The Two-Edged Sea: Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature 9781463243739

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The Two-Edged Sea

The Modern Muslim World

12 Series Editorial Board

Marcia Hermansen Hina Azam Ussama Makdisi

Martin Nguyen Joas Wagemakers

Advisory Editorial Board

Talal Asad Khaled Abou El Fadl Amira Bennison Islam Dayeh Marwa Elshakry Rana Hisham Issa

Tijana Krstic Ebrahim Moosa Adam Sabra Armando Salvatore Adam Talib

This series will provide a platform for scholarly research on Islamic and Muslim thought, emerging from any geographical area and dated to any period from the 17th century until the present day. 

The Two-Edged Sea

Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature

Nahrain Al-Mousawi

gp 2021

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2021 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܙ‬

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2021

ISBN 978-1-4632-4372-2

ISSN 2690-2249

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ......................................................................... v Acknowledgments ...................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1. Memory Work in the Mediterranean Crossing: Nostalgia in Morocco’s Migration Literature ..................... 45 Chapter 2. The Immigrant Dream: ‘Dream? Nightmare, More Like’ .................................................................................... 71 Chapter 3. Imagining the Mediterranean and Its Migrants: The Ambivalence of the Uncanny ...................................... 89 Chapter 4. Mediterranean Frontier, Mediterranean Circuit: Undocumented Migration in Egyptian Literature’s Double Imaginary ............................................................. 113 Chapter 5. Saharan-Mediterranean Transits: Impossible ‘Arrival’............................................................................. 141 Chapter 6. Death at the Border: Making and Unmaking the Migrating Body ................................................................. 169 Conclusion ................................................................................ 195 Bibliography ............................................................................. 207 Index......................................................................................... 225

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At an informal interview with a journalist in a café in Rabat, Morocco, I referenced something I read about writers who perceive the many undocumented immigrants from Morocco to be ‘abandoning’ their country. At some point, I remembered a reference to the ‘brain drain’, and mentioned that, too. I didn’t consider myself to be showing off my wide research about the topic, I was just desperate to get the journalist to give me his opinion. To his credit, the journalist stared at me with some degree of incredulity and said, ‘Do you know that some of these people who get in a boat to cross the Mediterranean have never even seen a sea or a lake in their lives? Many don’t even know how to swim! These people are desperate! Abandonment?!’ This moment clarified an important point for me: as much as a discussion of borders and migration thrived on the discursive and metaphorical potential of borders, when I discussed issues like undocumented migration and literature about undocumented migration, I had to always mind the way the ideological or metaphorical and the real informed each other. Of course it didn’t mean that I had to relinquish metaphors, but be attentive to the ways the discursive and the real kept an eye on each other. And, so I want to thank that journalist for encouraging me to keep an eye on the various modes that have insinuated themselves in various discussions on migration, be they ideological, fantastical, metaphorical, or real. Writing this book would not have been possible without the generous support of the EUME (Europe in the Middle East) fellowship at the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Freie Universtät in Berlin. Their excellent organization and unflagging vii

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support afforded me the valuable time I needed to read and write, more than I thought was possible. I would especially like to thank Georges Khalil and Manuela Ocampo for their flawless organization skills and kindness, and Maaike Voorhoeve for her friendship at this productive and challenging time away from home. This book would also not have been possible without the support of the Modern Arabic Literature and Culture fellowship at Washington University’s Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies department, most importantly Nancy Berg and Stephen Scordias. To my students in my “Undocumented” class at the university, I miss your intelligence, patience, and willingness to be daring in your analysis and criticism. Most of the revision process took place at the University of Balamand’s beautiful campus in Lebanon, where I was a professor of English literature. The friendship and professional guidance and support of my colleagues there finally brought this book to labor. I especially want to thank Peter Williams, Olga Fleonova, Michael Dennison, Ryan Davis, Zeina Jundi, Laure Salem, and Sossie Kechichian for their unwavering kindness. I will never meet academics as kind as them ever again, I am sure. The roots of this book, namely the work that went into the research and writing of my dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles, were nurtured by my brilliant and compassionate adviser Saree Makdisi, without whose support the work would not have been imaginable. My adviser Gil Hochberg supported me in the fieldwork fellowship, from the International Institute at UCLA, that led me to Morocco for the first time in 2009 to discover libraries, archives, bookstores, and simple street kiosks where I found the material to guide me in both my intellectual and personal life. I want to thank Negar Mottahedeh not only for her invaluable feedback and encouragement, but for making work itself seem exciting, elegant, and effortless. Lastly, Barbara Harlow made intellectual inquiry seem courageous to me—a trespass— and I thank her for guiding my work before the dissertation even began. I also cannot express enough appreciation for my Arabic professors, Mohammad Mohammad and Peter Abboud,

