essential in his text: his Algerianness. When Memmi states: “Dib est l’écrivain de la rencontre au-delà des dogmatismes et des frontières” (Écrivains, 112), the author’s interior and exterior landscapes blend into each other rather than meet at a frontier. Thus, Dib’s identity is not an enclosed entity surrounded by frontiers that resist and insulate what is at the interior of his Algerian existence. Rather, it is portrayed as a growing entity that is constantly in a state of becoming itself through an inward journey into its depths. As a contrast, Camus’s experience with Algerian land in Noces erected a deliberate scaffolding between the author and his milieu. Despite his apparent immersion in the Algerian land, he retained an intellectual distance from it. There is little doubt that Camus’s avowal of attachment to Algeria as he perceived it is anything but a forthright sentiment in his text. He never ceased to refer to it as his patrie. What remains to be explored is the contradictory nature of his ties as revealed in the complex strategies that the author employs in confronting them. The following passage indicates the source of this contradiction: Etant né dans ce désert, je ne puis songer en tout cas à en parler comme un visiteur. Est-ce qu’on fait la nomenclature des charmes d’une femme très aimée? Non, on l’aime en bloc, si j’ose dire, avec un ou deux attendrissements précis, qui touchent à une moue favorite ou à une façon de secouer la tête. J’ai ainsi avec l’Algérie une longue liaison qui sans doute n’en finira jamais, et qui m’empêche d’être tout à fait clairvoyant à son regard. Simplement, à force d’application, on peut arriver à distinguer, dans l’abstrait en quelque sorte, le détail de ce qu’on aime dans qui on aime. (L’Été, 848, emphases added) [Having been born in this desert, I cannot think of talking about it as a visitor. Does one name the charms of the beloved? No, one loves her in all, with just one or two precise endearments that explain a favorite facial expression or a movement of the head. In the same manner, I have an affair with Algeria that will perhaps not end and that prevents me from being totally clearheaded as far as she is concerned. It is only by dint of hard work that one distinguishes the precise detail that one loves from the total abstract of who one loves.]

Here, Camus has presented an Algeria loved as a whole at first glance. But despite the overall charming attributes of its milieu, he is able to distinguish the effects of the details that it displays to the author. Is it not due to the detail that Camus is able to differentiate from the “whole” that allows him to be clairvoyant in this passage? Indeed, the author delights in the challenge of separating the part from the whole that constitutes Algeria: “C’est cet exercice scolaire que je puis tenter en ce qui concerne l’Algérie” [It is a scholarly exercise that I can attempt as far as Algeria in concerned]

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(L’Eté, 848, emphasis added). The effort of distinguishing the detail from its abstract whole is difficult but still possible in Camus’s realm. It is by dint of application and hard work on the part of the author that he is able to appropriate for himself the detail that he appreciates. From such a fruitful exercise of distancing a single aspect from the entire abstract identity of Algeria, Camus creates a convenient cleavage between his own standing and the land he called his own. The “force d’application” is the impetus in Camus’s economy of confronting the Algerian soil. Having identified the stimulus of his encounter with the Algerian terrain, Camus’s “hard work” becomes a harbinger of a dichotomy between the land and its inhabitant. The ability to make a distinction between part and whole as regards the Algerian landscape underscores a contradiction overlooked by theorists from both sides of the Mediterranean, those who view Camus’s relationship to Algeria as entirely based on his love for the landscape or his defense of the plight of the poor Arabs, as well as those who see him exclusively as a false hero who let down his Arab counterparts by not committing himself to a sympathetic position. Nevertheless, the stance that allows Camus to distinguish a part from the whole in the Algerian landscape is one of distance. And it may be contrary to what first readings of Camus’s Algerian texts offer, namely a unity of the author and nature around him. By incorporating mental efforts into his perception of the Algerian land, the author undercuts the sensuous contact between himself and its physical beauty. In this way Camus successfully allows himself a range of nearness and distance in the same experience. The inherent contradiction in Camus’s reactions to the Algerian landscape is not so surprising when the echo of such experiences is to be found in the communicative distance that Camus describes in his autobiographical novel in Jacques’s/Camus’s conversations with his partially mute mother. In Le Premier homme, Jacques attempts, like Camus, to talk to his reticent mother in Algeria to elicit information about his dead father. The author recalls this attempt as a pure and stark experience that he transforms into a mystique of distance (78–80). Unable to express herself, Camus’s mother, a simple servant in Belcourt, lives meagerly in order to survive. From these early experiences as a poor colonial, Camus formed the division between self and the reality at hand. It is interesting to note here that Camus experienced this distance with the two most important influences of his early life: Algeria and his mother. From Algeria Camus learned the lesson of contrasts and from his mother the dignity in silence. As seen earlier, Camus’s love for Algeria was closer to a liaison because she remained his patrie de chair, a phrase that lends itself more to a lover’s sensual experience than to a country. Patrie by itself indicates more of a father-son relationship, which Camus missed

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throughout his life in Algeria due to his father’s death when he was barely a year old. Young Camus was then left in a world where his mother and grandmother dominated in their poverty, just as Algeria’s physical beauty emphasized the irony that though he was born to this land, the land was not Camus’s father. For Dib’s characters, the recognition of the contrasts in their reality enables them to question their present situation. As Dib empowers his characters to affect this reality, he empowers his Algerianness in his novels. He creates situations in his novel only to question the conditions surrounding him. In his text, the young Omar follows the pattern of recognition of the current state of affairs around him and then questions the causes. In the following passage, the author establishes the pattern of (a) a statement of the condition of affairs and (b) a question: [a]—Nous sommes des pauvres. [b] Mais pourquoi sommes-nous pauvres? . . . Ses idées se bousculaient, confuses, nouvelles, avant de se perdre en grand désordre. [a] Et personne ne se révolte. [b] Pourquoi? C’est incompréhensible. [a] Quoi de plus simple pourtant! [b] Les grandes personnes ne comprennent-elles donc rien? Pourtant c’est simple! C’est simple. L’enfant continuait: c’est simple. Cette petite phrase se répercutait dans son cerveau endolori et semblait ne point devoir s’évanouir. —Pourquoi ne se révoltent-ils pas? Ont-ils peur? De quoi ont-ils peur? Elle se précipitait dans sa tête à une allure vertigineuse. Pourtant, c’est simple, c’est simple! Une dérive sans fin. . . . Et voilà que le souvenir de Hamid parlant à une très grande foule se dresse dans son esprit. Hamid disait. Pourtant, c’est simple. (117–118) [(a)—We are poor. (b) But why are we poor? . . . His ideas were turbulent, confused, and new before losing themselves in great disorder. (a) And no one revolted. (b) Why? It is incomprehensible. (a) However, what could be more simple? (b) Don’t the adults understand anything? However, it is simple! It is simple. The child continued: it is simple. This short sentence reverberated incessantly in his aching mind. —Why don’t they revolt? Are they afraid? Of what? The sentence took on a precipitous urgency. However, it is simple, it is simple! This was an ever-present drift. . . . And soon Hamid talking to a large crowd came into his mind. Hamid was saying: however, it is simple.]

In this passage, “Pourquoi sommes-nous pauvres?” “Pourquoi ne se révoltent-ils pas?” “Ont-ils peur?” are constant reminders of a textual probing into the Algerian reality as Dib’s protagonist perceives it. Far from accepting the present state of affairs, Omar’s questions are a piercing view of

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the Algerian condition. In their repetition, the reader lives their cyclical existence. Dib’s interrogative text gives no respite to the reader because the questions reappear every two to three sentences and are relentless in their persistence. In the same manner, the question’s response—“c’est simple”—is a repetitive reminder of what needs to be done in order to break away from the adverse conditions in which Omar and others around him find themselves. For Omar in Dib’s text, the way to overcome the present state of affairs is simple and direct in keeping with a child’s perspective on his environment. Nonetheless, Omar is a precocious child. His courage in recognizing the backwardness, the poverty, and the awkward application of a French education to his Algerian life and his desire to break away from the prison that such ills create for him constitute the vital and simple step, so obvious is the need for change. Just as Omar is determined to forge ahead and not be held back by debilitating circumstances, so Dib’s text persistently reminds the reader of the realities of Algerian life: “Omar n’acceptait pas l’existence telle qu’elle s’offrait. Il en attendait autre chose que ce mensonge, cette dissimulation, cette catastrophe qu’il devinait. Autre chose. [Omar didn’t accept life as it was offered to him. He expected something other than this lie, this deception, this catastrophe he experienced. Something other than this] (115). The isolated “autre chose” in this passage not only relates the constant reinforcement of the will to turn over the status quo, but also it underlines the independent presence of concepts born out of the necessities of Algerian life. Taken out of its context in the previous sentence, “autre chose” lives a new and bold existence on its own in the author’s text. It announces an independence from the prevailing state of affairs. As the need for change grows, the pretense and catastrophes that Omar sees around him symbolize dysfunction in his society. And Dib’s narration throws the hardships his characters encounter into sharp relief. As Dib highlights the specificities of Algerian life in Tlemcen, they take on a forceful presence of their own. For Omar, poverty, heat, hunger, and even incessant hardship are the particularities of his life. So strong is hunger’s presence in Omar’s life that it, too, creates a space where he is able to articulate his Algerianness. Hunger becomes a living force in his life and subsequently takes on a human presence in Dib’s text. Indeed, Omar’s childhood is influenced by his family’s lack of resources. It should be pointed out that this is unlike Dib’s childhood, which was spent in relative material comfort. A la longue, il put . . . traiter [la faim] avec l’amitié due à un être cher; et il se permit tout avec elle. Leurs rapports s’établirent sur la base d’une courtoisie réciproque, attentive et pleine de délicatesse, comme seule une ample compréhension saurait en faire naître entre gens qui se jugent sans

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la moindre complaisance et se reconnaissent ensuite dignes l’un de l’autre. (109–110) [In the end, he could . . . treat (hunger) with the friendship due to a dear being; and he allowed himself anything with it. Their relation was established on the basis of a reciprocal courtship that was attentive and considerate and that is allowed by a full understanding between people who judge themselves without the least bit of complaisance and hence judge themselves worthy of one another.]

The reciprocity between hunger and Omar is the basis of the intense giveand-take between specificities of an Algerian existence and characters in Dib’s Algerian texts. In fact, the desire to explore the interconnectedness of various facets of his existence is what motivates the Algerian author and is inherent in the Dibian perception of Algerian reality. Since the connection between ideas and objects of Algerian culture and Dib’s characters is a palpable one, their Algerianness is a sensual experience in his text. In the following passage, as the poor family settles down to a night’s sleep in meager conditions, the proximity of bodies, the touch of moonlight, and even the itching sensations that irritate the skin and induce scratching on different body parts enhance the sensuality of the scene: Dehors, nuit d’août. Une réverbération sans chaleur rougeait de sa blancheur le ciel. Omar vit cette chambre éclatante et sombre. Le seuil baignait dans la lune étalée jusqu’aux pieds des dormeurs qu’elle léchait insensiblement. Il ne cessait de se retourner sur sa couche; l’insomnie s’emparait de lui. Ses vêtements le genaient. Au plus fort de la nuit, des démangeaisons les prenaient tous. Les ongles raclaient un ventre, des fesses, des cuisses longuement. (125–126, emphases added) [Outside, an August night. A reflection without heat was warming the sky with its whiteness. Omar saw this dark room glittering with the moon’s rays. The threshold was awash with the moon’s light, which spread to the feet of the sleepers and licked them. He could not stop tossing and turning in his bed; insomnia took over. His clothes disturbed him. In the middle of the night, itching got a hold of everyone. Fingernails scratched stomach, buttocks, thighs for a long time.]

In this passage, sensuality serves to establish Omar’s connection to the specific manifestations of his poverty-stricken life. The author’s choice of léchait for moonlight touching the sleeping members and scratching the lower limbs of the body is a sensuous rendering of the physicality of Omar’s Algerian poverty. In Dib’s early writings, he identifies with his reality not by confronting and differentiating it from another but rather by taking its driving force from its own existence and using it to create a difference in his life.

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Indeed, Omar finds his identity in his own daily acts. “Mais qu’avait-il besoin d’aller chercher si loin? La liberté n’était-elle pas dans chacun de ses actes?” [But did he need to search further? Wasn’t freedom in each one of his acts?] (115). Because of his will to conduct his “ordinary” life in a manner that disavows shame and backwardness, Omar’s identity gains spatial importance in his milieu. Furthermore, the correlation of a foreign culture and locus or indigenous sphere brings forth the awkward application of foreign ideas to a local culture. Omar’s first exposure to the concept of patrie is in M. Hassan’s classroom. Dib’s treatment of patrie, first as an abstract idea and then through the awkward implications of studying it in the colonial French education system and applying its definition to Omar’s life in DarSbitar, is clear from the following passage: M. Hassan . . . proclama: —La Patrie. L’indifférence accueillit cette nouvelle. On ne comprit pas. Le mot, campé en l’air, se balançait. —Qui d’entre vous sait ce que veut dire: Patrie? . . . Les élèves cherchèrent entre les tables, sur les murs, à travers les fenêtres, au plafond, sur la figure du maître; il apparut avec évidence qu’elle n’était pas là. Patrie n’était pas dans la classe. ... —La France est notre mère Patrie, annonça Brahim. [Omar, surpris, pensait] Comment ce pays si lointain est-il sa mère? Sa mère est à la maison, c’est Aïni; il n’en a pas deux. Aïni n’est pas la France. Rien de commun. Omar venait de surprendre un mensonge. Patrie ou pas patrie, la France n’était pas sa mère. Il apprenait des mensonges pour éviter la fameuse baguette d’olivier. . . . Les élèves entre eux disaient: celui qui sait le mieux mentir, le mieux arranger son mensonge, est le meilleur de la classe. (20–21) [Mr. Hassan . . . announced: —Homeland. This announcement was received with indifference. We did not understand what he was saying. The word hung in the air. —Who knows what Patrie means? . . . Students looked under tables, on the walls, across windows, on the ceiling, on the teacher’s face; it was clear that it was not there. Patrie was not in the classroom. ... —France is our homeland, Brahim announced. (Surprised, Omar thought:) How can this faraway country be his mother? His mother is at home, it is Aïni; he does not have two of them. Aïni is not France. Nothing in common between them. Omar had just caught a lie. Patrie or no patrie, France was not his mother. He was learning lies in order to avoid the famous whipping rod. . . . Students were saying among themselves: the one who knows how to lie, how to best maneuver his lies, is the best in class.]

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For the young Omar, the lessons on patrie in a classroom setting are both foreign and incongruous. To learn about the concept of homeland from a French textbook is not only awkward but insignificant as far as Omar’s present life is concerned. The incongruity of a foreign term’s application to Omar’s life is an intrusion on his Algerian reality. There are other immediate concerns that compete for Omar’s attention, such as hunger and the next warm meal. Thus, when the word patrie is first uttered, it is a foreign concept to most of the students in M. Hassan’s class. So incongruous is its presence in Omar’s milieu that Dib’s text brings out the humor of its introduction in his life with the line “Patrie n’était pas dans la classe,” as if Omar mistook it for someone’s name. As a foreign term, patrie could designate anyone or anything for Omar. Because it fails to relate to any part of Omar’s life, it “floats” to find a meaning in his existence. By contrast, the word pain would have solicited an entirely different reaction from Omar and his fellow students. Any mention of bread has much more significance to Omar’s life. Not surprisingly, then, when Omar hears the term “mère Patrie,” the confusion is furthered in his reality, for his mother, Aïni, is at home and could not have any link to the patrie being mentioned in class. This is the first step in recognizing that what he is learning in class about patrie is artificial and has very little significance in his life. Omar arrives at certain conclusions about the relevance of this new concept in his life: if Aïni is not his patrie, then according to his lesson, she is not France. In turn, France is not his mother. Omar learns the lesson of what he calls lies as far as the concept of patrie is concerned. In another autobiographical setting, Jacques’s/Camus’s first encounter with the term patrie in Le Premier homme takes place roughly around the same age as Omar’s first exposure to it in his classroom. It is Jacques’s friend Didier whose bourgeois life plays a major role in defining the concept of patrie to Jacques—the French family lineage and a historical perspective comprise patrie, or France. As Jacques confirms this meaning with his mother, his notion that patrie equals France is reinforced. Even though Jacques has not yet seen what constitutes his patrie, he accepts the definition provided to him as legitimate. The vertical implications of relating patrie and a French family lineage are retained in Camus’s text. As to the patrie de chair, as he referred to Algeria in his text, an effort is made not to confuse it with the patrie (France) in Camus’s autobiographical writing. As the pied-noir differentiates between the two, a chasm created by maintaining differences becomes the space that accommodates Camus’s central status and hence his privileged voice in the autobiographical setting of Algeria. It is interesting to note here that Dib’s portrait of a middle-class French family parallels the socioeconomic life that Jacques’s/Camus’s

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friend Didier enjoyed: the country house, the ivy on the wall, the shining dishes in the kitchen. And although such a life was foreign to Camus as well, he nonetheless appropriated the concept of patrie as rendered by his friend because they were both pieds-noirs and shared similar cultural experiences. However, such images of a distant life in a distant land have no reference to the life that Omar leads. Just as the cakes of Aïd-Seghir and the lamb of Aïd-Kebir are the Muslim counterparts to the Christmas tree in Dib’s text, so Omar’s life in Dar-Sbitar is the Algerian counterpart of the image of a child’s life in France. As Omar questions the concept of patrie delivered through a French textbook, he recognizes the irrelevance of its status in his life. As we have seen, his counterpart Jacques in Camus’s Algeria attaches all the connotations that he must integrate in his pied-noir status for the sake of his central and privileged position in Le Premier homme. This is why, confined by a definition far from his own reality, Omar judges it to be a lie, whereas Jacques internalizes the essential meaning of patrie as France as it is conceptualized by his friend and affirmed by his mother. It may be noted here that Omar’s Algerian teacher shows his frustration in recognizing the concept of patrie as a product of French education and uses Arabic to counteract the lesson’s French message. It is only in his concept of watan that the teacher does not feel like a foreigner. He must then recognize and formulate the experience he knows as his own. As Dib’s text anchors itself on an Algerian reality, Omar’s universe is that of a child of his milieu. The hardship that surrounds him is particular to his environment and constitutes his Algerianness. From this point of view, no other way of life exists for the young Omar, and no other horizons interfere in his life. The Algerian identity in Dib’s text is carved out of a realization of what is real: his mother, his hunger, his hardship as set in Dar-Sbitar. Thus, Dib’s text leaves no room for a French standard because Omar’s link to his milieu is too direct and immediate. There are no comparisons to a French existence and no indirect approaches to his own world. Even while being given a lesson on patrie in the classroom setting discussed above, the taste of bread in Omar’s mouth is more immediate and deserves more attention than “far-flung” ideas from another nation’s text. The center of Dib’s identity thus remains his Algeria, lodged in the everyday experiences of poverty, hardship, and survival as lived through a boy’s vision of his life. More important than the education he receives in the classroom is the one he absorbs from his immediate experiences. It is by retaining a local perspective that Dib’s text unburdens itself of a French influence. Thus, it is from his own reality that Omar views the incongruous image of a domestic scene set in France as having no relevance in his Algerian life:

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La lampe projette sa clarté sur la table. Papa, enfoncé dans un fauteuil, lit son journal et maman fait de la broderie. . . . [Le] feu qui flambe dans la cheminée, le tic-tac de la pendule, la douce atmosphère du foyer pendant qu’il pleut, vente et fait nuit dehors. (21) [The lamp projects its light on the table. Settled in his armchair, Papa is reading his newspaper, and Mama is embroidering. . . . (The) fire in the fireplace, the tick-tock of the clock, the homey atmosphere while it rains and is windy outside.]

Omar’s mother does not have the luxury of embroidering by the fireside, for she is caught up in the basic struggle to survive. Neither the comfort of the ticking clock nor the rhythm of the rain on the roof are part of Omar’s existence. Such images are alien to the young boy and can only be relegated to the stereotypical image of the French family. That a French family is stereotyped rather than the Algerian from a European’s point of view is also indicative of the humorous strain in Dib’s writings. Dib’s treatment of a common Algerian culture, his unfiltered depictions of his native Tlemcen, and the growing sense of communal concerns of members of his village serve to render nascent nationalistic concerns. H. Earnest Lewald’s definition of nationalism parallels Dib’s culturally inspired literary depictions of Algeria. For Lewald, the sense of a nation in a group of people is a “consequence of fundamental social relations within a community of material and spiritual interests, embracing morals, customs, and traditions that join to create what has so often been called a ‘common destiny,’ ‘soul of the people’” (The Cry of Home, 3). Such a movement from centralized individual concerns to a collective consciousness in Dib’s text brings into focus the interplay of land, Algerianness, and national identity. There is a correlation between the transition of Dib’s protagonist from boyhood to adolescence and the movement from one existential circumstance to another in Dib’s semiautobiographical context, the world he knew as a child. Like Omar’s changing circumstances, the varied professions that Dib practiced in his life gave the author a multitude of perspectives. In the end, however, the writing that best illustrates his inner voice was the one that recapitulates his Algerian code of life. Toward the end of his novel, as Omar becomes aware of the changes brewing in Algeria, his integration into the mesmerizing force of his cultural identity is an initiation not only into adulthood but into his national standing as well. En découvrant cette foule presque heureuse, Omar oublia le pain. Emporté par cette marée impétueuse, il n’eut aucune peur, bien qu’il se vît loin de la maison, et s’y glissa au beau milieu. En dépit de sa petite taille, de sa faiblesse d’enfant, il s’abandonnait au courant qui le traversait et le portait dans le même sens.

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Il n’était plus un enfant. Il devenait une parcelle de cette grande force muette qui affirmait la volonté des hommes contre sa propre destruction. (184–185) [Upon discovering this almost happy crowd, Omar forgot the bread. Carried away by the engulfing tide, he was not afraid. Even though he was far from his house, he slipped right into its center. He abandoned his little body and frail physique to the direction of the stream. He was no longer a child. He became a part of the great silent strength that affirmed the indestructible will of men.]

As Omar becomes a part of a larger entity than his own individual existence, he is swept into the collective energy of the swarm of people surrounding him. However, to be a part, hence “une parcelle,” in Dib’s text, is tantamount to being a knowing accomplice to a change brought on by the forces of cultural awareness. The crowd’s movement envelopes Omar. His being is internally and externally taken in by its energy. Yet Omar’s role as part of a whole is not an insignificant one. Dib’s creation of his character’s standing in the growing momentum of a change is one of selfconfidence and strength, hence the author’s statement: “[Il] s’y glissa au beau milieu.” By his jumping into the middle of the advancing crowd, Omar is empowered with the recognition that he is an active member of a larger force, and in this capacity, he is a part of anticipated change rather than a blind entity engulfed by a great force. The crowd itself is a collective gathering of forces, its energy dependent on each individual participant’s will to focus on the important sociological issues of Dib’s Algeria. In his text, Dib depicts the gathering alive with the purpose of claiming its will. Though composed of individual energies, the crowd articulates a collective voice. Even in Dib’s very early writings, the Dibian representation of an Algerian village’s recognition of a common will represents the growth of a nascent national energy. For his part, Camus continues the experience of difference and distance first experienced in Algeria in Le Premier homme. While describing a commonplace Sunday occurrence, he reverts to a consciousness of separation among Arabs and French even when he revisits Algeria in his autobiographical novel: Aujourd’hui, c’était dimanche aussi, mais les services psychologiques de l’armée avaient installé des haut-parleurs dans le kiosque, la foule était en majorité arabe, mais elle ne tournait pas autour de la place, ils étaient immobiles et ils écoutaient la musique arabe qui alternait avec les discours, et les Français perdus dans la foule se ressemblaient tous, avaient le même air sombre et tourné vers l’avenir. (77) [This day it was Sunday also, but the army propaganda services had put up loudspeakers in the kiosk, the majority of the crowd was Arab, but

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it was not circling the center, they were stationary and they were listening to Arab music that was interrupted by speeches, and the French lost in the crowd all resembled each other, they all had the same serious look toward the future.]

By marginalizing the Arabs in this relatively banal street scene, Camus maintains a split consciousness of the milieu in which he grew up and to which he returns to visit. The Arabs are in the majority. Yet they remain stationary in their “outside” position. They “receive” the musical strains in their outposts and merely look at the action in the center. Conversely, the French are occupied with the central action around the kiosk, their movements contrasting with the Arabs’ sedentary position. Caught in a motion that creates a significant presence for themselves in the land they now call home, the French resemble each other. Camus’s narrative glance at this typical pre-independence scene in Algeria is symptomatic of his awareness of the two existing poles of Algerian life as he knew it. The question that is vital to Camus’s position is where he places himself. If it is from Belcourt, the poor white section of Algiers, that Camus retained an impression of contradiction in his poverty yet relative superiority as a pied-noir over the local Arab and Berber population, then the force of the tension created by contrasts of two poles is a Camusian mechanism of taking on and retaining the opposites of the Algerian milieu as he experienced it. The impetus of Dib’s literary creation, however, is a direct link to his Algerianness as revealed in the representations of his land. The Algeria that the author depicts is a direct representation of the point where his inner landscape, or Algerianness, and the outer landscape, or Algerian milieu, unite. By depicting Omar’s Algerian universe in La Grande maison, Dib creates an overlapping space of the internal and external landscape of this Algerianness. This common space between the two is the microcosm of the Algerian essentiality of the author’s textual identity. The meeting place of the two arenas—the inner reality and the outer reality that composes Dib’s textual identity—is reminiscent of Jean Pélégri’s desire to merge the two realities of his life, whereas Camus’s internalizing of the lesson of contrasts from his Algerian experiences was replicated in a difficult embrace that the author retained with the Algerian soil.

Notes 1. In this and subsequent translations, I have tried to remain as close to the original French as possible. 2. I presented this argument in “Camus’s Equilibrium in Noces and L’Été: A Centralized Ethos of Place,” Maghreb Review (London) 21, nos. 3–4 (1996).

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Works Cited Bhabha, Homi K. Locations of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brée, Germaine. Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Camus, Albert. L’Été: Essais. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1965. ———. Noces: Essais. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1965. ———. Le Premier homme. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994. Déjeux, Jean. Littérature maghrébine de langue française. Ottawa: Editions Naaman, 1973. Dib, Mohammed. La Grande maison. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952. Lewald, H. Earnest, ed. Introduction. In The Cry of Home. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972. Lewis, Bernard. The Middle East and the West. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Lottman, Herbert R. Albert Camus: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1979. Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1957. ———. Écrivains francophones du Maghreb. Paris: Editions Seghers, 1985. Noiville, Florence. “The Long Journey Towards Publication.” Manchester Guardian (May 8, 1994): 16. Pélégri, Jean. Ma Mère, l’Algérie. Alger: Laphomic, 1989.

7

: The Maghreb of the Mind in Mustapha Tlili, Brick Oussaïd, and Malika Mokeddem Laura Rice

Mustapha Tlili, Brick Oussaïd, and Malika Mokeddem are contemporary writers who come from the southern Maghreb. Their works, set in the desert steppes of the northern Sahara, demonstrate the amazing power and variety of barren landscapes, landscapes that, to outsiders, embody the very idea of “nothingness.” For Tlili, Oussaïd, and Mokeddem, however, the contours, changing light, and movements of these flat and empty spaces provide the context for their experience and understanding of life: the landscapes shape their abstract conceptions of human activity—passion, loyalty, fear, desire—and the landscape in turn is shaped by the indigenous perspectives (stories, myths, ecological practices) these writers absorbed coming of age in these lands. Learning to see these environments as they do, through their works, helps us to understand not only the particular “geography of identity” each writer has developed but to understand as well the sets of assumptions we as readers—often from very different environments—bring to our readings of the Maghreb. Different people may see and value the “same” landscape differently. For example, in Patricia Yaeger’s recent collection, Geography of Identity, she makes geographical assumptions in her essay about Disney World (“Narrating Space”) that are strongly shaped by her life in a postmodern, industrial environment. She describes “Disney World” as a simulacrum “in which ‘the real’ disappears and an imitation takes its place.” Yaeger terms the space where the simulacrum operates “a desert” because the simulacrum, although full of copied detail, is empty of reality (3). She shares this geographical assumption (that deserts are empty) with some of the most influential scholars of postmodern cultural studies: “Empty space not only haunts Foucault, Baudrillard, and Lefebvre; it haunts a passel of other postmodern theorists. We have to ask why the trope of abandonment, 119

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blankness, vacancy, or void appears willy-nilly, whether we are contemplating the archival provinces of poststructuralist history, the hyper real world of commodity fetishism, or the uncivil world of political action” (9). Although Tlili, Oussaïd, and Mokeddem have all experienced firsthand the “uncivil world of political action” that has defined the colonial and neocolonial world systems, their “geographies of identity”—their self-concepts drawn from their environment—do not include a conception of the “desert” as unproblematically defined by notions of “abandonment, blankness, vacancy or void.” The desert is far richer in its variety and meanings. An environment of extremes, the desert requires of its inhabitants practices of conservation, humility (as opposed to a drive toward instrumental control), and hospitality that those from industrialized, postmodern societies are only now beginning to envision under the name “sustainable development.” In Lion Mountain, Tlili evokes a traditional and environmentally grounded sense of place that is destroyed by the advent of the modern space of the nation. Oussaïd, in The Mountains Forgotten by God, recognizes his tribe’s wisdom in distrusting colonial and neocolonial “maldevelopment” (that is, the unsustainable development of human and natural resources), despite the tribe’s desperate circumstances of extreme poverty and isolation. Mokeddem, in Le Siècle des sauterelles, challenges the notion that the desert is “empty” or “inhuman” by using images of the desert landscape to capture the nuances and hidden depths of her characters’ intellectual and emotional lives. These writers, who see deserts differently, add crucial alternative perspectives to the project begun in Yaeger’s volume to explore the “territorial imaginary” in an effort to contribute to a “new poetics” (38) of narrative space. To Westerners in general and to most urban Maghrebians, the high plateaus and deserts of the Maghreb are empty and forbidding places, wastelands that stretch endlessly between the place where we are and the place we might want to get to on the far side of the void, say, Timbuktu. It is a world of salt marshes (sebkhas), flat gravel plains (regs), stony deserts (hamadas), shifting dunes (ergs), and weird rock formations sculpted by the eroding winds. When desert environments appear in contemporary works from the urban Maghreb, they most often occur either as the empty stages upon which characters execute their actions or as hostile, alien settings that cause characters to remember, ruefully, all that they have left behind. From this perspective, the inhabitants of these desert lands are inhospitable hosts: horned vipers, scorpions, and rare nomads in raiding parties. This view of the North African interior is not new. In his History, the fifth-century- B.C.E. Greek historian and traveler Herodotus notes that although numerous tribes live along the fringe of the Libyan seacoast, further inland one finds wild beasts and then “a ridge of sand, reaching from

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Egyptian Thebes to the Pillars of Hercules,” broken only by occasional “heaps of salt in large lumps” (129). Similarly, the Greek geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.E. to after 23 C.E.) reports in his Geography that “Libya is . . . like a leopard’s skin, for it is spotted with inhabited places that are surrounded by waterless and desert land. The Egyptians call such inhabited places ‘auases.’ . . . [From] Carthage up to Maurusia and the Pillars of Hercules . . . [the] interior region, which produces silphium, affords only a wretched sustenance, being for the most part rocky and sandy desert” (501). Later travelers from the Maghreb itself found these interior places no more welcoming. Born in Tangiers, Ibn Battuta says of his travels by caravan from Gabès (Tunisia) to Atrabulus (Tripoli, Libya) in 1325 that his party was escorted for part of the journey by 100 or more horsemen and a troop of archers, “with the result that roving Arabs, in fear of them, avoided their vicinity,” but once they left Atrabulus, “the dromedary-men of some bands of nomad Arabs sought to attack us, but eventually the Divine Will diverted them and prevented them from doing us the harm they had intended” (Travels, 17). As in many other classical and historical texts, Ibn Battuta uses the word Arab (a distortion of A’ara¯b) to mean “Bedouin” or “nomad,” not the entire Arab race. Some years later, in the winter of 1352, Ibn Battuta joined a caravan leaving Sijilmassa (Morocco) for the Sudan (sub-Saharan Africa), and on this caravan route he found the Sahara equally alien. Twenty-five days out, they stopped in the mid-desert town of Taghaza: “This is a village with nothing good about it,” Ibn Battuta reports. Its houses and mosques are built of blocks of salt and roofed with camel skins: “It is the most fly-ridden of places” (Dunn, Adventures, 297). Leo Africanus, following the same Sijilmassa-Taghaza-Timbuktu caravan route in 1510 and again around 1513, describes Taghaza as the most desolate of places and its inhabitants most oppressed: “they are distant from all inhabited places, almost twentie daies iourney, insomuch that oftentimes they perish for lacke of foode. . . . morouer the southeast winde doth so often blind them, that they cannot live here without great perill. I my selfe continued three days among them, all which time I was constrained to drinke salt-water drawen out of certaine welles” (History and Description, 800–801). He describes the Numidian people of the Libyan desert as equally barbaric: “they liue all after one manner, that is to say, without all lawe and ciuilitie” (151), and “as for their manner of liuing, it would seeme to any man incredible what hunger and scarcitie this nation will indure” (152). But the difficult conditions of scarcity that beleaguer desert peoples have taught them to value hospitality and generosity and to embed these qualities in their communities. Thus, Leo Africanus also says of the Numidians: “the liberalitie of this people hath at all times beene exceedingly great” (History and Description, 154), and they insist on showing travel-

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ers great hospitality. The Arabians who live in Numidia “are very wittie and conceited in penning of verses. . . . And albeit they are most liberally minded, yet dare they not by bountifull giuing make any show of wealth; for they are daily oppressed with manifold inconueniences” (156–157). Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) describes the Arabs of the desert equally by contrasts: scarcity and liberality; anarchy and loyalty, wit and barbarism: “On account of their savage nature, (the Arabs [Bedouins]) are people who plunder and cause damage. . . . They [plunder] then retreat to their pastures in the desert. They do not attack or fight except in self-defense” (1958, I. 302). But countering this lack of civilization, according to Ibn Khaldun, is the salubrity and poetry that come from desert life. Concerning their salubrity, he notes that hunger and scarcity give them a diet with little variation, few spices, and few unusual ingredients, so their digestion is good. Their “air has little putrescence” and “too, they take exercise, and there is a lot of movement when they race horses, or go hunting, or search for things they need. . . . Thus, their temper is healthier and more remote from illness (than that of sedentary people). As a result, their need for medicine is small. Therefore, physicians are nowhere to be found in the desert” (1958, II. 377). If physicians are few and far between, poets are everywhere in the desert, where music and song are the most easily transportable of crafts: “[The Arabs] appreciated [poetry] very highly. It was distinguished in their speech through a certain nobility, because it alone possessed harmony. They made poetry the archive of their history, their wisdom, and their nobility, and the touchstone of their natural gift for expressing themselves correctly, choosing the best methods (uslub) of expression” (II. 402). But aside from the art of poetry, Ibn Khaldun sees the desert steppes and the Sahara as barren, with little to offer the “civilized” world. Most contemporary writers from the Maghreb tend to share this view of the vast interior of the land as empty, and intellectually they turn away from the desert and toward the Mediterranean (France in particular) as the source of their creative animus—whether expressed as inspiration or animosity. Although all three writers considered in this chapter have emigrated to France, each of them has developed a personal “geography of identity” from an inland, desert environment that has migrated with them. Mustapha Tlili from Feriana on the pre-Saharan steppes of Tunisia between Kasserine and Gafsa along the Algerian border, Brick Oussaïd from the barren mountains and plains of the eastern slope of Morocco’s Middle Atlas mountains as they run toward the Algerian border, and Malika Mokeddem from the oases of Kenadsa (the “gateway” to the great Sahara) on the vague border between Algeria and Morocco all recreate the landscapes of the mind that sustained their development despite harsh conditions and the demands of modernization. The three come from different backgrounds: Tlili’s narrator traces his forebears back to the Andalusian

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exodus starting in 1492; Oussaïd’s family are from Berber tribes who migrated north from the Sahara; Mokeddem’s relatives include the mixed race (Arab/Black) Doui Menia nomads of the Sahara southwest of Kenadsa. All three Maghrebian writers have internalized the immense variety of these landscapes in which others have seen mere barren wastes. Although these writers, like so many other Maghrebian writers, have migrated to the West for education and work, their imagery remains deeply tied to rural and desert places rather than to the metropolis. The works examined here reflect the enormous emotional range these authors associate with the natural ecologies of their natal borderlands, places that illuminate the interior mental landscapes of their characters and echo in their characters’ voices. Tlili’s Montagne de Lion (1988) [Lion Mountain, 1990]; Oussaïd’s Coquelicots de l’orientale [Poppies of the Eastern Slope] (1983, translated misleadingly as Mountains Forgotten by God, 1989); and Mokeddem’s Siècle des sauterelles [Century of Locusts] (1992) are autobiographical to different degrees. Lion Mountain is set in Tlili’s home village as opposed to his other works (Rages aux Tripes, 1975; Le Bruit dort, 1978; Gloire des sables, 1982), which are set abroad in places like New York or Riyadh. Oussaïd’s work is completely autobiographical, and all of Mokeddem’s works—Les Hommes qui marchent (1990), Siècle des sauterelles (1992), L’Interdite (1993), and Des Rêves et des assassins (1995)—seem to be semiautobiographical, each having a main character whose roots and biography resemble her own desert upbringing. What these works share, then, is not a particular relation of writing to reality but rather an internalization of a landscape that develops into a geography of identity of the northern Saharan Maghreb.

Tlili’s Lion Mountain: Visions of the Past, Voices of the Present The protagonists in Lion Mountain inhabit the complex borderland between East and West, between tradition and modernity, and between oral and written expression. On the most literal level, we are brought into this borderland by the voice of Horia, the central character of the novel, a widow whose voice emerges “as spoken” in the letters the public scribe has written for her to her elder son in the United States. These letters, refracted through the consciousness of that son—a professional writer— come to us as fragments that speak of tradition and stability in the midst of violent political change, first under French domination, then under the corrupt party politics of the independence movement, and finally under the modernizing initiatives of the developing postindependence nation. While Horia and her ancestors, like the desert mountain, persist and subsist

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despite the brutalities of change, her sons—one an intellectual, one a revolutionary—are caught in the contradictions between a disconnected past and an alienated present. When Tlili began writing his novel, he had not planned to name it after a particular, concrete landmark—Lion Mountain, the name of both the village and the mountain in the novel. Rather he wanted the title to suggest a more abstract historical concept. In 1987 he published part of this novel in an anthology he put together with Jacques Derrida, entitled For Nelson Mandela. His prefatory remarks to this early excerpt read: The story of Horia, an old woman living alone on the Tunisian steppe, is from a novel in progress entitled (provisionally?) A Thousand Futures Lost and concerns an adamant struggle to keep a beloved horizon pure, and to keep sovereign a freedom felt as a native inalienable good. The frail, weak Horia, with the inflexibility of a powerful inner vision, unshakably resists larger forces. These forces rise up against the old woman and build constructions justified only by tricky schemes, but which deprive Horia of the open and unobstructed view which she has always had from her ancestral home, of the ocher mountain proudly standing in the distance. A Thousand Futures Lost will be about resisting the intolerable.

As we listen to Horia’s voice in the letters she has dictated and sent to her son, who recalls them for us and comments on them, we realize that the geography of identity in this novel is charted according to three conceptual coordinates: place, time, and space. The idea of place is deeply tied to that “unobstructed view” of Lion Mountain, where both the village and the landscape stand for clearly demarcated ways of doing and seeing. Time in the novel is a function of both a mythic past, when the original Andalusian ancestors “galloped out of the unknown,” and a secular present, understood as “a thousand futures lost” because of the narrow, instrumental, and corrupt mentalities of the new national leaders. Finally, space shapes the novel, as the narrative is largely generated in epistolary fashion because Horia’s two sons are far away. One is the writer living in New York who narrates the book, and the other is a revolutionary who becomes as elusive and mythical as his Andalusian ancestors as he escapes from prisons and slips across borders. The difference between having a “sense of place” and having only an “experience of space” in the novel illustrates the historical divide that separates Horia from her sons: she is the land and continuity, whereas they are condemned to the borderlands because they speak multiple languages (Arabic, French, English), must deal with multiple governments (“first world/third world”; “developed/developing”; corrupt/corrupt), and experience multiple alienations from the place they were born. Jonathan Sime, an environmental psychologist, has argued that what differentiates “place”

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from “space” is chiefly the way we identify with them. Place is a concept that “implies a strong emotional tie . . . between a person and a particular physical location,” whereas space is unsettlingly anonymous (Yaeger, Geography, 5). An earlier theorist of environmental psychology, Yi-Fu Tuan, sees the relationship slightly differently: “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other” (Space and Place, 3). Lion Mountain explores the notion of “space,” seemingly defined in contradictory ways by Sime and Tuan, as a function of context. For Horia, space and place are found in her view of Lion Mountain from her home; she is geographically grounded. As for her son, place is what he has lost in emigrating, and space is what has replaced it. Tlili’s novel opens with the idea that Lion Mountain is defined by heritage and hierarchy and that Horia believed in a “clear and deliberate order of things” (5): “For everyone, the imam is the voice of our ancestors, assuring their continuity as the latest in an unbroken line of religious leaders that stretches back for centuries. Knowledge and faith. Order and law. Peace and justice. If the mosque is the center of Lion Mountain, Imam Sadek is the center of the mosque” (6). The mosque is “a dusty building, poignant in its simplicity, sparsely decorated and quite humble, with clumsy uneven lines of the utmost severity. . . . Walls and minaret of ocher, like the Mountain. Cupolas of a washed-out white, faded by the rains and sandstorms” (3). The mosque shapes and is shaped by the lives and the landscapes it echoes. The narrator of Lion Mountain, who has returned home following Horia’s death, experiences a loss of “place.” The landscapes of home so dear to Horia have been changed into alienating space for him on multiple levels: the voice in her letters comes now from the grave; he is rehearsing Horia’s story, which happened when he was far away, to a brother who is a fugitive and who shares the guilt of having left their mother alone; he regrets a past and a homeland from which he is, nevertheless, a voluntary exile: “I’m writing this story for you as well, Little Brother. She loved you best of all. Where are you? Will you ever learn what happened to our mother? Oh, if only we’d been with her when she needed us most!” (21). For traditional communities, place is so central to their identity that regional resistance to outsiders often presents itself as a passion for place. In the midst of a desolate, rock-strewn steppe, the village Lion Mountain had emerged at that place where, according to local legend, “a spring . . . gushed forth” just as the ancestors galloped out of the West, over Lion Mountain. Thus, this “stony, semi-arid waste” “once favored by lions” (12) became a fertile center; the spring irrigated “orchards of pomegranates, figs, almonds, mulberries, peaches, plums, apricots, and other fruit trees. Beneath their boughs, in square plots marked off by channels providing a thin but precious trickle of water, grow abundant tomatoes, and pimentos,

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parsley, carrots, and turnips, and all kinds of melons” (4). Horia, a gifted farmer, is associated with all these blessings of the miracle of water. Like the imam, she anchors the author’s sense of place, just as the mosque and the mountain anchor hers. These people and places are the landmarks of place that persist through the social changes and political storms of this historical novel. When the French colonizers arrived in Lion Mountain, they brought to this landscape the first indications of an alien concept of space. The villagers resisted this invasion, and “after the initial crisis that sparked the village’s defiant stand against the country’s new rulers, Lion Mountain was left to itself” (7). The French ignored the village, despite its location on the main north-south route, Highway 15, and built their own village just down the road, which they called “the Spring.” The narrator, who has come back to visit from the United States and to bury his mother and his memories as well, describes the French village as “a few European buildings—the school, the post office, the former police station . . . now completely dilapidated . . . and the few surviving poplars from a magnificent row planted along the uphill side of the stream” (8). The ability of the village of Lion Mountain and the French town called the Spring to coexist was an accident of fate; the particular French colonial official who happened to be assigned to Lion Mountain was willing to live and let live. He was, by historical chance, also largely ignored in his own turn, assigned to the dusty margins of the space of the metropole and overlooked by colonial power brokers. Tlili’s narrator describes Lion Mountain as a balanced environment where different places could exist in geometric harmony: “One could draw an almost perfect equilateral triangle between the Spring, Horia’s house, and the small group of traditional dwellings. The old woman’s house would be at the apex, while Highway 15 would form the base as it runs past, linking together the original village and the European neighborhood. Opposite Horia’s house looms the Mountain” (8). The sweep of the land between Horia’s house and the mountain had, until the recent past, “remained intact, untouched by any cultivation or construction” (9). This place is for the villagers, he tells us, “a geography more than physical or human: sacred” (9). In dealing with the French outsiders, the villagers, through their imam, had been able to send the message that their will to resist the pollution of this sacred place was so strong—and the stakes for the colonizer so minimal in this poor, arid, borderland—that the French turned their attention elsewhere, and Lion Mountain survived intact. Nevertheless, this equilibrium is quite temporary, Tlili suggests, because the two cultures involved conceive of their environments in very different ways: Lion Mountain appears to be an environment defined by extremes and contradictions. This land where “once . . . lions roamed the

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stony, semi-arid waste,” is wild; its seasons are harsh, with “endless pitchblack [winter] nights of bitter cold” (13) and summers “almost 50 degrees centigrade in the shade . . . still boiling hot late in the afternoon” (48); and its days are extreme: “the cool dawn draped in a delicate, almost diaphanous crimson veil . . . the twilight, all ablaze, covering the Mountain and horizon with a thousand deep red tongues of flame” (11). But space here is organized along a vertical axis of tradition and faith, so order and hierarchy bring it peace. The French, however, seem to deploy their concepts of environment along an undifferentiated horizontal plane. This is what Saad, Horia’s Nubian servant, is struck by when he enlists with the Allies in World War II: “the land of the Infidel . . . Wide, straight, endless roads, lines of asphalt that seemed as though they might have been traced with a ruler . . . People who all looked the same with their blue eyes, their wheat-straw hair . . . without any sense of shame or restraint” (28). But it is not the French who break this temporary equilibrium; rather their postcolonial “students,” the new leaders in the postindependence period, bring chaos to the land. These “new masters” with their “arbitrary rules” and their “misdeeds” are “insiders” to Tunisia but “outsiders” to the village, which they merely understand first as a voting district and next as a link in the tourist infrastructure. At the beginning, they are intent upon substituting for older traditions of place a new sense of national space defined as the motherland, synonymous with Habib Bourguiba’s Neo-Destour Party. The Delegate of the “New Masters,” described as “petty malevolence made flesh and blood” (59), comes to enroll all adult males in the party, with the threat that those who resist will lose their irrigation water—the resistance to the “national” space will result in damage to the traditional place. From the first day, our narrator remembers, the Delegate violates and pollutes the village as “he shows off at the wheel of a luxurious black Citroën, driving with ostentation and contempt through the narrow, stony streets of our poor little village at breakneck speed, making an incredible racket and leaving behind great clouds of dust” (59). Representative of the “modernizing” party interested in eliminating religious customs and laws that are “obsolete,” the Delegate narrates a new nation: “each visit, he tells us about a new episode in what he proudly calls the “epic of the Party” or about another miracle by the man he calls, in a voice trembling with veneration, “Monsieur the President,” who has returned in triumph to the country by way of the sea, on a white horse—or so he claims—like a prophet” (85–86). The Delegate explains to the villagers that outsiders are not the problem: “danger threatens from the Great South, source of all their [the party’s] problems. The enemy will attack any day now, and proceed up Highway 15 to the capital” (99). The historical issue referred to here is the support dissidents from the “Great South”—that is, the steppe

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and Saharan regions—gave to Bourguiba’s rival within the party, Salah Ben Youssef, who favored fighting the French for full independence rather than negotiating with them about withdrawal from Tunisia, as Bourguiba, the gradualist, was doing. The attempt is made, then, to convince the villagers to substitute this newly minted national epic with its secular “prophet” for the older hierarchical faith that has centered Lion Mountain. As the narrator learns much later, when Horia’s Nubian worker Saad, who is like family to her, refuses to sign up for the party, he gets firsthand experience of this new national space: “Saad shows me the cigarette burns on his arms. . . . I can see the stripes of a septic blue, mottled with blood, left by blows of a truncheon on his back. . . . three months of torture . . . an entire week without food or water in a dank, coal-black cellar infested with rats and flooded with water, the basement of a dilapidated building in a big city, perhaps the capital” (56). The Delegate, who causes dissension among some of the villagers and does bodily harm to others, is finally chased from Lion Mountain by the imam. The new authorities end up beating a retreat, finding, like the French, that the stakes are too high. From this point on, the party will administer the space of Lion Mountain from afar, via governmental agencies like the Post Office. The Post Office confiscates the letters sent between Horia and her son in New York. Horia circumvents this barrier by sending her letters through passing tourists who have come to capture in slides and pictures Lion Mountain’s sense of place. She lives with and adjusts to these daily attempted invasions; her son far away does not have this mundane contact as a defense. Away at school for years, he counts on letters and short visits to protect his sense of place: I renewed my ties by listening to Horia’s stories on long summer nights. With the melodious brook murmuring in the background, she would tell me of the latest torrential rains, the most recent sandstorms, and the thousand other events both great and small that had befallen our village, which nonetheless went on imperturbably, like the Mountain after which it was named. The essential bond was lost, however; the village I had left behind had abandoned me in turn. From that moment on I was an exile. A stranger. Was it so surprising that I should now be unable to understand what Horia was trying to explain to me? Was I right to blame myself for not understanding? (74)

Unable to hear the silences in his mother’s voice and out of touch with daily life, the narrator realizes with horror only much later what Horia and Saad had been living through. Lion Mountain itself was already the great secret of my life, a secret that remained entirely separate from the orderly, rational life I led with my companions [in New York], as someone passionately engaged in the

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sacred pursuit of learning Horia had so desired for her sons. The secret was my magic world; I lived it apart from the real world, and I considered it my right to do so even with friends who loved me. And I lived this secret as though it were a privilege. Lion Mountain was my secret garden. I was secretly proud of it. It was that pride I lost when I was forced to harbor the other secret [of Saad’s torture, of which even the imam is unaware]. My nights were filled with bad dreams. (80)

Silenced by the unspoken threats of the modern nation, the narrator suggests he understands the cost of getting papers to return home again. Horia warns him: “I have only the two of you in this life. Your little brother and you. You will still have to return here. To this village. To this country. So, a reckless move . . . well-intentioned, but imprudent. Why provoke the Devil? Just imagine the consequences. . . . Better let the Devil destroy himself” (72–73). Horia believes that “everything that is totally and basically corrupt is irrevocably doomed to perish. Of its own accord” (72). The narrator has grown away from this steady belief, so “Lion Mountain” now merges the dream-place of childhood memory with the nightmare of contemporary politics for this powerless and distant outcast. In the end, it is the government’s desire to capitalize on the tourism flow that causes Horia’s death. Invasion by the French and physical coercion by the party are replaced by socioeconomic modernization. The Delegates again arrive at Lion Mountain, this time to inaugurate the construction of a new space that will be built on the great sweep of land between Horia’s house and the ocher mountain. Monsieur le President has acted on the advice of “experts” and “chosen to endow Lion Mountain with a tourist area to be constructed on virgin soil at a geometric site . . . glass, concrete, shoddy flashiness out in the desert . . . the café-restaurant, the gas station, the crafts shop, the four story hotel” (150–151). To defend her land, Horia and her faithful servant have mounted an old World War II machine gun on the roof, a weapon left as a remnant of the battles at the Kasserine Pass that had largely passed Lion Mountain by. As security for the governmental groundbreaking, soldiers have placed tanks at the ceremonial site. The conflict results in the obliteration of Horia’s house, blown to smithereens, and the death of Horia and the faithful Saad. Lion Mountain is a place forever after fragmented. Returning months later, the narrator struggles to put the fragments of voices, landscapes, and history back together, and reconstructing this geography of identity is the final purpose of his narrative and of Tlili’s as well. This is perhaps why Tlili finally calls his story Lion Mountain rather than A Thousand Futures Lost: Each of us carries with him, among his resources in life’s struggle, a few deeply engraved images from his early years. They come—usually at their own bidding—to remind us of the many twists and turns in the long

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road already traveled. These images are beacons of light, safeguarding for all eternity those precious moments and loved ones we have lost, those parts of ourselves we treasure in secret, the better to preserve them from the banality of everyday life. The sorrowful or joyous events recounted in this narrative belong to this luminous heritage. (71)

Brick Oussaïd’s Mountains Forgotten by God: Drought as a Human Condition The direct translation of the title of Oussaïd’s autobiography is Poppies of the Eastern Slope rather than Mountains Forgotten by God. And although to the outsider (including the translator), the landscape of Oussaïd’s birthplace is simply barren, harsh, and plagued by drought, the point of Oussaïd’s story is that living in the harsh environment of the desert steppes brings both misery and salubrity, as Ibn Khaldun suggested: scarcity of material means does not translate automatically into poverty of the spirit but rather its opposite: honesty, loyalty, and hospitality. Oussaïd’s autobiography demonstrates that the causes of drought, both as a material and a spiritual condition, are often human rather than simply natural or distantly divine. At the beginning of the book, however, Oussaïd recounts how as a child he shared in the confusion about how to account for his family’s misery, and like his elders he looks to the earth and to the heavens and examines his own strengths and weaknesses before he begins to understand the socioeconomic and political processes that turn mere scarcity into human misery. Early in the book, the misery caused by the natural conditions in which Oussaïd’s family lives is looked on as an accident of birth that one struggles against: “Deep down, I understood the philosophy of my people. My father knew instinctively that the life of the tribe was a perpetual struggle against hunger, time, wolves, snakes, and other forces” (7). As for the injustices born of this misery, God is occasionally held accountable: “God was present in our home. My father and mother had respected Him. They prayed to Him all their lives, and had faithfully observed their religious duties. But this had never kept them from pondering the injustice of life, and in their confusion and perplexity they held God responsible” (4). Oussaïd’s parents do not understand the unjust division of resources they see around them, but they do think of this condition as being God’s will. His father tells him that in other, faraway places in Morocco the marabouts [religious leaders] are generous with the people, there are springs and ample rain, and the people are wealthy: “Not like us over here. But though that may be so, my son, we have to love our land, such as it is. God has been merciful in what he has given us” (33). Although his father shows occasional bitterness about the disparity of resources, “he would soon regret his bitter-

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ness and say: ‘If God is the only God, He is capable of making some of us rich and some of us poor. Besides, the wise men often say, ‘Woe to the rich for their access to paradise is infinitely more difficult than that of the poor’” (42). As a young man, Oussaïd’s father, “born into the twentieth century . . . [and suffering] from the living conditions of his poor, large family” (3), had learned to survive by raiding with the tribe and defending their small possessions. But scarcity teaches other ethical lessons: “he learned not only to steal, but also to share and help others” (3). Oussaïd is a child of his father’s old age, and he remembers his father, frail, somber, and tired on their weekly market trips, as following a set of rules that explained how one can exist in the midst of material poverty without succumbing to poverty of spirit: “Despite the poverty in which we lived, my father was honest and fair. I don’t ever remember him lying about the price of our wares. . . . He attached almost mystical significance to [the first client of the day]. To my great surprise he actually refused to sell anything to a person with a reputation for being dishonest or having the evil eye” (24). At home, where the family lives under a tent made of esparto grass mats that protects them neither from seasonal rains nor from summer’s excessive heat, the contradictory ethic that mixes superstition with faith and seemingly foolhardy liberality with generosity of spirit holds sway: The best times under the tent with our parents were when we had visitors. They were either people we knew or people who came from far away and needed food and shelter. My parents would prepare a meal for them and brew mint tea, taking time to talk about everything and nothing, and even to laugh and joke. . . . Despite our extreme poverty, my parents were excessively hospitable, something we famished children could not understand. . . . Yet we did make the most of these visits which were like a breath of fresh air. But we knew the sequence well. As soon as the visitors had gone we had to tighten our belts even more. . . . If we suffered from hunger, I believe that my parents, through excessive fear of the hereafter and excessive generosity, made it worse. (10–11)

This simple belief in living with faith and in extending human hospitality is synonymous with leaving fields fallow in times of shortage: the choice may seem foolish in the midst of a particular crisis, but it is what keeps the whole system from eroding and maintains the crucial edge of fertility. In a study of drought in northwestern Africa, Will Swearingen notes that before the colonial period, “fallowing . . . was widely practiced. Fallowing replenished the soil moisture and helped restore soil fertility” (“Is Drought Increasing?” 23). When the colonists arrived, they saw this land as badly managed, “underutilized.” Because the tribes in Oussaïd’s region engaged in hospitality, despite poverty, and in fallowing arable land, they were perceived by colonizers as both foolishly shortsighted and lazy.

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Although Oussaïd’s parents do not set much store by lay schooling, they do believe in the value of religious schooling, and so he begins his learning in that way. Oussaïd’s mother was prepared to make any sacrifice “that would allow [him] to become a fkih [religious scholar], to spread religion and live a little more decently” (41). His mother’s faith makes him decide as a small boy of about six that he will follow the path of schooling: “the idea of religious studies pleased me, for I greatly admired the fkihs, the wise men who could recite the Koran by heart and who could read and write. The fkihs also healed those who were sick by writing out talismans for them or by delivering them from the jnouns [plural of djinn, invisible beings] who lived in them. The fkihs were for my people religious leaders, wise men, and physicians” (37). The process of schooling— rather than the content of what he learns per se—teaches Oussaïd to differentiate between circumstances caused by nature, circumstances willed by God, and circumstances of poverty, want, and injustice that are directly attributable to human agency. Oussaïd sees that his family’s suffering could have been mitigated: “My people had lived and been aware of the injustice in their own lives, and in the lives of thousands of others. Yet my father was not an intellectual in today’s sense of the word. He had never gone to school or known the secret of writing. For him, the height of all knowledge was the ability to write a letter” (4). Early in the book, Oussaïd likens the lot of his family to that of their donkey, who works hard, eats little, and, when finally put out to pasture, dies in agony stung to death by bees: “Our donkey lived in misery, as we did. She had a passive and resigned nature. In fact, she was just like us—suffering, starving. I often wondered if she was aware of it. . . . Life, at its heart, is like our donkey: a mystery, a wall behind which there is a drama being acted out that we will never know” (19). Literate and more traveled than his parents, Oussaïd recognizes early on the human causes of misery (pride, greed, arrogance, jealousy), but he has learned as well from his family and from his connection to his tribe that human interaction is also what makes life worth living: “My mother instinctively understood the human need to communicate. She did nothing but console her friends in their suffering and misery. Even though she could do nothing for them on a material level, she listened, lamented with them, prayed for them, and shared their problems, and that was often enough to calm them or return them to better spirits. Communication and a feeling of solidarity form the umbilical cord between people and their existence” (25). Valuing this thread between human beings and their lives, Oussaïd chose to focus on human joy rather than on conditions of misery when he looked for a title for his autobiography: Spring among my people has left me with a memory of unequaled beauty and plenitude. . . .

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Spring reinvigorated the land we so often saw dry and burned. This paradisiacal atmosphere revived the shepherds’ hearts. The echo of their songs came all the way across the plain, penetrating my soul and filling me with a joy of being alive that I could not explain. The poverty of my people had taught me to recognize some wild plants that were supposed to be nourishing. . . . During May, the poppies were my family’s delight. They had to be picked while still in their pods, then steamed and eaten with butter. Thanks to my mother, they made a delicious meal, and I often came home with my hood full of these poppies that brightened my shepherd-boy’s road. (14)

Like most autobiographies, Oussaïd’s story telescopes two points of view, that of the protagonist experiencing the present moment of the story as it unfolds and that of the author looking back on his experiences. The autobiography ends when Oussaïd is eighteen or nineteen and believes he is finally escaping from distress and injustice by going to school in France. As the train takes him across Morocco to the capital city, his thoughts demonstrate the distance between the boy at the end of the book and the man who wrote the book: Oussaïd’s protagonist, as he leaves home to study in France, ponders why everyone doesn’t get out: “I could not help thinking of my origins, of my bare mountains back in the southeast. Why had my people persisted in clinging to this arid, infertile soil instead of looking for a home elsewhere? I suddenly felt resentment against my dead parents, my ancestors. My perplexity became intolerable. Was this blind ‘taking root’ due to strong feelings of love for the soil? Was it exaggerated masochism or was it ignorance and an inability to live elsewhere?” (120). Significantly, his stay in the capital city helps him learn “how to lie” (121), and once he disembarks from the airplane and is on French soil, where he has sworn to himself he will “make every effort; I would integrate myself and get to know the natives; I would forget my sufferings; I would never go back” (122), he finds an alien world: “Everything was wet. Everywhere there were billboards, radar beacons, flashing signals. The huge building, the escalators, the automatic doors, all sorts of gadgets. . . . my head was turning and felt as if it were in a vise” (122). In the final scene of the book, he has fallen down the metro stairs, come up against “a door that wouldn’t open” and discovers himself suffocating from panic in this underground maze (123). The Oussaïd who wrote the book shows us the potential this boy has for understanding that natural causes and divine will do not alone account for poverty, but he must learn to recognize the geography of his identity, the process of “taking root” in a spiritual and intellectual soil. In contrast to this desire to escape felt at eighteen, Oussaïd the writer, looking back in his “Preface” to the work, notes that his story is actually a testimony and that he bears witness: “Both in its moments of happiness and its moments of sadness, [my story] resembles the journey of the people for whom in spite of myself I speak. While for myself the vicious

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circle of suffering has been miraculously broken, for a great number of these people life remains insupportable and uncertain. They still live in fear of poverty on their doorstep and know no other life than the one on the brink of the abyss” (ix). As does Tlili, Oussaïd speaks for people who are silenced (“they can neither speak nor demonstrate”), for people who have seen the “guns that were meant to protect them . . . aim their deadly bullets in their direction” (ix). Yet most of Oussaïd’s story is not about war in a political sense; rather it is about the war for survival for those who have been pushed out and who exist on the margin of the margin. “Living on the margin” is a landscape, a life, and an identity. The crime Oussaïd witnesses is, finally, the almost transparent, naturalized crime of maldevelopment; this crime reveals itself first in the most marginal regions, where development schemes are clearly not sustainable, so the powerful people scramble for the riches while they last: “How can one accept people starving in the face of abundance and technical progress?” Oussaïd asks. “What morality can justify the abject poverty of so many next to the unbelievable riches of a few?” (ix). Across recorded history, the natural hazards plaguing northwestern African countries, sitting astride the Sahara, have been multiple, “including drought, earthquakes, floods and locust invasions,” development theorist Will Swearingen reminds us (“Is Drought Increasing,” 17). Of all these, drought has been the most significant, and it has increased in frequency during the span of Oussaïd’s life story. Although global warming and climate change have been factors in this pattern, Swearingen asserts that socioeconomic and political factors have played a major role in increasing the drought factor since the 1920s, but these human interventions causing drought have been largely overlooked and underestimated. As Swearingen pointed out in Moroccan Mirages, a study of colonial agricultural schemes in Morocco between 1912 and 1956, “conventional wisdom on European colonization and national development processes in former colonies is a surprisingly rickety construction of premature conclusions. . . . Indeed, to believe that French policy makers were shrewd businessmen completely misses what was perhaps the most striking feature of French colonialism in Africa: ‘the enormous disparity between the hopelessly unrealistic objectives of French policy makers and the actual results of their policies’” (1987, 3). Changes in land tenure, agricultural practices, technology, and governmental policies all involve decisionmaking at a state level that can wreak havoc at a local level. Works like Oussaïd’s autobiography give insight into the real impact of colonial policy and later modernization projects as they filter through the layers of Moroccan society, from urban to rural, from rich to poor, from the metropole to the peripheral colonial capitals and then out to the “periphery of the periphery.” Oussaïd’s story illustrates how direct and potentially destructive the impact of

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modernization is on the lives of those who live at the geographic and sociopolitical periphery and how distant and indirect is the access of those who live in remote regions and embody local knowledge to centers of power. The land where Oussaïd’s family lives a seminomadic life is geographically distant from the capital, Rabat, and prone to desertification: “My people live in the east, as the authorities of the country call it because of its geographical relation to the capital. So I was born somewhere on the eastern slope of the Middle Atlas, on the border of two countries, Morocco and Algeria. Behind a mountain range of medium elevation, a vast plateau stretches to the south side and joins the sands of the desert without transition. All we knew of this desert was the wind full of sand that invaded our mountains and burned our faces” (1). Living where desertification is already occurring through the “wind full of sand,” they find the risk of famine heightened by the fact that they have only scratch plows built by hand: “Papa had constructed a wooden plow made from a long, narrow tree trunk; straps of braided esparto were attached with wooden pegs. A blade of forged metal was fixed to the front of the rectangular base” (83). The hard shell of the plateau cannot be farmed unless there is enough rain to soften it for plowing; if the plowing happens, irrigation can be used later to distribute water to the crops. To survive under these desert imperatives, Oussaïd’s people move in search of pastures and food: “Our tribe moved with the rhythm of the seasons through different valleys, one as inhospitable as the next. Thus, we had no address on these forgotten parts of the map. Our means of communication with the outside were limited to one specific place, the market of Sidi Lahcen, once a week. The meeting place of the entire tribe, it was our only contact with the civilization of motors and manufactured goods” (1). The geographic isolation for the tribe is twofold, as they both live far from the capital and have migrated far from the central body of their tribe: Oussaïd learns their ancestor, Dada Ali, “belonged to the tribe of Ouled Haddou. His grandparents were condemned to leave their tribe for some serious wrong-doing, but no one really knows what it was” (46). In addition to social ostracism, the ancestors had migrated because of political upheaval: “Fleeing war, they had ended up here, paying for their security by living on barren, inhospitable land” (46). The income Oussaïd’s family scrapes from the land is mainly from peppers and potatoes sold at the weekly market in Sidi Lahcen: “[My mother and I] had to follow Papa and gather vegetables he carefully picked, place them in the chouari [plural of charia, twin baskets woven with esparto grass], which we had padded with grass, and tie the whole thing with string. But the most difficult task was to bring the cargo out of the vegetable patch on a donkey, along a steep and narrow path. If, by misfortune, the chouari turned over, it was a catastrophe for the whole family”

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(23). Catastrophe arrives in an unexpected fashion, however, when the war starts in Algeria, a war that Oussaïd’s family experiences at first as “flashes of light and . . . bombing . . . strange sounds of shooting, muffled by distance. My father, much less fearful [than my mother], tried to reason with her, explaining to her that all this was happening far from our home, in another country” (29). The vagueness of this border was in part the result of the 1845 Treaty of Lalla-Marnia, which the French signed with representatives of the Makhzan, the official Moroccan government under the sultan. This treaty only defined the Algerian-Moroccan border as far south as Teniet el-Sassi, a town a mere 68 miles from the coast (Dunn, Resistance, 137). When the French soldiers arrived on Moroccan soil, they terrified the local population as chilling stories circulated about the way they treated the local populace: “They were reputedly contemptuous and arrogant, they pilfered and occasionally raped women” (30). Oussaïd’s family escapes with mere humiliation: “What did these people who had come from so far want from us? Our tribe had such a difficult life; why did they need to humiliate us, to subjugate us? Life had already seen to that! We were hurt, beaten, and defeated” (30). But when some members of the tribe join the partisans, war breaks out to the west. Catastrophe occurs not in the form of battle but in the form of soil erosion as the French hunt for guerillas: “A heavy French column invaded our tribe with cannons. Their tanks no longer followed the established road, but cut across the fields, destroying the scanty harvest and the trickles of water indispensable to our survival” (32). A Berber-speaking group, the tribe is marginalized linguistically because they know little Arabic and even less French. Other children with whom Oussaïd goes to school are also desperately poor, but they at least can understand the quranic teacher who expects them to study in Arabic, and they do not dress like nomads: “It is true I was not like them. They wore pants and shirts like city people. With my ridiculous hairstyle [‘My father had always insisted I wear my hair like our ancestors. Therefore my head was completely shaved, except for a few locks in the middle that I wore in a braid’ (31)], my torn gray djellaba, and my wide trousers held together by an esparto grass braid which cut my skin, I felt like a stranger among them, misunderstood” (38). His exile at school because of his rural background is matched by his exile at home because of his family’s lack of knowledge about school: “At last I arrived at home, my head spinning and my heart heavy. Overcome with shame and helplessness, I did not dare speak in front of my father, and the evening passed without anyone asking me about my day” (39). Although Oussaïd quickly drops out of the quranic school, he will be forced into the French-style school by the local caïd, and his double exile will continue throughout his school career. His intellectual landscape, like the marginal land his family farms, will be bordered by more frightening possibilities. He experiences folk

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beliefs on the one hand and modernization on the other, both embodied in the material landscapes in which he lives. Traveling with his mother and uncle as a small child, he must cross the Oued Ighzer, “an unpredictable and destructive river which creates fear among the people and whose history is filled with legends. Ighzer is the source of life for the tribe from one end of the valley to the other, for the perpetuity of the river ensures a source of water the people so desperately lack. . . . because of the slope of the [river] basin, its large size and the rhythm of precipitation in the region, this river can increase its outflow considerably within a few hours. Then it sweeps away everything in its path—trees, animals, dwellings, the harvest. Sometimes the inhabitants of the valley, or travelers, are swept away forever by this demon, who is as merciless and as cruel as life itself. My people were terrified of this abyss, but they knew they had to overcome their fear and conquer it” (17). The voice of the river reverberates in the mountains, and its echoes fill the valley; the path to the ford winds “around the extraordinary formations the erosion of the soil had created” (17). The danger and difficulty of the journey reminds Oussaïd of his mother’s wisdom about life’s path and the justice one finds in nature: “There is justice after all—which is that, in life, everyone must leave by the same exit, that of death. This is perhaps the only truth common to us all” (17). The destructiveness of the river, flowing as it does unpredictably between the margins of excess and dearth, is a natural event, or it may be inspired by divine justice beyond human understanding. The life-giving water of the river, nevertheless, allows the tribes to survive in the arid land. Modernization, however, has left imprinted on the land vivid reminders of the misuse of the most scarce of resources, water. The material evidence of maldevelopment is found in Oussaïd’s description of the secular school he attends, located at an abandoned mining site. The term maldeveloped captures what Oussaïd experiences in a way that terms like underdeveloped, developing, and developed cannot—and purposely do not: “There is no such thing as ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘less developed’ if the phrases carry the unspoken message that ‘under’ and ‘less’ stand in contradistinction to ‘developed.’ If that is the message, it has to be stated categorically that there is no such thing as a ‘developed’ country and that, used in that sense, ‘underdeveloped’ is part of a semiological conspiracy of obfuscation. The only term genuinely capable of translating the global reality is maldevelopment” (Carmen, Autonomous Development, 27)—a term that suggests that all countries are developing in an ecologically unsustainable way. Modernization has poisoned the land rather than developed it: Our classroom was surrounded by strange ruins abandoned by workmen who had mysteriously disappeared forever. . . . Facing the school was the wall of an old reservoir which now held no water. . . . To the left was a

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very deep ancient well surrounded by a barbed wire enclosure. My companions used to throw rocks into the well and there would be a long silence, then a splash. Behind us were some metal structures covered with slate roofs. They had wide, heavy sliding doors. . . . The air inside them was nauseating . . . A little further on, in the middle of these ruins, was an enormous rustcolored derrick which had a pulley overhanging the well, where one could see an iron structure, and on the bottom of which was some dark red water. . . . The miners’ excavation had been spread over the entire region, as the wells found in small numbers everywhere testified. One of the wells had a special significance for our tribe. Two shepherds had been leaning over the enclosure, curious and not too careful. One of them, moved by some madness no one understood, pushed the other. It was a fatal joke. The unfortunate man slipped and was never found again, despite repeated searches in the bottom of the well. (45)

The destructiveness here, unlike that of the river, is not clearly reversible. Modernization schemes dating back to 1925 left the local inhabitants of Oussaïd’s region with a polluted landscape, tainted wells, and a general lack of understanding of the import of it all. Intellectual development at the school follows somewhat the same pattern, for the teacher, from the city, calls the Berber children “nigger,” “ape,” and “cripple” (48) and forces them to learn Arabic by outlawing Berber in school and at home. Oussaïd notes: “The school year finally came to an end and, after all, some progress had been made. I now could decipher a word in Arabic in the picture book our teacher had given us. I read the word with difficulty and then looked at the picture. I read ‘strawberry’ and saw the red blotch in a square. I guessed that strawberry must be a fruit or perhaps it was a vegetable. Only here was the problem: strawberries did not grow where I lived and so I was condemned to learn the names of things unknown to me when I would have liked to learn the names of things around me” (53). Alienation, as a result of the insults and injustices he experiences in school, protects Oussaïd from the pollution of the school’s idea of progress. He recognizes this progress as another form of maldevelopment, and he clings to his roots despite the poverty and misery he associates with them. The only way Oussaïd sees to help his family escape abject poverty, however, is to make the most of his intellectual ability as a student. Thus, he perseveres in school and stays at the top of his class despite lack of shelter, lack of food, unjust accusations of cheating by racist teachers, and lack of the most minimal school supplies. His experiences in school demonstrate to him the myth of meritocracy, the viciousness of the class system, the corruption that stems from the collaboration of government officials with the metropole, and the pettiness of local people who share similar backgrounds yet learn to compete against one another to the detriment

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of all. Injustice, stagnation, and waste define the situation of his people, and the only way he is offered to combat these evils is through a deeply flawed system of French-style schooling. He finds the unpleasant but necessary task of making his way through school not unlike the task of irrigation for which he is responsible when he returns home during vacations: Our water supply came from a great distance upstream on the wadi. The canalization consisted of a ditch dug in the soil along which a tiny streamlet made its way toward the orchard. But the canalization was badly constructed and large amounts of water were lost on the way. Many times during the week I had to follow the main irrigation channel with a pick and shovel and clear away all obstructions, rake up the soil where the sides had caved in, or plug the holes where water ran off the embankment. . . . The tiny streamlet ended in a small water basin built out of stone by our ancestors a long time ago. It was stagnant now and covered with water plants and a population of water serpents and toads had invaded it. (74)

Oussaïd has to reach into this basin and unplug the drain in order for the water to reach the plants perishing from lack of water and nutrients. Likewise, he understands that at school he must deal with a system that is badly constructed and mismanaged and persevere in spite of stagnation and waste because it holds the only hope for growth in the future. He vows to get along without engaging in the intrigues of the other students, who are better off than he and spoiled: “I would remain myself, clean and untouched in spirit; I would work; I would save my mother, I would help my people. I would explain to them the importance of our culture, the true foundation of our religion, the role materialism played in life. I would speak to them of their roots and help them reject the fatality of their poverty. I would convince them the earth is not flat” (113). At the very moment he is making these vows, a petty clerk at the boarding school in Oujda where Oussaïd is studying turns his mother away from the door after she has made a long and desperate journey to see him. She feels lost and afraid and does not know the rules concerning visitors, and when told she should come back in three days, she does not wait but returns home, grief-stricken. There she dies, having “passed the winter without shelter, malnourished, and inadequately dressed” (116). Oussaïd blames himself for being too absorbed with his own difficulties and his preparation for the baccalaureate examination to see that she needed him. Once she is gone, he seizes the opportunity to study abroad when the chance presents itself. Yet, as noted earlier, there is no escape by going abroad. A victim of maldevelopment, Oussaïd succeeds in becoming a hydraulic engineer with a doctorate in lock mechanics but remains haunted by the arid landscape of his childhood. “ Oussaïd’s dream,” the translator

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of the autobiography reports from her conversations with him about the unanswered questions the book raises, “is still to bring water to those whose very lives depend upon it” (xii).

Malika Mokeddem: Metaphysician Without Borders Mokeddem was born in the Saharan town of Kenadsa, which sits in the vague borderland between Morocco and Algeria. Today, Mokeddem lives in Montpellier, France, where she divides her time between medicine (her specialty is kidney problems) and writing. Mokeddem often makes reference to the fact that she has suffered many kinds of exile because of the existence of borders. Most recently, her exile has been defined by the border between France, where she will always be an immigrant, and Algeria, where her outspoken feminism has made her a target of conservatives. The border here is perhaps best thought of not as a line that divides one entity from another but rather as a borderland that defines the distance between two entities to which one does not completely belong. For example, Mokeddem is neither French nor completely Algerian in her current circumstances. Her novels explore the ways in which this borderland experience has defined her life. Earlier borderlands involved being literate in a largely oral culture and being a girl in a school destined for and dedicated to boys. Mokeddem’s semiautobiographical novels often take for their setting the desert steppe that separates coastal North Africa from the deep Sahara. This steppe, stretching from the area around Ain Sefra and Labiod-SidCheikh down to Kenadsa, the “gateway to the Sahara,” becomes the emblem of the borderland experience. Thus in her novel Le Siècle des sauterelles [Century of Locusts], the main character, Mahmoud the poet, finds in the high steppes a harsh borderland where he can survive and regain his health sapped by contacts with “civilization”: “The plateaus were an opening, a ‘nowhere‘ of truth. And Mahmoud, who was only able to perceive himself as existing between the nomadic and the sedentary; between orality, the conviviality of stories, and the solitary bewitchment of writing; between flight and revolt, always at the meeting place of contraries, at the point of contact between complementarities, discovered [in the steppe] a welcoming border zone” (64–65). The ambiguity the borderland represents is both sought after (as a revolt in contexts where others would have us follow strict rules that divide and control) and feared (in contexts in which we are desperately seeking some sort of clear self-definition). It is the borderland that inhabits Mokeddem’s characters, as much as they inhabit it. All Mokeddem’s novels contain striking scenes in which the desert and desert life are depicted in minute and sensuous detail. In these descriptions,

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there is an intimacy and a familiarity with the extremes of the desert environment and with everyday Bedouin activity that make us aware that these scenes exceed the conceptual bounds of conventional literary understandings of “setting” or “local color.” Rather these descriptions of place and local detail are repositories of historical memory, community identification, and self-understanding. The identities of Mokeddem’s characters are shaped by their experience of the desert. Looking back, for example, to her earliest semiautobiographical historical novel, Les Hommes qui marchent [Nomads], we see how time becomes a function of material landscape— not merely as a stage upon which it unrolls but as constitutive of how time is conceptualized in the first place. In the novel, a recently sedentarized Bedouin, Zohra, is asked her age. She comments that the minute, abstract, tidy, numerical units understood by the colonizer make no sense in the desert: “How can one imagine units of time in a landscape that is so unchanging? [In the desert], we don’t say ‘year so-and-so, year such-andsuch’ unless named by events. Nothingness before. Nothingness after. No measure can withstand the immensity of the Sahara. Here, light erases and burns all borders. Here space and sky consume endlessly. The contours of eternity make measures of time seem naive” (10). The desert marks time by monumental happenings, not anonymous, equal units of time passing such as hours, days, or weeks; likewise, it always defines time in terms of eternity, not merely in terms of present concerns. Instead of each year being assigned a consecutive and seemingly equivalent number (1906, 1907, . . . ), we find “the year of the locusts” or “the year of the flood.” These periodic natural events transfer their qualities into the descriptions of other historical events that are associated with them, as is the case with the title of Mokeddem’s second novel, Le Siècle des sauterelles, which depicts the experience of colonization and likens invaders and all who prey on others to locusts. Le Siècle des sauterelles is the life story of Mahmoud the poet, a literate nomad, and his daughter Yasmine, a literate girl who has been so traumatized by witnessing her mother’s murder that she has become mute. All three family members embody the idea of the borderland. Mahmoud has been separated from the rest of his tribe by his father’s premature death and by that father’s wish that the boy be sent to school. When he returns after years away in Cairo, he discovers literacy has metaphysically exiled him from his tribe. In addition, he has lost his biological connection to the tribe because his mother has died, leaving him only a letter from his late father. His father, who died fighting the French the year Mahmoud was born, asked that the letter be given to him at maturity. The letter saddles Mahmoud with two ghosts—a brother and a grandmother long dead. Mahmoud is told he has an older brother who died in infancy, and this boy, also named Mahmoud, begins to haunt him like an amputated limb, a miss-

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ing part of himself. Successive losses—the father dead before his birth, the brother who was a second self he never knew, and the mother who died while he grew up elsewhere—give him nightmares about death preying on the living. These nightmares hatch inside his head and consume him: “And as soon as sleep . . . overwhelmed me, I was overwhelmed as well always by the same images, vampires of my peace: monsters with human bodies rigged out with the enormous heads, long legs, and wings of locusts. The uproar of their wing sheathes produced a crescendoing mixture of cries, rattles and moans. The stridence culminated, exploded inside my head. I would awaken with a start, breath suffocated and heart stopped” (30). This first dream dimension of the “century of locusts” is amplified when he goes on a journey to deal with his grandmother’s ghost. His father’s letter tells him that his grandmother’s bones are buried on the family land in the tell (coastal plain), on a farm that French colonial settlers, the Sirvent family, had expropriated from them before his birth. His father asks that he dig up the bones and bring them to the desert steppe at Labiod-Sid-Cheikh to be buried. As a child, one way Mahmoud had explained his tribe’s nomadic wandering in the borderland between the desert and the tell was to think of it as being caught between two plagues of locusts—nature’s and culture’s. Nature’s perversity manifested itself not only in the harshness of winter but in its longed-for aftermath: “Then, that Spring. Then, that grass sprouting bushy and scattered between the rocks. Then the locusts and more locusts. Then, nothing, absolutely nothing” (32). Culture’s perversity he saw embodied in the French military patrols that occasionally crossed their path in the tell and the French camel corps that crossed their path in the desert: “We were so afraid of them! ‘Ejrrad! Ejrrad!’ [Locusts! Locusts!] the adults would say, for whom this vision of the triumphal conqueror reopened old wounds. So that when I saw them riding away I associated them with a true swarm of devouring locusts, who had spared us this time. . . . I thought that if our lives were lived shuttling endlessly between the edge of the tell and the edge of the desert, it was because the locusts waylaid us from the north and the south. The roumis were for me simply confused and dangerous clouds, swarming at the boundaries of my precious liberty, nesting in my nightmares” (32–33). His arrival as an adult to dig his grandmother’s bones out of the land purloined by the Sirvent family reinforces this idea. While the majority of the Sirvent family spy on Mahmoud from the windows of the large French farmhouse they have built, he digs beneath an olive tree for his ancestor’s bones. The Sirvent grandmother, however, watches him from beneath the tree and tries to participate by asking him if they can help him. After Mahmoud explodes in anger, saying, “You could perhaps give us back our land, dear Madame-so-full-of-generosity” (47), she reminds him that it was the French soldiers, not the French settlers, who had taken the land,

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and in any case, his people had preferred the “language of baroud [gunpowder]” to civilized behavior: These lands have been ours, for a very long time now! They belong to us because we took them, wrenched them, row by row, from the brush and dwarf palm. More than half of it was only oak. —Yeah, yeah, I know it, this lullaby with which the colonists rock and reassure themselves. It is still true nevertheless, even if they had been completely abandoned, that to occupy them was theft. One day or another, they will have to be returned. (47–48)

Mahmoud leaves with his ancestor’s bones in a cloth slung over his back, her skull bouncing in the hood of his burnous. In an odd way it is through the bones of this ancestor that the land begins to be returned to him. As he camps that night, he has a dream in which he sees the ancestor waking up in the campsite: She was a slender, brown woman. . . . Her eyes still filled with sleep, she scraped dried henna off the bottoms of her feet and the palms of her hands. She then dipped them in water to wash them. The slightly earthy odor of wet henna filled Mahmoud’s nostrils. Water brought to life the fire of her fingers and the saffron of her nails. The woman combed her long hair, stroked it with both hands dipped in olive oil. The aromas of cloves and orange blossom were plaited into her long braids. Ringed in black with kohl, her eyes were two deep pools of velvet night on that fresh morning. She rubbed her gums with mastic. Her teeth shown in her mouth, a pomegranate flower. . . . Behind her, the flames of the [camp]fire were rising. They elongated, roared, growled. Soon, they formed an incandescent wall. . . . She began to sway her hips, to rock her body that soon was no more than a small flame dancing in the front of the enormous brazier. Then suddenly, the huge colonial building of the Sirvent clan, as blinding as a sebkha in the sunlight, emerged from this incandescent crown. Great tongues of fire licked it avidly, sucked it with loud smacks. Youyous burst out from all side and filled the sky, featherlight and swelling, like the flight of starlings. Bendirs beat and kept time to the dance of the flames. (58)

His ancestor is this land of olives and henna and pomegranates and mint that has been stolen from his people by the settlers with their straight plowed rows of wheat and their vineyards. Upon awaking, he is abjectly reconciled to leaving the land with nothing but his grandmother’s bones. But this time the locusts, image of the colonial settlers for Mahmoud, sweep up from the south, flying in the direction of the Sirvents’ farm. Mahmoud is sickened and terrified by the locusts but soon finds some “poetic justice” in their arrival when he realizes they will destroy the Sirvents’ crops. The farmers have lit fires in an effort to drive off the

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approaching locusts with smoke. But Mokeddem’s description of the arrival of the locusts shows us that the locusts themselves are like sparks in a cloud of smoke: “[Mahmoud] saw welling up, in a break between the hills, a sooty cloud. He thought at first of the smoke from some advance camp of nomads. But the cloud was turning, twisting around itself in the quiet air. A flock of migrating birds? . . . The cloud was growing, spinning, advancing rapidly, in great jerky bounds. In this somber, swirling cloud, were small glitters of bright silver, fugitive, like sparks. A lightning flash in Mahmoud’s head: ‘The locusts!’” (59). Mokeddem then elaborates this description of poetic destructiveness with raw, close-up images of the locusts’ behavior, which for Mahmoud is parallel to the persistent, inescapable violation of the arrival of the French, their stealing of the land, and their efforts to penetrate all levels of his society: They were turning the sky black. They were transforming the earth into a hideous, pustulating crust. They were crashing into everything. They were covering everything. . . . They were in the kheimas [tents] and under the covers. They fell in the cooking pots the moment one lifted the lids. They devoured all down to the last minute trace of green. They devastated the silence. . . . They can lose their wings, become amputees, and still they don’t stop swallowing everything! . . . after the leaves and the grasses, they would gobble up the tree trunks. Then humankind! Then the entire earth! Following that, they would devour each other. . . . The end of the world would be, assuredly, in the image of a locust’s mandible. (59–60)

For Mahmoud, the destruction of the Sirvent’s’ farm is just one swarm of locusts destroying another. It is a sight he longs to see, so he buries his grandmother’s bones temporarily and rides back to see the farm, with its “rational, civilized, and instrumental” Western mode of agricultural exploitation, stripped of its crops. During this trip back, however, he meets a third kind of locust who is one of his own: the madman Majnoun. Majnoun, having learned of Mahmoud’s hatred of the Sirvent family, appropriates Mahmoud’s anger and translates it into action, knowing full well that Mahmoud will be held accountable: “I decided that your dream [of the destruction of the Sirvent clan] had given you ideas. Those ideas, I found luminous; I’ll admit it” (91). As a sequel to Mahmoud’s dream, Majnoun has taken it upon himself to set the Sirvent house afire, killing the most gentle member of their family. In the midst of destruction, where the vegetation has been stripped and the copulating locusts form a moving crust like a lava flow, Majnoun sets the farm ablaze and then informs Mahmoud—pointing out that everyone will think Mahmoud did it. And, of course, Majnoun adds, Mahmoud really had wanted to burn the house. This madman and his rat-faced henchman, Hassan, pursue Mahmoud like locusts, entering into the most private realms of his life and destroying it.

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In his effort to evade two plagues of locusts—the French settlers and the homegrown madmen—Mahmoud goes to the steppes, a borderland where no one lives. There he lives quietly with his wife Nedjma, a black woman without family ties who has gladly accompanied Mahmoud into a borderland that is a more hospitable home to her than the nonblack communities she had known. Mahmoud has promised Nedjma that they will find peace and safety in this barren environment where they live a nomadic life. Mahmoud, who was born in this environment, finds salubrity in it: “He was at the threshold of the desert, the threshold of the tell, the threshold of love. In this nowhere he hoped to find a place. The ills by which, in other places, the spirit is crippled, the words which, beneath other skies, possess the power of the gods, cannot withstand here the corrosion and derision of the empty space and silence that dilate within them” (144). This desert steppe brings Mahmoud security, but for Nedjma, who feels herself a stranger, this same environment takes on the shapes of her deepest fears. Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening chapter of Le Siècle des sauterelles, where Nedjma and their daughter, Yasmine, wait in front of their kheima for the return of Mahmoud, who has gone to the market in Ain Sefra. Trouble begins when Nedjma senses something on the horizon, but not in the direction from which her husband should be coming: Sitting in front of her kheima, Nedjma looks out over the land: a sky of slate and as far as the eye can see, desert. . . . Everywhere, the same horizontal planes. After wandering at length, Nedjma’s eye comes up against a small moving shadow, out there, in the distance. . . . It must be only the rustling of mirages on the horizon that haunts her gaze. The dunes, themselves, sleep on in their tawny excessiveness, beneath their curse of light. “Maybe it is just the wind?” So, was it the galloping of imagination or cavalcades of wind, imagination of the world? Nedjma looks around her. . . . The wind? It is the only thing that always finds them. From the north or the south, it is the only welcomed visitor, the wind. “Maybe it is el-rih! [the wind]” But the small shadow, scarcely larger than a fly, persists in staying there where the sky ends. “It is not the wind. It’s my own wretched fears!”

Nedjma’s monologue about what she thinks she sees in the desert is echoed equally but separately by Yasmine and by Rabha, the dog. [Yasmine] begins to see something very small that seems to float, like a hawk, at the edge of the sky, in the direction where the dog’s muzzle is pointing. . . . Mother and daughter have their eyes fixed on this little cloud which is slowly approaching.

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. . . Now, she clearly makes out two mounts, two camels which she recognizes from their swaying amble. Who are they? . . . She waits. Time wells up again. Time clings to the steps of the strangers. The silence, rent by the dog’s barking, explodes and falls back to earth again, its weight redoubled. And the plateau is there, vast and wasted, at the crossroads of nothingness and irreality. (12–15)

The approach of these two men changes the plain into a point, a landmark: “Suddenly, it’s as if this kheima, always isolated, was now the crossing point between two [distant destinations]” (12–15). Nedjma’s fears, hovering at the edge of the indistinct desert light, turn out to be accurate; she is raped and murdered by Majnoun and Hassan, who materialize from the haze. When they violate and kill Nedjma, they also violate the desert ecology that demands that humankind experience simultaneously both privation and generosity, the desert and Bedouin hospitality: “Here, under the desert’s rule, hearts are stripped of their pretentious differences. Aridity binds, mutual recognition comes here with ‘Peace be on you.’ Humiliation has no place in this country of all humiliations” (175). Following this trauma, Yasmine falls mute. Even though literacy brings her back into human communication, it simultaneously exiles her from the world of traditional Bedouin ways, from the world of women who think writing unlucky and men who think it unseemly in a girl. Yet writing helps Yasmine survive her silence in the same way that movement helps Bedouins survive where others would perish: “Writing is the nomadism of the spirit in the desert of absences, on the trackless paths of one’s obsessions” (154). To help his daughter survive in this border zone where she is literate but mute in an oral culture, Mahmoud teaches her that storytellers in her culture have special power: “You are the boundary marking the story’s flow . . . Thus you reverse the roles. In marking out the course of thought’s time, your make it your object” (163). Stories are water in a desert. Stories help Yasmine escape the pain of her loss by bringing with them forgetfulness. And it is forgetfulness, Mokeddem reminds us, “that allows the reseeding of interior deserts. It pours on the thirst for solitude a sip of water . . . that helps us traverse life’s deserts” (171). At the base of her silence is the vision of the two killers. She is the only person who can identify them, but for a number of years she is too traumatized to touch that part of her psyche. As long as she does not have speech, she does not have to remember or reawaken the nightmare by telling it. Mahmoud tells her stories to distract her, but one day he tells her a story about a landscape that so resembles her struggle with spoken words that she is put back on the road to speech. The story is about a storm off the coast of Tangier that destroys the calm of the sea: “The sea . . . Imagine, imagine, my sylph, a blue desert with the calmness and brilliance of our salt marshes, always filled with sound. Imagine marine dunes, under a

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breeze, moving caressingly” (163). A sudden tempest ruptures this blue atmosphere: The wind was coming from the west. Gibraltar had capsized, foundered in the tempest. The sea was attacking, pounding. . . . The sky was dirty, . . . Imagine, imagine, kebdi, thousands. . . . what am I saying? hundreds of thousands of migrating birds surprised there as they prepared to fly across to the other continent. Imagine birds of fire, birds of cinder and shadow, birds of gold, silver, sapphire, emerald . . . all blazing with the desire for flight and immobilized by the tyrannical breath of the wind. Gathered in clouds along the coast, they were chirping weakly. They opened their wings, took off against the wind, and were thrown against the shore like so many scraps of cloth. (164)

Mahmoud’s story uses the imagery of the traditional Arabic poetry so admired by travelers like Ibn Khaldun (“They made poetry the archive of their history, their wisdom, and their nobility”), as he describes the birds in the same dazzling color as poets have traditionally described Arabian horses; Mahmoud’s birds, “birds of fire, birds of cinder and shadow, birds of gold, silver, sapphire, emerald,” echo well-known Bedouin poems in which the horses of the desert are “blue like a pigeon in the shadow,” “green like the rushes,” “red as blood,” and “black like a night without moon or stars.” The juxtaposition of this beauty with the destruction of the birds brings up, from the depths of her being, Yasmine’s memory of her mother’s death: Her father’s words slip out and fall one by one into the successive layers of her being: first, they pierce the flawless surface of her silence, where they make concentric circles like stones thrown into calm water. Then, they fall into the depths of her being where they stir up strange movements. . . . Two pirates [had] . . . pillaged her solitude, taken away her mother, wrecked the shores of her sensibilities, paralyzed words in her innermost being. Her words are those birds. . . . She listens to them, these interior words. . . . She feels beneath her skin the trembling of their broken wings. (164–165)

Yasmine’s speech returns briefly when she sees Majnoun in the marketplace at Ain Sefra, where she and her father have been living with the Hamani tribe and slowly reintegrating into communal life. Sound rips from Yasmine’s throat when she identifies her mother’s killer, and then she retreats into silence: Say just one word, any word, her father implores her. A word. She opens the flask of [her mother’s] perfume [which she keeps on a thong around her neck], breathes it in to drown the words with her mother’s death. Spoken words? . . . She feels them in her fear. They

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whirl around inside her, birds of every kind of anguish, ready to surge up again. Inside her they are bitter, scorching and rough-edged. They are lugubrious and violent. Blown along by other winds than her own, be they fine and light or heavy and crook-beaked; be their songs suave or jarring, they all had sumptuous wings edged with light. . . . Say just one word, just one, her father repeats. (199–200)

In this passage, we see that even at the level of the single word—for example, “gorge” in reference to both Yasmine’s throat and the cliffs of Gibraltar in the story of the birds—the environments Mokeddem evokes in her novels inhabit her characters, shape their metaphysics, and generate the tales that can be told. The “mental geography” or “geography of identity” that Tlili, Mokeddem, and Oussaïd share is tied to the environment of the southern Maghreb. They share the experience of desert places and practices from an insider’s perspective. The values and practices that shape their narratives—a sense of place where outsiders experience only anonymous space, an appreciation for the practice of generosity in the midst of scarcity, and a recognition of a time/space framework that is expansive and humbling and of the imagistic wealth and poetry of barren landscapes—set them apart from urban writers. Any discussion of a new “territorial imaginary” or a “new poetics of narrative space” is enriched by comparing how a given environment is constructed mentally from both urban and rural perspectives, from both insider and outsider perspectives. Landscapes inhabit us as much as we inhabit them; what one person calls “empty” another person calls “home.”

Works Cited Carmen, Raff. Autonomous Development—Humanizing the Landscape: An Excursion into Radical Thinking and Practice. London: Zed Books, 1996. Dunn, Ross E. Resistance in the Desert: Moroccan Responses to French Imperialism, 1881–1912. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. ———. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Herodotus. The History of Herodotus. Vol. 3. Trans. and annotated by George Rawlinson, Henry C. Rawlinson, and John Gardener Wilkinson. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1889. Ibn Battuta. The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325–1354. Trans. H. A. R. Gibb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Hakluyt Society, Series 2, no. 110), 1958–1971. Ibn Khaldun. The Maqaddimah: An Introduction to History. 3 vols. Trans. Franz Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon, 1958. Leo Africanus. History and Description of Africa. 3 vols. New York: Burt Franklin (Hakluyt Society, no. 92–94), 1896. repr. 1963.

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Mokeddem, Malika. Les Hommes qui marchent. Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1997 [Ramsay, 1990]. ———. Le Siècle des sauterelles. Paris: Ramsay, 1992. Oussaïd, Brick. The Mountains Forgotten by God. Trans. Anne Woollcombe. Boulder: Three Continents, 1989. Strabo. The Geography of Strabo. Vol. 1. Trans. Horace Leonard Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931. Swearingen, Will D. “Is Drought Increasing in Northwest Africa? A Historical Analysis.” In The North African Environment at Risk, eds. Will D. Swearingen and Abdellatif Bencherifa. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996, 17–34. ———. Moroccan Image: Agrarian Dreams and Deceptions, 1912–1986. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Tlili, Mustapha. Lion Mountain. Trans. Linda Cloverdale. New York: Arcade, 1990. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Yaeger, Patricia, ed. The Geography of Identity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

8

: The Absence of the Self: Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent Laïla Ibnlfassi

In Le Pacte autobiographique, Philippe Lejeune defines autobiography as a “récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier, sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” [retrospective prose narrative in which a real person tells the story of her existence, emphasizing her individual life and in particular the story of her personality] (14). 1 Using this definition to place Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent (1981) in the category of autobiography would seem farfetched. There is, on the face of it, nothing in this text that would suggest that it is an autobiographical piece of work. It seems purely fictional, delving as it does into the realm of the unreal and the fantastic, thus pushing away any suggestion that it might have any link with reality. In La Prière de l’absent, the oneiric aspect of time is the main factor that locates the story at the level of myth, where action surpasses human belief. The characters themselves are well entrenched in the domain of disbelief. They bear characteristics, variously physical or spiritual, that make it difficult if not impossible for a reader to draw any comparison or link between them and his or her human state, let alone identify with them. So, in the light of Lejeune’s definition, La Prière de l’absent does not seem to offer a story that a real person would construct from his or her own life, nor does it seem to deal with a real life. However, autobiography is not necessarily a straightforward telling of one’s own life story, and it need not take the form of a confessional text. Autobiographies differ in genres and forms. A poem, for example, can be as autobiographical as a novel. Both genres in this case rely on metaphor; a device that, once decoded, reveals a good deal about the person who forges it. The power of metaphor is so great that it judiciously covers and shapes a reality to the extent of making it unintelligible in everyday discourse. However, even if 151

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a person uses metaphor in order to subvert reality, the fact remains that the same person’s reality has been subverted. Metaphor, in this case, would merely be a strategy, used either consciously or unconsciously, for masking one’s thoughts or reality. Autobiography, especially when it is not classified as such, as is clearly the case with La Prière de l’absent, is one master metaphor that conceals and masks any authorial presence in a given text. To be able to say that a work is pure fiction, the author’s self is said to be (and made to be believed) disengaged. But even this seemingly disengaged attitude is in itself a metaphorical self-denigration or a misrecognized selfhood. The self, as it appears in either an overt or covert autobiography, is constructed from one’s past, but autobiography, as Georges Gusdorf argues, “is not a simple recapitulation of the past; it is also the attempt and the drama of a man struggling to reassemble himself in his own likeness at a certain moment of his history” (“Conditions,” 43). This, indeed, is what most autobiographers would do: reconstruct a past self not as it really was but as they think or wish it was. To be completely truthful and authentic in telling one’s past self is beyond possibility. The passing of time creates gaps in one’s memories so that it becomes impossible to recollect the past in its authentic chronology and happening. Thus the self, that is, the center of an autobiography, becomes necessarily an invented self. Because of verifiable factual elements of an author’s life, one could easily mistake the written self for the author’s self; but the strong point remains that the written self only resembles the real self; it is not the same. Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent, as stated earlier, is not what one would call an autobiographical novel, for its world bears very little resemblance to a real life and a real world. But, as Ben Jelloun himself puts it: “Ce qui est intéressant c’est de voir comment un écrivain transfigure le réel, le change, le transforme, le perturbe” [What’s interesting is to see how a writer subverts reality, changes it, transforms it, disrupts it].2 Indeed, a story does not have to be faithful to reality to inform us about an author’s self. The subversion of reality in a story can be just as revealing. The following, then, will be an attempt to extract the autobiographical self in La Prière de l’absent and demonstrate how the writer’s authority plays a role in constructing and deconstructing it. Although Ben Jelloun maintains that La Prière de l’absent is not autobiographical, it nevertheless carries verifiable biographical facts that can be revealing. 3 The central character is said to have been a philosophy teacher in his previous life (13), a profession Ben Jelloun himself practiced in Tangiers after he graduated with a degree in philosophy from the University of Rabat. One can also notice a physical resemblance between the author and his character because both wear a beard (18). The author provides the reader with other details: the year of birth of the hero (1944)

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and the fact that Fès is his native city. Here, the author is stating precisely his own year and place of birth. More specifically, he offers the reader further information about historical events in the year of his birth: the famine Moroccans suffered in the year preceding the end of World War II, the system of rationing, and the typhus epidemics that struck throughout the country and were linked to the famine blight. Such veracity accredits La Prière de l’absent with ontological validity, but only within the limits dictated by the author. These limits are drawn by the latter’s opting for displacement and apparent disengagement. The dreamlike events in La Prière de l’absent make of the text, as J. M. G. Le Clézio puts it in the blurb for the book, “[Une] histoire imparfaite et hasardeuse, car les hommes et les femmes qui l’habitent sont des ombres fugitives” [An imperfect and risky story, for the men and women who inhabit it are fleeting shadows . . . ]. Le Clézio adds that Tahar Ben Jelloun is a writer “qui sait changer le cours du temps” [who is capable of altering the course of time]. This, in fact, is a major factor in La Prière de l’absent. The author does not respect or follow a chronological order in the telling of his story. In fact, he reverses the chronology so that the beginning is the end. To symbolize this, the first chapter of La Prière de l’absent begins with the negation of a previous life. Considering the ambiguity surrounding the concept of “negation” in psychoanalysis (denial, disavowal, Verneinung, méconnaissance, etc.), the focus here is on the existentialist philosophy of being and nothingness but also the notion of rejection. In an example pertaining to negation and rejection, Julia Kristeva shows that when a schizophrenic patient was asked to provide the opposite of “naître” [to be born], he answered, “ne pas être” [not to be], which makes “naître” dissolve into its homophone “n’être” (Revolution, 125). This example is relevant to the theme of La Prière de l’absent, for the Child, who is at the center of the narrative, is both n’est (dead) and né (born). The story/birth of the Child begins with his death. Thus, with an overall Nietzschean tone, the narrative provides the reversed time path that the events are to follow. The Child—after the event of his death—and his companions, who are “des ombres fugitives,” to borrow Le Clézio’s expression, embark on a journey from the city of Fès to the south of Morocco. Fès, known as the spiritual capital of Morocco, is considered the cradle of religious ideology and traditions. The city epitomizes the patriarchal situation of the whole country. So to leave Fès symbolizes departure from the trappings and constraints that subordinate the individual. Leaving, in this case, is seeking freedom. This journey undoubtedly represents the metaphorical journey into the depths of one’s self. Using this perspective that the outer journey symbolizes an inner one, I attempt to analyze how the Child and the other characters constitute at

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different times both the fragmented self of the author and his other or double. To a certain extent, the Child and his companions may be examples of the author’s narcissistic object-choice. As objects, they would represent aspects of himself, but in relation to his own self (Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psychoanalysis, 259). In his essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Sigmund Freud provides four sets of narcissistic types of objectchoice: (1) What he himself is, (2) what he himself was, (3) what he himself would like to be, (4) someone who was once part of himself. 4 The Child could represent the future self the author would like to be (3), and the Child’s companions could represent his present and past (1 and 2). In addition to making use of Freud’s ideas, I will focus on the journey to the south as the author’s autobiographical recreation of his self which stems from nothingness. The verifiable facts, stated earlier, mark the link between the Child and the author. By offering the reader a story that begins with death, it is somehow the death of his own subjectivity that Ben Jelloun seems to depict. The dead Child becomes the metaphorical deconstructed self of the author, and the dichotomy of life and death provides the setting for such deconstruction to happen. The idea of a deconstructed self in La Prière de l’absent is made clear by examining the individual as void of subjectivity. The book seems to suggest that to achieve subjectivity one has first to assume otherness; in other words, one has to die in order to exist. In La Prière de l’absent Ben Jelloun indicates that to be able to construct a self one has to do so from the abyss of nothingness, a notion that is close to the Sartrean idea of le néant [nothingness]. In this constructive development, the search for the true self starts by annihilating the being and assuming otherness. As the opening lines of La Prière de l’absent reflect: “A présent qu’il était devenu un autre . . . il venait de remporter la première victoire sur lui-même, sur ses manques et ses petits desseins” [Now that he has become another . . . he has obtained the first victory over himself, his shortcomings and his narrow designs] (11). Death represents a victory over the assumed self and an accomplishment of otherness. It is also the symbolic “death of the author.” Ben Jelloun kills himself, so to speak, in an act of defacement so that he can assume objectivity and narrate his self as if it were Other. Narrating the Other is one way for the author to involve his personality less and restrict his name solely to the book cover. To refrain from acknowledging his novel as autobiographical may be Ben Jelloun’s way of avoiding self-analysis. As he writes: “Ce retour sur soi l’oppressait et lui rappelait toute la fragilité du monde” [This soul searching was oppressing him and reminding him of all the world’s fragility] (13), which implies that the author’s world and reality are oppressive and that their frailty is that of his own self.

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Analyzing oneself is, in one way or another, part of an attempt to reach one’s truth. However, even though everything in La Prière de l’absent seems to indicate that the overall aim behind the characters’ journey to the south is an attempt to reach the truth about their being, readers are made aware of the Child’s fear of the truth. The symbolic journey from darkness to light (or from death to life) seems to trigger a sense of apprehension and agitation in the Child. Light, here symbolizing truth, becomes a negative source of knowledge: “C’est pour cela que la lumière lui faisait peur. Il craignait son pouvoir: elle devait préciser dans le miroir son image pleine, son être achevé” [That is why light frightened him. He was afraid of its power: it was supposed to reflect in the mirror his full image, his finished being] (14). This is, in fact, an ominous portent of later events in the novel. To become an “être achevé”5 is the purpose of the journey to the south, but for the Child, it is a journey to be dreaded. It is not surprising, then, that when the journey comes to an end, the symbolic search for the true self remains incomplete and unresolved. Confusion, hesitation, and fear of truth are the main preoccupations for Ben Jelloun in writing his novel. After the tremendous and torturous anxiety he makes his characters undergo, Ben Jelloun’s narrative, which seems more like improvisation, pulls back every time a final statement could be made. One could only see this kind of hide-and-seek game between the author and his readers in terms of the author taunting the readers by pretending to reveal something but not divulging enough. It is almost as if the author is actually making up the story as he goes along.6 He does not seem to follow a precise plot: “Je m’éloigne des mots de peur que mes lèvres ne saignent. Je garde l’épreuve de la blessure des mots pour la fin. La fin de quoi? Vous ne le saurez pas” [I move away from words lest my lips bleed. I keep the ordeal of verbal wounds until the end. The end of what? You will not know] (160). Furthermore, there seems to be an authorial confession through the following statement of Sindibad: “Cette mémoire effilochée me lasse. Je suis fatigué de courir derrière des morceaux de souvenirs” [This dwindling memory is wearing me out. I am tired of running after fragments of memory] (163). One could only see this kind of statement as a way of giving up the search for what appears to be unobtainable, that is, truth. However, before giving up the quest, Ben Jelloun goes to great lengths in trying to assemble a fragmented self. And to do so, he opts, as was mentioned earlier, for a Sartrean interpretation of being.7 He provides the readers with a set of characters who adopt nothingness before generating their existence. The Child, around whom the other characters revolve, is born of a union between a spring of water and an old olive tree in a cemetery in the old city of Fès.8 The Child is said to be immaterial and is nameless, which further

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adds to disconnection from the real world.9 Naming is castrating. A name is a code whereby one has a place in an ordered society. By not naming the Child, the author is emphasizing the point that the Child is out of reach of the power of castration. He is, in effect, a pre-oedipal child who has not encountered the Law-of-the-Father.10 Like the Child, the other characters are all disconnected from the real world and assume an identity totally different from any previous one. For example, Sindibad’s given name is Ahmad Suleiman, and he is the son of a craftsman and a brilliant student at Qaraouiyine, the Islamic university in Fès.11 Following his failure to freely declare his love for Jamal, one of his peers and fellow students, he sinks into depression and then becomes known by the name of Hammou (a derivative of Ahmad). As his depression drives him into madness, he assumes the identity of Sindibad, the legendary mariner of the tales of the Arabian nights. He becomes thus “Un mythomane. Il raconte qu’il a fait tellement de voyages qu’il a tout confondu et perdu la mémoire” [A mythomaniac. He says that he has traveled so much that he has confused everything and lost his memory] (47–48). The second character evolving around the Child is Yamna, the eldest of eight children. Her father emigrated to work as a miner in the north of France and was never heard from again. After many tribulations, she ended up working as a prostitute in a brothel in Azrou and later for a Jewish fortuneteller in Fès. The latter treated her well, but after her death Yamna had no other choice but to prostitute herself again. She contracted syphilis, remained untreated, and finally succumbed to madness. On a winter morning, she was found dead in an empty street where she had been begging and was then buried in a dump by rubbish collectors. Upon her encounter with Sindibad, she explains: “Yamna est morte. Et moi, je ne suis que son image” [Yamna is dead. As for me, I am nothing but her image] (54). The third character is Brahim, but he prefers to be called Boby and aspires to be acknowledged as a dog and adopted by a caring French family.12 He ran away from his parents when he surprised his father bargaining his sale with a foreigner (unlike Boby’s sisters, whom we are told were placed as maids with rich families. Ben Jelloun seems to be hinting here that Boby was going to be sold to a pedophile). Ironically, Boby runs away from a situation that is meant to dehumanize him, only to assume that of a dog. The major difference is that the latter is his free choice. What Sindibad, Yamna, and Boby have in common is their madness and their distance from their original identity. What links them to the Child—whom they have to care for and accompany to the south—is this lack of identity, which the journey to the south is supposed to resolve. As stated earlier, these characters ought to be considered as metaphorical displacements caused by Ben Jelloun’s search for subjectivity. In the case of La Prière de l’absent, subjectivity is proven by first assuming otherness,

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which is translated by the author into becoming a self from nothing, just like writing a book that has yet to be written. The self and the book thus become the parallel tasks the author sets himself to accomplish. As Ben Jelloun puts it: Le livre avec des pages blanches, encore intactes, c’est cet enfant. Il est l’histoire que nous vivons déjà. Ce qui nous arrive est tellement extraordinaire qu’il faut qu’il parvienne—bien après notre mort—à un conteur, quelqu’un qui pourra l’écrire et le raconter aux générations futures. (57) [The book with the blank pages, still intact, is this child. He is the history we are already living. What is happening to us is so extraordinary that it has to reach—well after our death—a storyteller, someone who will be able to write it down and tell it to future generations.]

One’s mind, at birth, is void of any ideas: a tabula rasa, a blank page. It then becomes Ben Jelloun’s task to fill in the blank pages with his writing so as to create a book and simultaneously provide the Child with ideas to nourish his mind and make him acquire his selfhood. The end result of both tasks will be Ben Jelloun’s recreation or rewriting of his own self. For, as it transpires from the passage just quoted, there is an implicit need and desire on his part for immortality. As Georges Gusdorf remarks: “Un individu qui ne se considère pas comme le centre du monde—ou le centre d’un monde—ne s’adonnera pas aux écritures du Moi” [An individual who does not consider himself the center of the world—or the center of a world—would not indulge in the writing of the Self] (Auto-bio-graphie, 228). Writing oneself is not only egotistical but also is driven by an implicit need for self-reconstruction and self-recreation. Besides the desire for eternity, the author also shows an underlying discontent with the course of his life before he decides to retell it. In fact, as Roland Barthes puts it: “Isn’t storytelling always a way of searching for one’s origin, speaking one’s conflicts with the Law?” (Pleasure of the Text, 47), which sustains the view of the individual’s need to break away from the dictates of the patriarchal law that prevents the self from becoming one. And as such, the self that is going to be reconstructed will undoubtedly also be rectified. So the act of reconstructing oneself will inevitably lead not to the recreation of the past self but to the creation of a completely new self, despite the fact that it will be nourished by past memories and thus bear a likeness to the past self. These memories that will help reconstruct the self can be identified through the different characters around the Child. Each of these characters is a reminder of an aspect of Ben Jelloun’s life. In fact, they could be aspects of the author’s life as he remembers them in their exactitude or inexactitude (that is, as repressed memories) or as he imagines or fantasizes about them. Each one of the characters has experiences that resemble events in the author’s own life. Looked at another way,

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one could see this as the author’s projection of his self onto his characters. In effect, these characters could represent memories that keep reappearing during the process whereby the author is trying to rewrite a new self. As memories, they keep surfacing in the present and hindering the possibilities of the author to recreate a self as a tabula rasa. Ben Jelloun’s task is thus threatened by the “return of the repressed,” which manifests itself in terms of memories and past experiences: Cet état d’absence et d’insistance que seul un corps vidé, un être réduit à sa seule forme, pouvait connaître, lui [the Child] procurait une espèce de sérénité mêlée d’inquiétude. En fait, il n’était pas totalement libéré de l’histoire, du passé et des traces de l’autre. Il sentait au fond de lui-même comme un reste de présence, un murmure de ce qu’il avait été. (15) [This state of absence and insistence which only an empty body, a being reduced to its very form, could know, provided him (the Child) with a sense of serenity tinged with concern. In fact, he was not totally free from history, from the past and the marks of the other. He felt in his heart the mark of a presence, a murmur of what he has been.]

The author is well aware here that accounting for one’s life as if it were new without being threatened by the emergence of past memories and events is an impossible task. One’s present is, therefore, conditioned by and bears traces of the past. As Ben Jelloun puts it: “Des liens invisibles persistaient” [Invisible ties lingered] (16), meaning that he cannot renew himself and be totally free from his past. In desperation, he assumes that rewriting the past will deliver him from it: Effacer, couper les racines de ce passé, son passé, celui qui s’était malencontreusement amassé dans un coin de sa vie et qui se faisait tumultueux à l’heure de l’oubli . . . Il comprit que seul le récit de son histoire pouvait le laver de cette emprise, le détacher définitivement de ces liens. (41) [To erase, cut the roots of this past, his past, the one he unfortunately has accumulated in a corner of his life, and which erupts at the time of forgetting . . . He understood that only by telling his story would he loosen this grip and definitively break these bonds.]

It is, in a sense, an attempt to exorcise his past. Self-exorcism is often characteristic of autobiographical writing, and the need for it is intrinsically a need for freedom. And this freedom seems attainable to the extent that one denigrates oneself and becomes Other: “L’autre en toi prit de l’avance. A lui tu dois ta libération” [Your Other is ahead of you. To him you owe your freedom] (45). However, to become Other does not necessarily mean becoming something new but rather becoming something that was already there, but hidden. As Ben Jelloun says: “L’autre t’habitait déjà, à ton insu, à l’insu de tous” [The Other already inhabited you, without you

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or the others knowing] (45). Therefore, the whole attempt to break away from the past becomes impossible; for the endorsement of the Other goes hand in hand with the past, thus forcing the search into an impasse where freedom is an illusion. Consequently, the attempt to recreate the self turns out to be a failure.13 As the task proves to be impossible for the writer to accomplish, he sets out to dispose of his characters one by one. Indeed, as the symbolic journey to the south starts showing signs of failure, the characters begin to leave the scene. Their exit takes a dramatic shape. They either die of exhaustion, like Yamna, or succumb to horrific madness, like Boby.14 As the characters journey to the south, the narrative glorifies the historical Moroccan war leader Sheikh Ma-al-Aynayn (1830–1910). His unification of the Moroccan southern tribes and his leading role against the French and Spanish colonial armies are celebrated. In Arabic Ma-al-Aynayn means the “water” (ma) of the “two springs” (al-aynayn). The word al-aynayn also means “eyes.” Both meanings are significant: by emphasizing the gaze and water, they hint at the story of Narcissus.15 Further, the notion of finding springs in the south points to the difficulty of the journey, because the south is the Sahara, where springs are scarce. Ma-al-Aynayn symbolizes the spring of water toward which the Child is heading and that is supposed to reflect his image: “La mémoire de Ma-al-Aynayn sera le miroir suprême, le vrai, l’unique et le dernier miroir où ton visage viendra se fixer; ce sera la source et l’eau qui préservent tes racines en plein désert” [Ma-alAynayn’s memory will be the supreme mirror, the true one, the only and last mirror where your image will be fixed. It will be the spring and the water that preserve your roots in the heart of the desert] (76). The process of going to the South and learning the history of Ma-alAynayn is a metaphorical displacement of Ben Jelloun’s search for the authentic self. But Yamna’s declaration that “Plus nous nous approchons du désert, moins je suis sûre de moi” (195) [The closer we are to the desert, the less sure I am of myself] reflects the ominous failure of the quest. Thus Ma-al-Aynayn becomes the metaphorical body of water where the Child, like Narcissus, meets his end. The failure to construct a new self is symbolized by the sheikh’s surrender to the colonial power. To demonstrate the impossibility of recreating a new self, the author proceeds to demystify the historical figure of Ma-al-Aynayn: Les ancêtres ne donnèrent du cheïkh Ma-al-Aynayn que l’image du héros national, celui qui résista à la pénétration coloniale. Ils oublièrent de dire qu’ils avaient fait de lui un mythe, un saint, une image, dissimulant le caractère féodal, autoritaire et même esclavagiste de ce chef de tribu qui rêvait d’être le chef de tout un Etat. (224)

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[The only picture the ancestors provided of Shaikh Ma-al-Aynayn was that of the national hero, he who resisted colonial penetration. They omitted to say that they turned him into a myth, a saint, an image that concealed the feudal, authoritarian, and slave-owning tribal leader who dreamed of ruling an entire nation.]

Alongside the demystification of the shaikh, the author mocks his own action by saying: “Emmener un enfant au Sud pour ressourcer sa mémoire et son être! Un beau sujet de roman ou de conte, mais une illusion dans le réel. Il fallait pour le faire beaucoup de foi et d’inconscience” [To take a child to the south to recharge his memory and his being! A nice plot for a novel or a tale, but an illusion in reality. To do so demands a great deal of faith and foolishness] (224). Ben Jelloun’s attempt to recreate a self from nothing is, in fact, to be understood as an attempt to deconstruct the notion of self-recreation and prove its impossibility. His demystification of the south and its hero goes hand in hand with his deconstruction of writing the self. In a sense, La Prière de l’absent can be regarded as a prototype of antiautobiographical writing. It proves the unreliability of biographical elements from one’s past life in the construction of a new self. In fact, the author holds the power to alter those biographical elements—whether the author knows this or not. It is an unavoidable fact that a recalled event in one’s life will never be the same as the real, lived one. Accordingly, one could say that it is impossible to produce a truthful and authentic piece of writing of the self. As the novel comes to a close, so does the quest. After an endless juggling with events, Ben Jelloun resigns himself to the fact that he is unable to recreate his new self. His inability to do so is primarily due to the return of repressed memories: “Les souvenirs les plus enfouis finissent toujours par réapparaître” [Even the most submerged memories reemerge in the end] (186). With the removal of Yamna and Boby from the scene, the only remaining characters are Sindibad and the Child, who could be regarded as images or doubles of the author’s repressed self, Sindibad in the present and past and the Child in the future. Yet even the Child, who was supposed to be reborn free from all constraints of the past and illustrate the perfect self the author aspires to be, faces the resurgence of past memories. Consequently, as a metaphor that fails to provide the author with the possibility of self-recreation, the Child is, in turn, removed from the scene. In a circular movement of the story/search, the Child ceases to exist in precisely the same place where he began: in a cemetery between a spring of water and an old tree trunk. Deprived of his companions, only Sindibad remains, surrounded by his loneliness. Unlike the other characters, Sindibad is the only one the reader

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could link closely to the author. In La Prière de l’absent, Sindibad’s troubled mind is said to result from his inability to live his homosexual love freely and publicly. 16 His passionate liaison with Jamal is ended by their parents, who are concerned that they not transgress community norms.17 Jamal is taken to an unknown destination by his father, leaving Sindibad to sink into despair. What held true for the androgynous Ahmed/Zahra in La Nuit sacrée (when she was in prison and suffering the separation from the Consul) also holds true for Sindibad. The reader learns that “La peur de perdre la raison le [Sindibad] 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” [Haunted by the specter of madness, Sindibad started writing in a dark, candlelit room. As long as he was writing, he felt secure] (79). Quoting Georges Bataille’s words, “I write not to be mad,” Roland Barthes adds, “which meant that he wrote madness” (Pleasure of the Text, 48–49). The same could be said of La Prière de l’absent. The novel’s febrile narrative can be regarded as an interpretation of the writer’s inner struggle to make sense of and order his ideas as he writes. As such, writing ensures “Le chemin de la libération” [The path to freedom] (41), and as with Ahmed/Zahra, the only salvation for Sindibad’s torment is writing.18 Sindibad’s suffering for the loss of Jamal is accentuated by his sense of exclusion from a society that forces him to keep his feelings secret and does not allow him to express himself. Fès, which is Sindibad’s and the author’s native city, thus becomes the target of revolt for Sindibad.19 However, in a remarkable shift of tone, the narrative rises to a higher pitch, whereby the anger it carries expresses the feelings of the writer more than those of his character. Indeed, Ben Jelloun takes on a prosecutorial tone in dissecting, so to speak, and denouncing the double standards and superficiality of the Fassi society he knows only too well: Une société qui cultivait ses préjugés et s’accrochait à ses privilèges . . . Fès, creuset d’une civilisation et d’une culture! C’était vrai. Mais c’était aussi le lieu de la servitude de l’âme pour l’égoïsme et les lois de l’intérêt. Société arrogante . . . Fès, société secrète? Non, société fermée. Elle verrouillait ses portes sur ses biens, sur ses bijoux et jeunes filles. . . . Si la médina de Fès est faite de ruelles basses et étroites, faite de labyrinthes sombres, de pierres vieilles et lourdes, c’est parce qu’elle couve, telle une mère, des certitudes fortes et inébranlables. (84–85) [A society that cultivates its prejudices and cherishes its privileges . . . Fès, the melting pot of a civilization and a culture! That is true. But also where the soul is held captive for the sake of selfishness and vested interest. Arrogant society . . . Fès, a secret society? No, a closed society. It locks its gates on its assets, on its wealth and its young girls. . . . If the medina of Fès consists of low and narrow streets, of dark labyrinths with old, heavy stones, it is because, like a mother, it is hatching strong, unshakable convictions.]