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both of whom provided me the warmth, support, and muchneeded humor I needed in light of the rife Orientalism in USbased Middle East studies departments, where we found ourselves. The friendships built in universities around the labor of this book provided—and still provide to this day—unwavering hope and utter delight, so I would love to thank Karla Stine, Amanda Rogers, Andrea Turpin, Paul Ocampo, Paul Nadal, Adam Talib, Sevan Yousefian, David Fieni, Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki, Barbara Hui, Susannah Rodriguez Drissi, Simona Livescu, Johanna Sellman, Jillian Sayres, and Teresa Keck. To my family, I owe my enduring gratitude for their love and patience during my disappearing tricks. Although we live continents apart, my mother and sister, Seham and Rafidain, continue to provide their warmth, love, comfort, and pep talks. In Morocco, I found not only the roots of my book, but I also found the love of my life, Yahya, who has surely taken a vow of enduring patience to ride it out with me. The other love of my life, my son Ilyas, offers me an opportunity to be caring, joyful, and loving every single day. Thank you.

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Grateful acknowledgment is made for the permission to reprint the following: Chapter 6 is a modified version of an essay that appeared as an essay for the Forum Transregionale Studien Essay Series in 2016 (no. 2).

INTRODUCTION The image of migrants washing up along southern Europe’s picturesque beaches has become a recurring and shocking representation in the visual archive of undocumented migration. One such image of emaciated and exhausted migrants washing up against pale fleshy tourists on Spain’s Canary Island, typically scripted into a story line about ‘collision of worlds’, emerged in 2006. 1 We are to understand the image’s collision of worlds stems from the contrast between affluent Westerners, interrupted in their leisure activities, and relatively poorer migrants, who undertake perilous journeys driven by a desperate desire for a better life. While the migrants survived and disappeared largely from public attention as soon as story coverage stopped, their entry into a carceral system was certain. The 2006 image followed a controversial photo of a European couple sunbathing on the beach in Tarifa, Spain, indifferent to a migrant who lay dead a few feet away. Another image surfaced in 2008 of a European couple enjoying their holiday at an Italian beach, utterly unmoved by the sight of two drowned Roma girls, aged 12 and 13, covered by a beach towel. 2 The implication is that two worlds, ‘Two Worlds Collide as Tenerife Sunbathers Rush to Help Migrants,’ The Telegraph, August 5, 2006. ‘Africa’s Shifting Population: When Two Worlds Collide … on a Tenerife Beach,’ The Independent, August 1, 2006. 2 ‘Italian Sunbathers Ignored Drowned Gypsy Girls,’ Herald Sun, July 22, 2008. 1