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It is, in fact, to combat such profoundly entrenched traditions that the author tries to fulfill his task: that of providing the self with freedom. However, like his character Sindibad, the author haïssait cette ville qui l’empêchait de respirer. Alors il préférait la chambre noire, chambre anonyme, fermée sur l’effervescence d’une pensée audacieuse. . . . Il écrivait . . . des textes pris aux ténèbres d’une âme souffrante, torturée par la commodité et la médiocrité environnantes. (85) [hated this city which prevented him from breathing. As a result he preferred the dark room, the anonymous room that contained the ferment of his audacious thoughts. . . . He wrote . . . texts drawn from the darkness of a suffering soul, tortured by the surrounding comfort and mediocrity.]

These lines actually sum up the reasons for and direction of Ben Jelloun’s writing. He is the Maghrebian writer considered most daring in approaching taboo themes such as sexuality and homosexuality. Like his character, the author’s only possible escape from the social constraints is his “effervescence d’une pensée audacieuse.” However, the power of these constraints is so great that it is impossible to shake them off. Hence, the failure of La Prière de l’absent to achieve and assert the self. Unable to live a lie or defy his society, Sindibad opts for madness and amnesia as ways out of his dilemma. The theme of madness recurs in most works by Tahar Ben Jelloun. Madness in Morocco is not, generally speaking, considered a clinical condition. In fact, there are only two mental institutions in Morocco, one in Berrechid and one in Salé, which are mainly for extremely disturbed patients who are a danger to society. In some cases, when madness is considered a source of shame and scandal, confinement of the mentally ill person is used to preserve family and social values. As Michel Foucault remarks: “In its most general form, confinement is explained, or at least justified, by the desire to avoid scandal” (Madness and Civilization, 66). The mad person, in Morocco, generally remains within his or her community. Though not necessarily integrated, he or she is tolerated. In addition, Moroccan society’s definition of madness is rather loose. A person is characterized as mad if he or she does not conform to the prescribed codes of social behavior. Finally, considering the fact that the Moroccan global mind is entrenched in the notion of the sacred, a mad person is more likely to be regarded as someone endowed with sainthood. These two definitions of madness—being outside social conventions and being saintly—are the ones used by Ben Jelloun in his depiction of madness. For example, Harrouda, Zahra, Yamna, Boby, and Sindibad all illustrate, in one way or another, these two aspects of madness.20 In a sense, madness offers a shield and a safety zone that protects these characters from the servitude to and constraints of society. Their

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madness is mainly a manifestation of nonconformity. Prostitution and homosexuality are outlawed by society because they are regarded as perverted and deviant. Madness is also a deviance from the norm, but it is also the vehicle by which the unspeakable can be spoken. The mad person is allowed to break the taboos of silence, but only because he or she is shielded by madness. This madness is a trompe l’oeil (Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 34). It is the kind of madness embodied by a buffoon in a royal court, the madness that allows one to speak the truth. Ben Jelloun makes use of this madness to allow his characters to say their truth. Such madness “deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive” (Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 27). For instance, it is through madness that Sindibad’s homosexuality and love for Jamal are expressed. By opting for madness, Sindibad protects himself from the wrath of society, for if his homosexuality were expressed under the mode of “normality,” he would have met with violence from a condemning society. Ben Jelloun makes an allusion to this by incorporating the love poems of Al-Hallaj in his text.21 Husain Mansur Al-Hallaj was a mystic Sufi poet in tenth-century Baghdad. He is famous for his ill-fated declaration “Ana al-haq” [I am the truth], which led to his death. As a consequence of this declaration, he was tortured and decapitated and his body burned; the remains were left in public for the people to see. Ben Jelloun transposes and intertextualizes this fateful event in the person of Hamaqa (a Moroccan term of endearment meaning “mad”), the madman of “le village de l’attente” [the village of waiting]. Apart from being the only mad person in the village, he is also a fisherman. As such, he is the perfect double of Sindibad the mariner. Hamaqa’s statement about his own death echoes Al-Hallaj’s verses, which prophesied the kind of death the latter met: Tuez-moi donc Brûlez-moi avec mes os fêlés Passez ensuite voir mes restes Eparpillés parmi les tombes oubliées. (194) [Kill me then Burn me with my cracked bones Then come see my remains Scattered amid forgotten tombs.]

Hamaqa believes that “la mort est bonne, cependant il vaudrait mieux encore n’être jamais né” [Death is sweet; however, it would be better not to be born at all] (202–203). After his death, his body is burnt and his remains, like Al-Hallaj’s, are left unburied. Sindibad “s’arrêta un moment près du bûcher, sourit et salua de la main ce qui restait de Hamaqa” [stopped for a while by the stake, smiled and waved at what remained of

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Hamaqa] (206)—an ultimate gesture to his forthcoming death and separation from his double. Foucault says, “Madness is the déjà-là of death” (Madness and Civilization, 16). Madness and death are intertwined in this sense and constitute a phenomenon of revolt against and escape from established laws. Another use of madness we encounter in Ben Jelloun’s work is the model that sanctifies the mad person. Because of the superstitious belief that the mad person is in communication with spirits that the “normal” person has no access to, he or she attracts reverence from the community. Such a person is believed to be in contact with the sacred and is therefore sanctified. This is quite often the case with communities and whole societies in which the “low” form of Islam predominates. In his description and explanation of fundamentalism, Ernest Gellner distinguishes between the high and low cultures of Islam: The area of dispute in which it [fundamentalism] does make itself most felt is an old internal division within Islam, long present though not always formally recognized, between what one might call the High and the Low Cultures of Islam. Fundamentalism is indeed opposed to alien unbelief, or the bowdlerizing interpretation, but it is also deeply concerned with encountering folk distortions of Islam, illegitimate superstitions and ritual accretions. (Conditions of Liberty, 16)

Moroccan Islam, as opposed to Iranian Islam, for example, fits the description of a low culture of Islam. The diversity among Arabs, Berbers, and Jewish Berbers converted to Islam means that the Islam professed by these groups is founded on the same principle but varies in each group. Each of these groups kept certain pre-Islamic customs, beliefs, and superstitions and incorporated them into their practice of Islam. Over the centuries, certain beliefs and practices that were originally pagan have become an integral part of the Moroccan profession of Islam. An example of this is “maraboutism,” or the sanctification of shrines. 22 Marabout is a French word (derived from the Arabic word morabit) used to designate a personage whose grave is a site of pilgrimage, and often marabout is confused with sorcerer.23 However, in Moroccan Arabic terminology such personages are referred to by the appellation sayyids, which provides a connotation of respectability and sovereignty. In general, a marabout, like a saint, is someone who is revered after death because in his or her lifetime he or she was recognized for piety and was a kind of religious leader of the community. It is also often the case that the marabout, during his or her lifetime, suffered from what modern psychiatry would have diagnosed as a mental disorder, and this madness provides the saint with respectability and translates into exceptional vision in a society in which superstition prevails. All over Morocco, in every city, town, village, and rural commu-

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nity, one can see sayyids’ tombs. These are recognizable by their specific architectural design: whitewashed small round buildings with a dome. The cover picture of La Prière de l’absent shows this architecture. Both Sindibad in his madness and Zahra in her delirious state at the end of La Nuit sacrée (1987) illustrate the visionary insight the mad person is believed to possess, which permits him or her access to sainthood or, from a different perspective, to self-protection. As noted earlier, Sindibad makes an existential choice to adopt madness as a solution to his conflictual position. However, no matter how many identities he adopts, his past keeps haunting him. The water that he hoped would provide him with the image of the self he aspires to provides him instead with a view of his own fragmented self: “Il se mit à genoux, regarda son visage dans la source calme. Il n’y vit rien, ou plutôt une image découpée d’un visage fatigué” [He knelt down and contemplated his face in the tranquil water. He saw nothing, or rather saw a fragmented image of a tired face] (225). Sindibad’s reality translates into living a lie, living like the other rather than being himself. And for such a dilemma, there seems to be only one possible escape. As in L’Enfant de sable (1985) and La Nuit sacrée, La Prière de l’absent provides its hero with an apparently nihilistic end as the only solution to his torment. The theatrical ending of La Prière de l’absent is, indeed, very similar to that of L’Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée. The same metaphors of fog and mist are used, and the separation of Sindibad’s body from his soul is described visually: “[Il] ferma les yeux et sentit son corps partir lentement, comme si on retirait une peau, une fourrure ou un vêtement” [(He) closed his eyes and felt his body slowly lifting as if peeling a skin, a fur, or a garment] (232). Free from his mask and from his false identity, Sindibad meets his death as an achievement, which is suggested by the smile on his face and the light surrounding him. The last chapter, also entitled “La Prière de l’absent,” is actually an epilogue. In Islam, in addition to the five daily prayers, other prayers can be performed occasionally or only when required. The prayer for the absent, for example, is one that is performed in the mosque after the Friday prayer. It is usually requested by someone in the congregation. Such a prayer is said and performed on behalf of those who have died but whose bodies remain absent to reunite the errant soul with its lost body. Ben Jelloun’s novel is thus a requiem for the absent self. The entire novel is a quest to unite a body with its true self, a search that results in accentuating the absence of selfhood in a society that does not permit the individual the truthfulness of being. Through Ben Jelloun’s character, the reader witnesses the author’s own disillusion and resignation: Il n’avait ni le désir ni la volonté d’aller fouiller dans les dédales d’une

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ville qu’il s’était appliqué à détruire maison par maison. Une ville démolie, anéantie par l’absence, vidée de son âme . . . Non, il n’allait pas agiter en lui le spectre d’un songe qui ne lui appartenait plus . . . un songe douteux . . . reclus dans la honte et la peur. (228) [He had neither the desire nor the will to go searching in the labyrinths of a city he had applied himself to destroying house by house. A wrecked city, annihilated by absence, emptied of its soul . . . No, he was not going to raise in himself the specter of a dream he no longer possessed . . . an ambiguous dream . . . hiding in shame and fear.]

The true self remains beyond reach.24 It transgresses norms and taboos, bringing about a sense of shame and the fear of a judgmental society in the individual seeking it. Therefore, it becomes an illicit self that the individual has to repress and disown. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Prière de l’absent is his elegy for “l’être défunt, le personnage de lui-même, l’ombre de sa propre apparence” [the lost being; his double, the shadow of his own mask] (228).

Notes 1. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated. 2. Personal interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun, June 1996, London. 3. Personal interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun, June 1996, London. 4. This fourth set does not necessarily apply in the study of this novel; however, in the case of L’Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée, it could be explanatory in the analysis of the androgynous Ahmed/Zahra. Zahra, as the feminine side of the author, could be regarded as what was once part of himself, that is, the part existing before the castration complex developed. It is, thus, the gender difference of the feminine object that allows the author to restore the unity of his self. 5. The adjective achevé has a double meaning in French. It means “fulfilled” as well as “finished” in the sense of “killed.” Both are relevant here in the description of the being. 6. The same applies to the story of Ahmed/Zahra in L’Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée. 7. Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of being has its roots in the Cartesian dualism that views human consciousness as autonomous of physical determination. According to Sartre, a person is free to change—that is, “to negate”—his or her “situation” and choose or imagine his or her own conscious “situation.” For Sartre, consciousness is nothing; it is through this nothingness that negation is made possible and selfhood constructed. 8. Note the quranic and biblical allusions to the resurrection of Christ on the Mount of Olives. The novel depicts the Child as having prophetic and messianic characteristics. We are told that in his previous life he was named Mohammed Mokhtar (the latter meaning “the chosen one”). 9. “Il est d’un horizon immatériel” (54). 10. References are made here to Jacques Lacan’s perception of the Oedipus complex. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like language. A child’s language acquisition marks its entrance into the realm of the “Symbolic Order”; in so

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doing, not only does the child embrace the “Law-of-the-Father,” but simultaneously it breaks away from the “Imaginary,” which is conceived of as the maternal and prelinguistic realm. The divorce, so to speak, of the child from the chaotic imaginary and its entrance into the ordered symbolic is what, in Lacanian terms, constitutes the castration complex. For further reading, see Lacan’s essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” (Ecrits). 11. Note that the name of Ahmed/Zahra’s father is also Ahmed Souleïman (L’Enfant de sable, 30). The spelling is probably deliberately different, and both fathers are craftsmen. 12. Boby (as opposed to Bobby) is a dog’s name. In Moroccan Arabic, it is actually synonymous with “dog,” as “Hoover” is with vacuum cleaner. 13. The same cannot be said about writing, though, for objectively the novel exists. 14. Such is often the tragic fate of doubles in literature. Driss Chraïbi’s doubles also disappear tragically from the scene once they have served their purpose. See, for example, the predicament of the mother and Hamid in Le Passé simple in Ibnlfassi, “Chraïbi’s Le Passé simple and a Theory of Doubles.” 15. Note the destructive nature of the gaze. In the myth of Narcissus, the latter dies by gazing at his image in the water, and in La Prière de l’absent the destructive gaze is suggested by the story of Shmihan, the Jew of Melilla, whom people dread because of his evil eye (le mauvais oeil). Shmihan does as he was told by the woman he falls in love with and shaves his beard. He looks at himself in the mirror for a long time to admire his shaved face but dies by inflicting his own evil eye on himself. This notion of the killer gaze suggests, in a sense, the destructiveness of introspection because it could lead to the discovery of hidden truths one would rather not know. 16. It is worth noting that Ben Jelloun never uses the word “homosexual” in the text, but only “love,” perhaps because of the derogatory way the word homosexual is used in Moroccan society. 17. Jamal means “beauty” in Arabic. The author describes him with feminine attributes. 18. For Ben Jelloun and Chraïbi alike, in their struggle for identity in the midst of a traditional and judgmental society, writing is more than a refuge; it is a necessary means of expression and revolt. 19. Like Ulysses, Sindibad leaves his native city and later goes back to it a changed and different man. The journey is a formative one whereby the individual acquires subjectivity. 20. Moha, most especially, is the perfect example of the predicament of madness in Moha le fou, Moha le sage (1978), a novel by Ben Jelloun not studied here. 21. The text shows the poems written in Arabic script, followed by the author’s translation. 22. “Maraboutism” has been severely condemned by the Moroccan Salafist movement, but to no avail. 23. It also means “moine” [monk] and/or “ermite” [hermit] in French. 24. Either because it is all too present or embryonic and not yet constructed.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. R. Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

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Ben Jelloun, Tahar. La Prière de l’absent. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981. ———. L’Enfant de sable. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985. ———. La Nuit sacrée. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987. Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Elbaz, Robert. Tahar Ben Jelloun ou l’Inassouvissement du désir narratif. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Elliott, Anthony. Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. R. Howard. London: Routledge, 1971. Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” (1914c), S.E., XIV, 90. Gellner, Ernest. Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. ———. Auto-bio-graphie. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1991. Ibnlfassi, Laïla. “Chraïbi’s Le Passé simple and a Theory of Doubles.” In African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction, ed. Laïla Ibnlfassi and Nicki Hitchcott. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. by M. Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1977. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1988. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972. ———, ed. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Être et le néant. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1943.

PART THREE

: Women’s Voice, Women’s Vision

9

: Voices of Resistance in Contemporary Algerian Women’s Writing Susan Ireland

In the postscript to Oran, langue morte (1997), Assia Djebar remarks that “dans la tourmente et la dérive actuelles, les femmes cherchent une langue: où déposer, cacher, faire nidifier leur puissance de rébellion et de vie dans ces alentours qui vacillent” [in the midst of the current turmoil and uncertainty, women are looking for a language in which to couch, to hide, and to nurture the power of their rebellion and their lives in this unstable environment] (377). Indeed, recent years have seen the emergence of a growing body of literature by women who have chosen to write in French at a time when the government is pursuing a policy of arabization and whose work makes an impassioned indictment of what postindependence Algeria has brought to the population as a whole and to women in particular. These writers, the “nouvelles femmes d’Alger” [new women of Algiers] as Djebar calls them (Oran, 367), include Malika Mokeddem, Leïla Marouane, Nina Hayat, Malika Boussouf, Fatiah, Fériel Assima, Naïla Imaksen, Latifa Ben Mansour, Maïssa Bey, Rachida Titah, Yasmina Khadra, and Hafsa Zinaï-Koudil. 1 Overtly political and gendered in nature, their work illustrates their “puissance de rébellion” [power of rebellion] (377) and provides a forceful answer to Fatiah’s question about women in contemporary Algeria: “comment les femmes pourraient-elles exprimer leur créativité?” [how could women express their creativity?] (Algérie, 85). That these oppositional texts are written by women is underscored in the titles and subtitles, many of which draw attention to the gender of the author: Algérie, chronique d’une femme (Fatiah, 1996), Une Femme à Alger (Assima, 1995), La Nuit tombe sur Alger la Blanche: Chronique d’une Algérienne (Hayat, 1995), Dakia, fille d’Alger (Dakia, 1996), La Fille de la Casbah (Marouane, 1996), “La Femme en morceaux” (Djebar, 1997) and Vivre traquée (Boussouf, 1995). The recurrent references to gender stress the importance of women as a group 171

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that voices its opposition and refuses to remain silent in the face of violence and intimidation. The focus of the women’s texts is Algeria’s second “guerre sans nom,”2 [war without a name], the civil war that has claimed an estimated 60,000 lives since the cancellation of the elections in 1992.3 In this fratricidal struggle, civilians are often the targets of terrorist acts, and the population as a whole deals on a daily basis with the psychological and economic repercussions of the political crisis. Unlike a war against an external enemy, “ici, c’est une tuerie en traître” [here, it’s a treacherous form of killing] (Assima, Une Femme à Alger, 144), in which the enemy is not immediately recognizable and could well turn out to be one’s neighbor. For this reason, the texts present “cette guerre qui ne dit pas son nom” as “plus terrible encore que l’autre, la vraie, celle où l’ennemi se découvre, s’affronte à visage découvert” [this unnamed war . . . (as) even more terrible than the other kind, real war in which the enemy shows his face, fights in the open] (Bey, Au Commencement, 10). Faced on the one hand with a military-backed government that has held the reins of power for thirty years and on the other hand with militant fundamentalists who favor the establishment of an Islamic republic, most of the women authors ally themselves with those who seek an alternative path that would be secular and democratic in nature. Refusing to envisage either the present government or a fundamentalist regime as a viable solution for the future, the women portray themselves as caught between “d’un côté les fous en djellabas, de l’autre les voleurs au pouvoir” [on one side, mad men in djellabas, on the other the thieves in power] (Assima, Une Femme à Alger, 94)—“entre deux terrorismes, celui de l’armée et celui des intégristes” [between two kinds of terrorism, the army’s and the fundamentalists’] (Mokeddem, Des Rêves, 98), “entre la kalachinikov et le couteau” [between the kalachinikov and the knife] (Hayat, La Nuit, 57).4 Consequently, their work denounces both the massacres carried out by the Armed Islamic Groups (GIA) and the abuses attributed to the government’s security forces—the use of torture, detention without trial, and alleged collusion in some of the terrorist attacks.5 All the texts emphasize the centrality of women’s issues in the present crisis. As Zinaï-Koudil puts it, “toute cette bataille qui ensanglante le pays porte en son coeur notre question, celle des femmes. Notre place dans la société” [this whole battle, which is turning the country into a bloodbath, has at its heart our concerns, those of women. Our place in society] (Sans Voix, 79). Indeed, all suggest that what Partha Chatterjee calls “the women’s question” (233) is inextricably linked to conceptions of national identity and modernization in contemporary Algeria. Although women participated in the fight for independence, national liberation and the emancipation of women have not gone hand in hand, and the women’s texts

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refer frequently to the failure to establish a democratic government that upholds women’s rights. As the country began to introduce economic and political reforms after the war of liberation, women were assigned the role of “gardiennes de la tradition” (Gadant, Le Nationalisme, 111), a role that made them a symbol of the new nation’s “true identity,” which had to be protected during the period of modernization (Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution,” 238).6 This move aligned women with permanence rather than change and set up a dichotomy in which the “modern” woman is perceived as Western, as the antithesis of Algerian.7 In this context, as in the case of the war in general, the women authors feel caught between two unacceptable poles and speak out against both the government’s and the fundamentalists’ views on women. On the one hand, they condemn the state’s retreat from the constitutional commitment to women’s rights, a retreat symbolized by the passing of the Family Code (the shari’a) in 1984 despite the demonstrations and protests organized by women’s groups.8 On the other hand, they decry the fundamentalists’ association of women’s rights with Western-style feminism and fear a regime that would entail further restrictions for women.9 Here again, their texts call for a third option,which would take their aspirations into account and would no longer equate them with permanence and tradition.10 In their search for a different path, the “new women of Alger” present their writing as a form of resistance: “Enfermées, voilées, opprimées, aujourd’hui violées et assassinées, les créatrices algériennes considèrent leur oeuvre comme un combat permanent” [Locked up, veiled, oppressed, and now raped and murdered, Algerian women artists view their work as a never-ending combat] (Fatiah, Algérie, 85). As such, their work constitutes an example of what Barbara Harlow calls resistance literature, a politicized form of writing “immediately and directly involved in a struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural production” (Resistance Literature, 28–29). Most of the authors refer explicitly to resistance, which appears on the thematic level in all the texts. Imaksen, for example, asks, “Quelle résistance mener? Contre quoi résister?” [What type of resistance should one engage in? What should one fight against?] (La Troisième Fête d’Ismaël, 10). In particular, she raises the question of how to combat those who do not hesitate to resort to terrorism: “Mais comment donc lutter contre un ennemi sadique, cruel et lâche que ne rebute aucun acte sanglant? Comment lutter contre des tueurs d’enfants, de vieillards et de femmes?” [But how can one fight a sadistic, cruel, and cowardly enemy for whom no bloody act is too much? How can one fight those who kill children, old people, and women?] (68). Likewise, Dakia, a fourteen-year-old girl who recounts her life in a militant, antifundamentalist family, examines what resistance means and what forms it takes in Algeria today—“Comment résister? / Et que veut dire résistance?” [How

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should one resist? And what does resistance mean?] (Dakia, 34). Like the other authors, she gives numerous examples of daily acts of resistance ranging from demonstrating for women’s rights, refusing to wear the hidjab, and writing in French, to simply continuing to work or go to school instead of giving in to intimidation.11 The very existence of texts such as Dakia’s and Imaksen’s constitutes part of their rebellion, at once creating a discursive space in which their resistance can take place and openly declaring the political nature of their message. The new resistance writers view themselves as part of a long tradition of rebellion on the part of women. However, all cite as their immediate precursor the novelist and journalist Tahar Djaout, who was assassinated in May 1993. He is alluded to by name in every text as a symbol of resistance writing, and his famous lines, “Le silence c’est la mort, / Et toi, si tu parles, tu meurs, / Si tu te tais, tu meurs. / Alors dis et meurs” [Silence is death, / And if you speak, you die, / If you keep quiet, you die. / So speak and die] (Dakia, Dakia, 43), form a refrain that echoes throughout the women’s work. One after another, they take up and respond to his words by speaking out in their turn, as does Aicha in Sans Voix: “La pensée est assassinée, le poète est mort! . . . Mais il faut dire avant de mourir: Ecris, Aicha!” (Zinaï-Koudil, 23–24)—“Du fond de mon rêve, la voix du poète disait: ‘Résistez, Résistez’” [“Thought has been murdered, the poet is dead! . . . But you must speak before you die: write, Aicha!” (Zinaï-Koudil 23–24)—“From the depths of my dream, the poet’s voice said: ‘Resist, resist’”] (78). In the realm of women, the models include real and legendary figures who have resisted their enemies through their actions or their words, a lineage that ranges from “la fille de Nedjma” (Zinaï-Koudil, 24–25), Lalla Fadhma N’Soumer (Dakia, 44; Zinaï-Koudil, 25),12 and la Kahina (Ben Mansour, 379) to Djamila Debèche (Fatiah, 19)13 and Sheherazade (Zinaï-Koudil, 168–169; Ben Mansour, 305; Djebar, Oran, 168). In Sans Voix, in a move that reverses the silence indicated in the title, Zinaï-Koudil brings together the voices of these earlier resisters in a powerful call for action and justice today: De Tinhinan à la Kahina, toutes deux reines berbères, j’interroge les tombes et les vivants. Livre vide, langue aride. Silence assassin. . . . Mais l’appel est lancé. Contre l’amnésie. Il monte des entrailles de la terre. Dyhia la farouche et la rebelle Lalla Fadhma conjuguent leurs cris et réveillent ainsi Nedjma l’insaisissable et sa fille. Des hautes montagnes, des dunes de sable et des cités, des Djamila affluent et derrière elles, nos grand-mères et nos filles relèvent la tête et répètent à l’unisson, afin que nul n’oublie: “Nous voulons vivre. Dignes et libres. Répondez à nos cris!” (25) [From Tinhinan to Kahina, both Berber queens, I interrogate the living and the dead. An empty book, an arid language, a murderous silence. . . . But the call has gone out. Against amnesia. It rises from the entrails

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of the earth. The shy Dyhia and the rebellious Lalla Fadhma cry out together and awaken the elusive Nedjma and her daughter. Dozens of Djamilas pour out of the high mountains, the sand-dunes and the cities, and behind them our grandmothers and our daughters raise their heads and repeat together, so that no one will forget: “We want to live. Proud and free. Answer our cries!”]

In this passage, the opposition of amnesia and memory, of “a murderous silence” and of voices united in protest, creates an impression of solidarity and strength and, by linking the women to the “entrails of the earth,” makes them the voice of Algeria. The women-Algeria parallel is reinforced in the references to Nedjma, who serves as a trope for Algeria in Kateb Yacine’s 1956 novel Nedjma—“cette femme-patrie,” “la Nedjma-Algérie” (Zinaï-Koudil, 25). In Sans Voix, Nedjma’s daughter—again a symbol of her country and of the voice of its women—admonishes the men in power for destroying the hopes of the nation and starting a brutal war (ZinaïKoudil, 20–21). The men’s refusal to listen to Algeria’s women is thus portrayed as the cause of the fratricidal war, and the appeal for resistance, which associates women with change rather than tradition, makes them the symbols of tolerance, peace, and freedom. The latest generation of women resisters present themselves as warriors with words. In what Zinaï-Koudil calls the “Combat dément du couteau contre la plume” [crazy struggle of the knife against the pen], their writing combats the “assassins du verbe, qui ne tolèrent pas de voir leurs thèses intégristes détruites par la vérité des mots” [murderers of language who cannot bear to see their fundamentalist arguments destroyed by the truth of words] (Sans Voix, 64). Faced with the strategy of the GIA, which consists of killing those who oppose its views—“Celui qui nous insulte par la plume périra par la lame” [He who insults us with his pen will perish by the sword] (69)—the women respond by proposing a new definition of “armed” combat that transforms their work into a site of battle. Polemical in nature, their texts are full of characters who claim their words as weapons and do battle using the regular tools of their trade: “avec pour seules armes du papier, un stylo, une chanson, un poème, un pinceau!” [with paper, a pen, a song, a poem, a paintbrush as their only arms!] (Hayat, La Nuit, 24). The nature of their arms and their combat thus stands in sharp contrast to that of their enemies, whose “seuls moyens de communication [sont] le viol, la torture, les bombes, les balles et le couteau” [only means of communication (are) rape, torture, bombs, bullets and knives] (Hayat, La Nuit, 14). The women’s warrior stance is reinforced in images related to war, which recur repeatedly in their work: Assima, for example, calls women’s voices of protest “la voix des guerrières” [warriors’ voices] (Une Femme à Alger, 138), while Fatiah presents herself as “une guerrière qui ne veut pas quitter le champ de bataille” [a soldier who

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does not want to leave the battlefield] (Algérie, 90) and describes women’s battle cry: “Nous égrenons comme un cri de guerre les noms des femmes assassinées” [We chant the names of murdered women as our war cry] (44–45). By giving themselves a warrior identity, the women problematize the stereotypes of women as noncombatants and of war writing as a male genre that glorifies the exploits of heroic warriors.14 Rather than take up arms in the traditional sense, they use their pens to counter the celebration of war and to demonstrate their resistance to internecine violence, a strategy highlighted in Zinaï-Koudil’s image of “un fleuve de sang taché d’encre” [a river of ink-stained blood] (Sans Voix, 64). The women are well aware that it is to a large extent the gendered, warlike nature of their protest that makes them privileged targets of the GIA and the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). As Zinaï-Koudil observes, “ce sont les femmes qui dérangent le plus . . . le fer de lance de leur combat reste sans conteste dirigé contre la femme” [it is women who bother them the most . . . the spearhead of their struggle is unquestionably directed against women] (Sans Voix, 69). To underscore the revolutionary nature of their struggle, the women set up a series of parallels between the combative attitude of women today and the role they played in the war of liberation. In particular, they portray themselves as a new generation of moudjahidate—contemporary versions of the women who participated in the struggle for independence.15 Fatiah, for example, draws attention to the parallel by calling the present struggle “ma deuxième guerre d’Algérie” [my second Algerian War] (Algérie, 77), and she explicitly refuses the fate of her predecessors, who fought for independence but were then expected to subordinate women’s issues to the needs of the nation: “On ne laissera pas l’expérience de 1962 se rééditer: Les Algériennes, qui avaient participé activement à la guerre de libération nationale, ont été renvoyées à leurs fourneaux” [we will not allow the experience of 1962 to be repeated: Algerian women, who had played an active role in the war of national liberation, were sent back to their stoves] (28). 16 Her chronicle frequently refers to women’s resistance activities during the war of independence, and she invites the reader to compare the anticolonial struggle against the French to the contemporary fight against internal forms of oppression: “si on devait mourir, on mourrait en moudjahidates” [if we were to die, we would die as moudjahidates] (Algérie, 40). Other texts give voice to combatants from the “first” war in order to highlight the role of the maquis as a symbol of resistance. In L’Interdite (1993), a former member of the resistance during the war of liberation encourages contemporary women in their opposition to the FIS: “C’est une ancienne du maquis qui te parle. Une femme qui ne comprend pas par quelle perversion l’indépendance du pays nous a déchues de nos dignités et de nos droits alors que nous avons combattu pour elle” [This is a former

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resistance fighter speaking to you. A woman who does not understand through what perversion independence has deprived us of our dignity and our rights when we fought for our country] (Mokeddem, 242). In similar fashion, Boussouf and Zinaï-Koudil use a mother-daughter relationship to create the comparison between the two generations and the two wars. Whereas Boussouf stresses the differences between her mother’s role as a maquisarde in the anticolonial war and her own battle against an internal enemy who has condemned her to death, Zinaï-Koudil uses the motherdaughter relationship in Sans Voix to highlight the theme of betrayal and to underscore the irony of the present situation in which a maquisarde now urges her daughter to seek refuge in France (75).17 This sense of the betrayal of the maquisardes is emphasized in Mokeddem’s Des Rêves et des assassins (1995), in which the maquis has been transformed from a positive symbol of resistance into a place of gratuitous violence that now represents the violation of the liberation movement and of women’s rights: “Pendant la guerre d’Indépendance, les Algériennes sillonaient les maquis, armées comme leurs frères. Maintenant, dans les maquis des frérots, les zéros d’Allah, séquestrent des adolescentes pour la fornication et la popote” [During the war of independence, Algerian women patrolled the maquis, armed like their brothers. Now, kid brothers, Allah’s losers, sequester adolescent girls in the maquis to provide them with sex and food] (96). Displaced from the geographically located maquis to its textual equivalent, the new generation of moudjahidate refuse to return to their kitchens a second time and forcefully reject the nation’s disassociation of political and social revolution: “la libération de la société passe nécessairement par la libération inconditionelle des femmes” [the liberation of society necessarily involves the complete liberation of women] (ZinaïKoudil, Sans Voix, 80). To emphasize the potential power of this new mobilization of women and its relationship to the original maquis, ZinaïKoudil applies to it Kateb Yacine’s famous comment on the explosive effects of women’s writing, a comment made in the preface to Yamina Mechakra’s novel on the war of liberation (La Grotte éclatée, 1979): “Pour l’amour et l’honneur de nous toutes, écris! Kateb Yacine ne disait-il pas: ‘Une femme qui écrit dans notre pays vaut son pesant de poudre’?” [For the sake of us all, write! Didn’t Kateb Yacine say: ‘In our country, a woman who writes is worth her weight in gunpowder’?] (80). As part of their oppositional strategy, the women document the atrocities that characterize the civil war. Presenting themselves as witnesses, they seek “les mots pour le dire,” the words with which to record unspeakable pain and violence—“les mots pour dire l’horreur” (Hayat, La Nuit, 7), “les mots pour dire l’indicible” (Bey, Nouvelles, 12). Like Djebar, Hayat and Ben Mansour directly address the question of finding a language that appears in all the women’s works:

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Comment imaginer, rêver, inventer quand la vie vous est un cauchemar de chaque instant rythmé par l’assassinat de tous vos amis, la peur, les cris, les larmes, le sang? (Hayat, La Nuit, 7) [How can you imagine, dream or create when your life is a constant nightmare punctuated by the assassination of all your friends, by fear, screams, tears and blood?] Qui saura trouver les mots justes pour peindre l’horreur et l’épouvante de ces adolescentes devant la lame rouillée introduite dans leur sexe et tranchant sous un flot de sang leur jeunesse et leur vie? Qui osera dire et crier et dénoncer la frayeur et le hurlement de ces jeunes filles et de ces femmes égorgées? (Ben Mansour, La Prière, 353) [Who will be able to find the right words to describe the horror and the terror of these adolescent girls before the rusty blade inserted into their genitals, slicing through their young lives in a stream of blood. Who will dare to speak and shout and denounce the fear and screams of these young girls and women whose throats have been cut?]

Despite the difficulty of expressing such suffering, the women find a variety of narrative forms in which to give their testimony.18 While their texts range in genre from novels (Mokeddem, Marouane, Zinaï-Koudil, Ben Mansour, Bey), short stories (Djebar, Bey, Titah), and detective fiction (Khadra) to chroniques (Hayat, Assima, Fatiah) and autobiographical accounts (Boussouf, Dakia), all are inspired by the author’s personal experience. As Hayat observes when trying to classify her own text, “Je cherche vainement, dans ce qui s’écrit aujourd’hui en Algérie, la fiction pure, le roman qui n’est pas habité par l’effrayante réalité” [I search in vain, in what is being written in Algeria today, for true fiction, for a novel that is not filled with terrifying reality] (La Nuit, 8). Although born of individual experience, the texts evoke collective suffering and a common struggle, and each piece of testimony communicates a sense of solidarity with all those who have chosen to resist. In the introduction to Vivre traquée, Boussouf comments on the importance of bearing witness despite the risks: “L’essentiel . . . c’est la nécessité de témoigner, de dire la peur, la révolte, le dégoût de tous les démocrates algériens otages de l’horreur.” [What is essential . . . is the need to testify, to give voice to the fear, revolt, and disgust of all Algerian democrats who are the hostages of horror.] This refusal to lay down one’s arms is repeated over and over again as the women stress the urgency of writing in order to record: J’écris, j’écris pour décrire l’horreur, pour ne jamais oublier, pour que les jeunes générations ne soient plus jamais tentés par l’aventure criminelle du fondamentalisme. (Fatiah, Algérie, 46) [I write, I write in order to portray the horror, so that I will never forget, so that future generations will never again be tempted by the criminal adventure of fundamentalism.]

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Il faut écrire, filmer, enregistrer, et parler. . . . Il faut raconter. (Assima, Une Femme à Alger, 141) [We must write, film, record, and speak. . . . We must tell the story.] Ecris, Aicha, pour que nos filles sachent. . . . Pour l’amour et l’honneur de nous toutes, écris! (Zinaï-Koudil, Sans Voix, 79–80) [Write, Aicha, so that our daughters will know. . . . For the sake of all women, write!]

Taken together, the women’s testimonial narratives chronicle the rise of the FIS, the wave of violence that has swept across the country since 1992, and the relationship of the former to political, economic, and gender issues. At the same time, they document the effects of civil war on ordinary people’s lives—death threats, assassinations, torture, terrorism, curfews, “disappearances,” and constant fear. The recurrent emphasis on testimony and on the truthfulness of the events recounted is reflected in the frequent choice of the journal or the chronicle as a narrative form. Here, the historical moment in which the texts are anchored is highlighted through the use of dates and references to real people and events.19 Imaksen’s chronicle of the period from August 1993 to August 1994 is characteristic of this group of texts. She presents her work as “la transmission d’un vécu” [the transmission of lived experience] (La Troisième Fête d’Ismaël, 7) and adopts the diary format to highlight the fact that she is recording lived events. As the narrator of the diary writes down and comments on the deaths and injuries reported in the daily news, her repeated use of dates, names, geographical locations, and media sources creates an impression of immediacy and veracity, and her emphasis on cataloging emphasizes the high number of daily casualties and fatalities. A similar effect is created in the chronicles that do not use a diary format. The autobiographical accounts written by Dakia, Hayat, Boussouf, and Assima contain numerous references to recent events and provide three different perspectives on the ways in which these events affect women. Dakia’s text, which recounts the awakening of an adolescent’s political and feminist consciousness, focuses on the events that shape her awareness of women’s issues and force the members of her family into hiding and exile. Hayat and Boussouf, on the other hand, write from the point of view of a journalist whose life has been threatened, and both invite the reader to reflect on the question, “Comment peut-on faire un métier comme le vôtre, aujourd’hui, en Algérie?” [How can anyone do a job like yours in Algeria today?] (Boussouf, Vivre traquée, 23). While Hayat’s narrator describes her life as a target of the FIS, her husband’s death in a terrorist attack, and her reluctant decision to go into exile, Boussouf recounts the reasons for her death sentence, the physical and psychological effects of life under threat, and her return to Algeria after a brief stay in France. Assima presents a third, more general

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perspective: in her “chronique du désastre” [chronicle of a disaster] (subtitle), she gives voice to a wide range of characters—mostly women—in order to convey a sense of the “cauchemar” [nightmare] (Une Femme à Alger, 187) that characterizes their lives. Her nightmarish vision equates the FIS with madness, excrement, and destructive insects (79, 72, 90) and the city in general with images of decay, refuse, and sewers (17, 58, 154). In this disturbing environment, her women characters attempt to deal with an endless array of problems ranging from the incompetence and corruption of city officials to housing shortages, poor medical care, and poverty. In most cases, the novels and short stories make use of the same combination of realist description and moral condemnation. The testimony presented in Ben Mansour’s La Prière de la peur (1997), for example, unfolds against the backdrop of civil strife, and the novel is framed by two acts of terrorism, opening with the random violence of a bomb exploding at an airport and closing with the targeting of a specific woman’s family. In similar fashion, Bey’s and Titah’s short stories, vignettes of life inspired by recent historical events, present a broad range of situations that affect many citizens today: a young girl whose mother is killed in an explosion (Titah, Un Ciel trop bleu, 9–13), a mother’s anger when her daughter joins the FIS and tries to force her to wear a hidjab (Titah, Un Ciel trop bleu, 31–35), a woman whose husband is assassinated in front of their home (Bey, Nouvelles, 21–42), and a nephew killed by security forces for being a dangerous terrorist (Bey, Nouvelles, 69–94). To emphasize the realistic nature of her stories, Bey takes up and reverses the common disclaimer about the links between fiction and real life: “toute ressemblance avec des personnages ayant existé ou existant n’est pas fortuite” [any similarity to persons living or dead is not fortuitous] (Bey, Nouvelles, 12).20 Finally, the same type of events constitute the crimes investigated by le commissaire Llob in Khadra’s trilogy of detective novels, Morituri (1997), Double blanc (1997), and L’Automne des chimères (1998).21 Llob, a policeman who writes detective fiction under the name Yasmina Khadra, represents integrity and justice in a country where violence and lawlessness reign, and his investigations into highlevel corruption, terrorist attacks, and the assassination of intellectuals bring him into contact with both the government and the FIS. It is the testimony he gives in his novel, however, that leads to his being fired and eventually killed, and his two-pronged approach to revealing the truth—writing and detective work—makes him an image en abyme of Khadra’s own resistance. His dogged but weary pursuit of justice reflects the general feeling of “rasle-bol” [being fed up] (Mokeddem, Des Rêves, 104) that characterizes Khadra’s and the other women’s work, and his fight to put an end to the violence implicitly raises the question at the center of the whole corpus— “Combien encore? Jusqu’à quand?” [How many more? For how long?] (Fatiah, Algérie, 35).

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Besides creating a record, the women’s writing is presented as a means of surviving. Both the autobiographical and fictional texts focus on the role played by writing in the narrator’s desire to survive. Aicha in Sans Voix “écrivait pour rester en vie” [wrote in order to stay alive] (ZinaïKoudil, 47), and Bey does so “pour ne pas sombrer” [in order not to drown] (“Interview,” 76). Likewise, for Imaksen and Fatiah, the act of writing a journal is “une brasse folle, dont on coule ou survit” [a mad attempt to tread water, going under or staying afloat] (Imaksen, La Troisième Fête d’Ismaël, 7), an activity whose effects are often commented on in the daily entries: “L’écriture m’a un peu calmée,” “Ecrire me libère” [Writing calmed me a little . . . Writing liberates me] (Fatiah, Algérie, 36, 48). Writing to ward off death, the women writers resemble Sheherazade, a symbol of survival through storytelling: “Comme Schéhérazade, elle arrachait un sursis à sa mort certaine, se jetait à corps perdu dans la narration d’histoires extraordinaires et interminables” [Like Schéhérazade, she snatched a reprieve from certain death, threw herself headlong into the narration of endless, extraordinary stories] (Zinaï-Koudil, Sans Voix, 48). However, since writing also puts the women’s lives at risk, Aicha reaches the paradoxical conclusion that “écrire me livre et me délivre” [writing hands me over to the enemy and sets me free] (Zinaï-Koudil, Sans Voix, 136), and she thus foregrounds the interrelated themes of writing as survival and as a dangerous resistance activity. Whereas writing is equated with survival for the narrators, for the victims of violence it constitutes a form of remembering. Explicitly rejecting the assigned role of “gardienne des traditions” [guardian of tradition], Aicha claims that of “gardienne de la mémoire” [guardian of memory] (Zinaï-Koudil, Sans Voix, 78) and writes “pour retrouver la mémoire et la garder” [in order to recover memory and conserve it] (136).22 In this sense, all the texts in the corpus are at once works of memory, memorial, and mourning. Imaksen explicitly presents her chronicle as “un modeste mémorial en hommage aux disparus” [a modest memorial in homage to those who have disappeared] (La Troisième Fête d’Ismaël, 7),23 and litanies of the names of the dead recur in her texts and those of others, often accompanied by the date and circumstances of their deaths: Lyabès, Boukhobza, Boucebci, Djaout . . . vingt-sept intellectuels, des dizaines de citoyens. (Fatiah, Algérie, 35) Bellazhar, Senhadri, Liabès, Boucebsi, Flici, Boukhobza, le couple Saheb, Djaout, Chergou. (Imaksen, La Troisième Fête d’Ismaël, 18)24

Other passages focus on scenes of mourning and grief, as in Assima’s portrait of women lamenting the dead at a cemetery (Une Femme à Alger, 96–100) and the sections of Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1995) that

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recount the loss of intellectuals such as Djaout, Abdelkader Alloula, Mahfoud Boucebci, M’Hamed Boukhobza, Saïd Mekbel, and Youssef Sebti. In most of the texts, the commemoration and mourning take the form of re-membering, of putting together maimed and mutilated bodies. Indeed, the theme of the body in pieces recurs insistently in the corpus as a powerful image of the physical and psychological suffering of the victims of terrorism. The repeated use of nouns referring to body parts and of verbs indicating mutilation creates a graphic image of the pain war inscribes on the bodies of ordinary citizens and, at the same time, evokes the dismemberment of the country itself: Têtes décapitées, membres sectionnés et jetés aux quatre coins de l’horizon, sexes et seins tronçonnés, yeux retirés de leurs orbites, foies encore chauds extraits de corps encore vivants. (Ben Mansour, La Prière, 54) [Bodies beheaded, limbs severed and thrown to the four corners of the earth, genitals and breasts cut off, eyes torn out of their sockets, livers still warm pulled from living bodies.] Quarante appelés égorgés dans un chalet . . . explosés dans un camion . . . égorgés, poignardés, fusillés, émasculés, éventrés, sept cents . . . cinq mille . . . dix mille, et, le soir, des hommes nus . . . abandonnés, sans têtes. (Assima, Une Femme à Alger, 144) [Forty conscripts their throats cut in a chalet . . . blown up in a truck . . . throats slit, stabbed, shot, castrated, disemboweled, seven hundred . . . five thousand . . . ten thousand, and in the evening, naked men abandoned, headless.] Chez nous, des fillettes sont violées puis décapitées, des enfants sont déchiquetés par des engins explosifs, des familles entières sont massacrées à la hache toutes les nuits. (Khadra, L’Automne des chimères, 68) [In our part of the world, young girls are raped then decapitated, children are ripped apart by explosives, whole families are hacked to death.]

Those responsible for the carnage are compared to animals that attack and tear apart their prey: “Ces fous veulent nous anéantir. Il y a de tout làdedans: des crabes, des écrevisses aux longues-pinces, des cochons de mer, des poulpes, des crabes encore. Horrible, effrayant; ça vous saute à la gorge comme des requins, ça vous plante des griffes comme des fauves, ça vous dévore, ça vous met en pièces, c’est l’horreur” [Those madmen want to wipe us out. They are a bit of everything: crabs, crayfish with long pincers, porpoises, octopuses, yet more crabs. Horrible, terrifying; they go for your throat like sharks, sink their claws into you like wild animals, devour you and rip you apart, it’s a nightmare] (Assima, Une Femme à Alger, 142–143). In particular, the image of “la femme en morceaux,” a traditional symbol of the oppression of women, serves here as a reminder of the literal dismemberment that may await resistance writers: “Ferme bien ta porte. Et surtout n’ouvre à personne, ma fille! Si jamais tes écrits tombent entre leurs mains, ils te découperont en petits morceaux” [Shut your door well. And above all

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don’t open it to anyone, my daughter! If ever your writing falls into their hands, they will cut you up into little pieces] (Zinaï-Koudil, Sans Voix, 136). Conscious of her possible fate as a “femme en morceaux,” Assima uses similar images related to the body to express her defiance and opposition to violence: “Qu’ils viennent fouiller mon ventre, trouer ma tête, arracher mon coeur, laver mes intestins! . . . Nous ne leur ressembleront jamais” [Let them dig around in my stomach, put a hole in my skull, tear out my heart, wash out my intestines! . . . We will never be like them] (Une Femme à Alger, 100). As if heeding Djebar’s injunction that “il faudra bien revenir . . . au corps de la femme en morceaux” [we must come back . . . to the body of the woman in pieces] (Oran, 207), contemporary Algerian women writers seek to reassemble the dismembered body as a means of resisting inhumanity and intolerance. In La Prière de la peur, Hanan is emblematic of this desire for reconstruction: injured in an explosion, she has “ni jambes, ni cuisses” [no legs or thighs] (Ben Mansour, 20), and she writes her story as an act of re-membering: “je désire rassembler dans ce manuscrit les morceaux épars de ma vie éclatée, Lalla. C’est ainsi que je triompherai de la mort et de la barbarie” [in this manuscript, I would like to put together the scattered pieces of my shattered life, Lalla. In this way, I will triumph over death and barbarity] (42). In this fashion, re-membering becomes synonymous with resistance and with women’s longing to put an end to civil strife. Mokeddem’s two latest novels both use images of the body to address the sacrifice and psychological dismemberment of women. The title Des Rêves et des assassins, with its opposition of “rêves” and “assassins,” refers to the “rêve collectif de liberté” [the collective dream of freedom] (29) and to women’s dreams in particular, all of which have been destroyed since independence: “Désespoir du rêve, de tous les rêves brisés. On ne rêve pas dans un pays comme le mien. Surtout quand on est une femme” [the despair caused by dreams, by all broken dreams. You don’t dream in a country like mine. Especially when you’re a woman] (158). In Mokeddem’s Algeria, those who continue to fight for democracy are assassinated, like their dreams, a situation that leads her to raise the question at the center of the novel, “Par quelle perversion la génération de l’Indépendance s’est-elle transformée en hordes de l’aliénation et de la mort?” [Through what perversion has the generation of Independence turned itself into hordes bringing alienation and death?] (50). More specifically, as the narrator asks, “Que réserve-t-il aux femmes, ce pays?” [What does this country have in store for women?] (96). The narrator of Des Rêves et des assassins distinguishes between two periods as regards the treatment of women. For her, the hierarchical social divisions of the years before the current crisis created a tripartite structure in which a small minority, the “Algé-Rois,” reigned over the majority,

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composed of “Algé-Riens” and “des moins-que-rien, les femmes” [the completely worthless, women] (46). This traditional patriarchal era contrasts favorably with the present situation, where the implementation of the Family Code and the rise of fundamentalism have further restricted women’s freedom. The transition between these two periods is represented in the novel through the figure of the narrator’s father, who serves as a symbol of postindependence Algeria. In the first pages of the text, he appears as a caricature of an “Algé-Rien” of the earlier patriarchal period. Here, his profession as butcher stands for his obsession with sex, and the satirical descriptions of his manipulation of meat (“la chair”) reflect his view of women as sexual objects: “Les femmes ne sont que ça pour lui: de la viande . . . mon père excelle dans la pratique du troc: l’usage d’un corps contre un peu d’agneau, de mouton ou de chameau. Le boeuf est trop cher” [Women are only that for him: meat . . . my father excels at bartering: the use of a body in exchange for a bit of lamb, mutton or camel. Beef is too expensive] (15). As the novel progresses, however, the butcher’s shop becomes a stronghold of the FIS, and the father is associated both literally and metaphorically with the “boucherie” (90) that has caused the deaths of thousands of Algerians. At the same time, the shop serves as a tribunal— “la boucherie de mon père se transforma en tribunal” (56)—where women, represented by the daughter, are judged according to the FIS’s rules for their behavior. This court, which defends tradition and sees women’s lives as inherently lacking in value, condemns the daughter as a “danger social” for wanting to bring about change (56). As a member of the tribunal, the father expresses his opposition to his daughter’s desire for education and independence by symbolically sharpening his butcher’s knives, and any resistance on her part brings the threat of violence and mutilation: “Et si tu te rebelles, je boirai ton sang!” [and if you rebel, I’ll drink your blood] (57). The father’s role as a symbol of contemporary repression is underscored in the characterization of both him and the country as “détraqué” (11, 30), and his conflictual relationship with his daughter reflects society’s sacrifice of women: “Des pères qui brisent l’avenir de leurs propres filles sont capables d’enchaîner toutes les libertés” [Fathers who destroy their own daughters’ futures are capable of putting all forms of freedom in chains] (29–30). The notion of the father-land’s betrayal of women is reinforced in a series of episodes in which an educated young man abandons the university student he loves in favor of a traditional arranged marriage. This type of episode, which also appears in L’Interdite and Bey’s Au Commencement était la mer (1996), is presented as a common occurrence: “Il y deux ans, ses études finies, son amoureux l’a abandonnée pour épouser une fillette choisie par ses parents. Lui aussi. Attitude commune à tant d’étudiants” [Two years ago, when her lover had completed his studies, he left her in

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order to marry a young girl chosen by his parents. Him too. An attitude common to so many students] (69).25 Through these episodes, the authors reproach those who could have become the voice of enlightened modernity for sacrificing Algeria’s women, and the young women’s contemporaries are presented as having perpetuated the attitudes of the past by continuing to align themselves with tradition in regard to women’s rights. The blame for this betrayal is assumed by a male character in L’Interdite: speaking for his generation’s failure to act as advocates for women, he affirms, “nous n’avons cessé de tuer l’Algérie à petit feu, femme par femme” [we have not stopped killing Algeria a bit at a time, one woman after another] (Mokeddem, 72). The narrator’s response to this betrayal in Des Rêves et des assassins, as in the other texts, is one of defiant resistance: “Non, nous ne serons ni rebuts ni déchues ni pions subalternes d’une communauté” [No, we will not be the cast-offs, the have-beens or the subordinate pawns of a community] (80). Whereas Des Rêves et des assassins focuses on city life, in L’Interdite Mokeddem expresses her opposition to the fundamentalists’ views on women through a woman doctor (Sultana) who returns to her native village in the south. The medical metaphors Sultana uses to describe the FIS, which controls the village, suggest a serious illness, a new form of plague that attacks the mind and the body and is spread by the mayor and his followers: “Ils, à la fois sauterelles, variole et typhus, cancer et lèpre, peste et sida des esprits” [They are at the same time locusts, smallpox and typhus, cancer and leprosy, the plague and AIDS of the mind] (187). With its echoes of Albert Camus’s La Peste (1947), Mokeddem’s portrayal of a doctor fighting an epidemic emphasizes the urgency of finding a cure. Women are presented as the main victims of the new plague: its psychological effects are expressed in them as physical symptoms and are designated by the term “koulchite”—“pathologie féminine . . . symptomatique des séismes et de la détresse au féminin” [a form of pathology affecting women . . . symptomatic of their upheaval and distress] (125). This female malady appears in various forms ranging from “aiguë” and “chronique” to “terminale” and “hystérique,” but in each case the bodily symptoms are the expression of psychological pain—“Je vois une koulchite aiguë, une inflammation de l’âme et de l’être chez une jeune femme de seize ans” [I see an acute koulchite, an inflammation of the heart and soul in a young sixteen-year-old woman] (183). As a doctor, Sultana stresses the need to diagnose the women’s silent suffering, and her treatment involves a form of re-membering—the reconstruction of the fragmented mind and body: “Je fouille les koulchite. Koulchites en vrac, souffrances en morceaux, en monceaux, en extricables écheveaux. J’essaie d’en trouver les bouts. J’écarte, je démêle, je trie” [I search through the koulchites. A jumble of koulchites, suffering in pieces, in piles, in tangled webs. I try to find the ends. I

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separate, untangle and sort] (245). In particular, she highlights the need to give the patient a voice and a language, and her own “années d’autisme et d’aphasie” (60) are contrasted with the importance of “talking”—“Il faut qu’on parle” (245). In this fashion, she equates telling with healing and prescribes speaking out in revolt as women’s main path to a cure. The final pages of the novel present a dramatic confrontation in the village that turns the women’s hitherto silent protest into a collective rebellious voice. As the women occupy the hospital to protect Sultana from the FIS, their angry, accusing voices denounce the mayor’s crimes and describe the punishments they would like to inflict on him. Intimidated by the united women, the mayor is forced to retreat, and the women’s act of rebellion marks the beginning of a war in the village. Their next meeting is a “conseil de guerre” (242) at which the women take on a warrior identity and declare themselves “prêtes à reprendre les armes s’il le faut” [ready to take up arms if necessary] (243). Their first act of war reflects their determination to fight back: when the mayor’s supporters set fire to the house Sultana is staying in, the women retaliate by burning down the town hall, the symbol of the FIS’s power. The end of the novel thus stresses the importance of solidarity, as women from various walks of life come together in a collective struggle against the diseased social body. Djebar’s “La Femme en morceaux” gives a broader historical dimension to the theme of re-membering. At once a rewriting of the tale of “The Woman Cut in Pieces” told by Sheherazade in The Arabian Nights and a political fable about the fate of women in contemporary Algeria, “La Femme en morceaux” is a powerful contribution to the fight against silence and dismemberment. The recurrent refrain, “un corps de jeune femme, un corps coupé en morceaux” [a young woman’s body, a body cut into pieces] (Djebar, Oran, 163), places a woman’s mutilated body at the center of the text and provides the link between past and present, Baghdad and Alger, and the unnamed woman in The Arabian Nights and Atyka, who in 1994 recounts her own version of the story first told by Sheherazade. Atyka, who was born in 1962, serves as a symbol of postindependence Algeria, and her “long martyre” (210) reflects both the war-torn country and the long suffering of Algerian women. A teacher of French— “une langue qu’elle a choisie, qu’elle a plaisir d’enseigner” [a language she had chosen, that she enjoyed teaching] (Djebar, Oran, 167)—Atyka is condemned by the fundamentalists for telling her pupils “des histoires obscènes” (209), the stories of The Arabian Nights, in particular that of “The Woman Cut in Pieces.” Like the anonymous woman in Sheherazade’s story, whose husband cuts her into pieces because he believes her to have been unfaithful, Atyka becomes a victim of violence when she dies at the hands of those who deem her behavior inappropriate.

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Djebar’s own story, which contains those told by Sheherazade and Atyka, is both a lyrical work of mourning and a tribute to the power of stories to save lives. On each of the three levels of the text, those narrated by Djaffar, Sheherazade, and Atyka, “une imagination . . . ‘sous menace’” is called upon to save someone from a “sentence de mort” (199). Just as Sheherazade “risque sa vie chaque nuit” (199), Atyka risks hers every day by teaching French and discussing with her pupils the political and feminist message of Sheherazade’s tales. The intertextual allusion in her final words underscores the parallel between the 1001 nights and days and suggests the somber nature of daily life in Alger: “La nuit, c’est chacun de nos jours, mille et un jours, ici, chez nous, à . . .” [Every one of our days is night, a thousand and one days, here, in our country, in . . .] (213). However, whereas Sheherazade’s story of “The Woman Cut in Pieces” helps her put an end to the beheading of the sultan’s wives, Atyka is decapitated in front of her class for recounting the very same tale. She had hoped to relate the last of the 1001 nights, in which Sheherazade is granted “la vie sauve” (212), but in Algeria today the beheadings are not yet over, and she in her turn becomes “Atyka, tête coupée . . . Atyka, femme en morceaux” [Atyka, her head cut off . . . Atyka, a woman in pieces] (211). By the end of the text, then, her dismembered body has merged with that of the original woman in pieces, and Djebar’s text returns in mourning to their “[corps] Non inhumé. Non pleuré” [unburied, unmourned body] (193). The final image of the story highlights the comparison between the two women and the two historical periods and urges the reader, embodied in the text by a pupil who witnesses the crime (Omar), to mourn the contemporary victims of violence, just as Haroun el Rachid laments the death of the woman he wrongfully killed: “Dans la ville blanche d’aujourd’hui et si loin du Tigre, Omar entend sans cesse Haroun el Rachid le calife, devant le corps de la femme en morceaux, sangloter” [In the white city today, so far from the Tigris, Omar can hear Haroun el Rachid the caliph sobbing continuously before the body of the woman in pieces] (215). Djebar’s re-membering of the women cut into pieces, like Mokeddem’s, stresses the importance of speaking out. Although Atyka loses her head to the sword, she refuses to be silenced and continues to recount her story after death until she reaches the point where Sheherazade is delivered from her ordeal. 26 The final pages of the text thus foreground the question of voice: “Le corps, la tête. Mais la voix? Où s’est réfugiée la voix d’Atyka?” [The body, the head. But the voice? Where has Atyka’s voice gone?] (214). By taking up the voice in her turn, Djebar rescues both Atyka and the original “femme en morceaux” from silence and invites us to consider how many more women must be beheaded before the violence stops. Meanwhile, in keeping with Sheherazade’s narrative techniques in

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The Arabian Nights, one story, that told by Djaffar, remains unfinished. Emblematic of the lack of closure that characterizes all the texts discussed in this chapter, Djaffar’s suspended tale about the possible reconciliation of two warring brothers evokes the fratricidal war that divides Algeria today and suggests the uncertain future of the country. Writing that future, Djebar suggests, involves giving women a voice and re-membering their lives as a step toward rebuilding the country. Taken together, then, the recent texts by women tell a story of resistance to a situation in which the fact of speaking out brings the threat of violent silencing. Part of the “talking cure” prescribed by Sultana, they repeatedly stress the importance of “la parole” as a weapon for women, and all recognize that “C’est par le verbe que Schéhérazade a tenu la mort en échec. . . . La parole est magique, elle nous fait vivre. C’est l’arme des femmes par excellence” [It is through her use of language that Sheherazade held death in check. . . . Words are magic, they give us life. They are women’s arms par excellence] (Zinaï-Koudil, Sans Voix, 169). In this sense, today’s “femmes d’Alger” are “une Schéhérazade des jours d’encre” [Sheherazade from the age of the written word] (Djebar, Oran, 369), and by taking up the tale, they ensure that “Le récit continuera. . . . Le récit, non le silence” [The story will continue. . . . The story, not silence] (371). The power of their voice and the strength of their resolve is captured at the end of La Prière de la peur: Par le serment de nos femmes, se battant mieux que des hommes, Tu revivras, Algérie. Par le serment de nos femmes, C’est sur ta terre que grandiront nos enfants. . . . Par le serment des femmes, . . . De tes cendres, tu renaîtras, Algérie. (Ben Mansour, 380) [Our women, fighting better than men, solemnly pledge that You will live again, Algeria. Our women pledge that Our children will grow up on your land. . . . Our women pledge that, . . . You will rise from your ashes, Algeria.]

Here, Ben Mansour expresses the hope of all the women authors that the stories told by the contemporary Sheherazades will save lives and will contribute to the rebirth of the country. This is their aim and their challenge as they wield the pen against the sword. In this sense, too, Hayat’s appeal to the reader is echoed in the other texts: “A vous tous qui lirez ce livre, je lance cet appel en forme de prière: aidez l’Algérie à rester debout, les Algériens à rester vivants!” [To all of you who will read this book, I make this plea in the form of a prayer: help Algeria stay on its feet, help Al-

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gerians stay alive!] (8). The question remains, of course, who will listen to the women’s plea and how they will respond?

Notes 1. The expression “les nouvelles femmes d’Alger” underscores the notion of a new generation of women engaged in a different type of struggle, and the intertextual allusion recalls both the silent women in Eugène Delacroix’s painting and Djebar’s earlier collection of short stories on Algerian women, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980). 2. In L’Algérie en 1995, historian Benjamin Stora comments on the similarities between the forms of violence used in the first “guerre sans nom,” the war of liberation (1954–1962), and those seen in Algeria today: “Différentes formes de violence à l’oeuvre aujourd’hui peuvent se rapporter à la ‘première’ guerre d’Algérie: terrorisme urbain, ‘ratissage’ de l’armée, exécutions sommaires, pratiques de la torture, terreur aveugle” (57). 3. The Amnesty International report of 1996 puts the figure at 50,000 (Algérie, 3). This is probably a conservative estimate. The number currently cited in the media ranges between 60,000 and 100,000. 4. An article written by the journalist-narrator of Hayat’s La Nuit tombe sur Alger la Blanche powerfully formulates this rejection of both camps: “Vous qui avez fait main basse sur le pouvoir que le peuple algérien vous a offert d’exercer en sacrifiant des milliers de ses fils, et vous qui tournoyez dans un ciel assombri par la mort comme des vautours prêts à fondre sur leur proie; vous, les dirigeants de l’Algérie Démocratique et Populaire et vous, les intégristes de la parole divine détournée, assassinez-nous, assassinez-nous encore, assassinez-nous toujours! Jamais vous ne parviendrez à assassiner notre liberté la plus intime, la liberté de penser” [You who have usurped the power the Algerian people entrusted to you by sacrificing thousands of her sons, and you who circle in a sky darkened by death like vultures ready to swoop down on their prey; you, the leaders of the people’s democratic Algeria, and you, the fundamentalists who have distorted the divine word, kill us, kill us again, kill us forever! Never will you manage to kill our most precious liberty, freedom of thought.] (111). 5. The human rights abuses of both groups are documented in the Amnesty International report of 1996, Algérie. 6. In this sense, Algeria fits the model described by Chatterjee in which, during an anticolonial struggle against an external enemy, something within the new state—often women—is repressed: in the new state, modernization takes place only in certain areas, and women serve as a symbol of national identity, which must be protected during the formation of the nation. 7. See Monique Gadant: “En liant les droits des femmes au patriotisme, on les contraint à être les symboles de la nationalité, donc à représenter la permanence. . . . Renvoyer l’identité féminine au national, c’est l’opposer à l’Autre” (Le Nationalisme, 137). 8. Feminist Khalida Messaoudi emphasizes the fact that the Code was passed by the National Liberation Front (FLN) government, an act perceived as a betrayal of the women who had fought for independence: “le traître qui veut le Code, qui impose le Code, c’est bien l’Etat” [The traitor who wants the Code, who imposes the Code, is indeed the State] (Une Algerienne debout, 102). The Code reduces

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women to the status of minors: “Dans ce Code, les femmes algériennes n’existent désormais qu’en tant que ‘filles de,’ ‘mères de,’ ‘épouses de.’ Elles ne sont pas des individus à part entière. En cinq points—l’instruction, le travail, le mariage, le divorce, l’héritage—ce texte fait d’elles d’éternelles mineures” [With this Code, Algerian women henceforth exist only as ‘daughters of,’ ‘mothers of,’ ‘wives of.’ They are not full individuals. In five areas—education, work, marriage, divorce, inheritance—this text makes them eternal minors] (97). 9. In this regard, Stora describes fundamentalism as a kind of populist neonationalism based on a return to a “pure” version of pre-colonial Algeria, a return that equates Islam with traditional definitions of women’s roles: “la grande habilité de l’Islamisme a été de faire croire à l’identification de l’Islam et du statut de la femme la plus traditionnelle” (L’Algérie en 1995, 31). 10. The women’s rejection of both sides is forcefully presented in ZinaïKoudil’s Sans Voix: “Les dirigeants de l’Etat islamique cherchent à nous réduire à de simples ombres sous le voile, servant de fabriques d’enfants, de préférence mâles, à nous museler et nous soumettre à la volonté de l’homme. Quant à ceux qui se réclament de la modernité, ils ne soutiennent notre combat pour la liberté que dans un but électoral. . . . La lutte pour notre reconnaissance comme citoyennes à part entière affole les premiers qui nous assassinent sans autre forme de procès, et amuse les seconds qui rient sous cape tout en déclarant publiquement, sans en penser un mot, qu’ils sont profondément convaincus de la légitimité de nos revendications d’égalité” (79–80). [The leaders of the Islamic State are trying to reduce us to mere shadows under veils serving as baby factories, preferably producing males; they are trying to muzzle us and to subject us to men’s desires. As for those who claim to be on the side of modernity, they support our fight for freedom only in order to win elections. . . . Our struggle to be recognized as full citizens terrifies the former, who kill us without any other kind of trial, and amuses the latter, who laugh up their sleeves while publicly declaring—without believing a word of it— that they are deeply convinced of the legitimacy of our demands for equality.] 11. Hayat emphasizes the importance of such daily resistance to terrorism: “L’acte le plus banal pouvait devenir héroïque. Aller tous les matins à son travail, refuser de revêtir le hidjab, continuer à enseigner, à chanter, à donner les informations, à écrire, de tels actes tenaient de l’héroïsme, car ils étaient autant de défis lancés quotidiennement aux barbares qui nous voulaient la mort, autant d’affirmations de notre refus, par milliers, par dizaines de milliers, par centaines de milliers, à nous soumettre à leurs diktats” (La Nuit, 56–57). [The most banal act could become heroic. Going to work every morning, refusing to wear the hidjab, continuing to teach, to sing, to provide information or to write—such acts were heroic for they were daily ways of challenging the barbarians who wanted us dead, ways of asserting the refusal of thousands, of tens of thousands, of hundreds of thousands of us to submit to their commands.] 12. Born in 1850, Lalla Fadhma N’Soumer led a group of sixty rebels against the French troops of General Randon (Dakia, Dakia, 44). 13. Djamila Debèche founded the feminist journal Action and is the author of two novels, Leila, femme d’Algérie (1947) and Aziza (1955), and of books on education and women’s suffrage. As an activist, she fought for education and the vote for women, and her fictional work reflects her opposition to colonization and to traditions that restrict women’s freedom. 14. See, for example, Miriam Cooke: “War has persisted through its writing as much as through its weaponry, and its fervent chroniclers have usually been men. It is men who have traditionally created the war myth” (War’s Other Voices, 2).

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15. The same comparison between the women of the two periods is made by Danièle Djamila Amrane-Minne in the introduction to Des Femmes dans la Guerre d’Algérie, a book in which she gives voice to women who fought for independence: “En fait, la continuité est manifeste entre les combattantes de la lutte armée pour l’indépendance et les femmes qui, aujourd’hui, dans une société anesthésiée par l’ampleur et l’apparente irrationalité d’une violence odieuse, manifestent dans la rue, voilées ou dévoilées, mais à visage découvert, leur refus du terrorisme et leur désir de vivre en paix dans la diversité des modes de vie qui est la marque d’une Algérie en pleine évolution” (12). [In fact, continuity can be seen between the women fighters in the armed struggle for independence and those who today, in a society anaesthetized by the extent and apparent irrationality of hateful violence, openly show in the street—whether they are veiled or unveiled—their refusal of terrorism and their desire to live in peace among the diverse ways of life that characterize a changing Algeria.] 16. Imaksen summarizes women’s contributions to the war of liberation and echoes Fatiah’s condemnation of their treatment after independence: “Mes soeurs donnaient à voir et à écouter d’anciennes combattantes de la guerre de libération nationale; celles dont on a banalisé, uniformisé, dédramatisé la lutte à travers des discours officiels qui ne disaient rien, n’apprenaient rien; lutte amoindrie, dévalorisée par la langue de bois, la langue du pouvoir: ‘les Algériennes ont participé à la guerre . . . etc.’ Non, elles n’ont pas participé à la guerre, elles l’ont faite, si vous permettez! Longues marches, maquis, tortures, massacres, procès, emprisonnement, perte irrémédiable d’époux, de fils, de filles, de maison” (La Troisième Fête d’Ismaël, 96–97). [My sisters enabled us to see and to hear women veterans of the war of national liberation, women whose struggle has been made to seem banal, unvaried, and undramatic in official speeches which said nothing, taught nothing; their combat belittled, devalued by wooden language, the language of power: ‘Algerian women participated in the war . . . etc.’ No, they did not participate in the war, they waged it, if you please! Long marches, resistance, torture, massacres, trials, imprisonment, the irreparable loss of their husbands, sons, daughters, and homes.] 17. Boussouf was condemned to death by the Movement for the Islamic State (MEI). 18. For a discussion of the difficulty of expressing physical pain, see Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, in particular her contention that “Physical pain . . . is language-destroying” (19). 19. Harlow sees such historical referencing as a fundamental characteristic of resistance literature (Resistance Literature, 80). 20. Bey makes a similar comment about her novel Au Commencement était la mer: “Je n’ai rien inventé. Toutes ces scènes vécues ou rapportées sont les fils avec lesquels j’ai tissé la trame de cette histoire qui pourrait être, intégralement, celle de milliers d’Algériennes” (“Interview,” 76). 21. Since this chapter was completed, it has been revealed that Yasmine Khadra is in fact the pen name for a male author. 22. “Gardienne de la mémoire, oui. Mais je refuse le rôle de gardienne des traditions où l’on a voulu m’enfermer depuis la nuit des temps. Responsabilité aliénante pour m’amener à être la première à rejeter tous les progrès dont je pourrais bénéficier!” (Zinaï-Koudil, Sans Voix, 78–79). [The guardian of memory, yes. But I refuse the role of guardian of tradition in which people have wanted to imprison me since time immemorial. An alienating responsibility designed to make me the first to reject all the progress I could benefit from.] 23. Her more detailed description of her project reads as follows: “Écrire,

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écrire comme pour dresser un mémorial. Noter des noms, des dates, témoigner, laisser des traces, barrer la route à l’oubli” (Imaksen, La Troisième Fête d’Ismaël, 124). 24. Of all the texts, Imaksen’s is punctuated the most frequently with litanies of this type, some of which are devoted entirely to women. See, for example, page 115, which presents “Des noms glanés de la trop longue liste des femmes martyrisées dans leurs corps et leurs vies depuis la pratique du terrorisme.” 25. Mokeddem makes the same generalization in L’Interdite: “Nous endossions le burnous de la tradition pour goûter aux pucelles incultes que nous choisissaient nos familles” (72). 26. In her article entitled “Castration or Decapitation,” Hélène Cixous uses a traditional Chinese tale similar to the story of Sheherazade to develop the notion of decapitation as a metaphor for the silencing of women: “Women have no choice other than to be decapitated . . . if they don’t actually lose their heads by the sword, they keep them only on condition that they lose them—lose them, that is, to complete silence” (346). Atyka literally loses her head for refusing to be decapitated in the figurative sense.

Works Cited Amnesty International. Algérie. Paris: Amnesty International, 1996. Amrane-Minne, Danièle Djamila. Des Femmes dans la Guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Karthala, 1994. Assima, Fériel. Une Femme à Alger: Chronique du désastre. Paris: Arléa, 1995. Ben Mansour, Latifa. La Prière de la peur. Paris: La Différence, 1997. Bey, Maïssa. Au Commencement était la mer . . . . Algérie Littérature Action 5 (November 1996): 5–73. ———. “Interview de l’auteur.” Algérie Littérature Action 5 (November 1996): 75–78. ———. Nouvelles d’Alger. Paris: Grasset, 1998. Boussouf, Malika. Vivre traquée. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1995. Camus, Albert. La Peste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Chatterjee, Partha. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989, 233–253. Cixous, Hélène. “Castration or Decapitation.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minhha, and Cornel West. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990, 345–356. Cooke, Miriam. War’s Other Voices. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Dakia. Dakia, fille d’Alger. Paris: Flammarion, 1996. Djebar, Assia. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Paris: Des Femmes, 1980. ———. Le Blanc de l’Algérie. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. ———. Oran, langue morte. Arles: Actes Sud, 1997. Fatiah. Algérie, chronique d’une femme dans la tourmente. La Tour d’Aigues: L’Aube, 1996. Gadant, Monique. Le Nationalisme algérien et les femmes. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995. Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. New York: Methuen, 1987. Hayat, Nina. La Nuit tombe sur Alger la Blanche. Paris: Tirésias, 1995.

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Imaksen, Naïla. La Troisième fête d’Ismaël: Chronique algérienne. Casablanca: Le Fennec, 1994. Khadra, Yasmina. Double blanc. Paris: Baleine, 1997. ———. Morituri. Paris: Baleine, 1997. ———. L’Automne des chimères. Paris: Baleine, 1998. Marouane, Leïla. La Fille de la Casbah. Paris: Julliard, 1996. Mechakra, Yamina. La Grotte éclatée. Alger: SNED, 1979. Messaoudi, Khalida. Une Algérienne debout. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. Mokeddem, Malika. L’Interdite. Paris: Grasset, 1993. ———. Des Rêves et des assassins. Paris: Grasset, 1995. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Stora, Benjamin. L’Algérie en 1995. Paris: Michalon, 1995. Titah, Rachida. Un Ciel trop bleu. Paris: L’Aube, 1997. Yacine, Kateb. Nedjma. Paris: Seuil, 1956. Zinaï-Koudil, Hafsa. Sans Voix. Paris: Plon, 1997.

10

: Malika Mokeddem: A New and Resonant Voice in Francophone Algerian Literature Yolande Helm

In an interview Malika Mokeddem granted me in June 1998, she said with a resolute tone in her voice: “Je suis une femme sans frontière et sans interdit [I am a woman with no borders and no taboos].”1 Her assertion undeniably reflects the guiding forces behind her life and writings. She has transcended spaces, cultures, and interdictions; from South to North, desert to sea, poverty to affluence, anonymity to recognition, and oppression to freedom.2 Her hybrid writing lies at the junction of creativity and urgency, aesthetics and politics, and pain and happiness. Mokeddem occupies a unique position in francophone Algerian literature; her nomad ethnicity and underprivileged background set her apart from the majority of other francophone Algerian writers, who mostly originate from middle- and upper-class families of northern and urban regions. Her work, infused with marginal traits, is thus important to examine in relation to conceptualizations of class, gender, ethnicity, and politics in the postcolonial debate. In this chapter, I also examine what Mokeddem shares with many other francophone Algerian writers: a bold denunciation of the Islamic fundamentalists’ “ideology,” which is anchored in dogmatism, violence, and an obsessive hatred of women. In this chapter, I examine first the concepts of nomadism and the desert, which confer a unique dimension upon Mokeddem’s texts. Her first novel in particular, Les Hommes qui marchent (1990), is a moving hymn of love to all nomads, especially to women of the desert.3 Malika Mokeddem’s grandmother, who was constrained to become sedentary after a life of nomadism, alleviated her own sense of loss and nurtured her granddaughter’s childhood with the enchanting oral tradition of storytelling. Mokeddem’s first two novels, Les Hommes qui marchent and Le Siècle des sauterelles (1992), are ingrained with that Arab oral heritage. 4 The relationship between orality and writing is part of the postcolonial dialogue: 195

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“These central questions of orality and literacy, speech and writing, truth and hyperbole, transparency and obscurity have become the cornerstone of the cultural aesthetics of many post-colonial writers” (Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices, 4). Having inherited the “verbe flamboyant” of her nomad storyteller grandmother, Mokeddem has transcended the traditional dichotomies between the oral logos and the written sign by transposing her grandmother’s “parole archaïque” into her own writing (Les Hommes qui marchent). I explore her combination of the two methods of storytelling by focusing on her two most recent novels, L’Interdite (1993) and Des Rêves et des assassins (1995).5 L’Interdite, written in ten months in a state of urgency, takes on the characteristics of a pamphlet; it is a plea against the violence of the Muslim fundamentalists who are persecuting people, women in particular, in the name of Allah. Other francophone Algerian women writers have expressed their pain in the face of such devastating persecution; however, Mokeddem writes with an unmatched rage, anger, and passion. She exorcises the demons of violence through writing whose tone is often harsh and provocative. Moreover, her texts, written in exile, underline the notions of mixed identity (métissage) and syncretism, as Christiane Chaulet-Achour has pointed out: Cette méditation sur la mixité identitaire renouvelle l’idée de métissage et de syncrétisme et désigne plus clairement encore que chez Fatima Gallaire et Leïla Rezzoug et à l’inverse d’Assia Djebar, le double public que l’on veut toucher: celui du pays d’origine et celui du pays de résidence. . . . (Noûn, 115) [This meditation on mixed identity reviews the notion of hybridity and syncretism. It also designates, more clearly yet than in Fatima Gallaire and Leïla Rezzoug’s works, and contrary to Assia Djebar’s, the dual public one attempts to reach: that of the country of origin and of residence.]

Mokeddem’s protagonists live in a no-man’s-land of exile and alienation. I examine how, in the end, their identities will be enriched and diversified by their exodus.6 In Les Hommes qui marchent, the narrative thread winds around three intertwined and intrinsic notions: nomadism, the desert, and the traditional Arab heritage of orality. Les Hommes qui marchent retraces a significant period in Algerian history, from the beginning of the century to the 1970s. The narrator takes us through major social convulsions during the colonial period, the war of independence, and the postcolonial era, marked by the “rebirth” of Islam. Amid the turmoil, the silhouettes of the nomads stand out in the background as a recurrent leitmotif of peace and freedom. Three

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generations of women engage in various forms of struggles, some quite visible and even ostentatious, others more concealed. The women’s utterances, multiple echoes resounding in the desert, merge in a magisterial concert in order to constitute a feminine collective voice. Profiles of Bedouin women are cut out in the fabric of the text; the nomad storyteller Zohra, with her dark green tattoos and metaphorical language; her daughter-in-law Yamina, true virtuoso of procreation; Saâdia, whose name signifies “the happy one” and who is paradoxically struck with malediction; “La Bernard,” a French midwife; Leïla, the seditious granddaughter of Zohra; Madame Bensoussan, the roumia, teacher of Leïla and her source of emancipation; and finally all the others, stricken in their souls and bodies but emerging nevertheless, empowered in grief and proud in “defeat.” Zohra, from the Ajalli nomad tribe, enjoys movement, the freedom of the open spaces of the desert. She was compelled by social and economic circumstances to interrupt her nomadic march, which she had hoped would be eternal. In order to fill the void and assuage the pain caused by sedentary life, Zohra, nostalgic for her past, has recourse to the “nomadism of words.” To perpetuate her memories, she narrates the stories of the men and women of the desert. In nomadism as in speech, she recognizes the same component of motion and continuity. Zohra, the taleteller, draws in the thread of words and, in the fluidity of her reinvented nomadic march, the fortitude to struggle with solitude and alienation. She explores her past and nourishes her imagination at the source of collective and individual memory. As a nomad, she lived in the immensity and immateriality of space and time. When asked when she was born, she would reply that time is only a sedentary people’s preoccupation (11). Indeed, time is hardly measurable in the desert, space of vastness and incommensurable moments. Zohra seduces her audience by the virtuosity of her narratives. Her stories, told innumerable times, nevertheless continue to exude the same enchantment. Insofar as the act of reading and writing have been theorized in terms of pleasure and perversion by Roland Barthes in Le Plaisir du texte, one can claim that the act of storytelling can be equally winding and devious. Zohra’s discourse is revealing in that regard: . . . sachez qu’un conteur est un être fantasque. Il se joue de tout. Même de sa propre histoire. Il la trafique, la refaçonne entre ses rêves et les perditions de la réalité. Il n’existe que dans cet entre-deux. Un “entre” sans cesse déplacé. Toujours réinventé. (12, my emphasis) [know that a storyteller is a strange being. She or he makes a game of everything. Even her or his own story. She or he traffics it, reshapes it between her or his dreams and the perditions of reality. She or he only exists in this interspace. A space incessantly displaced. Always reinvented.] (my translations throughout)

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The words I have highlighted carry strong connotations accentuated by the ambivalence of the signifier entre-deux. The French preposition entre (between) recalls its homonym antre (the den, cavern), a matriarchal space of refuge and paradoxically a place of mystery, haunted and dangerous. Zohra, the enchantress, possesses the power to transform her narrative space, her antre, into a zone both reassuring and disconcerting of pleasures and “perditions.” The desert where Zohra once lived can also be considered an area of entre-deux: “entre deux régions non-désertiques, et comme expérience des limites, de la menace de mort, de la ligne du Dehors…” [between two nondesert spaces, and as an experience of limits, of the threat of death, of the outer line] (Colombat, “Le Concept,” 270). Zohra, woman of the desert, positions herself between sedentariness and nomadism, between autobiographical and fictional narratives, and between dream and reality, in other words, “à la jonction des complémentarités, au point de rupture des contraires” [at the junction of complementarities, at the point of rupture of oppositions] (59). Her ideal collective listener is one who is willing to take risks and to engage—consciously or not—in the ambiguous sector of a “forger” without any resistance.7 Zohra’s favorite tale concerns Uncle Djelloul, nicknamed “Bouhaloufa” [man with the pig]. She confers upon this character a mythical dimension and in so doing challenges the rigid structure of her Muslim society. Djelloul, a dreamer and a loner, is different from the other young men in his nomad tribe. In a social environment where imagination is repressed and only the welfare of the community matters, Djelloul’s behavior disturbs the equilibrium of the clan. Moreover, he wants to learn how to read and write, but the era of Bouhaloufa is situated in 1840 at the onset of colonization, when “Lire et écrire [au] sein du monde de l’oralité [sont] pure extravagance . . . ” [reading and writing in the world of orality are pure extravagance] (16). In spite of their reticence, the clan members allow Djelloul to attend school in Tlemcen in western Algeria. However, Djelloul violates social taboos; he leads a libertine life and conceives a passion for the poetry of the “Jahïli,” the pre-Islamic era, which the Muslims regard as a time of perversion, violence, and ignorance (19). Outraged by Djelloul’s lifestyle, the men of the clan decide to reintegrate him into the tribe, hoping he will become “sobre, versé dans le Coran et féru de hadith islamique” [moderate, faithful to the Quran and fervent of Islamic hadith] (19). During the journey back to their camp, however, they catch sight of a young wild hog in distress. Since Islam views pigs as impure animals, the men prepare to destroy it. Djelloul, however, saves the vulnerable animal from its ill fate: “Ignorant la grogne des hommes, il regagna ainsi sa famille avec ses livres et son cochon. Et dans la tête les brasillements de l’interdite poésie” [Ignoring the men’s grumbling, he returned home with his books and his pig. And, in his head, the shimmering of the

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forbidden poetry] (20). Bouhaloufa is glorified and praised by Zohra for his individualism, love of poetry, and thirst for freedom. Following his banishment from the tribe, he is known to have wandered for many years in Morocco with his pig as a companion—the epitome of subversion in the context of Muslim society. He even made people believe that the animal was the reincarnation of a noble nomadic shaikh of the Ajalli tribe. A skilled storyteller, Zohra subtly induces her audience to approve of the hero’s behavior (Cauvin, Comprehendre, 38). Because Bouhaloufa has fascinated her for his marginality, his humor, his transgressions, and his challenge to the rigidity of religion, Zohra communicates her own positive feelings for Bouhaloufa to her audience. Leïla, the great-granddaughter of Bouhaloufa, has inherited his spirit of subversion and dissidence, a thirst for stories and books, a fascination for the magic of the written word, and “un grain de folie”—a touch of madness—as well. Leïla will wittingly cultivate that “madness” since, as her aunt so wisely remarks: “Chez nous, seul ce qu’ils qualifient de folie peut délivrer une femme. Garde ta folie, elle te sauvera des autres” [Here, only what they perceive as madness can free a woman. Keep your madness; it will save you from others] (254). Leïla transgresses against the prohibitions of her Muslim culture; her indignation is total and her hostility for archaic traditions profound. She represents a new generation of rebellious Muslim women who refuse the status of “object” and claim their right to be a “subject-agent” in the tribal structure; this initiation is strongly discouraged by the patriarchal Islamic code. Although as a young girl Leïla was encouraged by her grandmother to go to school, education represented the first symbolic exile, since it resulted in alienation from her family.8 Yet it allowed her to break free from the prison of traditions and obscurantism: L’école, le savoir lui ouvraient une échappée, jusqu’alors insoupçonnée dans l’impasse des fatalités féminines. Ils l’avaient arrachée à un destin moyenâgeux pour la précipiter, seule, en plein milieu du XXème siècle. (267) [School and knowledge allowed her to escape, an escape unsuspected until then in the dilemma of female fate. They had saved her from an archaic destiny to precipitate her, alone, into the midst of the twentieth century.]

Even her free-spirited grandmother finally reproaches Leïla for seeming to reject the family and immuring herself in the silence of reading and writing, activities that Zohra considers to be seeds of corruption sowed by colonization. In the text, the dichotomy between orality and writing is established in analogy to the antithetical notions of tradition and colonialism. As Christopher Miller explains: “If to write in Africa is usually to

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write a European language in a European alphabet and to show the signs, to recreate the traces of colonial domination, to speak is far more frequently to speak an African language. . . . Orality in its broadest sense thus has a clear political connotation in Africa, representing the authenticity of the precolonial world: ‘tradition‘ and orality are synonymous” (70–71). Zohra warns Leïla: “C’est cela la suprématie de l’écriture sur la parole. L’une a la voix et la force éphémère de la vie. L’autre la pérennité et l’indifférence de l’éternité” [That is the supremacy of writing over orality. One carries the voice and the ephemeral strength of life. The other the perpetuity and the indifference of eternity] (278). Zohra’s discourse conceptualizes the problematic of reading/writing as a violation and danger occurring in the exterior sphere, whereas orality, the spoken word (in Arabic, kalaam), symbolizes the refuge and quietude of the interior space (Mortimer, Journeys, 133–164).9 Leïla answers her grandmother in these words: tu n’as plus que tes mots et tes contes pour continuer à respirer, à faire revivre ton univers nomade et ne pas te laisser mourir. Pour moi, la mort est dans l’immobilité des esprits. Et pour que mes pensées puissent continuer à avancer, j’ai besoin des mots des autres, de leurs livres. (276–277) [you only have words and tales left in order to breathe, in order to resurrect your nomadic world and to resist death. As for me, death is in the immobility of the spirit. In order for my thoughts to continue to go forward, I need the words of others, I need their books.]

Zohra relives her nomadism through the flowing of words and stories; for Leïla, later in life, the act of writing will become a form of nomadism, “une errance.” When Zohra passes away, Leïla mourns for her grandmother as a mother and friend: the one who taught her the spoken Arab words, their sonority and ambiguity; the one who enchanted her childhood with fascinating stories; the one who consoled her (301). The absence of her grandmother tortures Leïla even more with the arrival of “Les hommes bleus,” a tribe of nomads who regularly made a detour during their peregrinations in order to visit with Zohra. 10 They all sit silently praying around her grave. Leïla senses they will never come back: “Si jusqu’alors ils avaient fait ce grand détour, c’était pour offrir leur marche à Zohra. Maintenant, elle voyageait avec eux” [Until now, they had made this long detour in order to offer their march to Zohra. Now, she was traveling with them] (309). Leïla is overwhelmed by sadness when the nomads depart: “[elle] devrait trouver son chemin. Il serait solitaire. Elle le savait” [She would have to find her way. It would be solitary. She knew it] (310). Alone, Leïla has to face the turmoil intensifying in Algeria at the end of the 1960s as Islamic fundamentalism grows in intensity. The Algerian

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government accelerates the process of arabization, indirectly facilitating Islamization by making the Arabic language mandatory in elementary school.11 Thousands of children are entrusted to fundamentalist teachers who use the sacred book in order to reject the vernacular Arabic “car si les écoliers ânonnaient par coeur les versets du Coran, ils méconnaissaient cette langue et bien d’autres choses, car les dogmatiques veillaient à étouffer en eux le moindre esprit critique” [because even though the pupils mumbled the quranic verses by heart, they misunderstood that language and many other things, since the fundamentalists made sure to suppress in them any critical thinking] (302). Leïla feels powerless in the face of militant Islam; exile becomes her only means of escaping the madness and finding freedom, peace, and security. The last pages of Les Hommes qui marchent suggest a ritual incantation and take on the tone of a plaintive ballad. The extradiegetic narrator now addresses the phantom of the deceased matriarch, whom she calls “hanna”; the narrator and Leïla thus become one person.12 Through the narrator’s voice, Mokeddem tells her own story by posing as Leïla’s double. In an emotional passage, Leïla retraces the events impelling her to exile: the triumphant rise of religious dogmatism; the brigades of Islamic fundamentalists patrolling the streets to apprehend Leïla and women like her whom they intend to catch “en délit de mixité illégitime” [guilty of illegitimate mixing] (314). Even the last sanctuaries, the universities, have been insidiously penetrated by this abstruse ideology; hence a glimpse of the freedom one could experience there earlier is no longer possible. Like her ancestor Bouhaloufa, Leïla must leave; she yearns to find an oasis of normal existence, a sanctuary of hope (315). Years later, the archaic logos of her grandmother hammers her memory and invites her to write. Zohra lives in Leïla and accompanies her faithfully on the path that takes both of them back to the original “sources.” For Leïla, writing in exile is to continue to utter the “flamboyant verb” of the female storyteller; the voice of Zohra abundantly nourishes the written words of her granddaughter. The only true liberation for Leïla lies in the solitude of writing, a writing that diffuses suffering; it hinders the immobility and even the paralysis of the spirit; it murmurs words of fear and hope. Writing is her antidote to all disillusions and bruises. To distill the orality of Zohra in the written text can be regarded as a way of transcending the antinomy between the living logos and the written sign. For Leïla, the ultimate goal is cultural métissage, which reconciles the Arab oral tradition and the French written words, métissage resulting from her own Arab-nomad-French acculturation. Leïla practices what Françoise Lionnet theorizes in these words: “We have . . . to bypass the ancient symmetries and dichotomies that have governed the ground and the very con-

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dition of possibility of thought, of “clarity,” in all of Western philosophy. Métissage is such a concept and a practice: it is the site of undecidability and indeterminacy, where solidarity becomes the fundamental principle of political action against hegemonic languages” (Autobiographical Voices, 6). From her Bedouin grandmother Leïla inherits the archaic logos, the love of the nomads and the desert with its waving sands, its reversal of equilibrium, its enchanting rays of light and darkness, and its implacable laws. Site of her nomad heritage, Leïla transcribes it in a writing catalyzed by the parole vive, the resplendent verb (verbe flamboyant) of her storyteller grandmother. The phantom of “hanna” invites her to weave indelible bonds between all women of the desert and to restitute to them the language occulted by the masculine Muslim world: Qu’une femme s’exprime ouvertement est regardé non seulement comme une transgression, mais comme une fitna, une menace à l’édifice des valeurs morales et des croyances religieuses qui sous-tendent la société traditionnelle. C’est pourquoi le langage de la femme a été voilé comme son corps. . . . (Segarra, Leur pesant de poudre, 18) [If a woman expresses herself openly, it is regarded not only as a transgression but as a fitna, a threat to the monument of moral values and religious beliefs that underlie the traditional society. This is why the woman’s language has been veiled as her body.]

For Leïla—and for Malika Mokeddem—the French language is an instrument that gives access to the unknown and the forbidden; it does not, however, destroy her Arab oral heritage. To the contrary, Mokeddem merges the Arab oral logos and the French written sign so that they complement one another; she successfully transposes the feminine voices of her past, allowing them to penetrate and enrich the French written text.13 In 1962, when Leïla was still a young adolescent, Algeria celebrated independence and experienced great times of joy. Women in particular, having fought alongside men during the war, had high expectations for their future. A symbolic event in Leïla’s life illustrates how these hopes are forever destroyed. For having refused to wear a veil at a public celebration for Algerian independence, Leïla and her sister fall victim to a massive male attack. The police barely save the two young women from lynching. Regarding the symbolic importance of the veil, Yolande Geadah says: au coeur de l’idéologie intégriste se trouvent le voile et la charia (ensemble des prescriptions de la loi islamique). . . . Le voile joue donc un rôle crucial et il est loin d’être un accessoire anodin, comme plusieurs l’imaginent. (Femmes violées, 22) [the issues of the veil and the chari’a (Islamic law) are grounded in the heart of fundamentalists’ ideology. . . . Thus, the veil plays a crucial role and is far from being, as many might think, an insignificant accessory.]

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That incident in Leïla’s life is highly significant in light of the future of Algerian women: “Leïla [sent] que ses dernières espérances en ce pays [viennent] de se disloquer. Ce qu’elle avait enduré cette nuit, supposée fêter le symbole de la libération, lui parut soudain symptomatique des menaces à venir” [Leïla feels that her last hopes in her country have just come apart. What she endured that night, when one was supposed to celebrate the symbol of freedom, suddenly struck her as symptomatic of worse things to come] (293). The liberation of Algeria from France was followed by a reaffirmation of rigid traditional values. The female heroines and victims of war, all those who had actively and enthusiastically participated in the liberation of their country, were soon to be “officially” forgotten, ignored, muzzled, or immured in anonymity and silence.14 Of all the sociopolitical and cultural changes that befell Algeria, the rising of fundamentalist Islam constitutes the most tragic one. Obscure dogmatism engendered a profound rebellion among intellectuals, journalists, and writers. As I mentioned, Malika Mokeddem is one of the most resonant female voices countering this ideology, who courageously expresses her outrage at the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) fanatics who engage in violence against the innocent population15 and particularly against women.16 It is clear that the philosophy of the FIS is deeply grounded in the hatred of women. In a documentary film by Louise Carré, Mon Coeur est témoin, Mokeddem declares: “Si la femme est l’avenir de l’homme en Occident, elle est son automutilation en Algérie” [If women are the future of men in the West, they are their self-mutilation in Algeria] (Script 6). The Islamic fundamentalists’ discourse is fueled by one obsession: the demonization of women. As Khalida Messaoudi states: au coeur de leur vie, de leur pensée, de leurs imprécations et de leur sauvagerie, je vois une obsession de chaque instant, une de ces obsessions qui traduisent la folie: les femmes. Il faut le savoir, aucun autre thème n’occupe dans l’idéologie du F.I.S. la place que les femmes y ont. . . . A entendre les intégristes, les femmes sont la cause de tous les maux. (Une Algérienne debout, 187) [at the heart of their life, their thoughts, their cursing, and their savagery, I see an obsession of every moment, one of those obsessions that translates as madness: women. One must be aware of it: no other theme in their ideology has such importance. The fundamentalists would have us believe that women are the source of all evil.]

In her novels, Mokeddem presents female characters such as Leïla, Sultana (L’Interdite), and Kenza (Des Rêves et des assassins), who embody a new, progressive vision of life and struggle to take charge of their destiny; these women cry out their anger. Although trapped and fettered,

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they are determined to break their heavy chains. Mokeddem thus descends from the same lineage as Assia Djebar and Djamila Debèche who, according to Jean Déjeux, have created a new woman in a movement (mouvance) of emancipation, a woman-subject whose subversive behavior disrupts the immobilization of archaic traditions (Littérature algérienne, 254–265). Malika Mokeddem dedicated L’Interdite to “Tahar Djaout, forbidden to live because of his writings” and to “the group Aïcha, my Algerian women friends who refuse to be forbidden” (Forbidden Woman). In the same vein, her novel Des Rêves et des assassins is dedicated to Abdelkader Alloula, another Algerian intellectual assassinated by Islamic extremists. Thus, pain and writing are intertwined. In her exile, Mokeddem exorcises the demons of violence and death by giving birth to the text. Her words and their “nomadism” portray the vision of a sick Algeria, victim of a deadly virus called religious extremism. In Les Hommes qui marchent, Leïla “buries” an infected Algeria suffering from the disease of intégrisme in order to find her freedom in France, and in L’Interdite, Sultana also “abandons” her country: L’Algérie archaïque avec son mensonge de modernité éventé; l’Algérie hypocrite qui ne dupe plus personne . . . l’Algérie de l’absurde, ses automutilations et sa schizophrénie; l’Algérie qui chaque jour se suicide, qu’importe. (L’Interdite, 115–116) Archaic Algeria, with its stale lie of modernity; hypocritical Algeria, who no longer fools anyone . . . absurd Algeria, with its self-mutilation and its schizophrenia; the Algeria who commits suicide each day, no matter what. (Forbidden Woman, 66)17

Sickened by the torments and insults of her Islamist father and brothers (fissistes), Kenza leaves for France in Des Rêves et des assassins, where she will attempt to heal her wounds.18 For her, exile is the only possible response; it is, however, an insidious, emotional mutilation, and paradoxically, it can lead to madness. To “desert” a country, the prey of a rare and deadly violence, is the ultimate price these Algerian women have to pay. As Marta Segarra points out, the theme of exile recurs frequently in much North African literature by women (Leur pesant de poudre, 156). L’Interdite and Des Rêves et des assassins go far beyond mere criticism of an oppressive culture to turn into a diatribe against the infamous Fous de Dieu [religious fanatics] and the consequences of their violent and atrocious acts. In L’Interdite, Sultana, a physician in Montpellier, returns to Algeria, to the Saharan ksar where she grew up.19 Upon her arrival at the airport, the cab driver reminds her of “une des grimaces anonymes de la horde qui me persécutait” (16) [one of the anonymous grimacing faces from the

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horde that used to persecute (her)] (Forbidden Woman 6). Instantly, she is reminded of male hostility toward women. Sultana’s refusal to answer the cab driver’s prying questions prompts him to harass her: “Tu es la fille de qui?” (21) “Alors tu viens d’où, toi?” (20) “La fille de personne, qui ne va chez personne! Tu me la joues ou quoi? Puisque tu refuses de parler, tu n’as qu’à porter le voile” (21) [Whose daughter are you? . . . So, you, where do you come from? . . . Nobody’s daughter, who’s going to nobody’s house! Are you trying to fool me or what? Since you refuse to speak, you might as well wear a veil!] (5, 9). The entire village, with the exception of a few brave women, suffers from a collective hysteria, “endémie surgie des confins de la misère et du désarroi et qui s’enkyste dans les fatalités et les ignorances du pays” (187) [an endemic disease that has burst from the confines of misery and confusion, and that encysts in the fatality and ignorance of the country] (109). During her stay, Sultana is unceasingly confronted with the anger of males who profess to be the bearers of divine wrath. Sultana’s identity is shattered: Moi, je suis multiple et écartelée, depuis l’enfance. Avec l’âge et l’exil, cela n’a fait que s’aggraver. Maintenant, en France, je ne suis ni algérienne, ni même maghrébine. Je suis une Arabe. Autant dire, rien. (191) [I’ve been multifaceted and torn apart since childhood. That’s only been aggravated with age and exile. In France now, I am neither Algerian nor even North African. I’m an Arab. That’s as much as to say nothing.] (112)

However, Sultana also claims that she would never exchange her foreign skin, since “elle n’en est pas moins une inestimable liberté” (191) [it’s nonetheless an invaluable source of freedom] (112). Marta Segarra makes an important point regarding such cultural crossings, explaining that they constitute a fundamental basis for an identity that does not aim at defining itself but rather seeks its affirmation in uncertainty (Leur pesant de poudre, 160). The torments Sultana has endured in the past are revived by the grievous sight of a sclerotic Algeria that imprisons its women. She comes to the conclusion that “ma survivance n’est que dans le déplacement, dans la migration” (234) [my survival is only in migrating] (136) and that she has lost all hopes “d’ancrage” (235) [of (ever) being anchored] (137). Powerless, Sultana polarizes her rebellion in a cynical discourse revealing the addressees’ pathological obsession: Vous n’êtes que des frustrés, dans vos têtes et dans vos slips! Vous n’avez jamais eu de cerveaux. Vous n’êtes que des sexes en érection! Une érection insatisfaite. Vos yeux ne sont que vermines. Une vermine constamment à souiller, à ronger, à dévorer les femmes! (237) [You’re just a bunch of frustrated people, in your head and your

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underpants! You’ve never had any brains. You’re just erect penises! An unsatisfied erection. Your eyes are nothing but vermin. Vermin that constantly dirty, gnaw at, and devour women!] (138)

In L’Interdite, a young girl, Dalila, is also persecuted by her Islamist father and brothers. Dalila’s sister, Samia, escaped male tyranny but found alienation and solitude in her exile. Dalila, too young to break away from home, escapes in dreams, “le plus grand des espaces” (57) [the biggest of spaces] (30). School, which ought to be a source of liberation and learning for Dalila, has become “une fabrique d’abrutis et de petits islamistes” (130) [a factory of morons and little Islamists] (73), where the schoolmasters promise children “tous les enfers” (131) [every kind of hell] if they refuse to conform to their religious precepts (74).20 Dalila deplores the teachers’ lectures, which all aim at reinstating “order” by maintaining women in their inferior status. Speaking with Sultana, Dalila expresses her “candid rage,” her “stubborn vehemence” at the injustices perpetrated in her world. Nurtured by the desert, Dalila draws a moving analogy between the women of Algeria and the nomads who have both “lost their space” (81) [ils ont perdu leurs espaces] (141). At the end of L’Interdite, the courageous and admirable village women ask Sultana to stay in order to help them fight their ruthless male oppressors: “Elles brocardent la langue de bois et les rodomontades officielles. . . . Elles vilipendent la veulerie et le simiesque des converties au hijab . . . ” (247) [They deride stereotyped formal language and the official saber rattling. . . . (They) denounce the venomous zeal of the Islamists . . . and inveigh against the spinelessness and the simian behavior of women who’ve converted to using the hidjab] (144). Yet, despite the ethnic and emotional ties that bind her to these women, Sultana decides to leave. Discouraged and emotionally weakened, she confesses to her friend Khaled: “je repars demain. Dis aux femmes que même loin, je suis avec elles” (264) [I’m leaving tomorrow. Tell the women that even from afar, I am with them] (154). Mokeddem’s third novel, Des Rêves et des assassins, whose title is quite provocative, is articulated through a dialectic between peace and violence, dream and nightmare, lack and excess, and nomadism and sedentariness. The protagonist’s childhood is aborted by the absence of a mother who died and by the presence of a fissiste father who is abusive and odious. His occupation as a butcher allows his sexual voracity and predatory temperament to explode within a setting of mutilated carcasses of dead animals. An avid consumer of “flesh,” he preys upon his female clients among the suspended cadavers. Kenza’s father manipulates meat with a machiavellian and insane pleasure; his knife becomes a penis that rapes, digs into, and parts the tender and wounded flesh. One could accuse Ma-

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lika Mokeddem of reinforcing the negative, stereotypical view of the Muslim male by presenting this vile and primal character. I believe, however, that a careful reader will not relegate him to a culturally authentic type. Kenza’s father is first and foremost the incarnation of an archetype of abjection that exalts male supremacy and divine faith through violence.21 Malika Mokeddem does not give this character a name, most likely a conscious decision on her part that reinforces the hypothesis established above. The man—without a name/without an identity—has an atavistic need to “eat” the female, to swallow her, and to consume her. To his daughter who resists his authority, he yells: “Tu es ma fille, toi. Il va falloir que je te trouve un mari qui te brise. Et si tu te rebelles, je boirai ton sang! ” [You are my daughter. I will have to find you a husband who breaks you. And if you rebel, I will drink your blood] (57, my emphasis). If he could, Kenza’s father would bury females at birth, since they incarnate evil and “leur entrecuisse est un enfer qui menace d’engloutir l’univers” [their sex is a hell that threatens to swallow the universe] (78). The sadistic site of butchery is identified with the metaphor of rape and death.22 Kenza will never recover from the trauma caused by her father and brothers’ threats and harassment. Her exile to France, where she feels neither Arab nor North African nor French, alienates her even more from everything and everyone. In Montpellier, where a conference of scholars, journalists, legal experts, and immigrants is held on the question of Algeria, Kenza discovers that an Algerian woman lawyer has received death threats. The message read: “Tu vas crever sale chienne! Tu vas crever sale chienne!” [You will die, bitch! You will die, bitch!] (219). Those words disturb Kenza’s mind and make her physically ill (220). Thus, she decides to flee, toward another city, another country, and another exile in a place where she has no roots (223). For Mokeddem’s protagonists, to leave one’s native country in order to take refuge in a land of exile results in a splitting of the self. These women have broken all ties with a painful past and, most importantly, have allowed themselves to embrace another universe. Leïla, Sultana, and Kenza are all tormented by the pain of exile, yet they continue to fight, to live, and to move forward, like the nomads, in search of new spaces to conquer and prohibitions to defy. In the end, the identity of these women is enriched by the trials and torments of exile. When a cab driver in Montpellier asks Kenza what nation she belongs to, she answers: “Je suis méditerranéenne” (126). She then reflects upon her response and the need to assert her belonging to such a vast geographical entity. It seems evident that Kenza is claiming a right to be métissée (a cultural hybrid), since people from the Mediterranean, in spite of similar traditions, are profoundly diversified. The theme of métissage is also expressed in L’Interdite when Vincent, a Frenchman, receives the transplanted kidney of a young Alger-

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ian woman. He reflects upon his new mixed and dual identity of ethnicity and gender in these terms: la chirurgie avait incrusté en moi deux germes d’étrangeté, d’altérité: l’autre sexe et une autre “race.” Et l’enracinement dans mes pensées du sentiment de ce double métissage de ma chair me poussait irrésistiblement vers les femmes et vers cette autre culture, jusqu’alors superbement ignorée. (42) [surgery had implanted in me two seeds of strangeness, of difference: the other sex and another “race.” And the feeling of this double métissage of my flesh became deeply rooted in my thoughts and pushed me uncontrollably toward women and toward this other culture, which until then I had haughtily disregarded.] (21)

As I stated earlier, Mokeddem claims to be “une femme sans frontière.” Through her protagonists, she inscribes an ethnic-gender hybridity in her writing. She and her characters are women—and men23—en devenir, in transitions, determined to survive. Their identities are split, not destroyed, and are evolving toward a new self. Sultana sums this up in her answer to Dalila’s query in L’Interdite: Yacine, lui, il dit que le grand-père, non, que ses aïeux, c’étaient peut-être des juifs, que beaucoup de Kabyles sont comme ça. Est-ce que tu crois qu’il y a des gens qui sont des vrais fils de vrais? Je pense qu’il n’y a de vrai que le mélange. Tout le reste n’est qu’hypocrisie ou ignorance. (135) [Yacine (a former friend of Sultana who died), he says that the grandfather, no, his forefathers, they were maybe Jews, that a lot of Kabyle are like that. Do you think there are people who are real sons of real people? I think a mix is the only truth. All the rest is only hypocrisy or ignorance.] (78)

In conclusion, the desert and its mythology inhabit Mokeddem’s writing: space impregnated by contradictory connotations of freedom and seclusion. As an adult in exile, her memory is haunted by the memory of a desert that is both terrifying and fascinating. As a child, she felt trapped in the heat of its Saharan climate, symbolic of confinement within oppressive traditions. A woman of the desert, she celebrates the tradition of orality through the words of her storyteller grandmother and combines the act of writing with the popular and legendary traces of her oral culture. In solidarity with all Algerian women, Malika Mokeddem also expresses the urgency to combat the collective and ancestral silence of women. Through her writing, she is empowered—and empowers other women—with a

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longing for freedom and diversity. Malika Mokeddem has definitely created her niche among francophone women writers of Algeria. Hers is indeed a new and yet resonant voice, one that will continue to echo for years to come in the desert of our hopes and dreams.

Notes 1. Thanks to a grant I received from Ohio University, I was able to travel to Montpellier, where I interviewed Mokeddem. The interview was published in French in Le Maghreb littéraire 3.5 (Spring 1999). 2. Mokeddem was born in 1949 in Kenadsa, along the western Algerian desert. Of nomadic ancestry, she was the eldest of a poor family of ten. Miraculously, she attended school, thanks to the determination of her Bedouin grandmother. After high school, she studied medicine in Oran and finished her studies in France at the Montpellier Faculté de Médecine. She specialized in nephrology and received her degree in 1985. She practiced medicine for several years but then decided to devote most of her time to writing. For more biographical information on Mokeddem, see “Portrait: Malika Mokeddem” by Christiane Chaulet-Achour and Lalia Kerfa. 3. Les Hommes qui marchent (1990) is authentically autobiographical, according to Mokeddem; only names have been altered (Helm, “Malika Mokeddem”). 4. Le Siècle des sauterelles (1992) is purely fictional and relates the spiritual quest of a poet in the desert. 5. L’Interdite was translated into English by Melissa Marcus and published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1998 under the title The Forbidden Woman. All quotations in English from L’Interdite are taken from Marcus’s translation. 6. Mokeddem states that the pain of her “exile”—which she prefers to refer to as “expatriation”—stems from parting with her family; her leaving Algeria was in fact a blessing, the opportunity to find freedom (Helm, “Malika Mokeddem”). 7. Feminist critics, for example Hélène Cixous, have suggested that the ideal reader/receptor of a text—written or oral—is “feminine” because of his or her willingness to wander and lose himself or herself in the narrative thread. 8. In the Algeria of the 1950s and 1960s, only 10 percent of the population attended school. Mokeddem was among the “happy few,” all the more remarkable in light of the fact that she was female (Helm, “Malika Mokeddem”). 9. Although Mildred Mortimer does not study Malika Mokeddem in Journeys Through the French African Novel, her theory apropos Assia Djebar and Mariama Bâ’s work is relevant to Malika Mokeddem’s writings. 10. The nomads are surnamed “les hommes bleus” because of the indigo color of their clothing. 11. Algeria’s linguistic policy has continued to weaken the French language. In July 1998, the process of arabization was finalized with a new law making Arabic the official language. 12. Hanna signifies grandmother in Arabic (and in Hebrew as well). 13. Contrary to Assia Djebar, Mokeddem harbors no ambiguous feelings visà-vis the French language. Instead, she attempts to reconcile/merge both languages and cultures. She confesses about the French language: “Je ne mordrai pas le sein

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qui m’a nourrie” [I will not bite the breast that fed me]. She also adds that she is proud to be, first and foremost, “une fille de l’oralité” [the daughter of an oral tradition] (Helm, “Malika Mokeddem”). 14. Assia Djebar and Khalida Messaoudi have underlined that sad truth. 15. According to Rachid Boudjedra in FIS de la haine, “the first—known— victim of the Islamic Front Liberation militia was a baby who, in 1989, was burnt alive in the fire set at his mother’s apartment . . . the reason . . . she was divorced and ‘thus’ corrupted” (140). As a reminder, the FIS’s full name in French is “Le Front Islamique du Salut.” 16. To this day, more than 40,000 Algerian women have been massacred, raped, tortured, strangled, decapitated, and reviled in the name of the Islamist “order.” 17. The Forbidden Woman is the title of the English translation of L’Interdite. 18. The fissistes are those who embrace FIS ideology. 19. The ksar is a small village built of earth. 20. The story takes place during the early 1990s, a time of “blossoming” for the Islamic fundamentalist movement. 21. In that respect, this metaphor could be considered universal, since machismo, religious fundamentalism, and violence against women are traits not exclusive to non-Western cultures! 22. In The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, Carol J. Adams makes a profound analogy between the practice of butchering animals and the maintenance of male dominance that sometimes results in violence against women. 23. Mokeddem presents odious male characters but also male protagonists of great substance.

Works Cited Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990. Amrane, Djamila. Femmes au combat. Alger: Rahma, 1993. Barthes, Roland. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Bessis, Sophie, and Souhayr Belhassen. Femmes du Maghreb: L’Enjeu. Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Lattès, 1992. Boudjedra, Rachid. Fis de la haine. Paris: Denoël, 1992. Carré, Louise. Mon Coeur est témoin (film). Canada: Virage, Maison des Quatre, 1996. Cauvin, Jean. Comprendre la parole traditionnelle. Issy les Moulineaux: Les Classiques africains, 1980. Chaulet-Achour, Christiane. Noûn: Algériennes dans l’écriture. Biarritz: Altlantica, 1998. Chaulet-Achour, Christiane, and Lalia Kerfa. “Portrait: Malika Mokeddem.” Algérie/Littérature/Action 14 (October 1997). Paris: Marsa Editions. Colombat, André Pierre. “Le Concept de ‘désert’ dans l’oeuvre de Gilles Deleuze.” In Francophonie plurielle, ed. Ginette Adamson et Jean-Marc Gouanvic. Canada: Hurtubise HMH, 1995, 269–276. Déjeux, Jean. Littérature algérienne de langue française. Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1973. Geadah, Yolande. Femmes voilées: Intégrismes démasqués. Québec: VLB Editeur,

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1996. Helm, Yolande. “Malika Mokeddem: Entretien.” Le Maghreb littéraire 3.5 (Spring 1999): 83–100. Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Messaoudi, Khalida. Une Algérienne debout. Paris: Flammarion (Collection “J’ai lu”), 1995. Miller, Christopher. Theories of Africans. University of Chicago Press, 1990. Mokeddem, Malika. Les Hommes qui marchent. Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1997 [Ramsay, 1990]. ———. Le Siècle des sauterelles. Paris: Ramsay, 1992. ———. L’Interdite. Paris: Grasset, 1993. ———. Des Rêves et des assassins. Paris: Grasset, 1995. ———. The Forbidden Woman. Trans. of L’Interdite by Melissa Marcus. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Mortimer, Mildred. Journeys Through the French African Novel. Portsmouth, NH/London: Heinemann/James Currey, 1990. Segarra, Marta. Leur Pesant de poudre: Romancières francophones du Maghreb. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.

11

: Reappropriating the Gaze in Assia Djebar’s Fiction and Film Mildred Mortimer

Although Assia Djebar is known as Algeria’s foremost woman novelist, her corpus also includes poetry, theater, essays, and film. She has used the image as well as the word to chronicle Algeria’s transition from colonialism to independence and to foreground the Algerian woman’s struggle to redefine her role in postcolonial Algeria. Portraying Algeria’s women as victims of dual oppression—French colonialism and Maghrebian patriarchy—Djebar claims subjectivity for herself and her Algerian sisters by reappropriating language, history, space, and the gaze. She reminds her public, readers and viewers, that 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 her right to circulate freely in public space where she may see and be seen. Despite the fact that Djebar’s first novel, La Soif (1957), represents a flight from the harsh realities of the Algerian war by depicting a love triangle set against the backdrop of Mediterranean beaches, her subsequent works chart woman’s transformation from passive object under patriarchal and colonial rule to active subject of her own discourse. Her feminist commitment first emerged in Les Enfants du nouveau monde (1962) and Les Alouettes naïves (1967), novels depicting woman’s coming of age through direct or indirect participation in the Algerian war, and was developed further in her film, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1977), and subsequent collection of short stories, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (1980).1 The writer’s appropriation of the camera to film La Nouba, followed by her meditation on Eugène Delacroix’s painting in the afterword to the short stories, an essay entitled “Regard interdit, son coupé,” confirms the importance she attributes to woman’s vision in a Maghrebian society in which patriarchy controls the female gaze. Finally, her most recent probing of the female gaze— and probably not her last word on the subject—occurs in Vaste est la prison (1995), the penultimate volume of her Algerian Quartet. 213

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Although Djebar’s resistance to colonialism and patriarchy is multifaceted, involving language, history, space, and the gaze (and, by extension, the female body), I focus primarily on the gaze in this chapter because it informs Djebar’s conception of individual and collective identity and concerns the relationship between the female artist and her craft. Not only does this focus of inquiry cross genres, finding expression in Djebar’s pertinent essay, her first film, and the latest volume of her quartet, but it probes connections between the image and the word, both problematic for women under the sway of patriarchy. For Djebar the gaze is crucial because the prohibition against woman seeing and being seen is at the heart of Maghrebian patriarchy, an ideological system in which the master’s eye alone exists; women challenge the patriarchal system by appropriating the gaze for themselves. She writes: Qu’est-ce que le regard de l’Autre dans une culture où l’oeil a d’abord été des siècles durant mis sous surveillance? Un oeil unique existait, celui du maître du serail, qui interdisait toute représentation visuelle et qui invoquait le tabou religieux pour conforter ce pouvoir. (“Un regard,” 35) [What is the gaze of the Other in a culture in which the eye has been under surveillance for centuries? Only one eye existed, the harem master’s, which forbade all visual representation and invoked religious taboos to enforce this power.]