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usually divided from each other, collide within the same frame. Perhaps this can be attributed to the distinction between Northern tourist and Southern migrant. 3 But really, one does not need to look further than the migration-tourism nexus of south European beaches’ leisure industries to apprehend an existing contact zone. 4 In his article ‘Crisis Heterotopias and Border Zones of the Dead’, Joseph Pugliese discusses photographs captured by the press of the encounter between migrants and tourists and concludes that the beach-border dramatizes a ‘two-tier [ontology]’ 5 that organizes subjects along a North/South axis, where tourists from the North and migrants from the South are subject to dichotomous experiences of the same space: the beach as holiday space and the beach as prison or cemetery. And, whereas tourists experience dead time of tranquil holiday inertia and inactivity, migrants experience dead time of decomposition/detention. While these bodies in the same sand leave similar imprints, they by no means are subject to the same experiences of the beach http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24059338661,00.html 3 See Chris Gilligan and Carol Marley, ‘Migration and Divisions: Thoughts on (Anti-) Narrativity in Visual Representations of Mobile People.’ Center of Social Research, Freie Universität Berlin, Forum of Qualitative Social Research 11, no. 2 (2010): http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1476/2981 The authors discuss photographs of the encounter between tourists and migrants captured by the press, also in terms of a ‘collision of worlds’: ‘Part of the drama of these images is in the way that two worlds, which are normally divided from each other, collide within the same frame’ (3). 4 Klaus Roth and Jutta Lauth Bacas, eds, Migration In, From, and to Southern Europe: Ways and Strategies of Migrating (Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2011), 178. 5 See Joseph Pugliese’s reading of the beach border scenes capturing the encounter of migrants and tourists by the press in ‘Crisis Heterotopias and Border Zones of the Dead’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23, no. 5 (October 2009), 663–679.

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border’s space or time. In essence, even though the media terms ‘collision of worlds’ apprehend a contact zone between migrant and tourist, the beach-border encompasses two orders of spacetime where in one single place festive holidaymakers in repose and exhausted migrants huddled under blankets experience different modalities of living, moving, even dying—the European coastline’s border. So while the media story is repeatedly reframed in terms of collision, what the beach-border dramatizes are two modes and experiences of space and time that unfold in the same site but neither meaningfully mix nor collide. I want to take this framework further in analyzing the literature of trans-Mediterranean undocumented migration. In Āḥmad Āl-Jalālī’s Al-Harāqa (2003), a collection of stories about undocumented migrants from Morocco, we also find migrants and tourists occupying the same place but experiencing two modes of being. The differences in ease of mobility between the eponymous protagonists—the harraga meaning ‘those who burn’ in Arabic, with harg meaning burning, or crossing, the Mediterranean Sea, or burning IDs before embarking on a voyage—and the European tourists that freely dock from shore to shore initiate each tale of the book. 6 In one story, an undocumented migrant smuggles himself aboard a tourist coach near the engine below while he hears European tourists celebrating and drinking above. The bus is both a means of escape for the impoverished migrants and part of a web of global mobility characterized by unequal freedom of movement and lack of access to space. While the Belgian, Spanish, German tour buses, carried by ferries, dock on the Mediterranean shore, its partying tourists remain on board as the undocumented migrant sneaks in near the engines, disoriented by their roar, filthy from their grease, but ultimately grateful to land on Spanish soil. Through their placement on the bus, Āl-Jalālī’s portrays this two-tiered ontology in which tourists and migrants are occupying the same The terms harraga, hrig, and harrag are transliterations of the Moroccan Arabic (‘g’ not ‘q’).

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space—the tourist coach—but experiencing different modes of mobility: celebratory above, illicit and clandestine below, unbound above, cramped and suffocating below, characterized by familiarity and ease above, disorientation below. Through the juxtaposition of sites of the tourism itinerary and sites of undocumented migration, the friction constituting the power relations of the Mediterranean as simultaneously tourist fantasy of adventure and transcendence and migrant reality of alienation and illicitness comes into focus. While the two-tier ontologies of the beach border and the tour bus evoke Foucault’s heterotopia in their juxtaposition of ‘several sites that are in themselves incompatible,’ ‘places where many spaces converge and become entangled’ 7—that which is in opposition to the homogenous space of utopia—the Mediterranean and its meeting points have been the subject of much writing that idealizes its unity and connectivity. Indeed, Foucault defines heterotopias as ‘real places— places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.’ 8 But, what I want to emphasize is the relational aspect of heterotopia, that is, the relationship between what he terms as ‘real’ and ‘utopic’—most emphatically, it is the relationship between ‘places where many spaces converge and become entangled’. As to the homogenous space of utopia, Mediterranean scholarship has been content with painting the Mediterranean as a common space for cultural and economic exchanges, even as it struggles with the way the sea’s present routes, ports, and

Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (‘Des Autres Espaces’), Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), 24. 8 Foucault, 24. 7

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coastal cities impose their own frontiers. 9, 10 Inspiring various works on the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel’s history of a unified Mediterranean focused on the timeless ‘constants’ of a geography that linked the shores that produced various civilizations. 11 However, it must be emphasized that Braudel was vigilant about not romanticizing Mediterranean unity, although the same cannot be said for his reception. In fact, Braudel writes, ‘The sea is everything it is said to be: it provides unity, transport, the means of exchange and intercourse, if man is prepared to make an effort and pay a price. But it has also been the great divider, the obstacle that had to be overcome.’ 12 While Braudel-inspired studies critique his totalizing view of history as a deterministic ‘landscape of time’ 13 that effaces human agency, they still apprehend a unified Mediterranean. While Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (2000) displaces Braudel’s geographical determinism, diachronic particularities, and metropolitan centers (in favor of neglected rural margins), individual will is no longer subsumed within a Braudelian framework of particular geographic conditions and temporal limits, but foregrounded as the basis for ‘communications’ on which Mediterranean unity

Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 722. 10 Horden and Purcell, 722. 11 By ‘constants,’ I am referring to Braudel’s focus on ahistorical geographical and environmental continuity and determinism through the longue durée perspective of historical time, wherein he privileges the unity of the Mediterranean: coherence of [this] history, the extent to which the movements of boats, pack animals, vehicles and people themselves makes the Mediterranean a unit and gives it a certain uniformity in spite of local resistance.’ Mediterranean and Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley, CA: University of California, Press, 1996), 227. 12 Braudel, 276. 13 miriam cooke, ‘Mediterranean Thinking: From Netizen to Medizen,’ Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999), 292. 9

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is dependent. 14 Although The Corrupting Sea’s relational ‘analysis of the whole by way of its components’ 15 in capturing minor everyday interactions and reciprocal exchanges (making up the sea’s dynamic networks, contact zones, and microregions) attempts to define a Mediterranean local heterogeneity defying totalization, the text still operates toward fulfilling a predetermined unity among Mediterranean societies. Simply supplanting nationalist integrity with regional integrity as a way of foregrounding the margins against the hegemony of the metropolis does not necessarily lead to de-essentializing frameworks (the authors devote an entire chapter on the paradigm of shame and honor as essentially Mediterranean). 16 According to Horden and Purcell, in the modern period the ‘history of the Mediterranean’ ends amidst the transformation of the sea into a ‘European lake’ for the flow of global trade and becomes ‘history in the Mediterranean.’ 17 In line with other Mediterranean historians, Horden and Purcell close off inquiry into the Mediterranean as antithetical to modernity, when they present Mediterranean history as a mere manifestation of (non-Mediterranean) hegemonic superpowers at work in the region. Literary critic miriam cooke has entered this engagement with the fraught study of the Mediterranean in the modern era through a geo-cultural perspective. She proposes a Mediterranean ‘way of thinking’ for building an epistemology of ‘crossoceanic arenas of culture and knowledge’ to rid Mediterranean study of its inclination toward essentialisms, while acknowledging it as a highly multicultural, multilingual area whose people have represented a broad array of religious, ethnic, social, and Horden and Purcell, 25. Horden and Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean and “the New Thalassology”,’ The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006), 722. 16 Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, Chapter 12. 17 Horden and Purcell, 2–3. Claudio Fogu, ‘From Mare Nostrum to Mare Alorium: Mediterranean Theory and Mediterraneanism in Contemporary Italian Thought,’ California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010), 3. 14 15