Thus, when the novelist temporarily abandons the novel for the cinema, recounting this experience in the second half of Vaste est la prison, written two decades after the film, she is fully aware of the significance of her transgression, her revolt against the dominating gaze. The act of placing her eye behind the camera’s eye elicits the novelist’s meditation on Delacroix’s painting, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, and more specifically the French painter’s regard volé (stolen glance) that resulted in the painting of an Algerian harem. Evoking the closed female space of the seraglio, the painting represents a Moorish interior with four Algerian women, one leaning against a set of cushions, two seated before a narguilé (water pipe), and the fourth standing as she lifts a heavy curtain. By lifting the curtain, the fourth woman, a servant, allows the painter to gaze upon the odalisques and their cloistered chambers.2 Reflecting upon the portrait more than a century after the French painter first viewed the cloistered women, Djebar writes: Prisonnières résignées d’un lieu clos qui s’éclaire d’une sorte de lumière de rêve venue de nulle part—lumière de serre ou d’aquarium—le génie de Delacroix nous les rend à la fois présentes et lointaines, énigmatiques au plus haut point. (Femmes, 170)

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[Resigned prisoners in a closed place that is lit by a kind of dreamlike light coming from nowhere—a hothouse light or that of an aquarium—Delacroix’s genius makes them both near and distant to us at the same time, enigmatic to the highest degree.] (Women, 135–136)

She acknowledges Delacroix’s talent, evident in his remarkable rendering of the sad and distant gaze of the captives of the enclosure and in his reproduction of the exotic interior with its luxuriant colors and textures but categorizes the French painter’s visit as a transgression. In her view, Delacroix, despite his genius, remains an emissary of colonial conquest, and the women whom he painted are victims of the patriarchal domination that preceded, then accompanied, and now postdates the French conquest of Algeria. Djebar states clearly that the man who agreed to allow Delacroix to enter his home was a chaouch, an Algerian in the employ of a French colonial official and therefore in a subservient position. Delacroix would never have been able to see these quarters before the French conquest of Algeria in 1830. Arriving two years later, the painter joins in France’s colonial venture; his gaze is therefore inextricably linked to the colonial conquest. Recognizing Delacroix’s genius and yet sensitive to his transgression, how does Djebar respond to the painting? An Algerian woman and therefore indirectly a descendant of the odalisques, she nevertheless conserves the role of spectator, not participant, and writes: “Entre elles et nous, spectateurs, il a eu la seconde du dévoilement, le pas qui a franchi le vestibule de l’intimité, le frôlement surpris du voleur, de l’espion, du voyeur” (173, emphasis mine) [Between them and us, the spectators, there had been the instant of unveiling, the step that crossed the vestibule of intimacy, the unexpected slight touch of the thief, the spy, the voyeur] (137, emphasis mine). Djebar positions herself not only as viewer who, like the painter, participates in the “stolen glance,” but as informed art historian. Citing the progression in Delacroix’s perspective from the first canvas of 1834 to the second exhibited in 1849, she explains that the women in the second version become more distanced and isolated, their universe more oneiric, their confinement more apparent. She also reflects upon Pablo Picasso’s series of paintings and lithographs inspired by Delacroix and undertaken in 1954, when the Algerian war began. Picasso’s Femmes d’Alger marks a radical departure from Delacroix’s painting by opening the cloistered chambers to sunlight and the outdoors. Contextualizing Delacroix’s painting within the historical framework of French colonialism’s encounter with an Islamic world that refuses figurative representation but finds artistic expression in architecture, calligraphy, and decorative arts, she explores the links between Delacroix’s stolen glance and the Maghrebian patriarch’s controlling gaze.3 She notes that as the Algerian nation became further dispossessed under colonial rule,

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Algerian men tightened their control over Algerian women. Colonial rule and colonialist dispossession joined to doubly imprison Algerian women, a domination conveyed graphically via le regard orientalisant, “the orientalizing look”: 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. (183) [The orientalizing 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.] (146)

Thus, the stolen glance of a remarkably gifted nineteenth-century French painter is transformed by a series of lesser artists, first painters and then photographers, into the “orientalizing look” that reifies the Algerian woman and her world; she, oppressed by French colonialism as well as Algerian patriarchy, becomes all the more vulnerable to constraints and confinement.4 The title of Djebar’s essay, “Regard interdit, son coupé” [Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound], in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, foregrounds Delacroix’s stolen glance as well as the inaudible conversation of the cloistered women. By granting importance to the muted conversation, to women’s silence, Djebar assumes a task completely beyond Delacroix’s realm of competence, that of restoring sound to this silent study of Orientalist imagery. Moreover, by linking the reappropriation of the gaze to the word, the right to see (and be seen) to the right to speak (and be heard), the essay marks an important stage in Djebar’s personal quest and explains her decision to become a filmmaker. Not only will her work restore the lost sound of her maternal language, but also it will defy and oppose the male dominating gaze. Yet by undertaking this task, Djebar is forced to think through her own position with respect to Delacroix’s Orientalist representation. 5 In addition, the circumstances surrounding the painting and the canvas itself set up a tension between disclosure and dissimulation—what to show versus what to hide—that occurs in the filming of La Nouba and in Djebar’s writing, particularly as her work has become increasingly more autobiographical in the volumes that comprise her Algerian Quartet. When she films La Nouba, Djebar views her appropriation of the camera as a challenge to colonial and patriarchal domination, an important political and symbolic event in the liberation and empowerment of Algerian women. It is, for her, the logical outcome of her rejection of the dominating gaze. If the project is crucial to the collective enterprise, it is also deeply personal as she undertakes the quest of reestablishing links with the maternal world of her childhood. In the attempt to restore severed sound,

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the maternal language of her past, she returns to her native region of Cherchell, revisiting the city situated approximately 60 miles west of Algiers and its neighboring countryside, the rocky coast, fields, and hills surrounding Mont Chenoua. There she captures in image and sound the oral history of rural women, and via Lila, the film’s fictional protagonist, she charts the process of self-discovery and self-affirmation of a modern Algerian woman troubled by a war-scarred past and an unsatisfactory marriage. In La Nouba, Djebar’s camera follows Lila on her dual itinerary: an exterior trajectory leading to a rediscovery of traditional rural life and an internal trajectory that becomes a meditation on memory. Returning to Cherchell fifteen years after the end of the Algerian war, Lila is obsessed by painful war memories—prison, torture, and the loss of members of her family. Through encounters with rural women, following their daily lives, listening to their accounts of their own war experiences, and eventually recording their narratives, she finds the comfort she seeks, and her psychological health is finally restored. Yet despite her spiritual renewal, Lila is unable to repair her marriage. She remains saddened by the failure of her marriage and the pervading weight of patriarchy in postcolonial Algeria. As Lila renews her contact with the rural Algeria of her childhood, her gaze encompasses landscapes, faces, architecture. Following Lila into the countryside, the camera’s eye takes in panoramic views of Mont Chenoua and the hills overlooking the Mediterranean. It lingers on landscape, capturing the reddish and golden hues of the rocks along the coast, and on the female collectivity, focusing on the rural women working in the fields. Yet when the camera follows Lila home to film the interior of the small house she shares with her husband and young daughter, it bears witness to tension, solitude, and the lack of communication between the couple. Thus, Djebar uses visual elements to convey Lila’s double itinerary: one path toward the outdoors and her encounter with rural woman’s life and traditions; the other path introspective, the protagonist’s meditation on intimacy and personal memory. The importance of Lila’s gaze is evident from the beginning of the film. In one of the first sequences, the protagonist, her back to the spectators, her face pressed against the wall, cries out in anger: “Je parle, je parle, je parle” (La Nouba, 297) [I speak, I speak, I speak], then pauses to address Ali, her husband, who is in the room: “Je ne veux pas que l’on me voie; je ne veux pas que tu me voies” [I don’t want to be seen; I don’t want you to look at me]. Thus, Lila comes before the camera proclaiming her right to speak and be heard and refusing the dominating gaze. Ali does not understand his wife’s desire to see and speak for herself or her rejection of his control; the woman filmmaker does. In a close-up of Lila’s head turned toward the wall, Djebar films Lila’s revolt. Her eye behind the camera moves from Ali’s gaze upon Lila to focus directly on Lila, recording

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the young woman’s progressive journey to self-affirmation. When she later describes the filming of La Nouba in Vaste est la prison, Djebar explains that she attributed her own words and gestures to her protagonist, who exclaims: “Je parle, je parle, je parle.” Lila’s struggle for empowerment, her desire to speak coupled with her refusal to be gazed upon, reflects the filmmaker’s personal identity quest and, as she explained in an interview preceding the publication of the novel, attributes importance to the appropriation of speech: J’aboutis à cette évidence, ou à cette interrogation: que le cinéma fait par les femmes—autant cette fois du tiers monde que du “vieux monde”— procède d’abord d’un désir de parole. Comme si “tourner” au cinéma représente, pour les femmes, une mobilité de la voix et du corps, du corps non regardé, donc insoumis, retrouvant autonomie et innocence. (“Un regard,” 37) [I have reached this conclusion, or this inquiry: that women’s cinema—as much in the Third World as in the “Old World”—begins with the desire for the word. As if “to film” means for women a mobility of voice and body, the body not gazed upon, but unsubmissive, retrieving its autonomy and innocence.]6

By affirming that the struggle to break the silence is a concern of women’s cinema, Djebar transforms an individual quest—her attempt to restore severed sound to her own world—into a collective one, thereby situating her personal struggle within a larger context, joining the common concerns of the community of women filmmakers. Charting Lila’s struggle for empowerment, Djebar introduces a later sequence that bears an important relationship to the first. Situated in the couple’s bedroom, it foregrounds the importance of woman’s eye behind the camera as it reveals the weakening of patriarchy. In this scene, Ali, who is temporarily confined to a wheelchair because of an accident, gazes intently upon his sleeping wife from the bedroom doorway. Asleep, Lila cannot refuse the erotic glance of which she is totally unaware. Although his gaze expresses desire, Ali’s infirmity makes him unable to rise from the wheelchair to approach her. Recording his failed attempt to lift himself from the chair, the camera, as the only mobile eye in the room, moves in his stead. Turning slowly around the room, its eye envelops the sleeping woman. In this way, the camera effects an important transfer of power, appropriating the control that eludes Ali, revealing the man’s impotence. Her eye behind the lens, the woman filmmaker successfully challenges the patriarchal gaze. Although Lila at first seems at peace in this scene, recurrent nightmares of war atrocities disturb her sleep. Thus, the tension apparent in the first scene, as Lila rejects Ali’s gaze and he responds with mute silence, is reinforced in the second sequence, in which the wife’s inability to bury the

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past is coupled with the husband’s inability to act. Yet as the couple founders, female bonding strengthens. Fleeing her unhappy home, Lila turns to the rural women and their world for her cure. As the camera shifts its focus away from the somber interior space where Lila and her husband live in silence and misunderstanding to the bright outdoors, it again follows Lila’s eyes, rediscovering peace in the rural world of her childhood, as she exchanges glances and then words with the women of Mont Chenoua. After reaching out to the rural women, Lila is invited to join in their world. This participation takes the form of an evening of traditional dances held in a local cave. Dancing with the women, Lila confirms her sense of belonging to the group. Moreover, the space in which the festivity takes place is significant. Dark, humid, mysterious, the cave where the women have assembled suggests a maternal womb and conveys a past history of tribal origins and earlier matriarchal power. Joining in the Berber women’s oral tradition of music and dance, Lila accomplishes the task that Djebar as writer and filmmaker set as her goal: she restores severed sound to her maternal past. Although Lila’s trajectory includes a voyage inward, a return to female space and to the female collectivity, it concludes with a solitary outward journey as Lila, alone in a fishing boat, sails out to sea. With a last glimpse of the shoreline, her eyes take in the beauty of the rocky coast and the blue expanse of the open Mediterranean sea. Thus, she leaves behind both the house that conveyed unhappiness and the women of Mont Chenoua who helped her move past painful memories. Having filmed Lila’s evolution, her coming of age by learning to see, Djebar later tells her readers of the impact of her protagonist’s maturation upon her own evolution. In Vaste est la prison, she writes: Au cours de ces mois de tâtonnements, à la suite de mon personnage, j’apprenais que le regard sur le dehors est en même temps retour à la mémoire, à soi-même enfant, aux murmures d’avant, à l’oeil intérieur, immobile sur l’histoire jusque-là cachée, un regard nimbé de sons vagues, de mots inaudibles et de musiques mélangées. . . . Ce regard réflexif sur le passé pouvait susciter une dynamique pour une quête sur le présent, sur un avenir à la porte. (298) [In the course of these months of probing, following my protagonist, I learned that the gaze on the outdoors is at the same time a return to memory, to one’s childhood, to earlier murmurs, to the interior eye, immobile on a history until then hidden, a clouded gaze of vague sounds, inaudible words and blended music. . . . This reflexive gaze on the past could initiate the dynamic process for a quest in the present and the future at hand.]

By filming Lila’s story, the camera becomes a conduit to the filmmaker’s maternal past. Moreover, in a subtle reversal of images, the eye of the cam-

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era that offers panoramic views, opening the world by filming vast expanses, transforms itself into the interior eye probing the hidden, immobile, indistinct, and inaudible. When Djebar returns through memory to closed space and indistinct murmurs, she hints at sharing some common ground with Delacroix. However, in a reflection reminiscent of Picasso’s response to Delacroix’s canvas, Djebar turns to the past to revitalize the present, conceiving of a future in which women are mobile and doors open to sunlit exteriors, not to darkened hallways. If Delacroix’s painting remains ever-present in Djebar’s consciousness, it is also because she, as an Algerian filmmaker, must come to terms with the question of interdiction: what to disclose, what to dissimilate. Critical of Delacroix, whom she termed a robber, spy, and voyeur, she avoids transgression. Thus, she is careful to show respect for her hosts, for whom she, her actors, and her camera crew, all visitors from Algiers, are potential intruders. Her intent is to discover and explore without disturbing daily lives. For example, she knows that were she to film adolescent girls and young women without the consent of their fathers or husbands, she would cause serious problems within traditional Muslim families. The filmmaker decides, therefore, to sacrifice certain images rather than attempt a stolen glance. Djebar later recounts in Vaste est la prison that she was unable to film a young woman she called “the Madonna” because the latter’s husband was not available to grant permission. We may argue that she submitted to patriarchy rather than oppose its constraints, but for Djebar, this woman came to represent those who, in the name of privacy, should be allowed to escape the camera’s eye. In contrast, Djebar does not hesitate to film the very young and the elderly, prepubescent girls and postmenopausal women, who are free from Muslim society’s restrictions upon women’s enclosure. However, her camera skillfully acknowledges interdiction by capturing glimpses of veiled women slipping into the shadows of a doorway as well as houses with their windows shut tight. Thus, Djebar’s response to Delacroix and the painters and photographers he inspired is to eschew transgression and reject the Orientalist’s attraction to darkness and immobility. Her only indoor footage is of actors and their fictional world; she films Algerian women outdoors and in movement. In this way, she distances herself from the regard orientalisant, the controlling gaze of the Other that Delacroix’s painting Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement has come to represent. It is important to note that Djebar’s deconstruction of the regard orientalisant points to a dual origin of oppression in both Maghrebian patriarchy and French colonialism. If at first one eye alone existed, the harem master’s, it was forced by political events—the conquest of Algeria—to make room for another, the colonizer’s. Significantly, Djebar is charting the process of woman’s empowerment in the postcolonial era. She herself

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has witnessed the dismantling of colonial empire and with it, the departure of the colonizer. Yet keenly aware of the presence and power of patriarchy throughout the Maghreb, she warns that although one controlling eye is gone, the other remains an active force in some areas of public and private life and risks being restored in others. Hence, as an Algerian writer and a feminist, she calls for the transformation of domestic space into a locus of positive relationships, a space no longer controlled by the male patriarchal gaze. In other words, she calls for an end to all vestiges of the closed and oppressive system of domestic organization Orientalists termed a harem. An analysis of La Nouba has shown that as the filmmaker distances herself from Orientalism, from Europe’s intrusive and distorting eye, in her fictional world she foregrounds her protagonist’s struggle to break free from the controlling gaze of Maghrebian patriarchy. Her exploration of both forms of domination continues in Vaste est la prison. Incorporating several strands of narrative, the novel begins with a first-person narrative that reworks aspects of Lila’s struggle for empowerment and later turns to Djebar’s reflections on her experience as filmmaker. Briefly, the first-person narrative (the first part of the text) recounts a thwarted liaison between an Algerian woman—wife, mother, university professor—and the younger man to whom she turns in the belief that he will rescue her from a stale marriage. However, illicit passion triggers violence. The wife’s confession to her husband of her desire for this other man results in her brutal beating and their eventual divorce. The narrator ultimately achieves independence, freeing herself from both husband and lover. She, like Lila, moves on, alone and empowered. Thus, the tension pervading domestic scenes in the earlier film explodes into violence in Vaste est la prison. To her exploration of the psychological mechanisms of passion and jealousy the novelist adds the factor of domestic violence, an issue she had addressed once before in Ombre sultane (1987). However, she now gives the theme of violence against women yet another dimension by including in Vaste est la prison incidents of attacks by Islamic fundamentalists against Algerian women whose dress or comportment they deem disrespectful of their religious tenets. Thus, the violence Djebar had depicted in earlier texts—Les Enfants du nouveau monde; Les Alouettes naïves; L’Amour, la fantasia (1985)—as brutality inflicted upon Algerians by an external enemy, the European colonizer, is refigured. Turned inward and self-destructive, this violence harms society and family life, transforming the Algerian nation into a divided society and the Algerian home into a prison where interrogation and intimidation replace communication and understanding. Although the plot of Vaste est la prison bears certain melodramatic elements, it nevertheless conveys the overarching theme of Djebar’s work: Algerian woman’s struggle for empowerment in defiance of patriarchal

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constraints. Woman’s right to see and be seen is again at the heart of the struggle; Isma’s beating is crucial in this regard. When the irate husband attacks his wife, wielding a broken whiskey bottle, he aims for her eyes. Isma, the narrator, recalls: Protéger mes yeux. Car sa folie se révélait étrange: il prétendait m’aveugler. “Femme adultère,” gronda-t-il, la bouteille de whisky cassée en deux à la main; je ne pensais qu’ à mes yeux, et au risque que représentait la baie trop ouverte. (85) [Protect my eyes. His madness is strange: he wanted to blind me. “Adulteress,” he mumbled, the broken whiskey bottle in his hand; I could only think of my eyes, and the danger of the wide open bay window.]

Beaten ostensibly for initiating an illicit relationship, Isma is in fact punished for daring to review her life and redefine it. Her husband claims the dominating gaze for himself alone. Threatened by his wife’s gaze upon the world and others, he inflicts violence upon her body in his vain attempt to control her. In her effort to fill an emotional void, Isma had entered into a game of seduction with her potential lover. By dancing seductively before him, she captures his attention and then feels validated by his presence and empowered by his gaze: “Ainsi un homme m’avait regardée danser et j’avais été ‘vue’” [Thus a man had seen me dance, and I had been “seen”] (64).7 Isma further admits that she is prisoner of the male gaze when she exclaims: moi regardée par lui et aussitôt après, allant me contempler pour me voir par ses yeux dans le miroir, tenter de surprendre le visage qu’il venait de voir, comment il le voyait, ce “moi” étranger et autre, devenant pour la première fois moi à cet instant même, précisément grâce à cette translation de la vision de l’autre. (116) [me gazed upon by him and promptly looking at myself in the mirror to see myself through his eyes, trying to seize the face he had just seen, as he saw it, this “me,” the stranger and the other, becoming me for the very first time, at this very instant, precisely because of this displacement of the other’s vision.]

By accepting the “displacement of the other’s vision,” Isma conforms to John Berger’s analysis of the construction of a female identity that depends upon woman’s internalization of the male dominating gaze: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves” (Ways of Seeing, 46–47). Only after the relationship with her lover has ended is Isma able to reexamine her relationship to the gaze of the man she had previously desired. When she understands that her self-image had depended upon his gaze mediating the process of her self-validation and that this dependency

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had in fact turned her, the female subject, into a passive object of male desire, then she gains the perspective necessary to free herself from his hold. Breaking the dependency, she reappropriates the gaze. No longer prisoner of another’s projection, she is free to shape and articulate her own experience, serve as her own mirror, and see and be seen without the mediation of the Other. Thus, Djebar situates Isma’s reevaluation of the male dominating gaze within her evolution toward emotional maturity. For Isma, the process of selfhood begins with the recognition of a sterile marriage followed by a futile romance and concludes with her rejection of the controlling gaze. Although Djebar considers the “displacement of the other’s vision” a legacy of Maghrebian patriarchy originating with the controlling eye of the master of the harem, Berger’s comments concerning female dependency upon the male gaze are directed initially to the Occident, not the Orient. They become all the more pertinent, however, in Algeria, a society that has traditionally cloaked its women in veils and barred their entrance into public space. Neither veiled nor cloistered, Isma never encounters the full weight of patriarchy. The protagonist retraces the novelist’s trajectory and like her is separated through schooling from the traditional world of the women of her childhood—her grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and mother—and from the experiences of enclosure that mark their lives. At the age at which her cousins were veiled, Djebar’s father sent her to a colonial secondary school. The break was not conclusive, however; she returned to her extended family every summer, reentering a world from which she became further distanced as she grew older. Throughout the novel, Djebar uses memory to bridge the gap between traditional women’s lives and her own. Isma, her voice and life story merging with Djebar’s, recalls episodes in the lives of her mother and grandmother that were clearly subversive and successfully challenged patriarchy and colonialism. 8 As Isma expresses Djebar’s struggle for self, she reveals that her female forebears were not resigned prisoners of the enclosure. She is following a path that earlier generations of women had already begun to trace. First, Isma remembers Lla Fatima, Djebar’s maternal grandmother, given in marriage at the age of fourteen to a wealthy aged patriarch. As the narrator imagines the wedding night, she studies the child bride’s eyes for signs of submission or revolt: Elle garde les paupières baissées, lorsque l’homme—son maître— soulève, des doigts, la voilette, approche son visage gris des yeux de la jeune mariée . . . sa main tâtonne, frôle les pommettes, les yeux de Fatima qui, lentement enfin, regarde. (210) [She keeps her eyes lowered, when the man—her master—raises the veil with his fingers, his gray face approaching the young wife’s eyes . . . his hand fumbles, strokes the cheek, the eyes that finally slowly look

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up.]

Although the girl’s eyes convey submission on her wedding night, as the old man’s wife she subsequently establishes control and, still an adolescent, manipulates the aged patriarch. Upon his death a few years later, she refuses to remain with his family. In later years, twice more widowed and then divorced, Lla Fatima secures autonomy and standing in Cherchell, where she is an important elder known for her wisdom and independence and becomes a property owner as well.9 Just as Lla Fatima subverts patriarchal domination, her daughter, Bahia, challenges colonial authority. When the latter’s son is sent to prison in France during the Algerian war, she sets out to convince French authorities to allow her a private visit with her son. Traveling from Algiers to the prison in Alsace, she knows that the fate of her mission depends upon a successful encounter with the French administrator. She will succeed if, under the scrutiny of the prison director’s gaze, she is able to affect a certain “Europeanness.” Isma explains: Elle parlait maintenant sans accent; ses cheveux châtain clair, sa toilette de la boutique la plus élégante d’Alger la faisaient prendre (quarante ans, elle en paraissait dix de moins, un peu raidie dans son air “chic”) pas tellement pour une Française, plutôt pour une bourgeoise d’Italie du Nord, ou pour une Espagnole qui serait francisée. (188–189) [She now spoke without an accent; her light brown hair and her clothes from the most elegant boutique in Algiers made her appear (at forty she seemed ten years younger, a little stiff in her “chic” appearance) not so much as a French woman, but rather an Italian bourgeois, or perhaps a Spaniard who had become quite French.]

The Algerian mother is granted the visit to her son, an Algerian “rebel,” because she meets criteria that place her outside indigenous space. In truth, the French prison director does not quite know where to situate her and asks himself as he looks her over: “Une Mauresque, cette jeune femme si bien habillée?” [A Moorish woman, this young woman so well-dressed?] (195). Her only trace of former veiling is the pair of dark glasses shielding her eyes.10 In this episode that foregrounds visual representation, Djebar conveys as well the importance of language skills to the performance, a test in assimilation. The Algerian woman must speak the colonizer’s language flawlessly at the same time that she undergoes the scrutiny of his gaze. Yet when Djebar becomes narrator and scribe, using the French language to record her mother’s and grandmother’s subversion of patriarchy and colonialism, she enters linguistic space they do not share. Delving into the past to bridge the gap between their lives and hers, the novelist encounters the barrier of language. In colonial Algeria, her grandmother was not taught to

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speak French; her mother was not taught to read or write it. Ten years after she examined the ambiguous nature of the French colonial educational experience in L’Amour, la fantasia, the text in which she recalls the crucial event of walking to school for the first time accompanied by her father, in Vaste est la prison Djebar recounts an equally significant episode, a scene constructed not from memory but from an image. At the age of four, the novelist is photographed with her father in his classroom with his male pupils. Not only does the photo reveal the schoolteacher’s intent to educate his children, break social and cultural barriers, and move his daughter into space formerly reserved for men and boys, but also it confirms the child’s response, a steady and resolute stare back at the camera’s eye; she accepts the challenge. The photo does not show—and cannot predict—either the subsequent process of social and cultural dislocation (the price one pays for challenging prevailing norms) or the powerful promise of discovery, formerly an exclusively male prerogative, that a move into new realms makes possible. Finally, by combining narratives, adding her memories of childhood and adolescence to biographical fragments of her mother and grandmother’s lives, Djebar retraces a collective trajectory away from the enclosure. The writer reveals that although her father, deeply committed to educating his children, made her individual journey possible, women family members provided collective support.11 Interweaving several strands of narrative and fusing the voices of protagonist and novelist, Djebar widens the scope of autobiography to embrace the collective female voice.12 Situating her discourse within the community of Algerian women, she, with their help, restores severed sound, the task she assumed from Delacroix, and in the process creates collective autofiction. Hence, when Djebar recalls her experience of filming La Nouba, she clearly defines her individual mission as a shared endeavor and writes: J’ai dit: “Moteur.” Une émotion m’a saisie. Comme si, avec moi, toutes les femmes de tous les harems avaient chuchoté: “Moteur.” Connivence qui me stimule. D’elles seules dorénavant le regard m’importe. Pose sur ces images que j’organize et que ces présences invisibles derrière mon épaule aident à fermenter. [As I said: “Begin,” I was seized with emotion. It was as if with me all the women of all the harems had whispered: “Begin.” This complicity urges me on. What only matters to me from now on is their gaze upon the images that I am organizing and that their invisible presence peeking over my shoulder helps develop.]

As Djebar’s pen brought Algerian women’s muted voice and veiled presence into public space, so does her camera; hence, the symbolic value of giving the camera to a sequestered sister. Before concluding Vaste est la prison, Djebar states:

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Cette image—réalité de mon enfance, de celle de mon enfance, de celle de ma mère et de mes tantes, de mes cousines parfois du même âge que moi, ce scandale qu’enfant j’ai vécu norme, voici qu’elle surgit au départ de cette quête; silhouette unique de femme, rassemblant dans les pans de son linge-linceul les quelque cinq cents millions de ségréguées du monde islamique, c’est elle soudain qui regarde, mais derrière la caméra, elle qui, par un trou libre dans une face masquée, dévore le monde. (174, emphasis mine) [This image—reality of my childhood, that of my mother and my aunts, my cousins who were often my age, this scandal that for me as a child was considered normal, here she is at the start of my quest; woman’s unique silhouette, gathering in the folds of her drapery-shroud the five hundred million segregated women of the Islamic world; suddenly she is staring at us, but from behind the camera, and through a free hole in a masked face, she is devouring the world.]

Djebar’s gesture of handing the camera to her sister is an attempt to encourage the latter’s subjectivity at a time when any effort to reappropriate the gaze is considered by Islamic fundamentalist groups a provocation to be met with violence and oppression.13 However, too long a victim of colonial and patriarchal oppression, the Algerian woman is in movement, engaged in the process of liberation.14 As writer and filmmaker, Assia Djebar represents an important voice of resistance. In her rejection of the controlling gaze—be it individual or collective—she reminds her fellow Algerians that her nation must remain committed to pluralism; she claims for herself and her sisters the right to see and be seen as they circulate freely in open space.

Notes 1. For the historical background to woman’s participation in the Algerian war, see Amrane-Minne, Femmes au combat. 2. Aas-Rouparis interprets the role of the servant as a sign of confrontation with tradition. Zimra views her as the spy, the proxy of the master (“Afterword” to Djebar, Women, 209). 3. Beaugé and Clément’s edited work provides a series of interesting articles on the image in the Arab world as well as portraits of the Arab world by European travelers, painters, and photographers. 4. For a study of photographs as postcards of the exotic Algerian woman, see Alloula, Le Harem colonial. 5. For a thorough and well-documented study of Orientalism, see Said, Orientalism. For an important study of Djebar’s “dialogue” with Orientalists Delacroix and Eugène Fromentin in L’amour, la fantasia, see Zimra, “Disorienting the Subject.” 6. This translation and the translations from Vaste est la prison are mine. 7. Chikhi notes the importance of the dance in Djebar’s work, particularly for its importance in saying or hiding certain things (“Les Espaces,” 105). For a detailed study of the role of women’s dance in the Arab world, see Henni-Chebra and

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Poché, Les Danses. 8. For a theoretical discussion of the autobiographical pact, the promise to the reader that the textual and referential “I” are one and the same, see Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, and Lionnet, “Métissage.” 9. Djebar dedicates a short story, “Les Morts parlent” (Femmes d’Alger) to her grandmother, Lla Fatma Sahraoui. 10. Djebar’s mother customarily wore the voile mauresque of urban Algerian women. See Gauvin, “Territoires des langues,” 78. 11. When the child goes off to school, she wears a “protecting eye,” an amulet containing quranic verses given to her by her grandmother (287). 12. In her study of L’Amour, la fantasia, Geesey provides an informative essay titled “Collective Autobiography.” 13. Djebar’s Le Blanc d’Algérie is devoted exclusively to the theme of violence and death in Algeria. She and her family members have had close friends and family assassinated by Islamic extremists. 14. For a further study of women in contemporary Algeria, see Lazreg, Eloquence of Silence.

Works Cited Aas-Rouparis, Nicole. “L’esthéthique d’une mémoire dans Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement d’Assia Djebar: Reconstitution et traduction.” Revue francophone 8.2 (1992): 5–17. Alloula, Malek. Le Harem colonial. Paris: Garance, 1981. Amrane-Minne, Danièle Djamila. Femmes au combat. Alger: Rahma, 1993. ———. Des Femmes dans la Guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Karthala, 1994. Beaugé, G., and J.-F. Clément. L’Image dans le monde arabe. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1995. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972. Chikhi, Beïda. “Les Espaces mnemoniques dans les romans d’Assia Djebar.” Itinéraires et contacts de cultures: Autobiographies et récits de vie en Afrique 13.1 (1991): 103–108. Djebar, Assia. La Soif. Paris: Julliard, 1957. ———. Les Enfants du nouveau monde. Paris: Julliard, 1962. ———. Les Alouettes naïves. Paris: Julliard, 1967. ———. La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (film). 1977. Produced by Algerian Radio television and distributed in the United States by Women Make Movies, New York. ———. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1980. ———. Women of Algiers in their Apartment. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Afterword by Clarisse Zimra. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. ———. L’Amour, la fantasia. Paris: Lattès, 1985. ———. Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair. London: Quartet, 1985. ———. Ombre sultane. Paris: Lattès, 1987. ———. A Sister to Sheherazade. Trans. Dorothy S. Blair. London: Quartet, 1987. ———. “Un regard de femme.” Courrier de l’UNESCO 910 (October 1989):

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34–37. ———. So Vast the Prison. Trans. Betty Wing. New York/Toronto/London: Seven Stories Press, 1999. Vaste est la prison. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. ———. Le Blanc d’Algérie. Paris: Albin Michel, 1996. Gauvin, Lise. “Territoires des langues: Entretien avec Assia Djebar.” Littérature 101 (February 1996): 73–87. Geesey, Patricia. “Collective Autobiography: Algerian Women and History in Assia Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia.” Dalhousie French Studies 35 (1996): 153–167. Henni-Chebra, Djamila, and Christian Poché. Les Danses dans le monde arabe ou l’héritage des almées. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Lazreg, Marnia. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge, 1994. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Lionnet, Françoise. “Métissage, Emancipation and Female Textuality in Two Francophone Writers.” In Life/Lines. Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. 260–278. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1979. Zimra, Clarisse. “Disorienting the Subject in Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia.” Yale French Studies 87 (1995): 149–170.

12

: Hélé Béji’s Gaze Sonia Lee

In his important essay on culture and metaphor, the Canadian critic Pierre Ouellet states: “La métaphore n’est pas qu’une affaire de mots. Elle concerne aussi notre rapport au monde. Aux choses, bien sûr. Et à l’histoire” [Metaphor does not solely concern words. It also concerns our relationship to the world. To things, of course. And to history] (“Le Changement,” 195, my translations throughout). This metaphorical relationship to the world, to things, and to history defines as well as describes the fictional universe of the Tunisian writer Hélé Béji. Furthermore, Béji’s metaphorical vision of the world bears a distinctly Proustian influence, although it is not an imitation. Hélé Béji brings a different voice to North African fiction written in French. She can be differentiated from women writers of her generation, for instance, Emna Bel Haj Yahia and Alia Mabrouk or the very well known Assia Djebar and Fatima Mernissi, by her lack of preoccupation with the world of women. In contrast to the majority of her contemporaries, Hélé Béji does not speak from a feminist viewpoint, and gender relations are not one of her concerns. Rather, she questions the vulgarity and mediocrity of modern life and the problematic of what is called modern culture. She reflects with often bitter irony on the hypocrisy of the Tunisian bourgeoisie and the empty discourse of its intelligentsia, thus revisiting the role that the writer and the intellectual should play in today’s world. Her prose stands alone in the world of francophone North African writers by the classical facture of her French, whose literary points of reference are unabashedly French or Western, and by the rhythm of her long, digressing sentences, recalling the distinctive cadence of the Proustian periods. However, she shares with many women writers of her generation the omnipresence of the first-person narrator throughout her work and its ambiguous relationship with the author’s persona, thus giving her texts a very personal tone and a strong internal focus. Hélé Béji was born in Tunis in 1948 into a prominent Tunisian family. After passing the Aggrégation de Lettres, she taught French literature at the University of Tunis. She is now working for the United Nations Education, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. Béji’s work 229

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strikes a balance between essays and fiction. In 1982 she wrote a political essay, Le Désenchantement national: Essai sur la décolonisation, published by Maspero, and in 1994 another essay, L’Art contre la culture, published by Intersignes; in 1997 L’Imposture culturelle was published by Stock. As for her fiction, it is a cross between the essay and the imaginary and to date consists of two works. Her autobiographical text L’Oeil du jour (sometimes called a novel) was published in 1985 by Maurice Nadeau, and a satire, Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis, was published in 1992 by Noel Blandin. Her great admiration and affinity for Marcel Proust, whom she considers the quintessential writer, infuses her work; his haunting presence is not unlike the “petite sonate de Vinteuil” whose melody lingers throughout Proust’s monumental work A La recherche du temps perdu (In search of Lost Time) to remind the narrator and the reader of the synthesizing power of art, without which reality is never complete. Béji’s style, albeit so Proustian in its vision, is not an imitation of the master but rather the result of a profound and uncanny similarity of the gaze. Béji’s concerns are, however, very different from Proust’s, and in this she stands on her own as an original writer and thinker. In his In Search of Lost Time, Proust explores the consciousness of a first-person narrator-protagonist from childhood to maturity through the different experiences of his life—social, romantic, aesthetic, and philosophical. In doing so, Proust draws a satirical and critical portrait of the French aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie at the turn of the century. The narrator’s introspection leads to an exploration of the concept of time and space, which becomes a further narrative technique linking moments of the past and the present. This association of two different elements in order to arrive at a new understanding of things is embodied in the Proustian style, his use of metaphor, and the cadences of the famous Proustian sentence. Proust’s response to the existential drama of lost time and human mortality is art: the only endeavor that frees us from what Charles Baudelaire calls the enslavement of time. Béji’s two fictional narratives, L’Oeil du jour and Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis, although published seven years apart, can be considered as one unit because they complete each other. They are also Proustian in vision and style in that, as already stated, they stand between essay and fiction. Spatially, they form a closed world between Tunis and Paris, where the first-person narrator-author moves mentally and physically, at the same time a participant and a detached observer of her complex world. In L’Imposture culturelle, Béji states: La terre où je me contemple est l’Orient, le lieu où je m’exprime est l’occident. La bizarrerie de cette posture ne m’échappe pas, car je m’éprouve d’abord sous la forme d’une géographie paradoxale, dans laquelle rien ne correspond mais où tout communique. (13)

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[The land in which I situate myself is the Orient. The space in which I express myself is the West. The strangeness of this attitude does not escape me because above all I compare myself to a paradoxical map on which nothing belongs but everything connects.]

Forced by history to accommodate herself to this paradoxical mental geography, Béji uses Proust, that most French of French writers, as a methodology, a mode of inquiry, to grapple with, explore, and attempt to understand her society and her contemporary decolonized world, which she claims is everybody’s world. The metaphor, which is the cornerstone of Proust’s style, is also fundamental to Béji’s narrative. For him, “Truth will begin only when the writer . . . comparing similar qualities in two sensations, makes their essential nature stand out clearly by joining them, in order to remove them from the contingencies of time, in a metaphor” (Shattuck, Proust’s Binoculars, 5). Both in her fiction and in her essays; Béji’s extensive use of metaphors does not serve a philosophical purpose as in Proust; she is not trying to reach the essence of things in order to free them from the contingencies of time. Rather, attaining the essence of things allows her to explore the essence of her time and to pose an essential question: Where is humankind going? Béji inscribes herself deliberately in the present, in the concrete, in an attempt to understand modernity. There is no metaphysical anguish in her work (which is also true of Proust); she makes it very clear that if Allah is a player in her world, he does not enter into her vision of things. Béji’s gaze is that of a decolonized, French-educated, secular Arab woman, a citizen of the world. Each of her two fictional texts begins with the stream of consciousness of the narrator-author lying in bed, between sleep and awakening, existing in an illusory space where time has been abolished, just like Marcel, the Proustian sleeper, who states: “I was like those sleepers who on awaking in the night do not know where they are, do not know in what bed, in what house, in what place on earth, in what year of their life they find themselves” (Poulet, Études, 9). It may be that Béji sees the Proustian sleeper as a metaphor of the décolonisée that she claims to be: someone who belongs to two worlds, a “world where nothing fits but everything connects,” at once familiar and strange but where frightening demons evaporate with the light of day and the reassuring presence of the familiar. L’Oeil du jour opens with the narrator’s desperate efforts to wake from a recurrent nightmare. To wake is like a liberation: “Contre la broussaille de mon cauchemar s’était levé l’archange du réveil” [Fighting through the thicket of my nightmare there arose the archangel of awakening] (9). This archangel is none other than the narrator’s grandmother, whose slippers can be heard shuffling to and fro in the adjacent room like a signal indicating daybreak. Like her Proustian counterpart, Béji’s grandmother is

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an authentic character, genuine, kind, and living in a world whose values no longer exist. Béji’s entire text is a homage to her grandmother and her space, an old and wonderful house in the medina of Tunis. It is evident that for the author, the old woman is a metaphor for the past, a reassuring and somewhat romanticized past, in my view, where everything was in its place and where it was still possible to feel confident about the future, especially if one was from the upper class. But the grandmother also stands for a lost world dominated by the presence of God, who manifests himself through the ritual of daily prayers, thus suspending in time the ordinary objects and activities of the day: “La prière est ce fil matériel où s’emperlent les moments après avoir été vécus, continuant de vivre sous une forme qui les empêche de s’éffriter” [Prayer is this tangible thread on which the moments that have just been lived are arranged like pearls on a necklace so that they will continue to exist untouched by time] (178). For Béji, this familiar world is now removed from her, as she views it behind the glass door of her lost faith and the rationalism of her Western education. Her grandmother’s belief embodies the reality and the security of a past still alive and yet already far removed. The narrator finds comfort in the contemplation of her past even though there is no place for her in it. By contrast, the modern world, which is the narrator’s world, appears to her as confused as an uncharted road. However, the existential discomfort experienced by the narrator as she faces the future should not be understood as an identity crisis of the kind affecting the African male writers of the 1950s but rather as a means of self-knowledge. Béji posits herself without angst as a decolonized subject, that is, one who is the product of two cultures that she has succeeded in making her own, albeit not without difficulty. Like Proust, the author casts an ironic gaze on her modern and Westernized society, and this generates sketches of very amusing and satirical scenes taken directly from daily life. Béji’s social satire is Proustian in its vision in that she does not condemn the upper class over their socio economic privileges but rather their lack of ethics, heartlessness, and arrogance. However, in her case and contrary to Proust, the irony is overtly political. In L’Oeil du jour, the object of her satire is the ordeal that the individual passenger must go through upon arriving at the Tunis airport, particularly on a religious holiday. She recalls her own frustration when confronted by the customs officer who “attend les voyageurs derrière son comptoir comme s’il nourrissait une aversion primordiale pour la nature humaine” [behind his counter awaits the travelers as if he had a primeval aversion for human nature] (52). She reacts to this arrogant bureaucrat by thinking: “Entre lui et moi je découvre que c’est une haine, un duel sordide, muet, pour moi perdu d’avance. . . . Il a réveillé en moi une férocité presque animale” [Between him and me, I discover the existence of a

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hatred, a sordid duel, silent, for me without recourse . . . He has awakened in me an almost animal-like ferocity] (53). But once the ordeal has ended, the narrator reconsiders the situation and sees the bureaucrat as a victim of the absurdity of the system, which equalizes them in the negation of their individual freedom, and they are both “réduit à cet état de vulnérabilité et de faiblesse où l’on se trouve dans les pays où l’autorité est devenue une force séparée des hommes” [reduced to this miserable state of vulnerability and weakness that is the lot of those who find themselves in countries where power no longer has anything to do with the people] (55). Béji will pursue the irony of the matter by adding a third player to this absurd tale. While waiting in line at the airport, the narrator witnesses the arrival of a person who is too important to stand in line and who proceeds to go through the crowd with the complete acquiescence of the otherwise misanthropic customs officer, whom Béji now compares to the highsociety lady who reprimands her domestics harshly but a minute later receives her dinner guests with the greatest amicability. Double standards are the order of the day, and the VIP, recognizing the narrator, who, after all, is a member of his own class, insists that she, too, must go through the line without waiting. The narrator switches roles and, from the position of victim, becomes a victimizer of the huge crowd of nobodies, eternal extras in a play they have seen many times before. Béji, herself a high-society lady, is keenly aware of the selfishness of her society, and like Proust uses images reflecting her milieu to denounce, in her case, injustice and the responsibility that the bourgeoisie has for maintaining it as the eternal guardian of a self-protecting status quo. In Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis, which is subtitled “A Satire,” Béji focuses her sarcastic gaze more specifically on her own class: the bourgeoisie and intellectuals. As in L’Oeil du jour, the narrative begins with the narrator as a Proustian sleeper, this time tormented by insomnia: the protagonist imagines herself flying through the air like the fragile musical note of a bird. The bird’s-eye view, which is the central metaphor of the text, makes it clear that the title is an imaginary space where the mind wanders through the memories and the preoccupations of the narrator. It also gives a detached tone to the text, which is that of a satire in which the narrator keeps her distance and floats above the human frailties she is about to describe. But the dreamer is brought back to reality and back to earth when the bell of the church in Sceaux rings at three o’clock. With this, reality sets in, and the narrator remembers with anguish that she has agreed to participate in a convention: “qu’ai-je à voir avec ces gens-là? Ces parisiens sans coeur? Ces génies ratés qui brillent comme une friture intellectuelle refroidie et indigeste” [What do I have in common with these people? These heartless Parisians? These failed geniuses who shine like a

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greasy intellectual fritter gone cold?] (Itinéraire, 19). Among these pseudointellectuals, the narrator singles out the real villain, the pseudo-writer: Oui, j’avais reconnu en lui le type même de l’écrivain actuel, poètereau, bellâtre, et benoît, avec ses manières de littérateur de congrès, cet acquiescement sans nerfs que l’on remarque aussi chez les politiciens ratés. . . . Prêt à tout et capable de rien. (28) [Indeed, I had recognized in him the prototype of the contemporary writer, poetaster, foppish, and falsely indulgent, acting like a conventiongoing literary personality acquiescing in everything like a bad politician. . . . Always willing but never able.]

This bitter caricature of the contemporary writer stands as the negation of the great writer of the past that is Proust. It also reveals the importance that writing holds for the author who, like Marcel, the Proustian protagonist, thinks that writing is not a social game but a truth-seeking endeavor through the aesthetic of language. As mentioned earlier, contrary to Proust, Béji does not see art as the answer to mankind’s existential anguish but as an ethic. The role of the writer is to get at the truth through beauty: Mais le plus extraordinaire pour moi . . . était qu’il prétendit faire profession d’écrire, de raisonner au nom d’autrui, de servir la cause de l’esprit! Il détruisait l’idée que je m’en étais faite depuis mon adolescence, comme une espèce de pur rivage où n’auraient dû briller, déposés par l’immense élément salé de l’esprit du monde, que de splendides coquillages, et non ce gris mollusque clapotant entre deux conversations. (30) [But what I found most extraordinary . . . was that he thought himself a writer capable of thinking for others and saw himself as a devotee of the intellect! He was destroying the very idea of what I had considered since my adolescence that the writer ought to be, that is, a sort of pure shore upon which, brought over by the salty waters of mankind’s spirit, there should have shone nothing but some splendid seashells and not this grayish mollusk lapping between two conversations.]

This sarcastic outburst against the writer as a social animal whose main purpose is to please and impress the upper class could be read as the author’s ethical credo concerning the role of the writer in this decolonized world. It is not stretching the point to see Béji as an author engagé, to revive an old Sartrian term. Writing is not only a question of style but a moral endeavor, and in her essay L’Imposture culturelle Béji states: “Le propre de notre époque est de nous laisser culturellement démunis contre sa perte d’humanité” [The very essence of our time is to leave us culturally deprived of any means to counter its inhumanity] (16). In Itinéraire, the author’s involvement resides in the satire of her own class, which she views without indulgence. The criticism of intellectuals

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that occupies the first four chapters of the text is followed by four chapters chastising the Tunisian bourgeoisie, in particular its preoccupation with the marrying off of its young “ladies.” Béji denounces the fact that marriage is still the main, if not the only, raison d’être of the young women of the Tunisian upper class. The quest for the right husband becomes the all-consuming preoccupation of their lives. Furthermore, the only criterion defining the “essential ideal” of the future husband is that of respectability: S’il satisfait à ce principe, plus enraciné que la présomption d’innocence dans l’administration de la justice, le prétendant aura radouci tous les regards, il pourra s’estimer sauvé. Toutes les réticences ont un maître incontesté, la Convenance. Rien ne peut jamais être décidé, sans ce préambule majeur. Tout se discute et se marchande, sauf le convenable. (68) [If he matches this principle, more deep-rooted than the presumption of innocence in the judiciary system, the candidate will have satisfied all requirements and can suppose himself saved. All reticence is put to rest by the supreme master: Respectability. Nothing can ever be decided without this major preamble. Everything can be haggled over and everything is negotiable, except respectability.]

The narrator expresses her contempt for this desire to be “comme il faut” and this view of marriage as a vocation so characteristic of the bourgeois class, whatever its cultural background. One cannot but be reminded of Proust’s protagonist, Swann, socially doomed by his unfortunate misalliance and who, in spite of his upper-class connections, will never be able to introduce his young daughter to the Duchess of Guermantes, the only way for the young woman ever to be respectable. Béji, unlike Proust, does not bemoan the cruelty of social snobbery. Rather, as a modern woman, she finds this bourgeois institution particularly negative for young women who, in order to conform, abandon all they could be for the good of the common bourgeois cause, which is the perpetuation of their class and the role women play in it. However, the fate of the bourgeoisie does not preoccupy Béji as much as the fate of the modern world and its ethical future, and the last four chapters of Itinéraire are a long meditation on its mediocrity. She takes up the subject again in her last essay, “L’imposture culturelle,” in which she attempts to comprehend “the mediocrity of our time” as well as to explore and denounce what she calls the imposture of modern times: the myth of culture. Intrigued by the feeling of alienation that she perceives in her contemporaries and her own sense of incompatibility with her time, the author offers some thoughts on this fin de siècle in which, like it or not, she must live. For Béji the profound malaise that characterizes our time stems from the moral uncertainty brought on by decolonization: “La décolonisation pose à la conscience moderne cette question à laquelle elle n’a pas encore répondu: quel sera le vrai visage de l’homme universel?” [Decolonization poses to modern consciousness the still unanswered question: What will be

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the true face of the universal person?] (19). There is something rather puzzling about this question and the fact that the author seems to feel that the old Western model for universality should still apply to a decolonized world whose very essence resides in cultural multiplicity. It is fair to say that Béji’s philosophical and political thought is greatly influenced by the thinkers of the eighteenth century and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the social contract, whereby the individual belongs to a nation by choice, contrary to the German Volksgeist and the claim for national identity that will provide the great debate of the nineteenth century. As a decolonized being in a decolonized world, Béji’s main question is: What will be the universal culture of the next century? Will our sense of humanity or what makes us human survive in our modern world? And if so, how will it be kept alive? She claims that decolonization is not a phenomenon restricted to the formerly colonized but a worldwide cultural fact. She states that much has been written on the effect of colonization on the natives, but little has been said of the effect of the natives on the psyche of the colonizers. The loss of identity has not been a one-way affair: La culture occidentale n’est pas cette entité indéformable qui s’avance inexorablement sans que rien ne l’atteigne de la part de ceux que, petit à petit, elle contrôle. En même temps qu’elle semble les dévorer, elle s’en nourrit, mais non comme une ogresse stupide en mal d’enfants, mais comme un fleuve dont les crues ne s’étendent dans les plaines environnantes que pour y absorber les sédiments qui vont pour toujours modifier la chimie des éléments. (L’Imposture, 21) [Western culture is not this untouchable entity that advances inexorably and remains untouched by those that it is little by little controlling. Although it seems to be devouring them, it is actually nourishing itself on them, not like a mindless ogre in want of children but like a river whose flood spreads itself over the neighboring plains only to absorb the sediments that will forever alter the chemistry of the original elements.]

This striking image of Western culture as a flooding river, absorbing and nourishing itself from the inundated spaces and in doing so losing some of its indigenous identity to foreign elements, is Béji’s central tenet. For her, “La décolonisation est une expérience fondamentale de la conscience moderne” [decolonization is at the core of modern consciousness] (18) because it has opened the floodgates of multiculturalism and therefore poses as never before the central cultural question. Béji states that “avec la fin du colonialisme s’achève le règne des races, mais commence la religion des cultures” [the end of colonization marks the demise of the race issue, but it gives rise to the religion of cultures] (34). However, she points out that if it is today an accepted fact that all cultures, be they traditional or modern, deserve the same recognition and hold the same basic values,

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they remain fundamentally unequal as they enter the modern world. Even though traditional cultures possess a rich cultural past, they are a diminishing treasure that cannot stand up to the powerful present of the West. All these cultures want access to modernity and to partake of the formation of this new phase of their civilization, which will be dominated by Western technology with its insistence on communication and the prominence of the visual over the written. For her, primitive humans, who lived in a world that they had not made, were nevertheless able to feel that they were part of this world, but “modern humans do not even recognize themselves in the type of world built with their own hands” (155). Béji feels that in the twenty-first century the answer to Martin Heidegger’s eternal question, “What does the humanity of man consist of?” (“Lettre sur l’humanisme,” 30) has been “culture.” And yet, the example of history tells us that culture did not prevent inhumanity. For Béji, the cultural plurality of the modern world has not resulted in a global dialogue but rather a plethora of aggressive nationalisms. She has treated this subject at length in Le Désenchantement national, in which she argues that if under the oppression of colonialism cultural identity was a form of resistance, it reversed itself with independence and became a means of domination. Furthermore, she thinks that the future of humankind does not reside in its cultural identity but in its ability to exercise political power, without which there is no freedom. For her, this cultural pluralism runs the danger of eliminating the moral issues that should be at the core of every culture, and therefore it offers no guaranty for preserving what is human. Béji believes that the future of humankind resides neither in culture nor in art but in human beings’ ability to preserve their humanity. In this, she refers once more to Proust, whose protagonists found the truth of things not through intelligence or sophisticated reasoning but through the intuitive appreciation of the essential value of life. Thus, for example, Marcel’s grandmother insisted on giving the child George Sand’s François le Champi because it reflected the charm of the past or a reproduction of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s painting of the cathedral of Chartres because, although less accurate than a photograph, the painting captured the cathedral’s soul. In keeping with that same vision that the past or art can be the locus of our humanity, Béji ends her long meditation on culture by sharing with the reader her unexpected encounter with Jalloul, the coal seller, whom she had met one rainy afternoon as he was selling coal in the streets of the medina. As she watched the man, she came to realize that in spite of his humble trade and simple life, he had been able, against all odds, to keep in his heart “une flamme pure d’humanité qui brûlait encore, et qui nous éclairait le coeur, sous l’écorce noire et providentielle d’un vulgaire minerai de charbon” [a pure flame of humanity still burning to brighten the heart, underneath the

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black and providential crust of an ordinary coal ore] (165).

Works Cited Béji, Hélé. Le Désenchantement national: Essai sur le décolonisation. Paris: Maspero, 1982. ———. Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis. Paris: Noël Blandin, 1992. ———. L’Oeil du jour. 2nd ed. Tunis: Cérès Productions, 1993. ———. L’Art contre la culture. Paris: Intersignes, 1994. ———. L’Imposture culturelle. Paris: Stock, 1997. Ouellet, Pierre. “Le Changement de lieux: Culture et métaphore.” In Joseph Mélançon, ed., Les Métaphores de la culture. Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 1992, 195–213. Poulet, Georges. Études sur le temps humain. Paris: Plon, 1949. Repr. 1964. Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: La Pléiade, 1954. ———. Du côté de Chez Swann. Paris: Grasset, 1913. Shattuck, Roger. Proust’s Binoculars: A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in “A la Recherche du temps perdu.” New York: Random House, 1963.

13

: Tunisian Women Novelists and Postmodern Tunis Marie Naudin

In an article that appeared in Le Nouvel observateur in 1997, Josette Alia praises Tunisia and its inhabitants.1 The Tunisian journalist notes that since 1960, the population of Tunisia has grown from 4 million to 9 million with the rate of population growth controlled; it is presently at 1.9 percent. Eighty percent of Tunisians are property owners, and only 6 percent of the population live below the poverty level. Education is at 93 percent, and the annual economic increase is 4.6 percent. Added to these figures is the promotion of women, placing the Tunisian woman in the most favorable position vis-à-vis her Muslim sisters. The Tunisian constitution prohibits polygamy as well as repudiation and gender-based discrimination. A Tunisian woman can be a head of a company, a legislator, or an engineer; she can choose to be man’s equal.2 This has not always been the case, particularly in the literary realm. Chems, the protagonist of Alia Mabrouk’s most recent novel, Le Futur déjà là (n.d.), complains that her female ancestors were never able to freely express their feelings. “No written text, no correspondence attests to either their joys or sorrows. They neither knew how nor were able to express their feelings” (21). However, since 1990, as the twentieth century drew to a close, Tunisian women have been writing, publishing, and receiving literary prizes. After deciding to limit my study to the novel and the 1996 bibliography Ecrits des femmes tunisiennes, I found eight women’s names.3 Among them are Nicole Ben Youssef, Turkia Labidi Ben Yahia, Syrine, and Hajer Djilani. The first three present frescoes that foreground national history. In this vein, Nicole Ben Youssef depicts the Carthaginian city of Kerkouane in Le Cap des tempêtes (1997); Turkia Labidi Ben Yahia portrays thirteenth-century Tunis grappling with the Crusades in Les Exilés de Valence (1996). Closer to modern times, Syrine’s Quand la mer aura des ailes retraces the painful struggle for emancipation of young women of the bourgeoisie and their female entourage in the twenty years following independence. Of Hajer Djilani’s two novels, Et 239

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pourtant le ciel était bleu takes place during the Gulf War and Hamza between 1950 and the year 2000. The first depicts a Tunisian in Iraq, whereas the second depicts the lives of rather exceptional individuals, large property owners driven to crime by uncontrollable passion. To find the contemporary face of Tunis and its inhabitants, it seems more appropriate to analyze the works of four other novelists. In chronological order, according to their first published works, these writers are Hélé Béji, Emna Bel Haj Yahia, Azza Filali, and Alia Mabrouk. Using a first-person narrative, in L’Oeil du jour (1985) Béji recounts the narrator’s experience of spending a summer with her grandmother in Tunis. In Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis she mixes memory and reflections to depict Tunis and its inhabitants. Emna Bel Haj Yahia writes Chronique frontalière (1991) and L’Etage invisible (1996) in the third person singular. In the first text, the main character, Zeineb, relates her experiences and those of a friend as they face the conflict between tradition and modernity. In the second text, Aida and her brother Yacine discover a more relaxed modus vivendi in their lives. Azza Filali’s Le Jardin écarlate (1996) is divided into two parts containing short descriptive sections and several short stories: the first, “Mon livre d’images,” refers to Tunisian landscapes; the second, the more interesting of the two, “Ces êtres tels qu’en eux-mêmes,” presents, in an impersonal manner, portraits of people from the capital and its suburbs in different situations. Alia Mabrouk has written Le Futur déjà là as a science fiction novel. Narrated in the third person, it depicts the encounter between very liberated Tunisians and a female clone from another galaxy. These six works of fiction are set thirty or forty years after independence, which occurred in 1956, when the French protectorate came to an end. In L’Etage invisible, Emna Bel Haj Yahia foregrounds Tunisia’s evolution since independence: “At the beginning of the 1980s, the country had been independent for almost thirty years. . . . In the high schools and universities, the teachers had lost their halo and no longer had their moral weight. The ideology of progress that had previously been rooted in some fiefs was losing force. Time seemed suspended. The minds of the young were filled with a void” (87). Two rigid tendencies took hold, one originating in the West, the other in the East; “exact science” and “dogma” were two sides of the same coin. However, as one protagonist notes, Tunis rejects extremes. The latter does not fit into its peaceful atmosphere: “Heroic or comic, bizarre or troubling, excess begins to resemble a drunken shadow that the gaze of the city quickly circles with a curved line and erases with an oblique glance” (111). In her work, Azza Filali evokes the dominant characteristic of the citizens: “the famous national sweetness” that permits “easy concessions, frequent conciliation, all of life’s angles smoothed out painlessly” (Le Jardin écarlate, 24).