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political difference. 18 On one level, one can see in her notion of the Mediterranean as a template for a cross-cultural contact zone resonances of earlier approaches to the Mediterranean as a cultural mediation model, which historian David Abulafia, who conceives of the Sahara desert through a Mediterranean template, shares. 19 However, Abulafia’s conception of the Sahara as Mediterranean functions as a heuristic device to convey a geohistorical crossroads of traders, scholars, artisans, and nomads that already set the stage for the emergence of richly diverse aesthetic expressions along North to South and East to West routes across the Sahara. cooke appropriates the Mediterranean space, as historically infused with past crossroads, exchanges, and contact zones, to posit an ideational and discursive Mediterranean ‘way of thinking,’ a philosophy and epistemology based on the sea’s connective properties, to imagine possible cultural links and identities unmoored and limited by the nation-state’s particular prisms. While Abulafia 20 depicts the Sahara through a history of human and cultural movements that contextualize it cooke, 291. David Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans,’ in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. William Vernon Harris, 64–93 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapter 4. 20 In ‘Mediterraneans,’ Abulafia uses the Mediterranean as a template to be applied to the ‘Middle Seas’ in other parts of the world, like the Sahara which he characterizes by an ease of contacts between very diverse cultures. He not only puts to task the divide separating North and sub-Saharan Africa and the tendency to view the Sahara Desert as an impenetrable barrier dividing the continent into the northern ‘white’ and sub-Saharan ‘black’ Africa, but he explores the shared history and culture among the regions of Africa linked by the Sahara Desert through centuries of continued exchanges and interactions. Contact among the Sahara and its peripheries continue to this day to be platforms of interconnected peoples and cultures. Despite trans-Saharan cultural contact spanning centuries, this inaccurate perception of Africa as two distinct zones separated by an empty wasteland of desert continues to influence the way people think about this region and the continent as a whole. 18 19

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both spatially and chronologically as a Middle Seas of sorts in its own right, cooke’s Mediterranean stands as an imaginative dynamics for potential fluid identities that would preclude material realities of citizenship, exclusion, and nation-state affiliations. Although cooke’s essay is cautious about the context of such a stance and critical of a romantic Mediterranean consciousness espoused by authors in the past (like Durrell which this chapter will discuss), it still has the potential to reinforce the material and discursive divide that often undergirds Mediterranean studies in its eagerness to assume the potential of aquacentric thinking and language for exploring alternative identities, which are in-flux, fluid, and unbound to national ideologies. By this I mean that even though cooke recognizes Mediterranean consciousness as problematic, her epistemology has the potential to replicate the problems inherent to assigning recuperative power to the discursive practice of space particular to the study of the Mediterranean, meaning the theoretical, abstract, metaphoric aspects of social and spatial categorizations, while neglecting the material. These divergences between the historical-material and the discursive in apprehending the Mediterranean need to be engaged through a contextual discourse that considers the constitutive elements of the nation-state and their borders. The resurgence of Mediterranean studies, including miriam cooke’s essay and Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea, and their metaphors of fluidity and exchange often appear as a ‘refuge’ to compensate for the asymmetrical power relations that really reflect the sea’s northern and southern shores. 21 We can also turn to Franco Cassano, who wrote Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean to establish an alternative to ‘Europe’ and ‘European culture,’ of which the southernmost areas of Italy, Spain, France, and Greece are not completely a part, according to him, since they border the Anna Botta, ‘Predrag Matvejević’s Mediterranean Breviary: Nostalgia for an “Ex-World” or Breviary for a New Community?’ California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010), 5.

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Mediterranean. He even attributes the development of Greek philosophy to the country’s position on the Mediterranean. 22 In recent years, the study of seas has come to be seen as a discursive tactic displacing nation-centered frames of cultural and historical studies. In light of this shift, scholars have been attracted to the idea of a presumably borderless world of oceans and seas. What this modern Mediterranean scholarship often reveals is a wishful, anti-nationalist sentiment and romantic longing, or nostalgia, for an age of regional cooperation—but out of touch with this era’s nationalist frameworks of intensely policed migration and violently patrolled borders. Recuperative imaginings of migration across the Mediterranean have figured the coming generation of migrants as ‘pioneers,’ crossing physical, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries to rejuvenate old Europe and prefigure a new Mediterranean supranational space: ‘another promise, another dream, the opening of another space: the Mediterranean community.’ 23 Although promoted by government reports, programs, and scholarship, this supranational space and its ideals of mobility have not of course pragmatically transformed the migrant into a ‘pioneer’— mobile, free, able enough to dissolve the boundaries that obstruct a utopic Mediterranean community. Contemporary literary reconstructions of Andalus by authors like Aamin Malouf 24 testify to the allure of a history of cooperation. Sometimes, these recuperative imaginings of the Mediterranean reframe identity through mobility, exile, diaspora, to oppose nationalist ideologies, which still determine much discourse on European frontiers. In nineteenth- and twentiethcentury literature, the Mediterranean and its cities were celeFranco Cassano, Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean, translated and edited by Norma Bouchard and Velerio Ferme (New York: Fordham Press, 2012). 23 Azouz Begag and Abdellatif Chaouite, Écarts d'identité (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 18. 24 Amin Maalouf, Leon L’Africain (Leo Africanus) (Paris: JC Lattès, 1986). 22

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brated for openness and utopic cosmopolitanism. From Lawrence Durrell to Paul Bowles, the Mediterranean featured as the model of a cosmopolis—an urban contact zone able to receive the ‘stranger’; a pluralistic, open society unbound by exclusions of nationalism. The cosmopolis is where every individual is a partial stranger because arrivals are incessant; openness and hospitality constitute its virtue. Paul Bowles’s Tangier-based writing represents the Mediterranean narrative par excellence—replete with travel narratives and multicultural encounters. Although Bowles wrote on Tangier’s picturesque qualities for tourism magazines, his stories described an urban contact zone that was far from tame—border towns at the crossroads of diverse nationalities and cultures with a seductive lawlessness. Criminality and chaos abound in his stories, but there is safety in permissibility, an order in the disorder, a comfort in knowing that its bustling cosmopolitanism, the flow of people coming and going, made it possible to hide out, lose oneself, become ‘clandestine’ without much repercussion. Bowles’s towns represent a liberating frontier for escape and criminality, as well as places of simplicity, transcendence, and inspiration for those seeking to ‘drop out’ of society. Bowles’s ‘contact zone’ 25 for travelers, the disorderly theatre of violence and leisurely escape, is part of a narrative archive In the perspective of Fernand Braudel's longue durée (a panoptic perspectivism), the ‘unity’ of the Mediterranean is considered within the historical conditions of heterogeneous networks stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to the Indian Ocean. These networks have been disrupted in the last two and a half thousand years, each time through the Punic wars, the Crusades, and European modernity. These are considered traumatic moments in which networks were torn apart by the imposition of the unities and hierarchies of Rome and Europe. Arab conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries reopened and revitalized the possibility of potential ‘unity,’ permitting Europe to establish contact with the Middle East and subsequently with a world system of commerce and culture that centered around Baghdad and Cairo. 25

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traced to the Middle Ages. After all, the Mediterranean is essentialized not only by a ‘history of travel culture attracted by freedoms,’ a contented freely mobile cosmopolitanism, but in the social vice and visceral experience that ‘dangerous mores associated with the region’ offer. 26 Likewise, Lawrence Durrell animated the Mediterranean narrative with nods toward cosmopolitanism. In Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, a series of novels set in 1930s and 1940s Alexandria, 27 he divides Alexandria: one is the cosmopolitan ‘Mediterranean’ city where his foreign minority elite cohort—most Alexandria-born but European self-identified—live and socialize; the other is a poorer, less cosmopolitan city that he designates as ‘Egyptian’, native African and Arab quarters. Early twentiethcentury cosmopolitan foreign elites, like Durrell, considered Alexandria not part of Egypt so much as a part of a larger refined Mediterranean, a more European Mediterranean. They considered Alexandria more of a Mediterranean city, rather than Egyptian or African, a place deemed more global, more universal, Mike Crang, ed., Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 160. 27 For more information on Durrell, see Julius Rowan Raper and Melody Enscore, eds, Lawrence Durrell: Comprehending the Whole (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995). Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was an expatriate British writer, born in colonial India to British colonials. Even though he was known as an expatriate British writer, he resisted affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan. Educated in England, he convinced his family to move to the Greek island of Corfu, his wife, first wife, mother, siblings, in order to write poetry. He wrote novels, poems, plays, essays, and his Alexandria Quartet became his most famous work. The Alexandria Quartet is of a series of novels, Justine, Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1959) and Clea (1960), set before and during the Second World War in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. The first three books tell the same story but from different perspectives, a technique Durrell described in his introductory note to Balthazar as ‘relativistic’. 26