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Thus, each of the four novelists present Tunis and its population as having a character that is neither committed to nor respectful of a disciplinary order but is entirely postmodern. According to the sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky in his essays on contemporary individualism, L’Ère du vide, the postmodern is characterized by flexibility as opposed to intolerance, intimacy as opposed to political and religious principles, and hedonism as opposed to rigor, whereas high tech is juxtaposed to tradition, with the latter reaping the benefits of intense public exposure through media and technology. I try to show that this concept of media attention characterizes Tunisians as they are presented in women’s fiction. To do so, I explore the major points put forth by Lipovetsky, who sees Western consumerism as characterized by the following: indifference to politics and religion; a sense of deterritorialization or rootlessness; and the process of “personalization,” which revitalizes sectors of social life that privilege personal accomplishment, the importance attributed to the body, and the dialogue between past and present. I am asking whether the city of Tunis does not also present postmodern characteristics. According to Lipovetsky, politics entered a new era, which he terms “the spectacular,” with the disappearance of rigor and with ideology giving way to a “dispersed curiosity embodied by all or nothing” (L’Ère du vide, 56). This breakdown of the great ideological systems is certainly evident in the Tunisian capital, where there seems to be a generalized political apathy on the part of the residents. If Chems, the strong-willed woman of Mabrouk’s Le Futur déjà là, reveals sympathy for the foreign leader Yasser Arafat, whose courage and facial characteristics evoke attributes of Christ (109), for Zeineb, the main character of Bel Haj Yahia’s Chronique frontalière, the heroes of national revolutionary thought are actually impotent, “with the certainty of belonging to the leftovers of a world” (186). Filali and Béji’s protagonists are content to faithfully watch the televised evening news. Filali makes fun of the husband who “followed with the same level of interest the 8 pm news and the nightly sitcom episodes” (Le Jardin écarlate, 66). Béji’s characters accept politics during the dinner hour “like the undesirable visit of an intrusive freeloader” (L’Oeil, 150). As for the presidential couple, they seem to be placed at the same level as the national soccer team, as shown by the photos behind the merchants’ displays. The same attitude holds for religion where, according to Lipovetsky, “everything that designates an absolute, a height that is too imposing, disappears” (L’Ère du vide, 105). Thus the inhabitants of Tunis, like those of New York, Tokyo, Paris, or Berlin, play out the fragmentation of contemporary reality. The systems that had given apparent meaning to daily life have gradually given way to the banality of the everyday. But with the exception of the piety that prevails among the grandmothers and the “gray

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blouse” fundamentalists, indifference is the order of the day. The characters in Filali’s Le Jardin écarlate have a “discreet relationship” with Islam. The author pokes fun at two conversions, one of which follows a bookseller’s return from a trip to “holy places,” a trip that darkens his mood and reduces the selection of books on his shelves. First the works of Gustave Flaubert and then of Jules Verne disappear: “There were only school books and religious education texts on the bookshelves” (55). The other concerns a professor brought back to the religious fold by a young colleague. He cannot get his family to agree to stop watching television, wear headscarves on Mouled (the Prophet’s birthday), and stop wearing perfume. “Soon Ramadan evenings began. Between the sweets, the tea, the evening television series, our man adjusted to his older daughter’s perfume. . . . A peace born of fatigue, forgetting, and silent sorrow returned to the household” (102). Heaven does not exist for the female narrator of Béji’s L’Oeil du jour who, by observing her grandmother’s piety, finds herself drawn not to the “great beyond” but to the “tangible tactile world” (179). She admits, in effect, that instead of feeling herself drawn by the power of faith, her grandmother’s prayers evoked within her “conflicting certainties” but gave a special cast to daily life: the prayers lost their transcendence and “mixed with the decor and life of [their] conversations and [their] gestures” (176–177). Zeineb, heroine of Bel Haj Yahia’s Chronique frontalière, is no longer a believer. She denounces the contradictions she finds in Muslim rites, such as the sacrifice of the innocent lamb for Aïd, which introduces children to “an incurable evil” by legitimizing the execution of the innocent. She notes that far from being a time of penitence, Ramadan is a holiday that “resounds, crackles, chatters, hums” in the heads of all the women who, at this exceptional time, can go out at night without facing danger. And she asks, Why put effort into fingering prayer beads when Hong Kong produces electronic ones that, like the turning drum of a cement mixer, move by themselves “scientifically,” imposing an infallible order on the recitation of sacred passages? As for the veil, in her mind it becomes the object of a veritable hesitation-waltz: a protection against the impious eye, it is sometimes encouraged, sometimes rejected, and then once again becomes fashionable (211–212). The extraterrestrials of Mabrouk’s Le Futur déjà là also mock human compromises with religion and the divine. The earthlings are shown to be incapable of conceiving of a being beyond all human power and therefore beyond injustice and aggression. In fact, they are only “molecules” ruled by a “superpower” (156). As Lipovetsky shows, this political and religious indifference does not stop a certain form of anguish and anxiety: “Crossing the desert alone, going on without transcendent support, today’s man is characterized by

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vulnerability” (L’Ère du vide, 67). Zeineb, for example, “looks around her to see if there is some model to follow, some path she can take . . . some fixed point from which she can move forward” (Chronique, 17). She assumes the role of spokesperson for middle-aged Tunisian women who have difficulty finding a balance between the strict education of their childhood and the liberal schooling that followed. Like Aida in L’Etage invisible, she fits the humorous description that Slim gives of the female stereotype of his country: “a person who, believing herself to be free of rules, is so uncomfortable by their absence that she becomes a drifter, unstable, unpredictable” (128). Unsure of herself, harboring “a hundred different women” within herself (Chronique, 169), the Tunisian woman drifts in a sort of vacuum, like all of her sisters caught up in the postmodern condition. This “deterritorialization,” this “decentering,” can be experienced well or badly. Chems, for example, in Le Futur déjà là, does well; she is single, creative, the head of a small enterprise, and very happy with her life: “She praised God for having been born in the century of optic waves, space, and multidimensional freedom” (107). But Béji’s narrators are unhappy, regretting “the old world” (Itinéraire, 92).4 In brief, postmodernism is not always an easy one to take on, especially for the writer: “In this country, the writer is public or does not write. She or he is polymorphous, polyvalent, polyglot, polysemic. . . . She or he is the scribe who mixes genres, finds the necessary words with which to write all the letters, transmit all the thoughts, express all the languor, all the waiting” (Bel Haj Yahia, Chronique, 158). Although the heroines of Chronique frontalière have made a bad break with the teachings of “the father’s voice,” those ancestral rules exterior to intimate will, and the novel revolves principally around the suffering experienced earlier by a female militant who struggled for personal liberty, Bel Haj Yahia’s second novel, L’Etage invisible, is dominated by the personality of Yacine, Aida’s brother. In contrast to his sister, he knew that he had to choose early. Not very much interested in politics, he did not strive to be a public person but concentrated instead on the personal realm. He practices medicine; he is also a good husband and a conscientious father. Because of his great tolerance and comprehension of others, he influences his sister to also place intimate family life above all else; neither brother nor sister is obsessed with the constraints of marriage and children. As Lipovetsky shows, individualism is centered “on the emotional growth of self” (L’Ère du vide, 19) rather than on professional accomplishments. This philosophy is shared by the characters of Filali’s Le Jardin écarlate. They are attentive to the quality of life: TV, car, no more than three children, comfortable housing, friendly divorce if necessary, reduced working hours, quitting a job when it proves boring, and, as one character remarks, many love affairs and many friends. In Mabrouk’s Le Futur déjà là, people

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group together to solve personal problems, for the pleasure of communicating and expressing themselves. They call each other on the phone at the drop of a hat, meet at the pool or in Omar and Leila’s living room on Sundays for cocktails and dinner with half a dozen other couples: “They are all assembled in this living room; they are all friends. They all want to keep arguing, loving one another, even hating one another, cursing each other because of a nasty jab that occurs just like that, because one spouse is making eyes at someone else. But they cannot live without this. The dynamics of their lives is in this community of goods, sentiments, ideas” (95). In Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis, Béji joins Filali and her gold-diggers in the ironic description of sociability among rich and idle women (99). But the narrator of L’Oeil du jour emphasizes the conviviality rooted in tradition, when her grandmother entertains her friends on her patio during the day and in the evening opens her living room to a veritable “troop of women,” with “relatives, servants, friends, neighbors, or simply visitors staying for the night” (160). This process of personalization, the abandonment of transcendence, the erasure of difference, leads to the erasure of large dichotomies, notably between body and spirit. Again, according to Lipovetsky, the body becomes the “subject” and even the “profound identity”: “As the apprehension of the other’s alterity disappears in favor of the reign of identity among beings, the body has lost its status of alterity, of res extensa, of mute materiality, in favor of its identification with the subject, with the person. The body no longer designates baseness or a machine; it designates our profound identity” (87). In the Muslim world in which the body, especially woman’s body, has consistently been regulated by religion, this merging of identity with the corporeal is a crucial means of challenging the established order. In Chronique frontalière Bel Haj Yahia relates the attempts to free oneself from the physical inhibition that Zeineb attributes to masculine domination (grandparents, father, husband). The young woman rages against young girls’ scanty bathing suits, fattening food ordered by her father, her boyfriend Tarek’s lack of pep and enthusiasm, and the frustration of her own desires. For all Zeineb’s contemporaries, as Lipovetsky remarks, music is a remedy, allowing for “a stimulating euphoric or dizzying break with reality,” by participating in the rhythm, in the movement, “vibrating directly, feeling immediate sensations, being placed in an integral movement, in a kind of sensory and pulsating trip” (L’Ère du vide, 33, 34). This is true of the malouf 5 that “digs an endless hole into each part of the body and from this hole an invisible spring gushes forth that quenches the thirst so well it transforms the person listening to it into a bird spreading its wings with joy and liberty within a cage whose bars it does not see” (Chronique, 214). In L’Etage invisible, Yacine, a doctor, naturally insists upon the im-

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portance of the body. To cure a patient is a more intelligent approach than to banish him or her from the city. As for Aida, she moves from frigidity to full sensual happiness through her encounter with Slim, who becomes her companion: “Bathed in light, her body no longer glided, relaxing in the heavy arms of sleep, but in the hollow of a sensation that makes it strike at the depths of itself, against the expression of shared energy from which Aida is able to extract a crystal song unfolding its greenery upon the plain” (129). With Slim and her brother, sister-in-law, and nephews, she spends weekends at the sea, swimming, walking on the beach, playing in tennis matches, and continually singing. In Béji’s world, the beach is a wellfrequented place. In Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis, she places young men and women anxious to show off their bodies under the watchful eye of their families. This is the place of the “first elimination phase” for marriage. The young man must show his “TV personality.” The women show their passion for streaked bangs and blonde highlights, as Filali notes in her short story in Le Jardin écarlate entitled “The Chocolate-Vanilla Ice Cream Cone.” This passion for hairstyles lends itself to amusing descriptions in Chronique frontalière, and Chems, in Le Futur déjà là, worries about her first wrinkles and thinks about having a facelift. Always luxurious, the marriage ceremony does not ensure future happiness. Sexual desires are not fulfilled, and in Le Futur déjà là, in addition to swimming and sunbathing, the couples satisfy their sexual drives by changing partners easily with no formalities. For the fans of games with no risks, the socalled athletes glued to televised sports events, Béji opposes two crowned champions whose performances reveal human endurance; they are the peanut vendor of Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis and the grandmother depicted in L’Oeil du jour. Whereas the first, ever present on the beach, is the walking champion, thanks to “his heel whose invulnerability would have saved Achilles” (52), the second, sequestered at home because of her old age but undaunted, rivals in virtuosity the champions of the high jump when she rises from her armchair and “her cane and her rear end struggle together with a kind of imperceptible sway” (163). If the process of personalization involves breaking down the distinction between body and spirit, it does so as well with the present and the past. This “personalization of the present via the preservation of the past,” this “museum politics” constitutes for Lipovetsky “the appendages of the politics of administrative and cultural regionalism putting in place . . . a dialogue between past and present, between the population and the land” (L’Ère du vide, 39). In other words, preservation of the past becomes the means of reinforcing the subject by establishing an interesting exchange between that subject (in the present) and its roots (in the past). This kind of problematic dialogue is at the heart of the structure of Le Jardin écarlate, in which the permanent characteristics of Tunisian physical geography and urban reality meet face-to-face. It is best illustrated in Béji’s work

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in the description of the grandmother’s armoire, whose function is to be the site of memory, and thereby recalls a passage from Gaston Bachelard’s La Poétique de l’espace (79–81) which explores the importance of the armoire as a veritable repository of identity. In the armoire, everything is side by side, including all the objects which elsewhere would be thrown out as garbage, but in her house are given equal treatment, for nothing is neglected; the jewelry is not put away with any more care than penny handkerchiefs; everything is recorded above the labels of her memory with museum-like precision; this is the living museum of daily life, where even modern fragile objects such as eyeliner and its accompanying sharpener . . . , some of today’s things that deteriorate so quickly find the magic potion of longevity at the bottom of the armoire. (L’Oeil, 15–16)6

One finds in Bel Haj Yahia’s work this same attraction for the synthesis between past and present. She notes in L’Etage invisible: “Generations follow one another without resembling each other, the presence of the dead is felt as much as the presence of the living, and the architecture is represented behind faces, at the edge of words. . . . As for the immense family tapestry, it was able to include the two respective threads in its weaving” (17). More specifically, the great love that appears when Aida reaches age forty means that Slim represents for her “the freshness of something new, but also the fidelity of the old, of the time before night had fallen in her life.” Thus, thanks to Slim, “at the crossroads between yesterday and tomorrow,” once again she owes to time her coming to terms with herself (L’Etage, 132–133). Although Le Futur déjà là preaches detachment from the past “to go forward,” neither Chems nor Omar, the two principal earthlings, find themselves ready to lead a life of amnesia in space: “this desert where humanity will evolve, isolating people from one another, leaving only the bits+ and the bits– as a sole rallying point” (Mabrouk, 147). This coming together of past and present is indispensable when the women novelists describe Tunis. The ancient city appears to be abandoned, but no one thinks of getting rid of it. For Béji, in L’Oeil du jour, the city has a wild and savage beauty: “white forest with stone branches!” (71). Tunis’s abandoned houses convey a mysterious geography that “multiplies like the stages of initiation; everything is communicated and holds a secret. Every room contains all the others and yet guards its irreplaceable quality” (76). This part of Tunis contrasts with the modern architectural monstrosity that overhangs it with official buildings, namely a “poor and misshapen” university and political party headquarters similar to “an enormous white crab” (70, 71). Bel Haj Yahia is less lyrical—she finds the old city and the souks [markets] filled with dust and completely dead at night. Zeineb’s hope for the market is to “someday see large plate glass bay windows re-

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place those small skylights through which only the most disagreeable weak light enters with difficulty (Chronique, 230). The young woman prefers the beautiful airy neighborhoods: “Belvédère, Cité-Jardin, Mutuelleville, El Menzah . . . There are no purple or pistachio green walls there, no tiny shops or small windows. . . . Streets are wide and straight. There are pretentious or elaborate façades, and well-groomed gardens” (150). In L’Etage invisible, Slim contrasts the suburban neighborhoods near the airport, “sparkling with youth,” their residents committed to work and efficiency, with the sadness of the old family home on the Rue du Miel. He delights in the many improvements made to the streets and the city. Filali’s characters live in suburban apartment houses—probably in the style of low- to middle-income housing projects—but do not appreciate them very much. They complain about the apartments’ location at the edge of the road; their anonymous character caused by uniformity of construction and the residents’ silence; their barrenness because of the lack of greenery and gardens; and their confined space, noisiness, smells, and rapid decay. One of the characters sums up his negative feelings: “When the sky is white, the treeless landscape recalls the first pictures of the lunar surface taken by American astronauts” (Le Jardin, 85). If many inhabitants dream of other dwellings, the houses described by Filali and Mabrouk also show signs of drabness, monotony, and emptiness. In front of the well-to-do home of his parents, Omar reflects sadly upon the physical aspect of Tunis in the year 2000, “assuming the form of a housing project built in reinforced concrete, the repetitive architecture accentuated by the total absence of vegetation, the salt on the ground reclaiming its saline domain” (Mabrouk, Le Futur, 52). For a rose-tinted city, Béji notes, compared to Paris, which “shrinks to the size of a square in a poor, dirty, uninhabitable suburb” (L’Oeil, 41), Tunis seems multiple, “kaleidoscopic” to the eyes of the reader, especially when the protagonists recount their voyages in cars and in the metro. For Yacine, a short trip in the latter brings forth an enchantment of noise, odors, forms, and colors. As an observer, Aida is a veritable collector: of the beauty and variety of cobblestones, whether they are “hexagonal” or “tiny with zigzag patterns,” “red brick” or “jungle yellow,” or “large anthracite rectangles” (Bel Haj Yahia, L’Etage, 42). And then, there are those of the numerous small sidewalk vendors. As for Zeineb, driving around the city in her Renault, she is amazed by the congested streets “filled with merchants, suppliers, beggars, ragamuffins, the debauched, the potbellied. Garbage, starving cats, flags, assorted trimming . . . streets filled with pedestrians and cars, with prohibitions” (Bel Haj Yahia, Chronique, 210), and, I might add, with offenders! The same kind of description appears in Filali’s first two portraits of Tunis in Le Jardin écarlate, with her enumeration of the bric-a-brac in store windows, the traffic noise. Thus, at red lights, there is the noise of arguments between drivers and those who try to

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wash their car windows, complaints of unhappy wives, kids screaming in the back seat, and horns honking every time the light changes. As for Mabrouk’s extraterrestrials, they think the Tunis dwellers join other earthlings in their movements through the various forms of litter and congestion of their own making: “They live here, hampered by passionate feelings, stuck in dictatorial laws, smothered by the pollution of their system, dazed by the monotonous encircling motion of their little planet Earth around their little sun” (Le Futur, 9). This vision of a heterogeneous city corresponds well to the current state of the country, where the new is superimposed upon the old without any great shocks and where the new adopts certain elements of the old without altering it. We see in Béji’s portrait of the grandmother a woman who is admired by her granddaughter, the narrator, because she already possesses a tremendous sense of hospitality toward people and objects of diverse origins as well as a sharp awareness of the elasticity and possibilities of one’s body. It seems that the protagonists’ sense of deterritorialization stemming from the ideological void is compensated for by the value they place upon work, family, and freedom from sexual taboos (the latter separated from any idea of vice). Thus, we have here, as Lipovetsky would say, an era of “well-tempered” individualism in which “the passion of the Ego, well-being and health” combine with a certain seriousness; here, Islamic fundamentalism, considered a simple “shelf” in the “supermarket” of modes of existence, is kept in check (L’Ère du vide, 327, 323). Although none of the authors mentions the shadow cast these past years by the government’s repressive measures used in the struggle against fundamentalism, we must note their lucidity and their critical view of society.7 One of the greatest pleasures in reading them is to discern their ironic barbs. In Béji’s texts, these can be very harsh. She does not tolerate what she considers to be an environment of “mediocrity,” whereas Bel Haj Yahia, delighting in the democratic wave, reserves her sarcasm for the residual excesses of the patriarchal system and its outmoded rites. If Filali approaches Béji in depicting the banality of “ordinary man’s” daily life, Mabrouk clearly reveals the risks of recent genetic and spatial discoveries that will not make our future either one of inescapable progress or a better era than the present. Ultimately, each novelist, in her way, presents a well-informed, critical view of the Tunisian capital with its complexities, contradictions, and vitality.

Notes 1. This chapter was translated by Mildred Mortimer. 2. Statistics from La Femme tunisienne do not mention the numerical superiority of Tunisian women in such fields as manufacturing, education, health, and administration. There are twelve women deputies, which constitute only 6.7 per-

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cent of parliamentarians. 3. I have not cited the authors of the Recueil de nouvelle de femmes de la Méditerranéenne or Dorra Chammam’s Profanation, which is a prose poem and does not specifically mention Tunisia. Her second work, Le Miroir, was not available when this chapter was written. 4. Aware of her own void, Béji states in two essays that she is jealous of the “plenitude of identity” of her grandmother (Désenchantement, 144) and says that she is sorry not to have lived in the classical age, whose culture offers a “marvelous support and its comfort is a precious relief to the agitation of our souls and thoughts” (L’Imposture, 157). 5. Malouf is traditional North African music for the lute, sometimes, but not always, accompanied by the human voice. It is of Andalusian origin with similar or different rhythms. 6. Béji also has beautiful pages devoted to the special moment of the changing of the seasons, when “signs, past and new, are miraculously joined during a brief interval” (Itinéraire, 107). 7. Le Nouvel observateur notes that the government blocks freedom of the press and expression by using “police surveillance and more and more restrictive legal measures.”

Works Cited Alia, Josette. “Tunisiens, encore un effort . . . ” Nouvel observateur 1719 (October 16–22, 1997): 33–34. Bachelard, Gaston. La Poétique de l’espace. 1957. Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1984. Béji, Héli. Désenchantement national: Essai sur le décolonisation. Paris: Maspero, 1982. ———. Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis. Paris: Noël Blandin, 1992. ———. L’Oeil du jour. Paris: Noël Blandin, 1985. Tunis: Cérès, 1993. ———. L’Imposture culturelle. Paris: Stock, 1997. Bel Haj Yahia, Emna. Chronique frontalière. Tunis: Cérès, 1991. ———. L’Etage invisible. Tunis: Cérès; Paris: Losfeld, 1996. Ben Yahia, Turkia Labidi. Les Exilés de Valence. Tunis: Cérès, 1996. Ben Youssef, Nicole. Le Cap des tempêtes. Tunis: Alyssa, 1997. Chammam, Dorra. Profanation. Tunis: L’Or du temps, 1993. ———. Le Miroir. Tunis: L’Or du temps, 1997. Djilani, Hajer. Et pourtant le ciel était bleu. Sidi Bou Said: ETS, 1994. ———. Hamza. Sidi Bou Said: ETS, 1996. Les Écrits des femmes tunisiennes. Bibliographie 1996. Tunis: Cérès, 1997. La Femme tunisienne en chiffres 1997. Tunis: CREDIF, 1997. Filali, Azza. Le Jardin écarlate. Tunis: Cérès, 1996. Lipovetsky, Gilles. L’Ère du vide. Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1993. Mabrouk, Alia. Le Futur déjà là. Paris: Entreligne, n.d. Syrine. Quand la mer aura des ailes. Paris: Flammarion, 1996.

PART FOUR

: Beur Fiction: North African Immigrants in France

14

: Family, History, and Cultural Identity in the Beur Novel Daphne McConnell

As Beur, or second-generation French immigrants, Tassadit Imache and Farida Belghoul both illustrate strategies of authors who attempt to address their problematic cultural identities through narrative. Many Beurs’ subject positions are complicated by the fact that they are historically, geographically, and culturally removed from their North African origins, yet many French refuse to recognize the legitimate place of the children of immigrants within French society.1 Beurs are thus situated in a cultural no-man’s-land; consequently, many of the protagonists in Beur narratives “experience their identity as one of lack” (Ireland, “Writing at the Crossroads,” 1024). Other critics have noted the degree to which the Beurs must write from a culturally “in-between” subject position. Nada Elia characterizes Beur literature as an “articulation of the dilemma of identity construction in the diaspora, highlighting not the both/and of biculturalism, but the neither/nor of homelessness” (“In the Making,” 49). Tajar Djaout states that “Beurs must deal with North African identity in terms of its ‘absence’” (“Black ‘Beur’ Writing,” 218). For many Beur protagonists, the parents represent the only link to their North African origins; also, the parents’ expectations that their children maintain their cultural heritage often leave second-generation North Africans alienated from French culture. Consequently, the parents are, in many ways, the source of their children’s ambivalence. Imache’s and Belghoul’s novels represent the protagonists’ need to reconnect with their parents’ culture and history and to redefine “home” and “family” in order to arrive at an understanding of their own identity. There are several sociopolitical circumstances surrounding immigration in France that contribute to the importance of “family” in these novels. According to Susan Ireland, the social critique that takes place through the treatment of “family” in the novels considered here is characteristic of Beur novels in general, which “explicitly address the social and political issues that have determined their present position in post-colonial France, 253

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and they thus provide an important perspective on the ongoing debates about the nature of French identity and the place of immigrants in society” (1022–1023). Thus, the question of the place of the immigrant “family” within France that these novels attempt to address is crucial not only to the protagonists’ sense of identity but to a redefinition of French identity as well. A large part of the ambivalent subject positions of the children of North African immigrants is rooted in the fact that the majority population ascribes to them and their parents expect them to uphold a culture with which they often do not identify. Indeed, as stated earlier, the vast majority of the children of North African immigrants claim to identify more with French culture than with their parents’ (Hargreaves and McKinney, “Introduction,” 19). This generation’s loss of connection with their parents’ traditions and origins is attributed in part to the illiteracy prevalent among a large percentage of first-generation immigrants; although these parents expect their children to carry on their traditions (particularly Islam), they are, to a large degree, incapable of fully transmitting their heritage to their children (Hargreaves, Immigration, 123). The literary silence of first-generation North African immigrants in France can be seen as an impediment to the formation of a coherent cultural identity in their children. Consequently, the protagonists in many Beur novels attempt to “write,” or come to terms with, their parents’ stories in order to address more fully the question of their own cultural and national identity. Tahar Ben Jelloun referred to the first generation of working-class North African immigrants in France as “la génération du silence” and to their children as “la génération de la parole” (cited in Ireland, “Writing at the Crossroads,” 1030). One might also employ the term “la génération de l’écriture” to define these Beur writers because the act of writing is essential to their reclaiming of their parents’ history. Another issue that is central to the alienation experienced by many Beurs is the permanence of migration. The majority of North Africans who emigrated to France initially believed that their stay would be temporary; the French believed the same (Hargreaves, Immigration, 15–17; Begag, “The ‘Beurs,’” 2). When the Algerian men who came to France after World War II as temporary workers were eventually joined by their families, it became evident that their presence was permanent. As a result, the family came to embody the immigration “debate” in France: “the ‘problem’ of immigration is thought of as the problem of the Arab-Moslem-Maghrébin families” (Begag, “The ‘Beurs,’” 6). Because the family serves as a symbol of the transformation of French identity, it also serves as a starting point from which these Beur protagonists must discover their own identities. The question of family is crucial in both of these novels: it represents the protagonists’ efforts to understand their parents’ history in relation to their own. The protagonist in Tassadit Imache’s 1989 semi-autobiographical novel Une Fille sans histoire [A Girl Without a Story]2 is Lil, the daughter of a

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French mother and an Algerian father, who must accept that her father’s Algerian heritage is as much a part of her as her French identity. Lil’s reluctance to recognize her bicultural identity is largely based upon France’s treatment of immigrants and her father, Ali, in particular, during the Algerian war. The novel’s opening passage, which portrays Lil searching through her father’s belongings after his death, establishes the protagonist’s need to discover her father’s history. The documents that Lil finds establish her father’s legal position within France. They allude to his role as a worker and also his Algerian nationality: “C’est par hasard que j’étais tombée sur le portefeuille. Machinalement, je l’avais vidé. J’en avais sorti de vieux papiers: une carte de Sécurité sociale . . . un certificat de résidence . . . une carte de nationalité algérienne . . . une lettre de la Caisse d’assurance vieillesse” [I came across the wallet by accident. I emptied it without thinking. I took out some old papers: a social security card, a residence permit, an Algerian identity card, a letter from his pension plan] (9). These documents bring to mind the contrôle d’identité, the verification of legal papers that is routine in France, particularly for minorities. Lil’s verification of her father’s identity reveals her ambivalent feelings toward him and the Algerian part of herself. Lil also finds a photograph of her family, which serves as a point of departure for her remembering and telling her family’s story. The act of remembering is linked to the act of writing—and creating history—through the juxtaposition of the photograph with a writing table: “Sidérée, je l’avais épinglée au-dessus de la table à écrire” [Shattered, I pinned it up above the writing table] (9). The role of writing as a means of creating or appropriating history is reinforced by the presence of a typewriter, referred to as “la machine à inventer des histoires” [the machine for inventing stories] (11). The papers that document the “identity” of Lil’s father, the family photograph, and “writing” all serve as tools with which she will ultimately construct her own narrative. The novel is characterized by a certain narrative instability. It switches back and forth between first and third person, which signals Lil’s unstable sense of identity and her alternating desire for closeness with and distance from her family. Though the novel begins in the first person, indicating Lil’s individualized sense of identity, the narrative voice becomes less stable when she discovers the photograph; she addresses her family in the first, third, and second person, expressing her ambivalence about rediscovering their collective history: “Comme leurs ombres étaient confuses et comme la mienne était nette, bien découpée. . . . Comme vos ombres sont confuses et vraies et comme la mienne est juste, précise” [Look how their shadows were so unclear, and how mine was neatly and clearly outlined. Look how your shadows are unclear and true, and how mine is exact and precise] (9–10). Lil’s discovery of the photograph causes a split between her present identity and the memories of her childhood and her forgotten history with

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her father; the narrative voice changes numerous times as Lil attempts to reconcile her present and past selves. Although Lil does include herself in the collective nous of the family, she paradoxically also refers to herself in the third person. She must resituate herself within this family history, with her father at the center: Nous sommes de part et d’autre de l’homme qui se tient droit, grand et puissant. Vêtu d’un pantalon sombre et d’une chemise blanche dont il a relevé soigneusement les manches au-dessus des coudes. Sa femme, à gauche, a la tête baissée sur la portée endimanchée. A droite, en jupe courte, et en souliers vernis, une petite fille échevelée porte la main à sa bouche. (10) [We are positioned on both sides of this man who is standing straight, tall, and powerful. Dressed in plain trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly up above his elbows. His wife, on the left, dressed in a short skirt and patent-leather shoes, is a little girl with messy hair who is holding her hand up to her mouth.]

Of note in this passage is that Lil refers to her mother as “sa femme” [his wife]; doing so marks the point of departure for Lil’s attempt to reconstruct the forgotten and suppressed history of her childhood: the hardships that her mother, Huguette, suffered as a Frenchwoman who was the wife of an Algerian immigrant during the Algerian war. Lil’s inability to situate her present self in the past is due to a lack of a coherent sense of history and tradition. As she goes through her father’s few remaining belongings, Lil also takes his suitcase from the closet; the “valise” represents the “beginning and end” of her father’s history that Lil will reconstruct. This process will, in turn, help her to make sense of her own identity. The suitcase triggers Lil’s recollection of her first memory of her father, when he returned to Algeria to honor his family after winning the lottery. Lil equates her father’s obligation to his family in Algeria with his neglect of his own children; she sees his history and tradition as separate from her own and believes that his French children hold no meaning for him: il devait s’acquitter auprès des siens de la dette de l’exil, il n’avait pas le choix. Il fallait qu’il leur donne ce qu’il n’avait pas. Cette singulière opération s’appelait l’honneur. J’avais compris . . . nous, ses enfants, manquions de tout. J’en avais déduit que pour lui nous ne comptions pas. (14) [he had to repay his family for their having sent him to France, he didn’t have any choice. He had to give them what he didn’t have. This overwhelming obligation was called honor. I understood . . . we, his children, didn’t have anything. I had come to the conclusion that we didn’t mean anything to him.]

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Lil’s reluctance to accept her Algerian heritage is largely based on her father’s unwillingness to transmit his traditions to his children. The honor of tradition and home for him remained in Algeria. Lil’s lack of understanding and knowledge of her father’s “story” makes it impossible for her to arrive at a complete sense of self: “Pour le reste, il aurait fallu croire sur parole cet homme qui n’ouvrait pas la bouche, qui ne m’avait jamais raconté d’histoire” [Anyway, I would have had to take his word for it— this man who never opened his mouth, who had never told me a story] (14, emphasis mine). The use of the past conditional in Lil’s recollection of this early period of her life indicates the degree to which her present self must reconstruct the process through which she became alienated from her father. As she begins to reconstruct the narrative of her childhood, Lil must combine the knowledge and understanding of adulthood with the lack of understanding of a child. The narrative self-consciously reveals the moments when Lil’s present-day understanding of the difficulty of her parents’ lives is projected upon the child of the past; Lil uses her present-day knowledge of the “history” of events that took place during the Algerian war to reinterpret episodes that she could not fully comprehend as a child. As Lil gradually begins to come to terms with the degree to which her bicultural family met with venomous resistance from the French during the war, she also begins to understand what her parents must have suffered during this period: “Lil distinguait à peu près nettement de quelle époque datait l’immense et confuse fatigue de sa mère” [Lil began to understand more clearly just when her mother’s overwhelming and confused exhaustion had begun] (19–20). Here, the third person is related to the Lil of the past, but it is the Lil of the present who attributes significance and meaning to this past moment. The distinction is partly explained by the gap between Lil’s adult understanding and the child’s inability to understand; Lil’s adult reinterpretation of her childhood also underlines the importance of history’s role in lending clarity to the confused events of the past. Lil’s reconstruction of her identity based on an understanding of this period—“cette année 1961 où elle venait d’avoir trois ans” [the year 1961 when she had just turned three] (18)—its violence and its ambiguity, parallels the need of France as a nation to look at this history. This most crucial point in Ali and Huguette’s story is situated within the context of the ratonnade, a massacre that took place on October 17, 1961. When Algerian immigrants marched in the streets of Paris to protest a curfew, the police responded violently with massive arrests and interrogations. Numerous immigrants were killed, and their bodies were dumped into the Seine. This event has remained largely undiscussed until recently (Hargreaves, Voices, 64–65), and its “silencing” is representative of France’s reluctance to fully come to terms with this period. The silencing of Ali’s individual history represents

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the “génération sans parole” [silent generation], or first-generation immigrants, and it parallels the silencing of the darker side of this period of French national history. The indirect discourse of the novel’s narrative structure illustrates the degree to which Lil has internalized the French majority’s negative views of Algerians during the war. In her recollection of the ratonnade, in which she tries to imagine what her mother must have experienced, the narrative voice becomes dominated by the viewpoint of those French who would have hated her mother: Elle n’a pas dû être fière le jour où les CRS ont bouclé le pont de Bezons et qu’ils les ont coincés, matraqués, tirés comme des lapins et jetés dans la Seine. Il fallait les voir courir et les entendre piailler, les bicots! Oui, elle devait chier dans son froc la salope derrière sa lucarne! (20) [I’ll bet she wasn’t too proud the day when the CRS blocked the Bezons bridge, trapping them and beating them to a bloody pulp and throwing their bodies into the Seine. You should have seen them running and heard the dirty scum squealing like pigs! She must have been shitting her pants, that dirty slut, hiding behind the window!]

The historic silencing of this event is underlined by Lil’s own clear lack of memory; she remembers nothing but supposes that her mother saw bloodstains in the street the following day (20). Huguette’s isolation and rejection by society equally manifest themselves in a silencing of history and tradition because she is no longer capable of telling stories to her children (85). This “lack” of history is based upon Huguette’s complete loss of the foundations of identity that occurs when she marries Ali; she is rejected by her family, and her French identity is also denied her: “Ça c’est français? une salope qui se fait sauter par un Arabe pendant qu’ils saignent nos gamins là-bas!” [You call that French? Some whore who’s screwing an Arab while they’re killing our kids over there!] (35). Because of the threat that Ali and Huguette’s family represents to French national identity, the French refuse to recognize their “family” relationship: when Huguette identifies herself to the police as Ali’s wife, they respond, “les bougnoules n’ont pas de femme, il n’y a que des putes pour coucher avec” [Arabs don’t have wives, they only have whores they sleep with] (35). Lil has always assumed that Ali’s distance from his children was a form of rejection. However, Ali’s isolation and loneliness become apparent to Lil as she recalls a single visit to several of his Algerian family members who live in France. Lil’s fond recollection of this visit serves as the beginning of her realization that Huguette has tried to distance her children from Ali and his family in order to protect them from the suffering that she and Ali experienced, even to the point of changing Lil’s name from Lila,

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a name that she shares with an Algerian cousin. Lil gradually realizes that her father did not reject his children; rather, the isolation of his exile was only reinforced by the rejection that he experienced from his wife and children: Trop usé par une vie de misères et d’humiliations, trop occupé à gagner leur vie. . . . Il avait abandonné. Que pouvait-il contre leur féroce assurance d’enfants décidés à survivre envers et contre tout, et . . . contre lui? (112) [Worn out by a life of misery and humiliation, and by having to provide for them, he gave up. What chance did he have against his children’s ferocious determination to survive anything and everything, including him?]

Lil’s awareness of her family’s rejection of her father grows as she gains an understanding of her father’s alienation. The following episode, in which Lil recalls Ali’s returning home from work after having cut his hand on a machine, creates a parallel between the ways in which Ali is silenced by his family and immigrants are silenced by history: Il était rentré plus tôt, le bras en écharpe. Les avait surpris, occupés à faire leurs devoirs sur la table de la salle à manger. . . . Il s’était assis sans un mot. Et ils s’étaient tous penchés au-dessus de sa main. (112) [He had come home early, with his arm in a sling. He had surprised them while they were doing their homework at the dining room table. He sat down without saying a word. And they all leaned over his hand.]

Lil’s recollection of this event focuses on every minute detail of her father’s hand; the descriptions in this passage take on a photographic quality that recalls the family photograph that serves as the narrative’s point of departure: Leurs têtes n’avaient jamais été aussi proches de la sienne. Un état d’immobilité les avait tous saisis là, sous le lustre dont une seule lampe éclairait encore. Leurs ombres s’allongaient, indéfinissables, sur les murs au papier peint déchiré. Et parce qu’il n’avait rien dit, ils en avaient conclu qu’il n’avait jamais mal. (112–113) [Their heads had never been so close to his. They were all frozen there in the light of the single lamp that had been left on. Their shadows grew longer and more obscure on the torn wallpaper. And because he didn’t say anything, they assumed that he never felt any pain.]

The injury to Ali’s hand simultaneously represents his exploitation as a worker and his “silence” that results from his inability to “write” his history. Ali is representative of what Kristin Ross terms the “two colonialisms” of

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French history: the exploitation of Algerians that took place abroad and the exploitation of the immigrant factory workers during the 1950s and 1960s (Fast Cars, 7–9). Just as Ali’s silence allows his children to ignore his pain, the illiteracy of many first-generation North African immigrants in France resulted in a “silencing” of their painful history: “Dans l’exil, abandonné de tous, . . . la dernière scène fut la plus tragique: celle de ‘l’immigré de service,’ grand corps usé, rongé, nié. [Exiled from his homeland, abandoned by everyone, the last scene was the most tragic: the dutiful immigrant, with his strong body that had been used up, chewed up, and rejected] (115). Lil’s reconciliation with Ali toward the end of his life is an attempt to resolve her own ambivalence regarding her father’s history; her relationship with her father parallels France’s ambivalent attitude toward its immigrant population. The conflicting value systems of the “republic” and colonization are symbolized in a walk that Lil and Ali take together shortly before his death: Après le dîner, elle sortait marcher avec lui. Ils traversaient la cité, empruntaient l’avenue de la République, remontaient jusqu’au carrefour et s’acheminaient vers Bezons. Ils faisaient demi-tour avant le pont. Il lui prenait la main, la mettait dans sa poche. C’était à mourir d’amour et de haine. (117) [After dinner she went out for a walk with him. They walked through the housing project, took the Avenue de la République, went up the intersection and headed for Bezons. They turned around before they got to the bridge. He took her hand and put it in his pocket. A moment filled with love and hate.]

Though Ali reaches out to connect with Lil, he remains silent as they pass by Bezons, where the brutal murders of immigrants took place years before. Ali is not unwilling to share his history with Lil; he is unable because it is too painful. His silence in the face of Bezons is juxtaposed with his promise to Lil that they will return to Algeria together so that she might discover their shared heritage (17). Her father’s encouragement causes Lil to begin to read as much as possible about Algeria and the culture and origins of her people (118). Shortly after Ali’s death, when Huguette addresses Lil by her false “French” name, “Lili,” Lil recognizes that, by changing her name, she has erased the only part of her Algerian heritage that is left to her: Elle avait dû s’appeler ainsi. Elle avait si longtemps été cette Lili-liliane . . . aussi vrai qu’elle avait si souvent tablé sur l’ambiguïté de son nom de famille, lorsqu’on l’interpellait: “Hasard? comme c’est original! et Lil, c’est quelle origine?” Avait-elle jamais cessé d’arborer le ruban racoleur, d’abuser du bleu de ses yeux, de mendier publiquement, outrageusement, une histoire qui ne fut pas la sienne? (122)

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[That must have been her name. She had been calling herself Lili-Liliane for so long. It was also true that she had taken advantage of the ambiguity of her last name, whenever someone called her: “Hasard? That’s original! And Lil, where does that come from?” Hadn’t she always tried to take advantage of her blue eyes, scandalously parading around in public a history that didn’t belong to her?]

Lil’s silencing of her own origins and of her father becomes entwined with the writing act, as she associates her denial of her own name with her assimilation into the French mainstream at school (112). However, Lil’s spelling of her name betrays her true origins; she recalls one episode in which her true identity is exposed by an examiner: “AZ-Z-HAR LILA”: “Une pied-noir,” avait compris avec terreur Lil. L’autre l’avait répété une seconde fois, forçant sur l’accent: “AZ-Z-HAR LILA.” . . . La fille assise à côté de Lil lui avait donné un coup de coude. “Non, mais Lili! t’as vu comment elle t’a appelée? c’nom-là, c’est pas toi?” (123) [“AZ-Z-HAR LILA”: “A pied-noir,” Lil realized with horror.3 The woman repeated it again, exaggerating the accent: “AZ-Z-HAR LILA.” . . . The girl next to Lil elbowed her. “Come on, Lili! Did you hear what she called you? That’s not your name.”]

Lil realizes that, through her assimilation into the education system, she has temporarily bought into the ambivalent history of the colonizer that silences the history of the Other: Un temps, elle avait cru trouver refuge à l’École, de l’autre côté de la cité. Là où l’Histoire, quand elle est insoutenable, n’est pas écrite dans les manuels. . . . Elle n’y avait pas appris pourquoi, lorsque la mère donnait le nom du père, les lèvres se scellaient, les regards se troublaient, les mots sifflaient. Elle n’y avait rien entendu sur presque un siècle et demi de colonialisme. (123–124) [For a while she thought she could seek refuge at school, on the other side of the housing projects. There, where History, when it is unbearable, isn’t written in the textbooks. . . . But at school, she didn’t learn why whenever her mother mentioned her father’s name, people’s lips tightened, they looked worried, or they muttered under their breath. She didn’t learn anything about nearly a century-and-a-half of colonization.]

The education that Lil believes is a refuge from her conflict is ultimately the source of her problematic sense of identity: the “history” that isn’t written in the manuals is her own. Lil begins the path to reconciliation at the end of the novel when she packs her bag, recalling the image of the valise as home that occurs in the beginning of the novel. Her plan to return to Algeria is not an idealized “return to origins” in order to find her true identity; rather Lil returns to Algeria in order to make peace with the part of her father’s history that

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will be forever lost to her. The return of the first-person narration at the end of the novel reveals that Lil’s reconciliation takes place when she visits Nanterre, where she grew up. Nanterre represents Lil’s true “return to origins.” While visiting her childhood home, Lil once again looks at the family photo; the division and ambivalence that surrounds the family in the description at the beginning of the novel is no longer evident: “La guerre, on ne la voit pas. On ne s’en doute pas” [You can’t even see the war. You don’t even know it’s there] (138). When Lil looked at the photo in the beginning of the novel, she saw a family divided from within; at the end readers know that her family was divided by the social and political circumstances surrounding them. This description at the end of the novel portrays a family that is tenuously united, but the division that is to come is forebodingly present: La photo de famille. Nous y voilà, mais y sommes-nous? Est-ce une famille? Ils étaient deux pour la faire et la défaire, non? Le chef de famille est présent. Cela ne va pas durer. Dans une seconde, il va sortir du champ. Le père est algérien, la mère est française. En pleine guerre d’Algérie, pourquoi avoir pris la pose? Par amour? haine? Par désir ou par répulsion? (138) [The family photo. There we are, but are we there? Are we a family? It took two to make it and to split it up, didn’t it? The head of the family is there. That won’t last. Pretty soon, he’ll leave the scene. The father is Algerian, the mother is French. In the middle of the Algerian war, why pose for this picture? Out of love or hate? Out of need or disgust?]

The answer to this question is perhaps that the parents had this photo taken in order to reaffirm their presence in history; they sought to claim their rightful identity and their children’s in face of the silencing process of history. Although Lil’s family was eventually torn apart, it was not forgotten; through her rediscovery of her family’s true history, she is no longer “une fille sans histoire.” Like Imache’s novel, Farida Belghoul’s text Georgette! (1986) also raises the question of the role of education in the problematic identity experienced by many Beurs. The narrative consists of the interior monologue of a seven-year-old unnamed female protagonist who must reconcile the conflicting cultural spaces of home and school and their respective values. Education is the primary means through which the children of immigrants are assimilated into the French mainstream. Consequently, the act of writing that the protagonist learns at school “erases” the values embodied in the protagonist’s home: her parents’ “knowledge,” orality, and Arabic. The “trauma” at the base of the novel’s narrative incoherence centers on the act of writing, specifically on the protagonist’s confusion over conflicting writing lessons in her school notebook. Because her father has taught her to write in Arabic, she begins to write in the back of the notebook. Be-

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cause the beginning of the notebook is blank, the teacher assumes that the girl is not working. The opposing directions of the two forms of writing reflect the numerous levels of conflict that the protagonist experiences and that ultimately leave her silenced and physically immobilized: “Je tourne et je marche en rond” [I turn and walk in circles] (9). The novel’s opening sentence, “La sonne cloche. . . . Non, la cloche sonne” [The ring bells. . . . I mean, the bell rings] (9), mirrors the opposing languages and forms of writing that the protagonist must negotiate, and the constant back-andforth that she experiences manifests itself on a syntactical level. All of the aspects of a coherent, stable identity that are potentially achieved through writing—a sense of place, of history, and of the self—are destabilized in the narrative structure of the novel; there is no coherent core to the protagonist’s narrative identity, as the frequent flashbacks create a tangle of present and past, home and school. The protagonist’s confusion over the two opposing forms of writing— and the two cultural spaces—is played out during the course of the entire novel; there are also several additional isolated incidents that reveal the protagonist’s ambivalent, “intercultural” identity. The first occurs when the protagonist’s mother buys her the wrong kind of pencil for school. In her frustration with her mother’s mistake, which occurs because she can’t read the list of school supplies, the protagonist is confronted with her parents’ illiteracy. The parents’ incomprehension, which situates them outside the French mainstream, is evident in the discrepancy between the father’s oral French and written French (symbolized by the “HB-type” pencil), illustrated in the language in the following passage: Tu crois qu’ j’ comprends rien à tes zaches! Mais j’comprends tout! C’est pas ma p’tite morveuse qui va m’apprendre la vie! C’est pas les zaches qui comptent! Zache c’est la marque. Y’a des crayons d’la marque Zache, y’a d’autres marques. . . . Demande à ta maîtresse, tu verras! (17) [You think I don’t understand your Aitches? I understand! I’m not going to let my snot-nosed little kid tell me about life! Aitches don’t matter! Aitch is the brand. There are Aitch brand pencils, and there are other brands. . . . Ask your teacher, you’ll see!]

The humorous way in which the protagonist’s home life is portrayed in the novel reveals a great deal about the cultural conflict that she must negotiate; because humor can often serve to defuse conflict, the narrator frequently expresses her frustrations with a sort of comic indifference: Je m’asseois sur une chaise derrière moi. Je suis trop fatiguée. Surtout, je suis foutue. Je me tais et j’abandonne l’explication. Sinon, je l’énerve davantage et l’affaire devient plus grave. Il est capable de monter jusqu’au plafond et, tout en haut, il me demande un rendez-vous. (17)

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[I sit down in a chair that’s behind me. I’m too tired. I’m really screwed. I shut up and give up trying to explain. Otherwise, I’ll really make him mad, and it will make things worse. He might really hit the roof, and when he does, I’m in for it.]

This episode also serves as an example of the way in which Belghoul employs humor to illustrate the protagonist’s “intercultural” position: the gentle mocking of the parents in this passage situates the protagonist in the position of the “insider” who laughs at her parents’ incomprehension in order to mask her own pain or discomfort. Still, the parents are portrayed in a rather endearing manner; the protagonist’s mocking of them takes on a bittersweet tone that again reveals her cultural ambivalence. This same ambivalence is evident in the way in which the protagonist feels torn between accepting her father’s or her teacher’s “authority.” Because a reconciliation of the two conflicting cultures is not possible, the narrator alternately accepts that either her father or her teacher must be right. The capricious acceptance of one form of authority requires a complete negation of the other: La maîtresse se trompe! Elle ouvre mon cahier à l’envers. C’est l’autre côté le bon! . . . Mon père n’est pas un âne mais . . . il imagine n’importe quoi et des montagnes d’erreurs, empilées comme des caisses, les unes sur les autres. . . . Il est tout à l’envers. (30) [The teacher’s all wrong! She’s opening my notebook at the wrong end. It starts at the other end! . . . My dad’s not an idiot, but . . . he gets things wrong all the time, and his mistakes pile up one on top of the other. . . . He’s all backwards.]

The novel also portrays the inherent racism on the part of the teacher and the education system in general; when the teacher opens the notebook and sees that the front of it is blank, she automatically assumes that the girl has not written in it. She does not “recognize” the “other” language or writing. Indeed, the education that purportedly gives voice to the children of immigrants also silences them. Though the teacher asks the girl questions, she really neither expects nor allows a response: Elle n’est même pas étonnée par les pages blanches. A sa place, moi, je m’interroge: quoi! une petite fille scolaire sans preuve d’écriture c’est pas normal! Je regarde la gosse et j’attends la réponse du mystère! J’abandonne pas la vérité en cinq minutes! (43) [She’s not even surprised to see blank pages. If I were her, I’d be wondering: what? a little girl who doesn’t write at all, that’s not normal! I’d look at the kid and try to figure out why! I wouldn’t give up in five minutes!]

The degree to which the girl is silenced in the classroom shows in the excessive frustration expressed in the monologue that goes on inside her

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head. The protagonist never receives the recognition that she seeks from her teacher: “La vérité est dans mes yeux. Je la regarde et je lui laisse le temps de déchiffrer. Elle ne s’en occupe pas” [The truth is in my eyes. I look at her, and I give her a chance to figure it out. She doesn’t bother] (52). Rather, the teacher turns her attention to the French students. The girl ultimately renounces the “authority” of her father’s lesson when her teacher corrects her “error”: “Pourquoi je l’ai laissé, jouer avec mon cahier, mon Dieu, pourquoi? . . . Son écriture pourrie c’est des gribouillages. L’écriture à l’envers n’existe pas!” [Good God! Why in the world did I let him play with my notebook? His lousy handwriting is nothing but scribbling. Backwards writing doesn’t exist!] (58). The discovery of her father’s “mistake” represents a “coupure”—an abrupt cutting off— for the protagonist, paralleled by an abrupt interruption in the narrative. The protagonist attempts to establish order in the narrative by embracing the writing act: “Je prends mon crayon HB, j’ouvre mon livre à la page 5 et mon cahier à la page 1. J’abandonne mon père et sa folie bête” [I take my Number 2 pencil, I open my book to page 5 and my notebook to page 1. I give up on my dad and his stupid insanity] (63). Although the protagonist accepts the “authority” of the educational system, she ultimately aims to appropriate writing as her own subversive tool (63–64). Writing thus becomes a potential strategy of cultural resistance with which the protagonist might reconcile the two cultures. This idea is elaborated with the novel’s play on words of the “pot rouge” [red ink pot] and the “peaux rouges” [redskins]. The “pot rouge” that the protagonist finds on her desk represents her turn to “speak” by learning to write. The narrative segues from the “pot rouge” to the family’s watching “la bagarre à mort entre les indiens et les cow-boys” [the fight to the death between the Indians and the cowboys] (72), drawing on the correlation between writing and resistance. The family identifies with the Indians because they share the same colonized position and develops a strategy of resistance to the colonizing narratives of television Westerns by refusing to watch the end: Mon père est immobile sur la chaise. —J’espère que les indiens vont les massacrer! Je sais qu’ c’est du cinéma mais ça m’f’ra plaisir quand même. . . . Du moment qu’ils s’font massacrer maintenant, c’est déjà ça! Tout à l’heure, on l’verra pas! (73) [My dad doesn’t budge from his seat. “I hope the Indians massacre them all! I know it’s just a movie, but I’d still like to see it. . . . As long as all the cowboys are getting killed now, that’s all I care about. Later on, we won’t see the end.”]

By refusing to watch the end of the film, the family is essentially “rewriting” the colonizing narrative; the closed narrative in which the Indians always lose is replaced with an open narrative that leaves room for interpretation.

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The “peaux rouges” and the “pot rouge” offer the same potential for a postcolonial appropriation of narrative. Although the protagonist hopes that learning to write will eventually serve her own subversive ends, she also fears being assimilated into the education system and violating or erasing her own family’s culture. The potential threat that education represents to her Algerian origins becomes evident in her brother’s accusation: “Ici, tu fais la maline [sic] mais à l’école tu dis à tes copines que tu préfères les cowboys” [Here you act clever, but at school, you tell all your friends you like the cowboys] (75). The protagonist’s fears of “annihilation” are realized when she discovers that the teacher has gone through her book bag and has found her notebook, as well as other belongings that represent her relationship with her family and her cultural heritage. The teacher’s silencing of the protagonist in this scene resembles that which took place earlier; what the teacher considers to be a “dialogue” is humorously portrayed as a monologue: “Si tu veux bien, nous dialoguons toi et moi. . . . Dialoguer ça veut dire parler” [If you want, we can have a discussion later on, you and me. A discussion, that means talk to each other] (119). Rather than listen to the girl’s explanations of her belongings, the teacher expresses her own false and stereotypical assumptions about the girl’s home life: Je sais que les hommes de là-bas frappent leurs femmes et leurs enfants comme des animaux. . . . Et tu crois que tu feras des études sans jamais ouvrir la bouche? . . . Si plus tard, tu étais . . . médecin, par exemple. Vous en avez besoin là-bas. Tu imagines de recevoir des malades sans rien dire? (121) [I know that the men over there beat their wives and kids like animals. . . . And you think you can go to school and never open your mouth? What if later you wanted to become a doctor? You need them over there. How can you see patients without saying anything?]

The teacher’s remarks reveal the degree to which she sees immigrants as not belonging in France but rather “over there”; the assimilation of their children into the French educational system continues the “civilizing mission” of the colonial system. The incompatibility of the two cultures is definitively established when the teacher tells the girl, after having discovered her father’s writing: “n’utilise pas ton cahier de classe pour ces cours-là. Prends un autre cahier et laisse-le à la maison” [don’t use your school notebook for those lessons. Use another notebook and leave it at home] (124). The threat that writing represents to the protagonist’s Algerian heritage is illustrated by her encounter with an old Frenchwoman who has been abandoned by her children and who asks the protagonist to write false letters for her and sign them with the names of her sons, Pierre, Paul,

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and Jean. The woman’s request reveals that writing will always be problematic for the girl; she cannot write without assuming a French identity. The alienation that writing represents is evident as the protagonist imagines her father’s fury should he find out about the letters: Et si mon père l’apprend, il me tue immédiatement. Surtout, il gueule: “j’t’envoye à l’école pour signer ton nom. A la finale tu m’sors d’autres noms catastrophiques. J’croyais pas ça d’ma fille. J’croyais elle est intelligente comme son père. J’croyais elle est fière. Et r’garde-moi ça: elle s’appelle Georgette!” (147–148) [And if my dad finds out, he’ll kill me right away. He’ll lay into me: “I send you to school to learn to write your name. And you end up writing these other horrible names. I wouldn’t have expected that from my daughter. I thought she was smart like her dad. And look at this: she signs her name ‘Georgette’!”]

Although the protagonist had hoped to use writing as a form of resistance, this passage reveals why the writing act necessarily represents her assimilation into French culture. Because of her parents’ illiteracy, she cannot write to them; the only mother that she could possibly write to is a false “French” mother who requires the assumption of a false identity. Her father sends her to school to write “her name” and her history, but she cannot do so without writing over the Algerian part of herself. The impossibility of the protagonist’s situation is embodied in the novel’s ending, when she is apparently run over by the teacher’s car. Though the reader assumes that the protagonist is dead, the ending is left open, without punctuation: “Je saigne sur la rue. J’ai joué ma chance: manque de pot. J’étouffe au fond d’un encrier” [I’m bleeding in the street. I gave it a shot, but just my luck. I’m drowning in the bottom of an ink bottle] (163). This open ending recalls the family’s strategic viewing of Westerns and provides a possible solution to the protagonist’s problematic relationship to writing: in refusing to allow the reader to see the end, the narrative undermines its own potential to silence. We have seen that the protagonists’ problematic identities in these two novels manifest themselves in similar narratives. The narrative voices are ambiguous in both of the novels; both lack a clear narrative time frame. This lack of a clear sense of identity is also apparent in the titles: the title of the novel Georgette! belies the anonymity of the unnamed protagonist; she is a “girl without a name,” just as Lil, the protagonist of Imache’s novel, is “a girl without a story.” These novels illustrate themes common to Beur literature: the protagonists’ attempts to (re)discover their own identity, particularly the cultural conflict between the family and public space, as well as the immigrants’ problematic relationship to education, which represents “assimilation” into French culture (Hargreaves, “Resistance,” 227). Both of these protagonists must face the threat that education, writing, and colonizing French “history” represent to their family his-

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tories. The protagonists’ recuperation of their own family histories within the narrative parallels these novelists’ accomplishment: by placing the immigrant family at the center of their narrative, they are staking a claim to their place within France and giving voice to the “silenced generation.” The youthfulness of these protagonists corresponds to the relative “youth” of Beur culture within France; their claiming of their family identity represents the potential for Beur culture to transform French society. By writing the immigrant family into French literature, these authors create a literary identity that might serve as a point of departure for young Beur readers in their journeys of self-discovery.

Notes 1. Despite the overwhelming perception in France that North Africans resist assimilation more than other immigrant populations of the past (such as the Italians or Portuguese), some have argued that it is the French themselves who refuse to accept North Africans in the cultural mainstream: “Nine out of ten [second-generation French citizens of North African origin] say they want to be integrated into French society. . . . Yet when the majority of French respondents are asked whether they see second-generation Maghrebians as French or Arab, less than a third say they see them as French” (Hargreaves and McKinney, “Introduction,” 19). 2. This and all further translations from the original French texts are mine. 3. The term pied-noir refers to French citizens from Algeria prior to the revolution.

Works Cited Begag, Azouz. “The ‘Beurs,’ Children of North African Immigrants in France: The Issue of Integration.” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 18.1 (Spring 1990): 1–14. Belghoul, Farida. Georgette! Paris: Bernard Barrault, 1986. Djaout, Tahar. “Black ‘Beur’ Writing.” Research in African Literatures 23.2 (Summer 1992): 217–221. Elia, Nada. “In the Making: Beur Fiction and Identity Construction.” World Literature Today 7.1 (Winter 1997): 47–54. Hargreaves, Alec G. Immigration, “Race,” and Ethnicity in Contemporary France. London: Routledge, 1995. ———. “Resistance at the Margins: Writers of Maghrebi Immigrant Origin in France.” In Postcolonial Cultures in France, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney. London: Routledge, 1997, 236–239. Hargreaves, Alec G., and Mark McKinney. “Introduction: The Post-Colonial Problematic in France.” In Postcolonial Cultures in France, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney. London: Routledge, 1997, 3–25. Imache, Tassadit. Une Fille sans histoire. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1989. Ireland, Susan. “Writing at the Crossroads: Cultural Conflict in the Work of Beur Women Writers.” The French Review 68.6 (May 1995): 1022–1033. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of

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: De-centering Language Structures in Akli Tadjer’s Les A.N.I. du Tassili Monique Manopoulos

Published in 1984 by Seuil, Les A.N.I. du Tassili is Akli Tadjer’s first and only novel to date. Now a screenwriter for French television, he adapted his own novel for that medium in 1987. Partly autobiographical, his novel was inspired by a trip back to France on the Tassili—a ferry between Algiers and Marseille—after spending a five-month vacation in Algeria in 1983. The fourth of seven children of Algerian immigrants, Tadjer was born in Paris in 1954 and thus is by definition a Beur writer. Members of the Beur community include descendants of North Africans who immigrated to France during the 1954–1962 Algerian war and afterward. Their position in society as members of the French community who retain strong ties with the culture of their parents is complex. As such, it creates a fascinating body of literary works that focuses mainly on multiple aspects of the process of fashioning an identity within a context of pluriculturalism. Beurs very often retain the nationality of their parents (Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian) even when they have been born and raised in France. This hybridity creates a notion of foreignness/strangeness when viewed from either a French or a Maghrebian perspective. Consequently, there is a spatiotemporal displacement between the internal/national culture (Maghrebian) and the external/original culture (French) and vice versa, since the Maghrebian culture of the household can be viewed as the exterior one when the French culture serves as the interior one—that is, as one’s birthplace. In order to deconstruct this situation that can involve both acceptance and rejection of parts of themselves, the Beurs have created a culture that allows them to avoid an identity logocentrism that would imply the choice of one of the two cultures as the fixed first element of their binary polarity. 1 Culturally, Beurs are in a spatiotemporal region delineated by two poles (French and Maghrebian), but simultaneously these two poles can be inverted and be of a multiple nature. Beurs are at times both French and Maghrebian and neither French nor Maghrebian; they can be French 269

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non-Maghrebian or Maghrebian non-French. Another binary element that adds to these possibilities of cultural spaces is origin/nationality (since being born in France doesn’t automatically make someone a French citizen), which creates a fourfold basis for poly-identities. Beur culture is neither a synthesis nor a crossing of the two cultures but rather a multidimensional web made of a circumstantial network of possibilities in between the two cultures. In literature, this in-between position is reflected in the use of multidimensional language structures. The language of Beur writers reproduces this multiple identity. They resort to glissements2—semantic slides and hiatuses between the two cultures—using terms that subvert culture from both sides of the Mediterranean. Beur culture and literature are situated in a third space that opens up beyond the constant reversals of binary terms. This space comprises both terms but simultaneously transcends them in order to escape any tautology and fixity. The slippage that is created in the interstices between continual term reversals opens up to différance, which is simultaneously difference/differing/deferral: Ce jeu c’est la différance. C’est l’acte par lequel on recherche et établit les différences par un travail qui, partant de l’opposition—excessive et par là fausse—de deux concepts, en découvrira d’autres: autres concepts, autres mots. Ils marqueront toujours qu’entre les concepts—sens et nonsens, sujet et objet, moi et non-moi—il existe autre chose que la simple contradiction. (Derrida, Marges, 11) [This play is différance. It is the act by which one researches and establishes differences by a work that, starting from oppositions—excessive and therefore false—of two concepts, will then discover others: other concepts, other words. They will always point out that between concepts—meaning and nonmeaning, subject and object, I and non-I—exists something other than a simple contradiction.] (my translation)

The core concepts of the third space are space and time that perfectly fit the in-between situation of the Beurs. It is more than a situation—it is a multiple moment—expressed through a cultural and linguistic de-centering. This third space subverts the notion of fixed identity in order to avoid the uncomfortable trap of belonging/rejection that is usually the experience of those existing between two cultures. It allows a de-centering of a binary counterdiscourse (French against Maghrebian/Maghrebian against French) while simultaneously incorporating and absorbing it by a process of mise-en-abyme. Subversion of the third space reaches an implosion/explosion of signifiers and opens up to an infinite web of possibilities within the limited space of a story line. Subversion characterizes the language structures found in Les A.N.I. du Tassili that, in their turn, symbolize the Beurs’ cultural situation. In the book, numerous language structures and strategies used by Tadjer and his

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main character, Omar, belong to a semantic third space that reflects the Beurs’ cultural third space. To show how these language structures position French and Maghrebian culture back to back, I examine the following deconstructive language structures that lie at the core of this novel: reversed/reversible poles, deconstruction of belonging, parodies and pastiches, reversed/reversible expressions, remodeling of French clichés, compound names, potentialities, and finally neo-Orientalism. Les A.N.I. du Tassili relates the journey between Algiers and Marseille of a heterogeneous group of people aboard the Tassili. The main character, Omar, is a Beur on his way back from his “adjustment internship” (8) as an Algerian. The other characters are Nelly and Francine, two young French women, Chérif (another Beur), Abou Batomic and Féfer (two immigrants of the first generation), a couple of pieds-noirs (former French colonists), a Belgian tourist, and an Algerian, Ben Cheikh. From the start, the novel deconstructs its own name. Omar is an Arab, but he was born in France; he belongs to a group, but one that is unidentified. Likewise, the ship is a location, but it is mobile and in between Algiers and Marseille. In another twist, the focus of the novel’s title, A.N.I. (Arabes Non-Identifiés/Unidentified Arabs), is based on a humorous adaptation of OVNI., the French acronym for unidentified flying object (UFO). This expression functions on several levels. On the first level, it represents the “Arabs” who live in France, whether born on French soil or Maghrebian, and who are ironically described in the novel as such: Ainsi donc un peuple nouveau est apparu sur la terre en les années 1950–1980 de notre ère. Ce peuple porte le nom de son chromosome “500 000 ANI” (500 000 correspondant au nombre de cas dépistés et recensés, ANI signifiant Arabes non identifiés). Ils ont la redoutable faculté de s’adapter partout où ils se trouvent. Ils investissent tous les endroits que les chants des mosquées condamnent. Ils ont, en l’espace d’une génération, créé leur propre espace culturel, leur propre code, leur propre dialecte. (27) [Thus, a new breed of people appeared on earth in the years 1950– 1980 of our era. This people bears the name of its chromosome “500,000 ANI” (500,000 corresponding to the number of detected and recorded cases, ANI meaning Unidentified Arabs). They have the fearsome ability to adapt wherever they are. They besiege all places condemned by the mosques’ chants. They have, in one generation, created their own cultural space, their own code, their own dialect.]3

On another level, the acronym refers to the passengers aboard the Tassili who do not strictly belong to this definition, except for Omar and Chérif. They are all some kind of mutants who for one reason or another live in between two countries, France and Algeria. It also alludes to the fact that

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everybody is unknowingly an ANI, since each is a foreigner to somebody else, or as one passenger explains: “Ya trop d’étrangers dans le monde” [There are too many foreigners in the world] (130). But Omar, the Unidentified Arab per se, gives himself a fluid identity that defies any and all identity parameters that would classify him as an uncanny Other. His tool of choice is humor. Humor, like Omar, is elusive and incisive without erasing its basic seriousness. Humor is a dagger hiding within an unadorned sheath. It gives one the ability to cut the tendons of tautological language. Language creation is effervescent. Due to his overflowing and imaginative language, Omar accepts the signifier of his in-between position, but the signified is not one simplistic answer but endless spatiotemporal possibilities. Hence, the last sentence of the novel reads: “Et moi, je voyais déjà ma Garenne-Colombes” [And I could see my Garenne-Colombes] (191). Here he is alluding to the Parisian suburb that he comes from. The possessive “my” is not restrictive but, on the contrary, open. It is his own definition of the place, and it represents the potential and circumstantial identities that defy any and all inflexibility. The two poles that symbolize the position of Beurs in France are Algiers and Marseille. These two cities are simultaneously similar and different as they face each other. With one on the African continent and the other in Europe, the reader can picture Algiers as an inverted Marseille and vice versa, with the Mediterranean serving as a mirror. Pictures of the two ports in tourist guides reveal similar landscapes of a bustling city and cluttered buildings set against the deep blue Mediterranean sea. In the novel, these characteristics are symbolized by the similar position the passengers assume, both when the ship leaves Algiers and when it arrives in Marseille: “nous sommes tous sur le pont comme au départ d’Alger” [We are all on the bridge like we were when leaving Algiers] (189). Also, the Mediterranean, the common denominator, represents the third space in between two isomeric poles. “Isomer” is a term from chemistry meaning “a compound having the same percentage composition and molecular weight as another compound but differing in chemical or physical property.”4 Here, it applies to the binary opposition/similarity between Marseille and Algiers. This particularity is stressed by the significance of the ship Le Tassili, which goes back and forth between the two poles. This ship represents a primordial element for the Beurs on board ship, the one element that allows a fluid back-and-forth movement between the two cultures. Proof is the disarray felt by passengers who experience various nightmares, which all have one common feature, the loss of the third-space vehicle Le Tassili, as it is conveyed in Chérif’s dream: Eh ben voilà . . . J’ai rêvé que c’était la nuit. . . . D’un seul coup la tempête s’est levee. . . . Tout le monde était malade. . . . Les enfants y

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pleuraient. . . . Les femmes, elles criaient. . . . Nous les hommes, on soignait les blesses. . . . Le bateau y bougeait dans tous les sens. . . . Après y a eu un incendie dans la salle des machines. . . . C’était horrible mes frères. . . . En un instant le Tassili, il a coulé à pic. . . . Après, je me suis réveillé en sursaut! . . . Quel cauchemar! (180) [Well, here it is! . . . I dreamed that it was nighttime. . . . Suddenly a storm broke out. . . . Everybody was sick. . . . The children, they were crying. . . . The women, they were screaming. . . . We, the men, took care of the wounded. . . . The ship, it moved in all directions. . . . Afterward, there was a fire in the machine room. . . . It was horrible, brothers. . . . In one minute the Tassili went straight down. . . . Later, I woke up in a cold sweat! . . . What a nightmare!]

The loss of their third-space vehicle would symbolize the loss of spatiotemporal freedom and poly-identities. The two poles of departure and of arrival are confused, since each port functions as first one and then the other. Another subverted binary relationship is that of Beur/pied-noir. It deals with the reversal of origin/nationality. Whereas many Beurs were born in France and retain a North African nationality, the pieds-noirs were born in North Africa and are of French nationality. This fact is emphasized when Omar talks about the pieds-noirs, the concierges of his building; whom he calls “mélomanes maghrébins” [Maghrebian music lovers] (40). This phrase underlines similarities that neutralize their differences through the use of the preceding label pieds-noirs. A humorous detail adds to the sense of difference/similarity between Beurs and pieds-noirs; the crémerie (dairy shop) the couple used to own in Algiers was called “Au vrai beurre” [the real butter]. This evident pun unites Omar and the concierges in an image deeply rooted in French culture while differentiating them from the “true French from France.” Also, Omar neutralizes the binary even further by referring to both the concierges and the pieds-noirs passengers as “black-panards,” with panards being the slang word for “foot”; thus renaming them. This binary also reproduces that of Algiers/Marseille, where the reversals between two continents deconstruct any fixity. The passage from the first binary relationship to the second allows the multiplication of interactive probabilities. On one level, a play of possibilities exists between Algiers and Marseille. On a second level lies a play of possibilities between Maghrebians and pieds-noirs. On a third level, by combining the first two levels, a network of plays occurs among the various possibilities. It is interesting to note that this threefold play allows the text to simultaneously multiply and cancel out the differences and similarities, since the poles are isomeric. For example, we have Algiers, where Maghrebians and pieds-noirs live together before independence, and Marseille, where Maghrebian and pieds-noirs now live after independence.

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Also, Le Tassili is a ship that belongs to both ports, travels between both ports, and transports both pieds-noirs and Maghrebians in both directions. All the elements of the threefold connection face one another in space and time and create possibilities of meaning among them. Given that Beurs are in the third space of the Maghrebian/French binary, the moments of choice of one or the other element cannot be anything other than circumstantial. The various circumstantial choices prevent any fixed synthesis, since they function as deconstructed reversals. What is affirmed at one point is disavowed later. Moreover, when we study the various reversals, we find that the only point reached is the coexistence of the various and contradictory possibilities. For example, Omar demonstrates a certain kind of patriotism for Algeria, giving the reader the impression he has chosen one side; but immediately afterward he derides his own discourse by demonstrating a similar enthusiasm for his grandmother in an ironic way: Colons, je vous déteste. Je suis persuadé que si Chérif avait pu bénéficier d’une scolarité digne de ce nom, à l’heure qu’il est, ce n’est pas avec un grutier mais avec un des barons de l’économie algérienne que je débattrais. Je vous en veux. Et vive les fellouzes!5 Et vive le FLN! Et vive ma grand-mère qui, dans un moment de bravoure, empoisonna Youki, le sale clébard du père Charotte qui la faisait trimer comme une chienne dix-huit heures par jour! (33) [Colonists, I hate you. I am sure that if Chérif had been able to benefit from a good education, right now I wouldn’t be debating with a crane operator but with one of the barons of the Algerian economy. I hold it against you. Hurrah for the freedom fighters! Hurrah for the FLN! And hurrah for my grandmother who, in a rush of courage, poisoned Youki, the lousy mutt of old Charotte who worked her like a bitch eighteen hours a day!]

The first part of the passage, from “Colons” to “FLN,” seems very serious, but the following sentences have a different tone. Yet when considered in binary terms, they contaminate each other. Both seriousness and humor coexist in each part separately and in both parts simultaneously. Consequently, what remains are the possibilities created by the various deconstructions that take place in the play between the two parts of the passage. Another example of this occurs during a conversation between Omar and Chérif in which Omar, who says he is not religious, reminds Chérif that last July was Ramadan (42). When an old religious man asks him if he is going to say his prayers, Omar mentions a “blocage net” [total block] (63), meaning he doesn’t know what to do. Later, however, Omar refuses alcohol in the name of his religion when the bartender wants to sell him some pastis (105). The juxtaposition of these three incidents shows that Omar is a “circumstantial Muslim,” but his circumstantial choice reveals

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he is knowledgeable about Islam. He changes sides as a strategy to avoid any stereotypical and fixed side and to slip through the coinage of any/all stable identity/ies. Another example in this vein involves the deconstruction of a nationalistic Algerian discourse. As a reaction to a verbal attack on Algeria by a Belgian tourist, Omar answers: Moi, mon sang ne fait qu’un tour. Le nationalisme que je croyais avoir à tout jamais perdu sur le chemin de l’oubli surgit tel un diable de sa boîte. . . . C’en est trop! L’Algérie et ses révolutions traînées dans la boue par un Belge. . . . C’est pire que la fin du monde. . . . —Eh! le Belge! hurlai-je en me levant, tu vas la fermer ta grande gueule! Parce que quand t’auras des révolutions, tu pourras parler! . . . Même une révolution, c’était trop dur pour vous! . . . Vous avez été incapables d’en décrocher une! . . . Vous avez un roi comme au Moyen Age! . . . Nous, on a trois révolutions, et même quatre si l’on compte celle de Chérif. (116–117) [Me, my blood boils. The nationalism I thought I had forever lost on the path to oblivion surged up like a devil out of its box. . . . That was enough! Algeria and its revolutions dragged into the mud by a Belgian. . . . That was worse than the end of the world. . . . —Hey! Belgian! I screamed while getting up, are you gonna shut your face! Because when you have revolutions, you’ll have the right to talk! Even one revolution, it was too much for you! . . . You have been unable to even land one! . . . You have a king like in the Middle Ages! . . . Us, we have three revolutions, even four if we count Chérif’s.]

Omar’s impressive nationalistic speech is immediately deconstructed by the fact that his reward for saving Algeria’s honor is a can of beer and other trifles: L’Algérie est sauve. Chérif, Abou et Féfer me congratulent. J’ai gagné une canette de bière que m’offre le commissaire de bord. J’ai gagné l’orange-dessert que m’offre Chérif. J’ai gagné la part de camembert que m’offre Abou. Féfer le goinfre a déjà tout bouffé. . . . Il m’offre une Marlboro. . . . —Mais fallait pas les amis. J’ai pas fait ça pour que vous me refiliez vos desserts. . . . C’était comme un devoir, dis-je mi-sincère, mi hypocrite. (122–123) [Algeria is saved. Chérif, Abou et Féfer congratulate me. I have won a beer offered by the purser. I have won the dessert orange offered by Chérif. I have won the piece of Camembert offered by Abou. Féfer the pig has already gobbled everything up . . . He hands me a Marlboro . . . But you shouldn’t have, my friends. I didn’t do this so that you hand me your desserts. . . . It was like a duty, I said, half sincerely, half hypocritically.]

Here, the deconstruction functions on several levels: first, in the reversal between Omar’s patriotic outburst and the rewards he receives, and sec-

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ond, in the fact that Féfer, the other Beur, does not participate in the dessert offerings. His nonparticipation itself has multiple meanings. It introduces a humorous element that subverts the nationalistic outburst, but only indirectly. It allows Féfer to keep his in-between position, which is reinforced by his offering of a Marlboro, a brand of cigarettes that is neither Maghrebian nor French. It represents a reversal of the reactions of the others. Finally, Omar himself is in between two poles that are already ambiguous, half-sincere and half-hypocritical. Various pastiches and parodies play on deconstruction through intertextuality. When a text is parodied, deconstruction intervenes in the space between discourse and counterdiscourse and in the space between text and context. The parodies and pastiches found in Les A.N.I. du Tassili are articulated by a play between discourse and counterdiscourse, in which the counterdiscourse becomes established as a new discourse that is in its turn deconstructed by a reversal, as can be seen in the following examples. In a long passage, the narrator parodies the pseudo-objective style of scientific experts and continues to subtly change the narration into a parody of journalism and a mixture of both: Le célèbre généticien Peter Rampling, qui officie au centre universitaire de Melbourne, affirme que ce serait le résultat de la descendance d’une femme et d’un homme venus du Maghreb dans les années cinquante, le tout additionné d’un gaz d’origine encore inconnue que l’on respire en banlieue parisienne, lyonnaise ou marseillaise. Il prétend aussi que Lille Strasbourg, Grenoble seraient en voie de contamination. Quelques cas d’intoxication auraient été décelés à Plouhinec, Châteauneuf-du-Faou et Quimper. . . . Cette information serait à prendre au conditionnel, avec toutes les réserves qui s’imposent. . . . La conjugaison de leur présent et du vécu de leurs aînés devrait conduire à l’acclimatation de cette nouvelle peuplade sans problèmes particuliers, affirmait-il aux informations télévisés tout en serrant dans ses bras un petit ANI. . . . Ainsi donc un peuple nouveau est apparu sur la terre en les années 1950–1980 de notre ère. Ce peuple porte le nom de son chromosome “500 000 ANI” (500 000 correspondant au nombre de cas dépistés et recensés, ANI signifiant Arabes non identifiés). (24–27) [The famous geneticist Peter Rampling, who works at the Melbourne University Center, affirms that it is allegedly the result of the coupling of a woman and a man who came from the Maghreb in the 1950s, and their descendants mixed with a gas whose origin is still unknown and that is breathed in the suburbs of Paris, Lyon, or Marseille. He also pretends that Lille, Strasbourg, Grenoble might be on the verge of being contaminated. Some cases of poisoning have been reported in Plouhinec, Châteauneufdu-Faou, and Quimper. . . . This information is allegedly said to be taken as an allegation, with all proper reserves. . . . The conjugation of their present and the past of their elders should lead to the adjustment of this new people without any particular problem, he said on the newscast while holding a little ANI in his arms. . . .

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Thus, a new breed of people appeared on earth in the years 1950– 1980 of our era. This people bears the name of its chromosome “500,000 ANI” (500,000 corresponding to the number of detected and recorded cases, ANI meaning Unidentified Arabs).]

In this passage, scientific and journalistic styles are employed in a derisive way, especially through the use of the conditional mode in French. In a second movement, this first counterdiscourse, now established as a discourse, is in its turn deconstructed by a game in which Omar is an expert. It is a play full of humor, derision, and bravura: Ils ont la redoutable faculté de s’adapter partout où ils se trouvent. Ils investissent tous les endroits que les chants des mosquées condamnent. Ils ont, en l’espace d’une génération, créé leur propre espace culturel, leur propre code, leur propre dialecte. Ils sont beaux. Ils sont forts. Ils savent d’un seul coup d’oeil faire la différence entre un vrai et un faux ANI. . . . Ce sont les rois de la démerde, les rois de la navigation en eau trouble. . . . Alors, vous pensez bien que la traversée de la Méditerranée à bord du Tassili n’était pas faite pour impressionner Omar de la Garenne-Colombes. (27) [They have the fearsome ability to adapt wherever they are. They besiege all places condemned by the mosques’ chants. They have, in one generation, created their own cultural space, their own code, their own dialect. They are beautiful. They are strong. They know how to instantly discern between a real and a fake ANI. . . . They are the kings of knowing how to get out of shit, the kings of navigation in troubled waters. . . . So, you can well imagine that crossing the Mediterranean on the Tassili was not going to impress Omar de la Garenne-Colombes.]

After using elevated terms to refer to the ANI as an unwanted child or a threatening disease, Omar uses familiar terms to rehumanize them and goes even further by transforming them into modern-day heroes. Between the first and the second passage a subtle play intervenes, based on a parody of pompous style versus familiar style and seriousness versus derision. In fact, what is presented as “serious” is a joke, and what is presented in a comic tone is also a true account of Beur culture. A metamorphosis takes place that transforms an objective (scientific) discourse into the narrator’s subjective discourse, mainly through the use of “they” in both passages with a surreptitious shift in tone and meaning, a movement from parody to its reversal. When parody is abandoned, there is a shift from fantasy to reality. The narrator turns parody into a truthful discourse and reverses it by affirming the ANI’s strength, allowing the ANI to go from being an epidemic to human beings. Parodies and pastiches—of the fable of the Crow and the Fox by La Fontaine (98) and an Aznavour song (99), among others—play on a good knowledge of “true” French culture and its remodeling by an Oriental/ Occidental, as is shown in the following pastiche of La Fontaine:

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Voyant passer un couple de black-panards qui voyageait à bord d’un grand bateau blanc, Omar, poussé par une frénétique envie de fumer, leur tint à peu près ce langage: “Eh! bonjour, alors comment c’était l’Algérie? Si votre humilité se rapporte à votre nostalgie, vous devez être chez nous accueillis avec émoi.” A ces mots, le couple ne se sent plus de joie. Il ouvre un large portefeuille et laisse tomber un Delacroix. (98) [Upon seeing a couple of black-feet who were traveling on board a big white ship, Omar driven by a frenetic urge to smoke, spoke in these words: “Hey! hello, so how was Algeria? If your humility is proportionate to your nostalgia, you must be welcomed by us with emotion.” Hearing these words, the couple is overwhelmed with joy. They open a large billfold and drop a Delacroix.]6

Omar takes advantage of the situation to exploit the colonial mentality to his advantage and accomplish a reversal of poles between the colonizer and the colonized of the past, which in the present is a binary polarization between native and immigrant that functions on constant reversals of origin and citizenship. It is also interesting to note a reference to the painter Eugène Delacroix, an Orientalist turned symbol of trade between Orient and Occident. The various renovations of clichés found throughout the novel are also based on the intertextuality of canonized French culture and its reshuffling by Omar, an Oriental/Occidental. In this instance, though, it remains within the context of French slang, which is a favorite form of expression of the Beurs. Using slang situates them in a context of relationships between generations, and is also characterized by great energy. Slang is a language constantly in movement—a language that doesn’t freeze in time. It belongs to nobody in particular and surely not to the Académie Française. Anyone can let his or her imagination run free with no cultural limitations—as proved by the wide use of foreign, mostly Anglo-American vocabulary, which provides an escape from the French pole that Beurs can neither totally negate nor totally affirm. When Omar says, “J’en ai ras les Santiags” (56) instead of “J’en ai ras le bol”7 to mean that he’s had it up to here, or “pis de flic” (99) (“flic” is a slang word for “cop”) instead of “pis de vache” (“vache” is a cow’s udder, and “cow” is also a slang word for “cop”), he remains within the French side of the binary poles, but he subverts it with a slight semantic shift. Of the following two sentences—“il n’a pas dû inventer le fil à couper l’eau tiède” [he must not have invented the wire to cut lukewarm water] (67), instead of “il n’a pas dû inventer le fil à couper le beurre” [he must not have invented the butter wire], which means that he is not too bright— the first is the most interesting and complex deconstruction. The first semantic shift lies between the words beurre (butter) and eau tiède (lukewarm water). First, it avoids a bad pun on the word Beur while simultaneously

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evoking it, since the intertext—beurre as Beur—is undeniable, thereby creating two isomeric poles. Then, the expression eau tiède neutralizes the cliché, not only because of the fluidity of the chosen term but also because of the impossibility of water being cut with wire. Moreover, the water is lukewarm, which means in between hot and cold, neither one nor the other and at the same time both one and the other. Finally, the word couper (to cut) evokes impurity from the French perspective, since vin coupé (cut wine) means that the wine is diluted with water; but it evokes purity for the Maghrebian perspective, since circumcision symbolizes purity. Such a deconstructive strategy, which plays on the neutralization of French intertexts, is also found in the use of the expression “image d’Epinal” [Epinal’s image]8 applied to the Algerian town of Ghardaïa: Que reste-t-il de Ghardaïa, cité sortie tout droit de la lampe magique de Salah Eddin? Ghardaïa, fourmilière humaine, chacun son rôle, précis, clair et déterminé. Ghardaïa, où la prétendue avarice des Mozabites n’est qu’une vulgaire image d’Epinal savamment entretenue par le peuple de la côte. (58) [What is left of Ghardaïa, a town straight out of Salah Eddin’s lamp? Ghardaïa, human anthill, a role assigned to each, specific, clear, and determined. Ghardaïa, where the so-called miserliness of the Mozabites is but a vulgar Epinal’s image cleverly kept alive by the coastal people.]

“Epinal’s image” strikes right at the core of French imagery. This expression, applied to an Algerian town, reproduces the French/Maghrebian binary that lies at the core of the novel. In this passage, Omar uses both images that stereotypically evoke French culture and images that evoke a stereotypical Orient—Salah Eddin’s magic lamp—and subverts both. Other clichés are deconstructed by context. For example, some expressions are kept intact but used in an unusual context: Sur ce lumineux conseil, je la remercie et m’éclipse. Quel con! elle m’a traîné dans la fiente, s’est foutue de ma gueule et c’est moi qui la remercie. (17) [With that brilliant advice, I thank her and slip away. What an asshole! She dragged me through the muck, she made fun of my fucking face, and I am the one who thanks her.] Nous arrivons à la buvette après moult crochets. Le barman, nous voyant surgir, décapsule d’office une canette de bière. (44) [We reach the refreshment booth after many a detour. The bartender automatically opens up a beer bottle when he sees us suddenly appear.]

Although the words fiente (excrement) and moult (many a) belong to an elevated and archaic language, other words such as con and asshole belong to colloquial, if not coarse language. The new context destabilizes the stiffness of academic French and renews it.

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The invented compound names used in the novel, such as “Omar de la Garenne-Colombes,” “Accent kabylo-parigot” [Kabyle-Parisian accent], “Léthargie immigro-nostalgique,” play on great mastery of the French language by Omar as they deconstruct identity classifications linked to filiation and origin. When Omar gives himself “de la Garenne-Colombes” as a last name—which is not accepted by either the French or Algerian authorities—he positions himself in the margins of the two isomeric poles that are the basis of his identity. By doing so, he claims his uniqueness, his individuality, and his identity according to personal parameters, not according to parameters imposed by the outside. The two outsides, the French and the Maghrebian, automatically situate him as the Other on each side of the binary polarity. The only elements left are a first name (prénom, or prename in French), and what follows is a name that is a nonname. As for the last name, it looks like one because of the de that designates nobility, but it merely indicates the place he is from. This designation reiterates the two basic binary poles given by the Other, but simultaneously what is given is a volatile identity, a nonestablished and nonfixed identity. This goes against what is usually considered an official identity: a fixed last name that has been passed on from generation to generation. These marginal identity parameters are emphasized when Omar reveals that his job is “vendeur de vent à temps complet” [full-time wind salesman] (65). Other compound names use a similar strategy to deconstruct the isomeric poles of belonging. “Accent kabylo-parigot” [Kabyle-Parisian accent] (60 and 133) places his accent in the third space. “Léthargie immigro-nostalgique” [immigro-nostalgic lethargy] (108) reproduces the deconstruction established between the two poles, Magrebian and piednoir, by evoking the intertext of a previous passage when Omar mentions the pied-noir’s nostalgia toward Algeria during his pastiche of La Fontaine’s fable. Yet other compound names are a medley of open-ended terms. “Opération insertion-assimilation-digestion” (24) is an open reappropriation and subversion of what’s expected of an immigrant in a host country. “Tous les automobilistes-vacanciers-touristes” [all the motoriststourists-immigrants] (190) symbolizes the heterogeneous group composing the Tassili’s passengers. Each group is represented by one of the expressions, yet the expression as a whole can also apply to each one of them, since they are all in one way or another ANIs. All these compound names negate any belonging while at the same time claiming them because they apply to no one in particular but simultaneously to everybody aboard the Tassili. Neo-Orientalism is the epitome of the reversals Omar inflicts on the duality of Algeria and France. Although neo-Orientalism is usually based on two isomeric binaries that are simultaneously subverted, here it is based

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on two binaries (four polarities). First, neo-Orientalism must be defined in contrast to Orientalism, as Edward Said explains: “Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). This definition of Orientalism represents the appropriation of the East by the West not only as image but also as the image of the Other. This creates the first binary (Occident/Orient), which is based on a radical opposition, since the Other is placed in the non-I, contrary and hence exotic. But, as in the third space, the reversal is simultaneously as valid, as expressed by Said: “How it happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). In this quote there is an echo of the concept of inquiétante étrangeté—a term coined by Sigmund Freud (das Unheimliche) and taken up by Julia Kristeva: Tout indigène se sent plus ou moins “étranger” à sa “propre” place, et cette valeur métaphorique du mot “étranger” conduit d’abord le citoyen à une gêne concernant son identité sexuelle, nationale, politique, professionnelle. Elle le pousse ensuite à une identification—certes sporadique, mais non moins intense—avec l’autre. (Étrangers, 33) [Every native feels more or less “foreign” in his or her own “place,” and this metaphorical value of the word “foreign” first leads the citizen to a feeling of discomfort concerning his or her sexual, national, political, professional identity. Then it compels him or her to identify—sporadically of course, but nontheless intensely with the other.] (my translation)

Thus the I is defined by the non-I but also encompasses it. By extension, even the Occident is used as a referential basis, and in spite of itself. Orientalism functions on an unconscious exclusion of the same in the Other that automatically classifies the Other as a Foreigner, in which the subject insists on its quality as logos in order to hold on to its identity. Neo-Orientalism emerges from Orientalism, as the following definition by Michel Laronde shows: Tout comme le néo-orientalisme est une invention moderne de l’Orientalisme “classique” en ce que le discours néo-orientaliste sur l’Orient (donc, par translation, sur l’Etranger) est tenu par l’Oriental (l’Etranger) en position interne à l’Occident; le néo-exotisme est un faisceau de pratiques qui appartiennent au Monde oriental (donc, étrangères au Monde occidental) mais sont le fait de l’Oriental en position interne au Monde occidental. Dans les deux cas, on voit que quelque chose ne change pas: c’est la place de l’Occident comme base reférentielle du discours, ce qui

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confirme le maintien de l’Oriental dans la position d’Etranger par rapport au discours occidental. Or, ce maintien est voulu par l’Etranger luimême. (213) [Neo-Orientalism is a modern invention of “classical” Orientalism, since neo-Orientalist discourse concerning the Orient (and by translation, with the Foreigner) is made by an Oriental (the Foreigner) from a position inside the Occident; similarly neo-exoticism is an array of practices that belong to the Oriental world from a position inside the Occident. In both cases, we see that something doesn’t change: it is the place of the Occident as a referential basis of discourse that confirms the preservation of the Oriental in his position as Foreigner with respect to the Occidental discourse. But this preservation is desired by the Foreigner himself or herself.] (my translation)

In neo-Orientalism, the Oriental is simultaneously subject and object, thus representing the first deconstruction of a binary. Between these two poles there is always a spatiotemporal moment made of constant movements and their reversals. Then in a simultaneous movement of deconstruction, the binary of Occident/Orient is added, which exists in the term Orientalism itself in contrast to neo-Orientalism and its various shifts. A space opens that is made up of all the various plays between the four polarities and all the blank hiatuses that continuously occur between the various possible reversals: Orient/Occident/subject/object. In Les A.N.I. du Tassili, the pervasive neo-Orientalism becomes very pointed in some passages where Omar reveals himself as an Orientalist— in those instances in which Omar, the ANI, wants to succeed in his adjustment training in Algeria. In the following passage, Omar wears Maghrebian garb that would appear to be genuine under the Occidental gaze: Au bout de dix-huit jours, j’ai craqué. J’en pouvais plus. . . . Vidé . . . plus rien dans les tripes . . . J’ai capitulé. . . . C’est con, j’m’étais super bien préparé. J’avais toute la panoplie, sandales, saroual, quelques mots d’arabe, la crème solaire, enfin tout, quoi! (65) [After eighteen days, I snapped. I couldn’t take it anymore. . . . Drained . . . my determination gone . . . I capitulated. . . . What a frigging shame, I was super prepared. I had the whole outfit, sandals, saroual, a few Arab words, suntan lotion, well everything, I’m telling you!]

Omar’s outfit has retained only the superficial image of the exotic Oriental, as in a movie poster. He is like any tourist in search of exoticism who wants to look local or native and makes the commendable effort of learning the indigenous language before the trip. Neo-Orientalism as the novel’s main thread is the metatext of all the language characteristics that have been studied so far—the third space found in the hiatuses between the various plays on polarities. All the binaries are articulated by two main polarities (Occident/Orient) through an ANI narra-

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tor, that is, somebody in between: a neo-Oriental whose referential basis is French. Hence the main character at the connotative level is a woman: Safia (she is the exotic image of Woman, in Omar’s view, who is the main character at the level of the story line). Also, the binary of Safia/Omar adds to the complex network established by the various deconstructed polarities. Like a spider weaving her web between the Orient and the Occident, Safia is multifaceted. Her multiplicity derives from the numerous characteristics that come primarily from her name and the images it evokes. Safia lies between sapphire and sophia, between jewel and wisdom, the dream mermaid between Algeria and France. She embodies all the exoticism of The Arabian Nights. In her name, the Occidental mind feels enveloped in the perfumes of the sultry body of the veiled Oriental woman, images of odalisques painted by the French masters Jean Ingres, Delacroix, Henri Matisse: J’aperçois ma Safia qui arrive, plus belle que jamais. Son tailleur noir sied à merveille ses longs cheveux roux. Je vais à sa rencontre. . . . Mon Dieu qu’elle est belle! . . . Pour se mettre à l’aise, elle déboutonne la veste de son tailleur d’où jaillissent les gorges de la Chiffa. (50–51) [I see my Safia, more beautiful than ever. Her suit goes marvelously well with her long red hair. I go to meet her. . . . My God, she’s beautiful! . . . To get comfortable, she undoes the buttons of her jacket from where gush forth the gorges of the Chiffa.]

This oneiric image of Safia encompasses stereotypical imagery often used to describe both Oriental and Occidental women. She wears a suit (a classical Western dress), but her eyes are underlined by kohl (Oriental makeup). Safia remains elusive. She will always be the exotic image Omar longs for on both sides of the Mediterranean and on board the Tassili, the vehicle that travels in between the two. On yet another level, Safia also symbolizes the “Arabness” that Omar is looking for at times: Que j’aimerais ne pas courir après mon arabité comme certains courent après leur bifteck. Il y a pourtant des jours où je la sens toute proche de moi. Elle me provoque, m’excite, m’effleure et me caresse. Alors, je tends une main docile et avenante. J’ai envie de l’enrober entre mes bras, la blottir fort contre ma poitrine et lui baiser le front. Je veux l’apprivoiser . . . La garce s’est glissée entre mes doigts. (187) [How I would love not to run after my Arabness like some run after their steaks. Yet, some days I feel she’s very close to me. She provokes me, excites me, brushes against me, and caresses me. So, I put out a docile and friendly hand. I want to smother her in my arms, hold her tight against my chest and kiss her forehead. I want to tame her. . . . The bitch has slipped through my fingers.]

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This inaccessible Arabness that bewitches him is like an exotic woman, desired when elusive yet no longer of interest once possessed. It is obvious that Omar does not truly want to conquer either his Arabness or Safia. He has never really approached Safia; and even when he pretends he is trying to seize his Arabness, he only dons the superficial outfit of a vacationing Orientalist. The Arabic quality he pretends to seek is a third-space Arabness that is only one of the numerous possibilities of Omar’s identity network. Like the Tassili, Omar endlessly navigates between two Mediterranean coasts, carried by the various winds of circumstance. He goes back and forth between his desires, never really wanting to reach any specific destination. Open identity reaches an apotheosis with the use of language characteristics that are in constant flux between France and the Maghreb. First are the reversed/reversible expressions that play on French clichés that concern the Orient. Second are the open-ended answers given by Omar in response to questions by other passengers. This first language strategy makes use of the same mechanism as the remodeling of clichés, but these reversals also reproduce the basic binary of Maghrebian/French. Of course, their referential basis is in the French language and its fixity. They are founded on preconceived ideas transmitted from generation to generation without any reflection about their meanings and structural mechanisms. This deconstruction is doubled, since the “Oriental” expressions used to deconstruct French clichés are themselves used in spoken French. Consequently, all the reversals end up looking like somersaults in which it is impossible to find the original movement. Many examples of this occur in the text. By observing the paradigms, one can easily see the mechanisms by which they function: Dinars sur l’ongle. ➝ rubis sur l’ongle (22) Il ne me lâchera plus les babouches. ➝ lâche-moi les baskets (94) Un chouilla bézef l’intello. ➝ un peu intello sur les bords (115) Ces querelles de minarets. ➝ querelles de clochers (127) Ils s’ennuient à 100 dinars de l’heure. ➝ s’ennuyer à 100 sous de l’heure. (155) [Dinars on the fingernail ➝ rubis on the fingernail (to pay cash) He won’t let go of my babouches ➝ let go of my sneakers (leave me alone) A chouilla bezef intellectual ➝ slightly intellectual on the edges These minaret quarrels ➝ church tower quarrels (parochial quarrels) They are bored at 100 dinars an hour ➝ to be bored at a dollar an hour (to be bored to death)]

The isomeric poles reproduced here allow constant movements back and forth between the two cultures with no pause on either side. Also, some for-

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eign/Oriental words are part of the French language—“chouilla” [a smidgen], “bézef” [not much], “babouches” [slippers]—which adds further irony. Other expressions are not French clichés in their entirety but also play on both cultures’ symbolism: Tantôt une croix façon du Sud, tantôt un croissant qui n’attendait plus que son petit café noir. (15) [Sometimes a cross in the southern style, sometimes a croissant that waited only for its little black coffee.] Croix de bois, croix de fer si je mens. . . . J’ai levé la main droite et craché par terre! (27) [Wooden cross, iron cross if I lie. . . . I raised my right hand and spat on the ground!] Puis se retournant il me menace par la foudre d’Allah de m’expédier à vingt mille lieues sous les mers rejoindre le capitaine Nemo. (160) [Then turning around he threatens me with Allah’s thunder that will send me 20,000 leagues under the sea to join Captain Nemo.]

In the first example, each main expression functions on several levels. The “croix du Sud” evokes both the Mediterranean South and a neutral stellar dimension, since it avoids any notion of “country”; the “croissant” is simultaneously a symbol for Algeria and France. Everything is then set back-to-back, since it is drowned in “café noir,” a multidimensional symbol: coffee is a stereotypical staple of French culture, and black is the symbolic color of the African continent. As for the second sentence, Omar swears by borrowing from both cultures and yet does not finish his phrase as anticipated. He swears on the cross in a French manner, but without finishing the expression as expected (“je vais en enfer”—the “I’ll go to Hell” is missing). Then he resorts to the Mediterranean custom of spitting on the ground to seal a deal. But once again, any possible conclusion is drenched in the irony of a spit—another “purifying” liquid that takes the expression beyond either/both sides. The third example is based on the evocation of Allah, which is then counterbalanced with the evocation of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, a figure belonging to the French literary canon. Also, Nemo is from India and hence Oriental. Cultural references to both sides are again drowned “a thousand leagues under the sea” in an ultimate deconstructive abyss (abyme). In these three examples, all plays on both cultures deconstruct all that is said and remain open-ended because they are washed away by some sort of liquid while everything is taking place on a ship that floats on the Mediterranean, in exactly the same way Omar floats in between two multiple cultures. When Omar talks about himself, he never quite reveals himself. He pretends to do so, but either each revelation turns out to de-center any reference, or every sentence he starts remains incomplete. The main sentence

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he uses to define himself is “vendeur de vent à temps complet dans une soufflerie” (69) [full-time wind salesman in a wind tunnel]. According to this response, Omar is air that goes everywhere. And when other characters try to solicit personal information from him, he evades all answers. In one instance, he finishes all his replies in ellipses (29–30): —“Qu’est-ce que tu as comme voiture?” —Ben, j’en ai pas. —“Comment tu fais pour te balader alors?” —Je réponds que . . . —“T’as vu comme c’est bon Alger?” —Je réponds que je l’ai vu et que c’est bon. —“Qu’est-ce que tu fais comme métier?” —Je réponds que . . . —“J’connaissais pas . . . et ça paie?” —Je réponds que ça paie mon oxygène quotidien, et que pour le moment j’en demande pas plus. —“Ah bon!” fait-il étonné . . . “Et ton oxygène, ça fait combien en francs?” ironise-t’il. —Pas convertible! ... —“T’as de la chance . . . Tu vas prendre le train à Marseille.” —Je réponds que . . . [—“What kind of car do you have?” —Well, none. —“So how do you go out, then?” —I’ll say . . . —“Did you see how good Algiers is?” —I answer that I saw and it’s good. —“What is your job?” —I’ll say . . . —“I didn’t know . . . and it pays?” —I answer it pays for my daily oxygen, and that for now that’s all I ask for. —“Ah,” he says surprised, “and how much is it in French francs?” ironically. —Not convertible! ... —“You’re lucky. Are you gonna take the train in Marseille?” —I’ll say . . . ] ...

Astute at dodging questions, Omar gives readers no information in this dialogue. He does the same thing in a conversation with Nelly, a French social worker, when she questions Omar in order to learn his identity. Omar deconstructs all the questions, as in the following example: —O.K.: as-tu déjà eu affaire au racisme?

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—Eh ben, je dois l’avouer, j’ai eu affaire au racisme très tard . . . ça m’a pris très tard. Un soir un cousin est venu passer une nuit à la maison. . . . Mon vieux très chaleureusement lui a proposé ma chambre. Je devais donc partager ma piaule avec ce cousin venu d’ailleurs et qui n’avait d’autre famille pour l’héberger. Le matin, je faillis ne plus me lever . . . Début d’asphyxie. Y puait des pieds que c’en était insoutenable . . . Même avec du grésil, impossible de déloger l’odeur . . . Un vrai cauchemar! Depuis ce jour-là, je hais, je méprise tous les gens qui puent des pinceaux et ça quelle que soit la couleur de leurs pieds. (169) [—OK: have you ever been exposed to racism? —Well, I have to admit, I was exposed to racism very late . . . it got me very late. One night a cousin came and spent the night at home. . . . My old man very nicely offered my bedroom. So I had to share my pad with this cousin from somewhere who had no other family to host him. The next morning, I almost couldn’t get up. . . . Beginning of asphyxia. His feet stank so bad it was unbearable. . . . Even with deodorant, impossible to get rid of the smell. A real nightmare! Ever since that day, I hate—I despise anybody with stinky hooves, no matter the color of their feet.]

Here, Omar opens up the definition of racism. First, he reverses Nelly’s question by speaking as a racist and not as its victim (the point of view at which Nelly was hinting). Then he deconstructs the expected definition of racism by giving a very personal interpretation, since for him, it seems, racism is not a question of oppositions between two distinct poles of colors. These structural de-centering mechanisms defy any fixed identity parameters, as in the following sentence, which deconstructs the notion of the I and the Other: “Eh oui! je suis heureux de partir de ‘chez moi’ (Algeria) pour rentrer ‘chez moi’ (France)” [Yes! I am happy to leave “ home” to go back “home”] (20). Here Omar illustrates Freud’s term uncanny, according to which everybody has in themselves the I and the Other. Like his astrological sign, Pisces, and his job as a wind salesman, Omar eludes us the same way that Safia eludes him. In conclusion, all the language structures in Les A.N.I. du Tassili that subvert fixed identity parameters function to constantly deconstruct the basic binary of French/Maghrebian. Hence, they create a third-space writing that offers an open-ended text corresponding to the open-ended culture of the Beurs who, like Omar, evade any conventional identity. Omar, the ANI, Omar the Beur, Omar de la Garenne-Colombes and his ironic and self-derisory language(s) escape all categories. His deconstructed/deconstructive language de-centers any label and gives him a unique identity built upon multiple possibilities. In doing so, Omar reappropriates the inbetween situation of the Beurs. Although this placement can be perceived as a dilemma, it turns into the affirmation of a third-space position that evades logocentrism. Omar subverts any location/dislocation dilemma,

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since all loci and their opposites are simultaneously affirmed and disaffirmed. Instead of affirming the power of the Beurs as opposed to the French or Maghrebian cultures through the use of a counterdiscourse, Omar’s language and identity are both/neither that of the I and/or Other, the French and/or the Maghrebian.

Notes 1. A binary polarity is a binary opposition in which a hierarchy is established, with the first term dominant and the second term subservient. 2. This term is defined by Roland Barthes in Degré zéro de l’écriture. 3. All translations of Tadjers’s text are mine. 4. The definitions comes from The American Heritage Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985). The concept is more specifically used by Michel Laronde in Autour du roman beur. 5. “Fellouzes” and “FLN” refer to the Algerian freedom fighters during the war of independence. 6. Delacroix was a nineteenth-century French painter. Here his name refers to the 100 French franc bill, which features his portrait. 7. “Santiags” are a kind of boots popular among youngsters who live in the banlieue. “Bol” is a French cup used for café-au-lait. 8. The “Images d’Epinal” are popular etchings that, since 1800, have depicted stereotypical aspects of French culture and literature. They are deeply inscribed in French cultural imagery. The expression, now widely used in ordinary language, represents the core of an idealized France and is somewhat the equivalent to Norman Rockwell’s idealized paintings of America.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Degré zéro de l’écriture. Paris: Seuil, 1953. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Hargreaves, Alec. Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction. Oxford: Berg, 1997. Kristeva, Julia. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Fayard, 1988. Laronde, Michel. Autour du roman beur. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1983. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Tadjer, Akli. Les A.N.I. du Tassili. Paris: Seuil, 1984.

16

: Storytelling on the Run in Leïla Sebbar’s She’ razade Jean-Louis Hippolyte

N’appartenir à aucun lieu, aucun temps, aucun amour. L’origine perdue, l’enracinement impossible, la mémoire plongeante, le présent en suspens. L’espace de l’étranger est un train en marche, un avion en vol, la transition même qui exclut l’arrêt. De repères, point. Son temps? Celui d’une résurrection qui se souvient de la mort et d’avant, mais manque la gloire d’être au-delà: juste l’impression d’un sursis, d’avoir échappé. (Kristeva, Etrangers, 17–18) [Not belonging to any place, any time, any love. A lost origin, the impossibility to take root, a rummaging memory, the present in abeyance. The space of the foreigner is a moving train, a plane in flight, the very transition that precludes stopping. As to landmarks, there are none. His time? The time of a resurrection that remembers death and what happened before but misses the glory of being beyond: merely the feeling of a reprieve, of having gotten away. (Strangers, 7–8)]

Leïla Sebbar has written an autofictional trilogy that goes from Fatima, ou les Algériennes au square (1981) to the Carnets de Shérazade (1985), of which Shérazade, 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts (1982) constitutes the central and most accomplished segment and the one upon which I focus here. The triple bildungsroman describes the urban fracture where young North African or second- or third-generation women of North African origin confront the problem of bilingualism and biculturalism. Sebbar’s trilogy attempts to provide an answer, albeit fictional, to the questions posed by young Beurettes in a fast-changing French society that has brought back into itself the previously exotic and marginal presence of Algeria, the former colony.1 Thus, in a paradoxical move, Algeria, because it has become a lieu de mémoire constitutive of French identity, eludes North African immigrants. Shérazade plays out like a double escape and a double transgression of the familial microcosm and of the societal macrocosm, of their parallel presuppositions concerning race, class, and gender. It comes as no surprise, then, that the key narrative trope of this novel is the “fugue” (fugue but also runaway), the trivial event foregrounding the structural pattern and vice versa. 289

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Sebbar’s novel depicts a radically postmodern Parisian milieu, where alienation and embourgeoisement [adopting a bourgeois life style and values] exist side by side, where individuals from different social classes and different paths of life interact through a dynamic that eliminates diversity for a shallow homogeneity and in the process constitutes a specious cultural capital that is superficial and meaningless. The novel reads like a series of slices of life, a fractal ensemble organized around one narrative pole, Shérazade—the main protagonist—with whom each and every other character interacts at some point in the narrative. In the chaotic economy of the novel, Shérazade functions as a strange attractor to whom the loose and wandering strands of the text are tied and from which they become untied as resolution (or absence thereof) renders them obsolete, as narrative subplots finally exhaust their potentiality, like all stories when they come to an end. Sebbar’s minimalist style translates the banal simplicity of everyday life, as the text’s narrative polyphony presents the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives, emphasizing more particularly the singularity of each character’s experience through the extended use of monologues. Indeed, the myriad voices of Shérazade rarely meet, and more often than not dialogues give way to voices that pursue or echo each other, as in a fugue. In that sense, the disorganization of the narrative, the 1001 episodes of Shérazade, underscore the postmodern fragmentation that the text addresses. These episodes also speak of the violation of tradition by modernity and the consequent weakening of modernity with the return of tradition and its discontents, in a series of warped images from which the young narrator attempts to build a coherent diegesis. The Arabian Nights looms large as Shérazade’s intertext, but the differences between these two texts engage the reader. First translated into French by Antoine Galland from 1704 to 1717, the tales of Sheherazade function primarily as normative texts in the Western canon. Far from wishing to upset the political and social order, Sheherazade intends rather to dampen King Shahryar’s vengeful habit—having been traumatized by his first wife’s infidelity, he murders young virgins once he has spent the night with them. Erasing the king’s trauma of betrayal, returning him to the social manners and graces befitting a ruler, and appealing to his wounded sense of humanity—such are Sheherazade’s undisguised objectives. And besides advocating ideological conformity, for the modern reader The Arabian Nights also partakes of the hegemonic cultural discourse, Orientalism, which conflates the need to represent the Other (the Oriental) with the inability of the Other—supposedly—to represent himself or herself. Orientalism, states Edward Said, proceeds from a geopolitical awareness that has been distributed into all forms of discourses, from scholarly to economic and sociological, and as such “it not only creates but also

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maintains; it is rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world” (Orientalism, 12). As such, Galland’s translation—and subsequent ones—have played a determining role in Western conceptions and strategies of containment of the Other, the Other becoming then a thoroughly reified object, strictly curtailed by the gaze of the onlooker. Unlike The Arabian Nights, however, Sebbar’s text challenges the normality of cultural discourses and addresses the need to find new discursive venues for its narrator(s), both formal and aesthetic. In a telling moment, Shérazade’s lover, Julien, proposes to shoot a movie with her and to use a bathhouse as one of the backdrops for the film. Immediately wary of the deeply clichéd nature of such an “exotic” site, Shérazade ironically comments: “C’est tellement beau qu’on voit ça tout le temps pour les pubs de mode, dans des boutiques, ou des films publicitaires genre Club Méditerranée . . . couleur locale [It’s so cute that you see it all the time in fashion ads, or TV spots for the Club Med and the like].2 “C’est vrai [that’s true],” answers Julien, “je n’y ai pas pensé” [I hadn’t thought about it]. “Tu penses cent ans en arrière, alors bien sûr” [Sure, you think a hundred years behind],” concludes Shérazade (199), flippantly unmasking Julien’s Orientalist stereotypes (the languor of the Orient, its mystery, its perversion) and denouncing their innate racism and cultural imperialism. Mentioning the odalisques, recurring figures of the text through the paintings of Eugène Delacroix and other Orientalists,3 Julien had already stated that “elles évoquent pour les peintres de l’Occident la nonchalance, la lascivité, la séduction perverse des femmes orientales. Elles sont toujours allongées, alanguies, le regard vague, presque endormies” [for Western painters, they evoke nonchalance, lasciviousness, and the perverse seduction of Oriental women. They are always lying down, lascivious, vaguely gazing away, almost sleeping] (190). But there too he meets with resistance on the part of Shérazade, who finally tells her lover that she is not an odalisque (206).4 The eponymous heroine of Shérazade is a young Beurette whose family lives in the banlieue, the working-class outskirts of Paris. Her childhood is not an unhappy one, and her parents let her read for hours on end, a sign of relative tolerance toward what they perceive as the disquieting influence of Western modernity. Yet Shérazade decides to run away from home in the hope of finding an exogenous lifestyle that would both blend with and go beyond modernity and tradition, seeking a lost place, a lost time, plural and hybrid, what Alexandre Laumonier calls “milieu”—read as “mi-lieu”—that is, a space in between, entre-deux, necessarily marginal, a no-man’s-land (“L’errance,” 24). In this context, France becomes less a land of immigration than of migration, a mandatory space of passage as in

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a fairy tale. In fact, Shérazade, like Sebbar herself, feels resolutely French, as France assumes the role of land of exile, the ground upon which the narration of loss of memory—and its reconstitution—can take form. Beyond providing the text with its social theme, Shérazade’s wandering recalls Gérard de Nerval’s in Paris et ses alentours, for instance, or that of Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire’s Passant de Prague, George Perec’s Perec/inations, or more recently, that of François Bon’s Calvaire des chiens, as well as that of Blaise Cendrars, Victor Segalen, and Henri Michaux. From Victor Segalen, Shérazade understands that the traveler, the exiled, must be an “exote,” that is, one who is resolutely foreign to the culture he or she explores, not through cultural hierarchy but rather cultural diversity.5 The modern novel linked the figure of wandering to the development of urban space, as Walter Benjamin notes in Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle. But Shérazade’s wandering—her name signifies “open city” in Persian—is also an exploration and reveals a lack—topically lipogrammatic—and a search, not only for the missing letters (Shérazade/ Shéhérazade) but by extension for all letters, all books.6 Indeed, Shérazade is a voracious reader, seeking what Philippe Sollers calls “la vérité de l’écriture.”7 Discussing Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, Shérazade singles out the scene in which actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg pass their time reading on an island, without a goal, for the sole purpose of reading, “n’importe quoi, j’ai oublié” [just anything, I forgot what] (255), Shérazade says. The act of reading for its own sake takes on an importance that belies the need for an end, for it is the process itself that looms large in Shérazade’s vision rather than a hypothetical sense of resolution, as if the lack of titles (“n’importe quoi”) bespoke the necessary absence of names, compounding paratextual and onomastic lack. In a sense, Shérazade appears to be closer to Dunazade—Sheherazade’s sister in The Arabian Nights—than to Sheherazade herself. She must learn to plot and narrate her own destiny out of the narrative polyphony she is presented with before she can achieve an autonomous voice, in contrast to Sheherazade who, from the very beginning of The Arabian Nights, is an accomplished and masterful storyteller. Thus, in storyteller’s fashion, Shérazade decides to begin by taking notes, notably on the Orientalist paintings that play a significant role in the elaboration of her identity (243–245). This move is significantly echoed at the metanarrative level when Sebbar lists the items in the catalogue of the Matisse exhibit (196–197) or when she inventories the various items that make up Shérazade’s possessions (233–235). List making, and the enumeration of the note entries, thus constitute the first step in the elaboration of the text, the liminal move that allows Shérazade to begin understanding the significance of the images that shape her worldview:8

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Sans suivre un ordre précis, Shérazade prit son carnet rouge et noir et consciencieusement nota, d’après leur apparition et l’intention inculte qu’elle leur portait, le nom du peintre, le titre et la date de chacun des tableaux. . . . Matisse, Liseuse sur fond noir, 1939. Shérazade a écrit Matisse, avec application, sans y penser. Elle regarde à nouveau la liseuse et sur la plaque de droite elle voit MATISSE. “Merde, c’est Matisse.” . . . Elle regarde autour d’elle, tourne les pages de son carnet, c’est le premier qu’elle voit, en vrai. Son coeur bat. . . . Shérazade revient sur ses pas, essaie de procéder par ordre, n’y parvient pas, recommence, regarde avec soin chaque tableau, à cause de Matisse, sans savoir encore pourquoi Matisse. (244) [Shérazade took her red and black notebook, and as the paintings came into her field of vision, she started noting in random order the names of the painters, consciously and uneducatedly, as well as the title and date of each painting. . . . Matisse, Reader on a Dark Background, 1939. Shérazade writes down Matisse, carefully, without thinking about it. “Shit, it’s Matisse.” . . . She looks around her, turns the pages of her notebook, that’s the first one she sees, for real. Her heart beats. . . . Shérazade walks back, tries to proceed in orderly fashion, fails to do so, starts over, looks at each painting carefully, because of Matisse, without knowing why Matisse.]

In this haphazard string of images, one key painting stands out, Matisse’s Liseuse, a choice that is hardly innocent on the part of Sebbar. Though Shérazade still displays the naive attention of the uneducated (inculte), her choice falls on the image that is the most symbolically pregnant in terms of narrative or readerly authority (liseuse). Henri Matisse’s painting serves as the focal point around which all other paintings are organized (“[elle] regarde avec soin chaque tableau, à cause de Matisse”), reproducing within the framed narrative (Shérazade’s story) what is taking place within the framing narrative (Sebbar’s Shérazade), as in a mise-en-abyme, the liseuse in the painting mirroring intratextually the other liseuse— Shérazade—who watches (and decodes) the painting. If Shérazade devours books, and notably the North African texts of Mohammed Dib and Mouloud Feraoun, it is because she must control her own narrative and “most importantly” seize up on its pre-text, here the hypotexts that inform it, be they the Arabian or Persian tales that underlie the development of her own narrative as well as Sebbar’s.9 Shérazade needs to anchor her discourse in foundational narratives, not to get at an infallible truth but to divert narration away from hegemonic colonialist discourses. She seeks traces that would point back to a beginning, both ethnic and narrative, in a tension that must always remain unresolved, pending. Shérazade’s identity then becomes a space of deconstruction, lieu de mémoire and de démémoire, to quote and modify Pierre Nora’s expression, the rejection of totalitarian fixations on ethnic, sexual, and cultural identities, a space exogenous to both normative and countercultural discourses.

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The Other, Sebbar points out, now plays like a variation on ourselves and challenges our sense of normality, of here and there. “Etrangement, l’étranger nous habite” [strangely, the foreigner lives within us], Julia Kristeva elaborates: Il est la face cachée de notre identité, l’espace qui ruine notre demeure, le temps où s’abîment l’entente et la sympathie. De le reconnaître en nous, nous nous épargnons de le détester en lui-même. Symptôme qui rend précisément le “nous” problématique, peut-être impossible, l’étranger commence lorsque surgit la conscience de ma différence et s’achève lorsque nous nous reconnaissons tous étrangers, rebelles aux liens et aux communautés. (Etrangers, 9) [He is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns “we” into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.] (Strangers, 1)

From the text’s incipit—“Vous vous appelez vraiment Shérazade?” [Is your name really Shérazade?] (7)—the reader is led to understand that the protagonist’s oddly familiar name—and by metonymical association, her whole identity or multiple identities—fashion a heterodox and singular presence. Shérazade’s name bespeaks a lack and forbids closure, whether narrative or onomastic. Shérazade’s wandering prefigures the foreigner’s quest for what Kristeva calls “that country that does not exist but that he bears in his dreams, and that must indeed be called a beyond” (Strangers, 5).10 In a deconstructive move, Kristeva then concludes that “according to the utmost logic of exile, all aims should waste away and self-destruct in the wanderer’s insane stride toward an elsewhere that is always pushed back, unfulfilled, out of reach” (Strangers, 6), unorthodox and polyvalent.11 Shérazade’s quest would at first seem earmarked for a performance of romantic melancholy, but her longing has little to do with the yearning for home/land. She has set her sights “elsewhere,” beyond borders. She is, literally and metaphorically, “sans frontières” (127). Shérazade’s running away from home, justified as it may be in the light of family pressures, must also be read as the initial severing of ties that will allow her to lay claim to radical heterodoxy: “Etre dépourvu de parents—point de départ de la liberté?” [to be deprived of parents—is that where freedom starts?], ponders Kristeva: Certes, l’étranger s’enivre de cette indépendance, et sans doute son exil lui-même n’est-il d’abord qu’un défi à la prégnance parentale. Qui n’a pas vécu l’audace quasi-hallucinatoire de se penser sans parents—exempt

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de dettes et de devoirs—ne comprend pas la folie de l’étranger, ce qu’elle procure comme plaisir (“Je suis mon seul maître”), ce qu’elle contient d’homicide rageur (“Ni père ni mère, ni Dieu ni maître . . . ”). (35) [Certainly foreigners become intoxicated with that independence, and undoubtedly their very exile is at first no more than a challenge to parental overbearance. Those who have not experienced the near-hallucinatory daring of imagining themselves without parents—free of debts and duties—cannot understand the foreigner’s folly, what it provides in the way of pleasure (“I am my sole master”), what it comprises in the way of angry homicide (“Neither father nor mother, neither God nor mast e r . . . ”).] (21)

We must then understand Shérazade’s “fugue” as a double parricide, one that opens up the orthodoxy of tradition—her parents’—to the unfettered dialogical influence of the outside world. From one encounter to the next—there are nineteen characters in the text—Shérazade builds herself an identity, but an open one.12 She plans a trip to the motherland, Algeria, although she does not physically get there within the frame of the novel. The voyage remains a purely imaginary one, which is not insignificant in the metatexual economy of the text. For Alexandre Laumonier, “Le problème du lieu n’a pu se poser qu’avec la naissance et la reconnaissance de la notion de Sujet” [the problem of space is congruent with that of the subject] (“L’errance,” 20). Indeed, Shérazade’s decision to run away from her family can be rationalized easily enough: even though she is not asked to marry against her will, she is regularly presented with new suitors, whom she rejects with the same regularity. Imitating her “almost” namesake of The Arabian Nights, Shérazade keeps pushing back the fatal moment, but unlike her, Shérazade chooses to solve the problem by eliminating its causes. Yet beyond the sociocultural anecdote that serves to justify the act, the “fugue” functions first and foremost as a disavowal of spatial and personal closure. Shérazade tries at each turn to escape the implacable logic of patriarchy, vying for control of narrative performance. When Pierrot admonishes her for having walked through Saint-Denis, a red-light district of Paris, she answers curtly: “Je vais où je veux, quand je veux et ma place c’est partout” [I go where I wish, when I want to, and my place is everywhere] (88), a statement that holds true for the discourse(s) she endeavors to adopt. Carried away by her desire to emulate the Rimbaldian ideal, Shérazade flees the destiny of housewife (mère au foyer) and instead strives to become one of Rimbaud’s voleurs de feu, seeking within books—and her own writing—what is glaringly missing from her everyday life. As she attempts to rid herself of the mask of the odalisque that her lover places over her, Shérazade refuses to become objectified by the male gaze, her lover’s in particular and all men’s in general. It comes as no sur-

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prise, then, that she would be profoundly affected by photos of Algerian women taken by a French soldier during the war. Caged in by the penetrating objective of the camera, their gaze in turn reflects the violence imposed upon them: “Ces Algériennes avaient toutes, devant l’objectif mitrailleur, le même regard, intense, farouche, d’une sauvagerie que l’image ne saurait qu’archiver, sans jamais la maîtriser ni la dominer” [facing the barrel-like lens of the camera, these Algerian women all had the same intense ferocious gaze, so wild the camera could only hope to collect this wildness but not master or dominate it] (220). Repeatedly, the reader is led to understand that representation is one of the crucial tropes of Shérazade. The father’s incapacity to describe his teenage runaway daughter to the officer at the police station—where he has gone to fill a missing person report—is significant in that regard: Le père avait dû aussi remplir le signalement au verso. ll avait été obligé à plusieurs reprises de s’interrompre, pour demander des explications à l’inspecteur. Par exemple, il ne savait pas ce qu’il avait à écrire pour TYPE, et pour SIGNES PARTICULIERS il téléphona à sa femme à qui il demanda aussi des précisions sur la partie description, vêtements, sousvêtements, chaussures, coiffure, bijoux, objets divers, pour les accessoires et particularités la concernant. L’inspecteur s’impatientait. C’était long. Le père ne voulait pas écrire n’importe quoi. Cela dura une heure et le père de Shérazade avait laissé des blancs pour le signalement. (129) [The father still had to fill out the description part on the back of the form. He had to stop several times to ask for clarification from the inspector. For instance, he did not know what to put under TYPE and for DISTINGUISHING MARKS he called his wife. He also asked her for further details on the part entitled description, clothes, underclothes, shoes, hairstyle, jewelry, various items, and for the accessories and characteristics of the missing person. The inspector was losing patience. The father did not want to just write anything. It went on for an hour, and Shérazade’s father still left some blanks in the description.]

The father’s inability to give a physical description of his daughter testifies to a lack that must be filled. The other end of the equation will be provided by those whose gaze would determine Shérazade’s reality, be it that of Rosa Lux (Rosa Luxembourg) the revolutionary, of Zina the warrior, or of the odalisques, whose hieratic pose in Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger stands in stark contrast to Shérazade’s perpetual movement from one place to the next too fast for the gaze to follow. Needless to say, Shérazade refuses to become part of the photographer’s virtual harem or part of Julien’s, as much for the foreclosure of the photographic act as for the fact that a photo is a still, a moment in time, a fragment, one that necessarily curtails the breadth and span of the individual self. Julien’s love, seemingly pure and virtuous, becomes doubly alienating for Shérazade, too, for it erases both cultures, Metropolitan France and

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North African: “parce que c’est vous qui allez faire des enfants bicolores, des sangs-mêlés, des mixtes, des coupés, des bâtards, des hybrides, des travestis.” “Moi, des enfants? j’en aurai pas” [because “you” are going to have bicolored, half-caste, mixed-blood, blended, bastard, hybrid, transvestite children? Me, I won’t have any!] (192), she adds vehemently. From then on, Shérazade’s friends, like Julien, stumble upon her refusal to submit to a father figure and become a Maghrebian woman like her mother, her disavowal of illiteracy (her father’s), and her unwillingness to lose track of herself, of her past as well as of her future. Her flight from home takes her into a transitory space, that of the fashion industry, from the tawdriness of clothing boutiques to the fast-paced and transient life of jet-set parties. But such life fails to offer Shérazade the possibility of defining herself both as a woman and as a cultural being. At the squat where Shérazade seeks refuge after her flight from home, she meets a motley group of marginal figures—“subalterns,” in the words of Gayatri Spivak13—mostly teenagers fleeing from the law, their family, or both. There, the same aporia is played over, as the inhabitants of the squat find themselves divested by society of their ability to define themselves, unable through their marginality to speak themselves into existence. As in a fugue, all these marginals seek out a meaning that they explore in the space of their own variation—their idiosyncratic physical and narrative space—often with limited success. In this polymorphous and polyphonic marginality, this chaos of bodies and voices, all evolve necessarily outside the law, be it the law of the father or the law of society, and in the evanescence of the present. Although their narrative attempts often remain inconclusive, the members of the squat are at least successful in creating the embryo of a collective unit, as they mediate between parties and lay down ground rules that all are expected to follow. However, their proto-organization is a loose one, and it stays in flux, with new members coming in and old ones moving out. It proves to be an unattainable attempt to conjure up new forms or present new openings. In fact, the squat functions primarily as an open discursive community, or as a non-lieu. “A place is a communal space,” says Marc Augé, “one which invests its inhabitants with an identity, a basis for relating to others, and a connection to history. A space drained of such capacity to confer meaning is therefore a nonplace, a non-lieu,” he adds. For him, “postmodernity,” which he prefers to call “supermodernity,” is characterized by the production of nonplaces. “[These are] temporary abodes ranging from refugee camps to luxury hotels, pseudo-gathering points such as supermarkets and suburban shopping centres, points of transit along the sprawling networks of interlocking transport systems, even the means of transport themselves, together constructing a sort of nonworld, a world given over to solitary individuality, to being on the move,

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and to impermanence” (Gratton, “Post-modern French Fiction,” 258). But besides functioning as a non-lieu, the squat also stands both for cultural and structural métissage, allowing Shérazade, the intradiegetic narrator within the text, to string together the many stories of its inhabitants and bring forward the various facets of their common alienation. One of the stories featured most prominently is that of Basile, a young African cut off from European culture who chooses negritude as an alternative narrative of identity. However, his trip to Africa remains unsatisfactory, and he eventually comes back to France, although the reader does not learn the cause of the failure, which adds a narrative hiatus to the cultural one. Similarly, Pierrot’s story contains the same elements of dream and failure: its protagonist, a young Polish immigrant who embraces the life of a Marxist activist and member of a terrorist cell, fails to bring about the revolution he envisions. Like his namesake, Pierrot le fou—Godard is explicitly mentioned—he then attempts to evade society’s stifling grasp through a definitive act. But the double suicide that he plans for himself and Shérazade is only half-successful, and Shérazade survives and steps out of a plot she has not chosen for herself. Once again, she intends to tell her own story, invent its modalities, and find or create her own roots. Other people’s tales may weave in and out of the primary narrative—note, for instance, the seemingly haphazard appearance and disappearance of characters—but Shérazade’s narrative provides the novel’s basso continuo. Borrowing the Deleuzian dichotomy between “racine unique” and “rhizome,” Edouard Glissant draws a distinction between the root that would extend to meet other roots—other cultures and voices—and the monoethnic root.14 He applies this image to his concept of cultural identity in order to differentiate atavistic cultures from composite ones. If an atavistic culture incorporates two principles; genesis and filiation, in order to legitimize the possession of a land (terre) that then becomes “territory,” then a composite culture offers a rhizomatic identity, one that achieves creolization (59–60). Glissant’s definition has much bearing on Shérazade’s story, which is determined through a process of intertextual creolization and narrative cross-fertilization, whereby one character’s quest for roots intersects with another’s, as Eddie’s quest merges with Djamila’s or Shérazade’s with Julien’s. One of the strands of this rhizomatic narrative is Julien’s story, which is the main subplot of Shérazade. 15 Born to French colonists in North Africa who sided with Algerian revolutionaries during Algeria’s war for independence, Julien emulates Shérazade insofar as he also grapples with a hybrid and conflictual identity in which national and ethnic politics end up at odds with each other. But the Algeria that Julien attempts to construct is an Orientalist one and the culture he yearns for is markedly atavistic. The paintings of Delacroix and Matisse are its most telling mark-

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ers, for they delineate a vision of the Levant as a purely aesthetic exogenous space, free of war and cultural dispossession. Sebbar sets Julien squarely within the category of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropologists/explorers as he defined them in Tristes tropiques. The Algeria that Julien seeks is a mythical projection, one mediated through romantic tropes. As Lévi-Strauss explains: “quand il aborda la côte des Antilles à son premier voyage, Colomb croyait peut-être avoir atteint le Japon, mais, plus encore, retrouvé le Paradis Terrestre” [When he reached the Caribbean coast on his first trip, Columbus might have thought he had reached Japan, but even more so, that he had rediscovered an earthly paradise] (78, my translation). However, unlike his Italian predecessor—the first benchmark in Western expansionism—Julien will not attain the object of his quest. No wonder, then, that the most glaring absence in this text is that of the war(s) of Algeria, depicted not as the event itself, not through the brutal political and cultural consequences of colonization, but rather as a resolutely aesthetisized discursive space, for Julien takes Shérazade to the Louvre to see Vernet’s Prise de la Smala d’Abdel-Khader, a work that both raises the specter of the imperialist drive and underplays the sense of violation that it brings. “Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture,” Said contends, “and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world” (Orientalism, 12). Unlike Julien, Shérazade chooses to focus upon the political upheavals of the 1960s and takes it upon herself to revisit the well-worn archetype of the Oriental woman. Typically, as Julien sets his sights on the green eyes of Delacroix’s odalisque, Shérazade focuses on another green, that of the Algerian flag, an emblem of the Algerian fight for independence and, by extension, the icon of Shérazade’s own liberation—“Le vert, disaient les femmes entre elles, c’est la couleur de l’Algérie” [Green, said the women between them, is the color of Algeria] (203).16 Yet Julien remains the catalyst who brings the young woman in contact with the written roots of Arabo-Muslim culture—the reader learns that Julien works as a translator of classical Arabic. In return, Shérazade is the one through whom Julien discovers the orality of that culture and its dialectal vibration. In this way, two facets of Western modernity come unglued and patched together again under the pressure of ethnic intégration. Shérazade’s two women friends, France and Zouzou, represent two other examples of the France plurielle that Shérazade rejects, even though France and Zouzou seem to stand on opposite ends of the political spectrum in terms of their respective views on identity politics. When Zouzou wholeheartedly embraces consumerist society, taking in its materiality and its ephemerality, she symbolically trades in the letter “l,” that of “Zou lou”—a very eloquent image of resistance to colonialism—for the letter “z.” On her part, the ill-named France rejects Zouzou’s compromise and

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invokes the image of Zingha, the Angolan queen. But such resistance could be just a moot point, for the bourgeois milieu recuperates and overcomes all attempts at resistance: Cette nouvelle bourgeoisie cultivée et esthète se laissait volontiers, pour un soir, maltraiter par ces jeunes excentriques, insolents et séducteurs, nés pour la plupart dans le béton des blocs de banlieue, . . . ces bandes de jeunes métèques étaient peut-être porteuses d’un courant nouveau, il ne fallait pas les négliger. (116) [The new cultivated and esthete bourgeoisie gladly let these young rogues, arrogant and seductive, probably born in inner-city concrete, illtreat them for the duration of a night, . . . these young gooks might be announcing a new fad, one could not neglect it.]

It is worth quoting Kristeva at length on the issue: Tout indigène se sent plus ou moins “étranger” à sa propre place, et cette valeur métaphorique du terme “étranger” conduit d’abord le citoyen à une gêne concernant son identité sexuelle, nationale, politique, professionnelle. Elle le pousse ensuite à une identification—certes sporadique, mais non moins intense—avec l’autre. Dans ce mouvement, la culpabilité tient évidemment sa place, mais elle s’éclipse aussi devant une certaine gloire sournoise d’être un peu comme ces autres “métèques” dont on sait maintenant que, quelque défavorisés qu’ils soient, ils ont le vent en poupe. Un vent qui bouscule, dérange, mais nous porte vers notre propre inconnu et on ne sait quel avenir. Ainsi s’établit entre les nouveaux “maîtres” et les nouveaux “esclaves” une complicité secrète, qui n’a pas de conséquence pratique dans la politique ou dans la jurisprudence . . . mais creuse surtout chez l’indigène un soupçon: suis-je vraiment chez moi? suis-je moi? ne sont-ils pas maîtres de l’avenir. (Etrangers, 32–33) [Every native feels himself to be more or less a “foreigner” in his or her “own and proper” place, and this metaphorical value of the word “foreigner” first leads the citizen to a feeling of discomfort concerning his sexual, national, political, professional identity. Next it compels him or her to identify—sporadically, to be sure, but nonetheless intensely— with the other. Within this motion guilt obviously has its part but it also fades away to the advantage of a kind of underhanded glory of being a little like these other “gooks” (métèques), whom we know now that, disadvantaged as they may be, they are running before the wind. A wind that jostles and ruffles but bears toward our own unknown and who knows what future. There is thus set up between the new “masters” and the new “slaves” a secret collusion, which does not necessarily entail practical consequences in politics or the courts . . . but, especially with the natives, arouses a feeling of suspicion: am I really at home? am I myself? are they not masters of the “future?”]

Trying to cash in on the “mixed-blood” exoticism of Shérazade, France, and Zouzou, a famous photographer invites the three young women for a photo session of dubious nature (153). But our three “guérillères” (154) soon

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take control of the situation, overpowering the would-be pornographer and making their exit with several thousand francs. Yet such victories over bourgeois hype and vacuity are fallacious, and the only way out is often oneiric. Following in the footsteps of Arthur Rimbaud, all the marginals of the squat are resolute dreamers. For Shérazade, as well as for Djamila, Julien, Eddie, and Basile, utopia takes the form of a circular migration, a return to roots but one that is necessarily incomplete, always pending. Basile, after envisioning a life as a truck driver in the Orient—possibly and ironically the echo of a “French” movie, Le salaire de la peur—fails to integrate an African society that, in all likelihood, rejects him as a Westerner with a discourse unconnected to African realities. Eddie, a Tunisian Jew, examines his family past and seeks there a meaning that will in turn reflect upon society at large. Politically passive, Julien seeks solace in the contemplation of Orientalist works, where historical past and ideological fantasies interact. Pierrot, a seeming counterpoint to Julien’s bourgeois restraint, stands as a rebel whose political engagement remains largely discursive and often falls into revolutionary lyricism, “mélangeant ainsi, à l’insu de Shérazade, qui ne connaissait aucune de ces femmes célèbres, révolutionnaires, prophétesses et chefs de guerre, odalisques, brigadistes italiennes, poétesses arabes, sultanes turques” [thus mixing without Shérazade’s knowing the names of famous women, revolutionaries, prophets and war chiefs, odalisques, Italian Brigadista, Arabic poets, and Turkish sultans that she did not know] (103). Providing the text with yet another contrapuntal figure, Mouloud takes up the image of the revolutionary already explored by Pierrot but strips that image of its romantic glow, espousing the cause of Islamic fundamentalism. Rejecting the myth of a proletarian uprising, he falls under the spell of small-time gangsterism, in which brute violence winds up being his sole answer to political and cultural predicaments: Il lui arrivait de plus en plus souvent de discuter avec d’anciens copains de zone qui étaient soudain devenus musulmans. . . . Il n’était plus humilié parce que son père ramassait la merde des Français, et que ses frères et lui avaient été vus dans la cité menottes aux poignet. (108–09) [More and more often, he would talk with old chums from the projects who had become Muslims. . . . He no longer felt humiliated that his father was picking up French shit and that he and his brothers had been seen in the project with handcuffs on their wrists.]

But Mouloud provides Shérazade with at least one symbol of liberation: the Palestinian scarf (kaffieh), which she wears as a sign of political and sexual emancipation. Reinscribing the meaning of the scarf, Shérazade invokes and claims for herself the iconic figure of the Arab woman warrior. Ultimately, the novel ends where it started, and it is in myth and its

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deconstruction that Shérazade finds the meaning that she needs. In a reversal of Samson’s allegory and as a consequent denial of the Greek myth’s hegemonic position in Western discourses on empowerment—and disempowerment—it is by cutting her hair that Shérazade finds the strength to start her journey and leave the squat behind: Le deuxième ou troisième jour, elle était entrée chez un coiffeur de quartier, n’importe lequel, pour se faire couper les cheveux sans savoir ce qu’elle allait demander exactement. Le coiffeur parla de massacre, quand tant de femmes auraient payé cher pour des cheveux pareils. Shérazade insista. . . . . Au moment de payer, le coiffeur lui dit qu’elle ne devait rien. Elle lui avait donné ses cheveux. (242) [On the second or third day, she had walked into the first local hair salon, one of them, to have her hair cut, not knowing what she wanted exactly. The hairdresser spoke of a massacre, when so many women would have paid a fortune for hair like that. Shérazade insisted. . . . When it was time to pay, the hairdresser said she owed nothing. She had given him her hair.]

Notes 1. The strict meaning of “exotic” is “that which does not belong to Western culture.” The Greeks applied the word to all non-Hellenic civilizations, and so did the Romans to all non-Latin peoples. Later, the term was applied to communities outside the Greco-Roman world. 2. All the translations from Shérazade are mine. 3. An odalisque was originally a slave, or concubine, in the harem of the Sultan of Turkey, so the image of the odalisque compounds that of the slave. The etymology of the term (odalik) also reveals a misspelling on the part of the French, the term later becoming odalisk, so that the missing vowel accounts, linguistically and metaphorically, for the original gap or absence that Shérazade attempts to fill. 4. Later on, she writes her friends France and Zouzou that she is leaving precisely because of the odalisque (252), as she must rewrite herself outside of that image (244). 5. “Or, il y a, parmi le monde, des voyageurs-nés: des exotes,” Ségalen writes, “ceux-là reconnaîtront, sous la trahison froide ou sèche des phrases et des mots, ces inoubliables sursauts donnés par des moments tels que j’ai dit: le moment d’Exotisme. [“There are, in the world, born travellers: exotes,” Segalen writes, “they recognize, under the cold or dry betrayal of words and phrases, these unforgettable jolts given by moments such as those I have called: the Exotic moment”] (24). It is then the absolute and irreconciliable difference between subject and object which triggers the attraction between the exotic and the exote. 6. A lipogram is a text that, as a formal constraint, does not use one or several letters of the alphabet. The most famous example is probably Georges Perec’s La Disparition, written without the “e,” the most common letter in the French language. 7. In an interview with P. Werner, “Le témoin du temps qui change,” France Culture 8 (August 1997). 8. The first known examples of a written text are Sumerian tablets that enu-

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merate the products and items of bartering sessions. Thus writing did begin and still does begin as counting. 9. It is worth noticing that Mouloud Feraoun is the only writer whose name appears in a chapter title. Feraoun then becomes doubly emblematic, as an Algerian writer first but also as a Kabyle, member of a minority thrice oppressed, first by the French colonial government, then by the Algerian revolutionary government, and lately by Muslim fundamentalists. As such, Feraoun stands for resistance to all and any form of colonialism. 10. “Ce territoire invisible et promis, de ce pays qui n’existe pas mais qu’il porte dans son rêve, et qu’il faut bien appeler un au-delà” (Etrangers, 14). 11. “Selon la logique extrême de l’exil, tous le buts devraient se consumer et se détruire dans la folle lancée de l’errant vers un ailleurs toujours repoussé, inassouvi, inaccessible” (Etrangers, 15). 12. They are, respectively: Shérazade (also called Camille or Rosa or Zina), Julien Desrosiers, Pierrot, Mériem, Basile, Krim, Driss, Farid, Olivier, Djamila, Eddy, Zouzou, France (or Zingha), Véro, Rachid, Omar, Esther, and Yasmine. 13. On the “subaltern,” see Moore-Gilbert, Stanton, and Maley, Postcolonial Criticism, (6). 14. See Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux. 15. Julien appears five times in chapter headings, only one chapter fewer than Shérazade. There are three chapters entitled “Pierrot” and three “Mériem”— Shérazade’s sister. Basile, Driss, and France each head two chapters. Everyone else appears only once, at most, in chapter headings. 16. The attempt to ensnare Shérazade within the image of the green eyes of the odalisque is played over at the end of the novel (260). As Pierrot plays an Eddie Mitchell song, with the apropos title of “Les yeux couleur menthe à l’eau,” on the jukebox, Shérazade tears apart a letter she was writing to Julien, thus marking her final rupture from the vision of the odalisque.

Works Cited Adler, Franklin Hugh. “La xenologica: Incontro critico con l’altro.” Ponte 4 (1996): 54–65. Bakhtin, M. M. La poétique de Dostoïevsky. Trans. Isabelle Kolitcheff. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Benjamin, Walter. Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle. 1935. Paris: L’editions Cerf, 1993. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Chambers, Ross. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Mille Plateaux: Capitalism et Schínophrénie. Paris: Minuit, 1980. Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Formentelli, Eliane. “Les langues sont des êtres de fuite.” Littérature 77 (1990): 72–74. Glissant, Edouard. Introduction à une poétique du divers. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Gratton, Johnnie. “Post-modern French Fiction: Practice and Theory.” In The French Novel: From 1800 to the Present, ed. Timothy Unwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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Henry, Freeman G., ed. Discontinuity and Fragmentation in French Literature. French Literature Series 21. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Kristeva, Julia. Etrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. ———. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Léon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Laumonier, Alexandre. “L’errance ou la pensée du milieu.” Magazine littéraire 353 (1997): 20–25. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1955. Lipovetsky, Gilles. L’Ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Gilbert Stanton, and Willy Maley. Postcolonial Criticism. London: Longman, 1997. Nora, Pierre. Les Lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. ———. “La ruée vers le passé.” Magazine littéraire hors-série (1996): 68–70. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Sebbar, Leïla. Fatima ou les Algériennes au square. Paris: Stock, 1981. ———. Shérazade: 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux verts. Paris: Stock, 1982. ———. Les Carnets de Shérazade. Paris: Stock, 1985. Ségalen, Victor. Essai sur l’exotisme. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1978. Sollers, Philippe. Interview with P. Werner. “Le témoin du temps qui change.” France Culture (August 8, 1997). Zipes, Jack, trans. Arabian Nights. New York: Signet, 1991.

Afterword

: Mildred Mortimer

When Albert Memmi’s Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française appeared in 1964, the Tunisian writer was concerned that Maghrebian writing in French would disappear. Acknowledging the paucity of francophone Maghrebian readers, he wrote in the introduction to the anthology: “Isn’t it paradoxical, indeed disquieting for the future of this work that the writer, because he uses French, cannot be understood at home” (19).1 Although Memmi believed at that time that francophone writing would quickly be eclipsed by Arabic, this has not been the case. The chapters that form this collection have demonstrated that francophone writing of North Africa remains vibrant and prolific, sharing cultural and linguistic space with Arabic-language texts. Rather than lose a public, the literature has gained additional readers via translations into many languages (English as well as Arabic), profiting from increased interest throughout the world in postcolonial literature in the 1990s. Tracing the evolution of francophone North African literature, we find that from the 1950s to the early 1970s, Maghrebian writers were deeply involved in political and social issues. Hence, critics tended to focus upon political engagement rather than explore aesthetic dimensions of the texts. However, now that the literary corpus extends from the 1950s into the new millennium and critics have an extended view of a significant number of works, we find that aesthetics are being carefully examined by literary critics, and writers are becoming increasingly involved with experimentation in language and form. Questions of language and identity remain crucial preoccupations of Maghrebian literature, but writers explore them somewhat differently than in the 1950s and early 1960s, when the end of colonialism was the immediate goal. For example, if French remains the linguistic tool of a great number of North African writers today, it is clearly a flexible tool that, as Farida Abu-Haider and Richard Serrano have 305

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shown in their chapters, allows writers such as Boudjedra to refashion the French language, making it often somewhat foreign to the francophone non-Maghrebian reader. Not only do Arabic or Berber works and expression contribute a Maghrebian “flavor” to a text, but writers may change the word order of a sentence to resemble Arabic syntax, thereby working with the French language in a way that was inconceivable in the late colonial period. Hence, contrary to Memmi’s earlier pessimistic prediction, the French language has not disappeared from North African literary texts; it has merely been transformed. Revisiting the literature of the 1950s through the early 1970s, readers encounter a predominantly male voice and perspective. Assia Djebar, whose first novel, La Soif, was published in 1957, is the only francophone Maghrebian woman writer whose career has spanned the five decades. Now, however, increasing numbers of women writers are taking their place in the literary canon. Most importantly, they are engaged in the process of revitalizing literature, space, and language, entering public space in a society that has traditionally prohibited women from speaking freely in public. Given the emergence of women’s fiction at this point in time, it is perhaps appropriate to make the argument now that Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia, published in 1985, has had an impact upon the francophone Maghrebian novel comparable to that of Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma, published three decades before. Kateb’s female protagonist Nedjma remains a shadowy, enigmatic figure who inspires the men around her but is nonetheless a silent erotic presence. Djebar’s protagonists, in contrast, challenge patriarchal constraints, rejecting the bonds imposed upon them by Maghrebian patriarchy. Moreover, Djebar has turned to film as well as text to resist patriarchy’s attempts to restrict women’s freedom of speech, movement, and vision. In this same vein, Malika Mokeddem, representing the generation of the 1990s, not only follows Djebar in her struggle for women’s rights but opens Maghrebian fiction to new geographical space. She situates most of her texts in the Algerian Sahara, a region that was not often introduced in the literature written by indigenous writers during the colonial period for the simple reason that colonial schools were more accessible to children in the north, particularly in the large cities such as Algiers and Oran and the villages in Kabylia. Indeed, writers born in the southern Sahara view desert landscapes differently from either Westerners or northern Maghrebians, both of whom tend to consider the vast Saharan expanses to be barren, dangerous wastelands. As Laura Rice and Yolande Helm have shown, Mokeddem, for example, has developed a personal “geography of identity” that accompanied her in her migration to the north; her imagery remains tied to the desert and her narratives shaped by desert landscapes. For the young Algerian novelist, the Sahara is an intimate, sensual sphere where

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dunes, light, and shifting sands serve to contextualize her protagonists’ experiences. As Mokeddem depicts the Sahara as a physical space and spiritual refuge, Tahar Ben Jelloun, in La Prière de l’absent (1981), transforms Saharan physical space into metaphor as the Moroccan south becomes the goal of a symbolic search for self. The search for self poses the proverbial question: “Who am I ?” For the postcolonial Maghrebian subject, this question is imbued with ambiguity. Recalling that Maghreb in Arabic means “west” and thereby identifies the westernmost region of the Arab world, we find that the very term used to denote the region establishes ambiguity. For inhabitants of the Middle East, Maghreb signifies west; for Westerners, in contrast, it conveys an Oriental identity. Should North Africans attempt to construct an identity that links East and West or should they abandon a Western legacy tainted by colonialism? Is it possible to find the proper balance between two cultures and two ideologies? Finally, is it appropriate to view the West purely in terms of modern technology and materialism and the East as a spiritual source and the only true historical frame of reference for the Maghreb? The questions of cultural identity that affect Maghrebian society find an echo on the other Mediterranean shore among the Maghrebian diaspora. The challenge to Maghrebians in France is to redefine cultural space so that the North African culture of origin and the European culture in which they find themselves located—but not rooted—do not clash. Beur culture must appropriate a new space that is in some way distinct from dominant Western culture but maintains important links with it. For Maghrebian immigrants dwelling in a francophone secular state in which the Arabic language and Islam are marginalized, the task is not an easy one. An added complication for them has been Algeria’s undeclared war between the military government and Islamic fundamentalists, with massacres that have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Algerians in the past few years and acts of terrorism in France. Writers such as Leïla Sebbar, Tassadit Imache, and Farida Beghloul continue to explore the issues of Beur cultural identity, describing an “in-between” position that at its best promises biculturalism and at its worst results in rootlessness and despair. As Maghrebian literature moves into the twenty-first century, perhaps the most thoughtful and eloquent advocate of plurality and multiculturalism is Abdelkebir Khatibi. The Moroccan writer opens the door to the exploration and cross-fertilization of ideas by proposing an eclectic rather than an orthodox approach to art and literature. As Lucy Stone McNeece has shown, Khatibi continually asserts the importance of dialogue with other cultures. He is, for example, intrigued by Japan’s paradoxical relation to an ancestral past and its technical transformation into a modern state. He finds that Japan even offers an interesting paradigm for the

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Maghreb in the realm of aesthetics, exploring the creative tension between the verbal and the visual and between the sign as symbol and as figure in the art of calligraphy. Khatibi is one voice among many to speak for multiplicity in the face of the mounting tide of Islamic fundamentalism. The latter is bent on imposing a single rigid, orthodox view on a culturally diverse society that has the potential for creating multiple links with nations and cultures beyond its frontiers. Moreover, as Gilles Carjuzaa reminds us in his chapter on tradition and modernity in Algerian literature, it is clearly erroneous to place a superimposed Arab and Muslim identity upon North Africa’s Berber populations. In this collection that deals with the Maghreb as a cultural entity, we have not ignored differences among the three Maghrebian nations. For example, Marie Naudin’s chapter on Tunisian women writers reveals that Tunisia appears able to balance tradition and modernity, thereby avoiding the open conflict with Islamic fundamentalism that plagues Algeria today. Given the cultural, political, and social diversity within the Maghreb itself, we entitle this collection of essays Maghrebian Mosaic in order to emphasize diversity, plurality, and multiplicity. In art, a mosaic is a surface decoration of small colored fragments—pebbles, tiles, shells—set into an adhesive ground. Only when the small components are set in place does the overall design or motif appear. Throughout antiquity, the mosaic remained a technique used for floors and pavements where durability and resistance to wear were important factors. The title of this collection not only foregrounds multiplicity but attempts to convey as well the sense of durability, of “resistance to wear.” As we enter the new millennium, let us hope that cultural pluralism will triumph in the Maghreb, where historically conquerors have come and gone, and men and women have fought successfully to retain or regain their freedom of movement and self-expression.

Note 1. The writers who appear in this anthology are, in alphabetical order: Ait Djafer, Jean Amrouche, Malek Bennabi, Mohamed Boudia, Mourad Bourboune, Driss Chraïbi, Mohamed Dib, Assia Djebar, Mouloud Feraoun, Malek Haddad, Kateb Yacine, Henri Krea, Mostefa Lacheraf, Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi, Mouloud Mammeri, Albert Memmi, Malek Ouary, Ahmed Sefrioui, Jean Sénac, Marguerite Taos, and Nordine Tidafi. Of the twenty-one writers, seventeen are Algerian, and three are Moroccan; Memmi is the sole Tunisian. Two women, Djebar and Taos, are included in the anthology; both are Algerian.

Selected Bibliography

: Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1990. Alia, Josette. “Tunisiens, encore un effort . . . ” Nouvel observateur 1719 (October 16–22, 1997): 33–34. Alleg, Henri, ed. La Guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Temps Actuels, 1981. Alloula, Malek. Le Harem colonial. Paris: Garance, 1981. Amnesty International. Algérie. Paris: Amnesty International, 1996. Amrane, Djamila. Femmes au combat. Alger: Rahma, 1993. ———. Des Femmes dans la Guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Karthala, 1994. Bachelard, Gaston. La Poétique de l’espace. Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1984/1957. Bakhtin, M. La poétique de Dostoïevski. Trans. Isabelle Kolitcheff. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Le Degré zéro de l’écriture. Paris: Seuil, 1953. ———. Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973. ———. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972. Bessis, Sophie, and Belhassen Souhayr. Femmes du Maghreb: L’Enjeu. Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, 1992. Bizri, Balal. “La femme arabe dans le discours Islamiste contemporain.” Peuples méditérrannéens 48–49 (July–December 1989): 13–34. Cauvin, Jean. Comprendre la parole traditionnelle. Issy Les Moulineaux: Les Classiques Africains, 1980. Cixous, Hélène. “Castration or Decapitation.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russel Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minhha, and Cornel West. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990, 345–356. Cooke, Miriam. War’s Other Voices. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University. Press, 1984. Déjeux, Jean. Littérature algérienne de langue française. Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1973. ———. Littérature maghrébine de langue française. Ottawa: Editions Naaman, 1973. ———. “Djoh’a, Héros de la tradition orale dans la littérature algérienne de langue française.” Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord (1984). 27–34. 309

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Derrida, Jacques. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. ———. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Djaout, Tahar. “Black ‘Beur’ Writing.” Research in African Literatures 23.2 (Summer 1992): 217–221. Elbaz, Robert. Tahar Ben Jelloun ou l’Inassouvissement du désir narratif. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. R. Howard. London: Routledge, 1971. Gadant, Monique. Le Nationalisme algérien et les femmes. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995. Gauvin, Lise. “Territoires des langues: Entretien avec Assia Djebar.” Littérature 101 (February 1996): 73–87. Glissant, Edouard. Introduction à une poétique du divers. Paris: Seuil, 1996. Hargreaves, Alex. Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction. Oxford: Berg, 1997. ———. Voices from the North African Immigrant Community in France: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction. Oxford: Berg, 1991. Helm, Yolande. Interview with Malika Mokeddem, Montpellier, June 26, 1998. Ibnlfassi, Laïla, and Nicki Hitchcott, eds. African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Berg, 1996. Ireland, Susan. “Writing at the Crossroads. Cultural Conflict in the Work of Beur Women Writers.” The French Review 68.6 (May 1995): 1022–1033. Kristeva, Julia. Etrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. ———. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. N. Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits II. Paris: Seuil, 1971. ———. Ecrits. Trans A. Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1977. Laronde, Michel. Autour du roman beur. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1983. Lazreg, Marnia. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York: Routledge, 1994. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1955. Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. ———. “Metissage, Emancipation and Female Textuality in Two Francophone Writers.” In Life/Lines. Theorizing Women’s Autobiography. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, 260–278. Mehrez, Samia. “The Subversive Poetics of Radical Bilinguism: Postcolonial Francophone North African Literature.” In The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominique LaCapra. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. ———. “Azouz Begag: Un di zafas di bidoufile or the Beur Writer: A Question of Territory.” Yale French Studies 82.1 (1993). Memmi, Albert. Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1964. ———. Écrivains francophones du Maghreb. Paris: Editions Seghers, 1985. Miller, Christopher. Theories of Africans. University of Chicago Press, 1990. Mortimer, Mildred. Journeys through the French African Novel. Portsmouth, NH/London: Heinemann/James Currey, 1990. ———. “Entretien avec Assia Djebar, écrivain algérien.” Research in African Literatures 19.1 (Spring 1988): 197–205.

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Nora, Pierre. Les Lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. ———. “La ruée vers le passé.” Magazine littéraire hors-série (1996): 69–70. Pélégri, Jean. Ma Mère, L’Algérie. Alger: Laphomic, 1989. Poulet, Georges. Études sur le temps humain. Paris: Plon, 1964. Repr. 1969. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Sollers, Phillippe. Interview with P. Warner. “Le Témoin du temps qui change.” France Culture (August 8, 1997). Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Zéraffa, Michel. Roman et société. Paris: PUF, 1971. Zimra, Clarisse. “Disorienting the Subject in Djebar’s L’Amour, la fantasia.” Yale French Studies 87 (1995): 149–170. ———. “When the Past Answers Our Present: Assia Djebar Talks about Loin de Médine.” Callaloo 16.1 (1993): 16–131.

The Contributors

: Farida Abu-Haidar is a specialist in the languages and literatures of the Maghreb. A member of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women at the University of Oxford, she is preparing a study of the polyglossic literatures of the Maghreb. Fawzia Ahmad is visiting lecturer at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she teaches women and Islam (women’s studies) and French. Her dissertation concerns Albert Camus, Mohammed Dib, and Mouloud Feraoun, and she has published several journal articles on Francophone literature. Gilles Carjuzaa is lecturer in Spanish and French at Rocky Mountain College, Billings, Montana. He specializes in the literary history of colonialism in the Maghreb and is completing a comparative study of the literary and journalistic representation of the pre–World War I colonial conflicts in Morocco. Mustapha Hamil is visiting assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he specializes in postcolonial literature in English, French, and Arabic. He is currently completing a book on the Moroccan novel in French and Arabic. Yolande Helm is assistant professor of French at Ohio University where she specializes in Francophone literatures. She has published a book on Malika Mokeddem (2000). Jean-Louis Hippolyte is assistant professor of French at Kansas State University. He specializes in twentieth-century French fiction, particularly the “extreme contemporary.” Laïla Ibnlfassi is senior lecturer in French at London Guildhall University, UK. She has published extensively on North African Literature and 313

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is coeditor (with Nicki Hitchcott) of African Francophone Writing: A Critical Introduction (1996). Susan Ireland is associate professor of French at Grinnell College. Her research interests include the literature of immigration in France and Quebec. She is editor of the Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature (1999). Sonia Lee is professor of French at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She specializes in African literature, particularly women’s writing, and is presently working on essays written by African women of North Africa and West Africa. Monique Manopoulos received her Ph.D in French literature from the University of Iowa in 1994. She is presently doing research in the field of postcolonial French literature and is working on a monograph about Ahmed Zitouni. Daphne McConnell is assistant professor of French and Spanish at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. She is currently continuing her research on Beur novels and is also studying women’s narratives of war in Africa and Latin America. Lucy Stone McNeece is associate professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut. She specializes in francophone literature and film of Africa, the Maghreb, and the Near East, and is currently finishing a book-length study of the traces of Arabic culture in the works of francophone Maghrebian writers. Mildred Mortimer is professor of French at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her publications include Journeys Through the Francophone Novel (1990). She is currently preparing a study of spatial representation in francophone literature of Africa and the Caribbean. Marie Naudin is professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut. She has published a critical edition of the work of the Quebec writer Adrienne Choquet and has published several articles on French and francophone literature. Laura Rice is associate professor of comparative literature and colonial and postcolonial studies at Oregon State University. Her essays on gender and colonialism have appeared in Cultural Critiques, Departures, and Gendered Agents. She is currently involved in two studies on women, development, and environment in North Africa, translations of the work of

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Malika Mokeddem, and is principal investigator for a three-year USIAsupported affiliation grant between Oregon and Tunisia. Richard Serrano is assistant professor in the Department of French, Program in Comparative Literature, Program in Middle East Studies, and Center for African Studies at Rutgers University. He is currently completing a book, Neither a Borrower: Forging Traditions in French, Chinese, and Arabic Poetry.

Index

: A La recherche du temps perdu (Béji), 230 Abdelkader, Emir, 43 Abdelkrim-Chikh, Rabia, 45 Africanus, Leo, 121–122 Ahmed Ben Mostapha, goumier (Chérif), 18–19 Aimez-vous Brahim? (Zitouni), 21 Algeria: civil war, 172; desert landscape, nomadic life, 195–208; influence on Camus, 101–116; women as force of resistance, 171–189 Algerian Quartet (Djebar), 14, 213–214 Algerian Revolution, 299; bilingualism, 36–38; effect on rural areas, 136; postwar return to fundamentalism, 202–203. See also Beur writers and culture Algérie (Dib), 103 Algérie, chronique d’une femme (Fatiah), 171–189 Allouache, Merzak, 49 Les Alouettes naïves (Djebar), 213, 221 L’Amour, la fantasia (Djebar), 14, 221, 224–225 Amrouche, Jean, 39(n6) Amrouche, Taos, 14 Les A.N.I. du Tassili (Tadjer), 9, 269–288 Anthologie des écrivains maghrébins d’expression française (Memmi), 305 Antiautobiography, 160 Anticolonial period, 4–5, 17, 19, 43 The Arabian Nights, 186–188, 290–292

Arabic language, 38(n2); ambiguity of, 39(n5); formality of, 17; inadequacy of, 31–32; mandatory teaching of, 201; modern standard Arabic, 38(n1); Mokeddem’s merging of, 209(n13); as nationalist identity, 27–28; nostalgia for, 13–14; written versus oral tradition, 200 Assassinations, 13, 55 Assima, Fériel, 171–189 Attilah Fakir (Zitouni), 21–22 Autobiographical form, 85, 90, 151, 160; Beur literature, 269; Camus, 107; civil war Algeria, 179–180; Djebar’s Algerian Quartet, 216–219, 223–226; fighting Islamic fundamentalism, 201; Les Hommes qui marchent, 209(n3); Malika Mokeddem, 140–148; mental landscapes, 123; as metaphor, 150–166; Mohammed Dib, 103; Oussaid’s Mountains, 130–140 L’Automne des chimères (Khadra), 180 Autour du roman beur (Laronde), 21 Barthes, Roland, 87, 97(n3), 157, 161, 197 Bedouins, 121–122, 141, 197 Begag, Azouz, 22 Beghloul, Farida, 307 Béji, Hélé, 8, 229–237, 240, 249(n4), 249(n6) Belghoul, Farida, 253, 262–267 Bel Haj Yahia, Emna, 240 Ben Badis, Abdelhamid, 27–28 Ben Chérif, Mohamed, 18–20

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Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 6, 18, 151–166; Beur identity, 254; displacing barriers, 61; French as product of violence, 28; Sahara as metaphor, 307. See also The Sacred Night Ben Mansour, Latifa, 171–189 Ben Youssef, Nicole, 239 Berber language, 15, 27, 56, 136 Bertrand, Louis, 2 Beur writers and culture, 5, 9–10, 307; bilingual approach, 22–23; binary identity, 253–262, 269–270; identity through language, 262–267; tension of modernity and tradition, 289–302; “third space,” 270–274. See also Tadjer, Akli Bey, Maïssa, 171–189 Bhabha, Homi K., 104 Binary relationships: Beur/pied noir, 273–274; Beur writers and culture, 253–262, 269–270; Maghrebian/ French, 284–288; Occident/Orient, 281–284 Le Blanc de l’Algérie (Djebar), 13, 181–182 Blanchot, Maurice, 86 La Blessure du nom propre (Khatibi), 83–84 Blood, symbolism of, 30–32 Boudjedra, Rachid, 6, 209(n15); Arabic writing, 24; bilingual approach, 16–18; conflict presentation, 41; disentangling the past, 52; language and identity, 56–57; on limitations of French, 28–29; losing the French reader, 35–36; revitalizing Arabic language, 31–35; straddling two languages, 27–31; women’s fight for autonomy, 46 Bourgeoisie, 233–235 Boussouf, Malika, 171–189 Camus, Albert, 2, 7, 13, 101–102, 185 Canon of Medicine (Ibn Sina), 48–49 Le Cap des tempêtes (Ben Youssef), 239 Capitalism, 81 Carnets de Shérazade (Sebbar), 289 Censorship, 15 Chaulet-Achour, Christiane, 196 Chraïbi, Driss, 4–5, 41, 78(n6)

Chronique d’une Algérienne (Hayat), 171–189 Chronique frontalière (Bel Haj Yahia), 240–245 Cinema, 28–29, 33; Djebar’s exmination of the gaze, 213–214; Djebar’s restoration of voice, 225–226; male censorship of, 45; reappropriating the gaze, 214–220 Civil war, Algerian, 27, 29, 31, 33 Colonialism: ambivalence about, 3–4; exploitation of Beurs, 259–260; female symbolism of, 67–72; impact of decolonization, 235–236; increased oppression of women, 215–216; influencing literature, 90; land management, 131–132; Saharan drought, 134–135; “space” and “place,” 126–130; symbolism of blood, 29–31; women’s challenge to, 224; women’s rights during, 42 Conflict presentation, 41 Cultural systems: danger of cultural pluralism, 237; mediation between tradition and modernity, 81–82 Dakia, fille d’Alger (Dakia), 171–189 Daudet, Alphonse, 1–2 The Dead Father (Barthelme), 76 Death and mourning, 181–182 Debêche, Djamila, 204 Deconstruction, 275–279, 286–287 Déjeux, Jean, 18, 103 Delacroix, Eugène, 213–216, 220, 225 Le Démantèlement (Boudjedra), 33, 35, 46–47, 53, 56–57. See also AlTafakkuk Derrida, Jacques, 86, 97(n1), 124 Le Désenchantement national (Béji), 230, 237 Des Rêves et des assassins (Mokeddem), 20, 177, 183, 185, 203–204, 206 Development. See Modernization Dib, Mohammed, 2, 4, 7, 101–116 Dis Oualla! (Begag), 22–23 Djaout, Tahar, 9–10, 55–56, 58(n3), 174, 204, 253 Djebar, Assia, 4, 8, 204, 213–226; bilingual approach, 13–15; career longevity, 306; early Islamic women,

Index 43–45; French versus Arabic, 209(n13); L’Amour, la fantasia, 224; on language choice, 28; on the new women of Algiers, 171; reappropriating the gaze through film, 213–220 Djilani, Hajer, 239–240 Domestic violence, 186–187, 221–223 Domination and liberation, 67–68 Double blanc (Khadra), 180 Dreams and fantasies, 72–73, 75, 151 Drought, as human condition, 130–140 Duhamel, Georges, 2 East-West conflict, 82–83 Education: overcoming obstacles, 136–139; role in Beur history, 254–267 Elia, Nadia, 253 L’Eloge de l’ombre (Tanizaki), 87 L’Enfant de sable (Ben Jelloun), 18, 62, 66, 74, 165 Les Enfants du nouveau monde (Djebar), 213, 221 Eroticism, 73–74 L’Etage invisible (Bel Haj Yahia), 240, 243–247 L’Été (Camus), 101, 106–107 Et pourtant le ciel était bleu (Djilani), 240 Exil (Perse), 35–37 Exile, 3–4, 37, 204, 207; French as language of, 28; Khatibi’s voluntary literary exile, 83–84; Oussaid’s exile from school, 136; political and feminist, 140 Les Exilés de Valence (Labidi), 239 Extraterrestrials, 248 Family, role in Beur identity, 254–255 Fanon, Frantz, 13 Fantasy and myth, 72–73, 75, 151 Fatiah, 171–189 Fatima, 44 Fatima, ou les Algériennes au square (Sebbar), 289 Une Femme à Alger (Assima), 171– 189 Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Delacroix), 213–214, 216, 220 Feraoun, Mouloud, 3–5, 13

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Fikri, A. (pseud.). See Hamou, Abdelkader Hadj Filali, Azza, 240 La Fille de la Casbah (Marouane), 171 Une Fille sans histoire (Imache), 254–262 Le Fils du pauvre (Feraoun), 3 FIS. See Islamic Salvation Front FIS de la haine (Boujedra), 27 Flaubert, Gustave, 1–2 Le Fleuve détourné (Mimouni), 15, 48, 56 For Nelson Mandela (Derrida and Tlili), 124 Foucault, Michel, 162–163 French language, 38(n2); controversy over Khatibi’s use of, 86; as functional language, 13–14; future of francophone literature, 305–306; inadequacy of, 28–29; Khatibi’s bilangue, 91–92; as language of exile, 4, 28; losing the French reader, 35; Mokeddem’s merging of, 209(n13); power of written language, 202; recontextualizing through deconstruction, 278–280; role in Algerian nationalism, 27–28 Freud, Sigmund, 154 Fromentin, Eugène, 1–2 Le Futur déjà là (Mabrouk), 239–242, 245–246 Gautier, Théophile, 1–2 Gaze: colonial oppression of women, 215–216; Djebar’s examination of, 213–214; women’s challenge to, 225; women’s internalization of, 222–223; women’s struggle against, 217–219 Geography (Strabo), 121 Geography of identity, 119–130, 148, 306 Geography of Identity (Yaeger), 119–120 Georgette! (Belghoul), 262–267 Ghoussoub, Mai, 42 Gide, André, 2 Globalization, 81 Le Gone du chaâba (Begag), 22–23 La Grande maison (Dib), 7, 103–116 Graphic images, 90, 94–95

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Haddad, Malek, 3, 28 Hamou, Abdelkader Hadj, 2 Hamza (Djilani), 240 Harrouda (Ben Jelloun), 61, 75 Hayat, Nina, 171–189 Heidegger, Martin, 86, 237 Herodotus, 120–121 History: Beurs’ inability to write their own, 254–267; importance of narration of, 77–78; influencing literature, 90–91; language, identity and, 56; preservation of the past, 245–246; The Sacred Night as allegory, 68; transcription through literature, 84–86 History (Herodotus), 120–121 Les hommes qui marchent (Mokeddem), 8, 19–20, 141, 195–201 Houari, Leïla, 21 Houhou, Redha, 43 Ibn Bashshar Burd, 34 Ibn Battuta, 121 Ibn Khaldun, 52, 86, 122 Ibn Sina, 48–49 Identity, 5–6; Beurs’ binary identity, 253–262, 269–270; body as, 244–245; erasure through education, 262–267; fleeing patriarchal oppression, 295–297; French versus Arabic, 18; geography of, 7, 104–106, 113–114, 119–130, 148, 306; history, language and, 56; impact of decolonization, 236; role of language in, 93–94, 262–267; straddling North African and French culture, 298–299; in transition, 208 L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine (Laroui), 66 Imache, Tassadit, 253–262, 307 Imaksen, Naïla, 171–189 Immigration, as Beur issue, 254 L’Imposture culturelle (Béji), 230–231, 234 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 230 Independence, struggle for, 3 Indifference, to politics and religion, 241–243 L’Insolation (Boudjedra), 17, 29–33, 47–48

L’Interdite (Mokeddem), 176–177, 184–185, 196, 204–208 Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Todorov), 72 Islam: Algeria’s colonial past, 50–54; diverse customs and beliefs, 164; feminist historiography, 43–45; opposition to fundamentalism, 195. 197–200, 204; patriarchal oppression of the gaze, 213–214; religion reduced to the everyday, 241–242; rise of fundamentalism, 184, 202–203. See also Gaze Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), 176, 179–180, 184, 203, 209(n15) Itinéraire de Paris à Tunis (Béji), 230, 233–235, 240, 244–245 Le Jardin écarlate (Filali), 240, 242–243, 245, 247 Kateb Yacine, 4, 13–14, 28, 50, 52 Khadra, Yasmina (pseud.), 180 Khatibi, Abdelkébir, 5–6, 42, 81–97, 97(n1); bi-langue as cultural bridge, 91–95; cultural deconstruction, 82–84; exploring play of forms, 95–97; exploring semantics, time, technology, and space, 88–89; literary forms, 85–87; straddling cultures, 307–308 Kipling, Rudyard, 102 Kristeva, Julia, 281 Laabi, Abdellatif, 85 Labidi, Turkia (Ben Yahia), 239 Lacan, Jacques, 62–63, 66, 166(n10) Lacan and Narration (Davis), 62 Landscape, 6–7; desert space, 197–198, 208; effective use of, 146–147; influence of land on writings of Camus and Dib, 101–116; influence of Sahara on writing, 119; postindependence Tunis, 239–248; use of in Djebar’s films, 217–220 Language: controversy over choice of, 14; Djebar’s reappropriation of, 213; history, identity and, 56; multilingualism, 27–32, 81, 93–94, 289; opposing forms, 263–265; signs and symbols, 90–91; targeting

Index

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321

readers, 16–17; use of, in film, 217–218; written versus oral tradition, 195–196, 198–200, 202, 299. See also Arabic language; Berber language; French language Language of Psychoanalysis (Freud), 154 Laronde, Michel, 21, 281–282 Laroui, Abdullah, 66, 79(n11) LeClézio, J. M. G., 2, 153 Lettres algériennes (Boujedra), 27 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 42, 299 Lion Mountain (Tlili), 7, 120, 123– 130 Liseuse (Matisse), 293 La littérature algérienne contemporaine (Déjeux), 18 Littérature maghrébine de langue française (Ben Chérif), 18 Loin de Médine (Djebar), 14, 43–44

Mokeddem, Malika, 7–8, 171–189, 195–208; background, 122–123; bilingual approach, 19–20; geography of identity, 306–307; influence of Sahara on writing, 119–120; mental landscapes, 140–148 Montherlant, Henry de, 2 Morituri (Khadra), 180 Morocco: Mokeddem’s background, 140–148; Oussaid’s Mountain, 130–140 Mosteghanemi, Ahlem, 43 The Mountains Forgotten by God (Oussaid), 7, 120, 130–140 Moussali, Antoine, 16, 35 Multilingualism. See Language Muqaddimah (Ibn Khaldun), 52 Musette (pseud.). See Robinet, Auguste Al-Mutannabi, 52–53, 58(n2)

Mabrouk, Alia, 240–241 Madness, 162–165 Maldevelopment, 137–138 La Malédiction (Mimouni), 47–50 Mammeri, Mouloud, 5, 13, 50–52 Marouane, Leïla, 171 Matisse, Henri, 293 Maupassant, Guy de, 1–2 Meddeb, Abdelwahab, 5, 35 Memmi, Albert, 2, 4–5, 20–21, 106, 305–306 La Mémoire tatouée (Khatibi), 42, 85 Mernissi, Fatima, 44–45 Mesgueldi, Zohra, 63–64 Metanarrative, 93 Metaphor. See Signs and metaphors Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 68 Mimouni, Rachid, 15, 47–49, 56 Modernity, 41–42; Algeria’s colonial past, 49–54; Maghrebian alienation from, 66; mediation between tradition and modernity, 81–82; political tension, 57–58; violation of tradition, 290; women’s fight for autonomy, 42–47 Modernization, effect on rural areas, 134–135, 137–138 Moha le fou, Moha le sage (Ben Jelloun), 62 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 45

Naissance du cinéma algérien (Boudjedra), 33 Name-of-the-Father, 62–64, 72, 74 Names, importance in novels, 20–21 Narration, propositions of, 62–63 Narrative: linking past and present, 230–232; protagonist’s control of, 292–293, 298; reflecting ambiguity of identity, 255–258; resistance literature, 178–181 Nationalism. See Landscape; Sahara Nedjma (Kateb), 175, 306 Neo-Orientalism, 280–283 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 86 Noces (Camus), 101, 106 Noces de Mulet (Wattar), 55–56 Nomads, 130–141, 196–197 North-South conflict, 82–83 Notre Dame de Paris (Hugo), 292 La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (Djebar), 28, 213, 216–217, 221, 225 La Nuit de la lézarde (Mokeddem), 20 La Nuit de l’erreur (Ben Jelloun), 62 La Nuit Sacrée. See The Sacred Night La Nuit tombe sur Alger la Blanche (Hayat), 171 L’Oeil du jour (Béji), 8, 230–233, 240, 242, 244–246

322

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Index

Ollier, Claude, 84 Ombres japonaises (Khatibi), 87–88 Ombre sultane (Djebar), 14–15, 221 Oral tradition, 195–196, 198, 202, 299 Oran, langue morte (Djebar), 171 Orientalism, 290–292, 299; explored in film, 220–221; increased oppression of women, 216; Khatibi’s “translation” of, 87–88; NeoOrientalism, 280–283 Oussaid, Brick, 7, 119–120, 122–123, 130–140 Paris et ses alentours (de Nerval), 292 Le Passé simple (Chraïbi), 41, 78(n6) Patriarchal oppression, 206–207, 295; emancipation from, 64–77; the gaze, 213–214; Name-of-the-Father, 62–64, 72, 74; women’s empowerment against, 221–222. See also Gaze; Women Patrie, 107–116 Une Peine à vivre (Mimouni), 15 Pélégri, Jean, 101 Pensée-autre (a thought-other), 94 The Perfumed Garden (al-Nafzawi), 73–74 Perse, Saint-John, 35–38, 39(n6) La Peste (Camus), 185 Picasso, Pablo, 215 Pieds-noirs (French colonials), 273–274 Pierrot le fou (film), 292 Le Plaisir du texte (Barthes), 197 Play of forms, 95–96 La Pluie (Boudjedra), 17 Le Poète comme un boxeur (Kateb), 50 Politics: focus on, 305; postindependence Tunisia, 241; Saharan drought, 134–135 Poppies of the Eastern Slope. See The Mountains Forgotten by God Postcolonialism, 4–5, 15–16; cultural aesthetics, 196; mediation between tradition and modernity, 81–82; reconciling past and present, 69–72 Le Premier homme (Camus), 7, 101, 107, 112–113, 115 La Prière de l’absent (Ben Jelloun), 7, 62, 151–166, 307

La Prière de la peur (Ben Mansour), 180, 188–189 Le Printemps n’en sera que plus beau (Mimouni), 15 La Prise de Gibralter (Boudjedra), 17, 31–32, 35–38, 53 Proust, Marcel, 229, 231–232, 234–235 Quand la mer aura des ailes (Syrine), 239 Randau, Robert, 2 Rape, 74–75, 146, 206–207 Al-Rawd al-’Atir (al-Nafzawi), 73 Reality, 72–77 Religion. See Islam; Women La Répudiation (Boudjedra), 6, 39(n4), 41, 78(n8) Resistance: corporeal identity as, 244–245; literature of, 173–181; women as force of, 175–183 Rimbaud, Arthur, 86, 301 Robinet, Auguste, 2 Roblès, Emmanuel, 2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 236 Rushdie, Salman, 68 Al-Saadawi, Nawal, 76–77 The Sacred Night (Ben Jelloun), 18, 62, 78(n1), 161, 165; displacing barriers, 61; domination and liberation, 64–72; social and fictive reality, 72–77 Sahara, 7; drought as human condition, 130–140; geography of identity, 306–307; influence on writing, 119–120; “space” and “place,” 140–141; travelers’ perception of, 121–122. See also Landscape Salammbô (Flaubert), 2 The Sand Child (Ben Jelloun), 6, 64, 68, 78(n1) Sans Voix (Zinaï-Koudil), 174–175, 177, 181–183 Sebbar, Leïla, 9, 289–302, 307 Self: and Other, 157–158, 293–294; recreating, 158–160 Semantics: Khatibi’s exploration of, 88; word play, 153, 198, 273–274, 277–278 Sénac, Jean, 13

Index Sensuality and sexuality: Camus’ writings, 107; in Dib’s writings, 110–111; homosexuality, 160–162, 167(n16); madness and, 162; repression of, 78(n8); sexual liberation, 73–76 Shérazade (Sebbar), 9, 289–302 Le Siècle des sauterelles (Mokeddem), 19–20, 120, 140–148, 195 Signes du présent (review), 89 Signs and metaphors, 90–95, 229–232; in autobiographical work, 151–166; Djaout as symbol of resistance, 174; exploration through multilingualism, 93–96; exposing class issues, 233; symbolic rape, 74–75; symbolism of blood, 30–32; symbolism of male and female roles, 65–72; symbolism of women’s bodies, 62–64 La Soif (Djebar), 213, 306 Sommeil du mimosa (Zaoui), 15 Sonate des loups (Zaoui), 15 Souffles (review), 85 La Soumission (Zaoui), 15–16 Space and place, 291–292, 295; Beurs’ “third space,” 270–274 Spleen de Paris (Baudelaire), 292 La Statue de sel (Memmi), 20–21 Superstition, 164–165 Symbolism. See Signs and metaphors Syrine, 239 Al-Tabari, 14, 44 Tadjer, Akli, 9, 269–288 Al-Tafakkuk (Boudjedra), 27, 34–35 Tamazight. See Berber language Tanizaki, Junichiro, 87 Terrorism, 172–173 Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie (Boudjedra), 52–55 A Thousand Futures Lost. See Lion Mountain A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari), 79 Titah, Rachida, 171–189 Tlili, Mustapha, 7, 119–120, 122– 130 Todorov, Tzvetan, 72 Tombéza (Mimouni), 15, 47–48, 50 Tradition, 41; Algeria’s colonial past, 49–54; Beurs’ loss of, 254, 257;

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fluctuating boundary with modernity, 42; Maghrebian alienation from, 66; political tension, 57–58; weakening of modernity, 290; women’s fight for autonomy, 42–47 Translation: ambiguities and inaccuracies, 37–38; eligible material for, 32–34; revising text, 35 La Traversée (Mammeri), 50–52 Triptyque de Rabat (Khatibi), 92–93 Tristes tropiques (Levi-Strauss), 42, 299 Tunisia, 229–237 Vaste est la prison (Djebar), 14–15, 213–214, 218–226 La Vie à l’endroit (Boujedra), 27 Vivre traquée (Boussouf), 171–189 Wattar, Tahar, 55–56, 58(n3) Woman at Point Zero (al-Saadawi), 76–77 Women, 7–9; caricature of petty bourgeoisie, 233–235; domination and emancipation, 65–73, 295–297, 300–302; emancipation and identity, 172–173, 239–248, 248(n2); emerging independence in Algeria, 213–214; fight for autonomy, 42–47; as force of resistance, 175–189; French voices in Algeria, 171; Islamic demonization of, 203; postcolonial empowerment, 220–221; real and symbolic rape, 74–75, 206–207; stressing gender in writing, 171–172; symbolism of body, 62–64; victims of violence, 184–187; writing in time and space, 306. See also Gaze Woodhull, Winifred, 45 Writer-tourists, 2–3, 120–121 Yaeger, Patricia, 119 Zaoui, Amin, 15–16 Zeïda de nulle part (Houari), 221 Zenzela (Begag), 22–23 Zinaï-Koudil, Hafsa, 171–189 Zindj revolt, 53 Zitouni, Ahmed, 21–22 Zohra: La femme du mineur (Hamou), 2

About the Book

: When Albert Memmi published the first anthology of francophone Maghrebian literature, he expressed his unhappy belief that francophone writing would quickly be eclipsed by Arabic. To the contrary, this volume demonstrates that the francophone writing of North Africa remains vibrant and prolific. Two distinct periods are evident in contemporary Maghrebian letters, that of the anticolonial works appearing prior to independence and the subsequent critiques of postcolonial society. This collection examines themes common to both periods: identity, conflicts between tradition and modernity, women’s place in society, and the lives of North African immigrants living in France. Throughout, the uneasy and ambiguous relationship between the Maghrebian writer and the French language is evident, as is the ongoing political nature of North African literature. Mildred Mortimer is professor of French at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her numerous publications include Journeys Through the French African Novel.

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