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more intercultural (European-wise, at least), but distinctly set apart from the natives. 28 Durrell exhibits ‘this elite poetics of Alexandria, initiated as a form of revialism, re-inscribing Alexandria’s literary identity almost exclusively with reference to the city’s ancient origins and/or through the lens of a privileged Western genealogy … birthplace of cosmopolitanism and universalism.’ 29 Durrell denied a cultural and representational ecology in which South of the Mediterranean bore influence beyond its shores and saw Alexandria as simply a site for a Western ‘homecoming’. Like Durrell, the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantin Cavafy experienced Alexandria as a site of loss and nostalgia where a great Western culture was to be retrieved, as echoed in Durrell’s description of the modern city as ‘Capital of Memory.’ 30 Alexandria is often dealt with by both Durrell and Durrell’s friend Gaston Zanarini, on whom the character Balthazar in the series Alexandria Quartet is believed to be based, championed the idea of an Alexandria removed from Egypt and Africa but rather part of the Mediterranean. 29 Beverly Butler, ‘Egypt: Constructed Exiles of the Imagination,’ in Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, and Place, eds Barbara Bender and Margot Winer (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001), 305. 30 Born in 1863 (–1933) to a Greek merchant family in Alexandria, Constantine P. Cavafy wrote in Greek, and his work has been widely translated. Cavafy’s poetry, like ‘Ithaka’, explores the figure of the traveler always seeking a lost homeland in exile. Likewise in ‘Exile’, he explores the exiled figure cast out of the homeland and prevented from returning. Even though Cavafy was born and lived in Alexandria of the nineteenth and twentieth century, his work reveals a persona of an exile of the ancient Greek Mediterranean, a specific heritage of ancient Alexandrian myth and history. He, thus, envisaged his poetry as memory work that would return him home not to ancient Alexandria but to the country that, in his view, gave Alexandria its ancient heritage, Greece. Cavafy, born in Egyptian Alexandria, demonstrates the impression Alexandria left on his work—but only insofar as he explored it as the site where Western civilization and its Hellenistic influences originated—that is, Hellenistic Alexandria, the Alexandria of antiquity, the Alexandria of an ancient Greek past, the Alexandria named after 28

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Cavafy as a repository of cultures that belonged to not only the present but multiple eras and their cultures—i.e., Cavafy’s accessing of a repository of cultures including Byzantine and Hellenistic, to explore Alexandria. Durrell, in fact, referred to the city as a ‘matrix of civilizations,’ but only past civilizations that set the stage for his own re-imagining of Alexandria as a cosmopolitan city for its European minorities. Of course, colonial Alexandria has a different historical trajectory than Tangier, at the time an expatriate haven for Americans. But, whether they engaged in a representational ecology of the places they lived, these writers and their work became Western synecdoches for Arab Mediterranean cities— multinational, polyglot, liberating cultural ‘frontiers’—during the eras in which they were written and they depict. Robert Ilbert explains the transformations of the city in the 1960s by citing literary works that define the era: ‘it is 1966,’ he writes, ‘and the Alexandria of Lawrence Durrell has become that of Naguib Mahfouz. The writers and their works function as a synecdoche for Alexandrian culture and society during the years in which they were written, and which they depict. Thus, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, published between 1957 and 1960, represents cosmopolitan, Mediterranean, polyglot Alexandria of the 1940s and 1950s, and Mahfouz’s Miramar represents the Egyptian, Arabophone Alexandria of the 1960s, following the mass migrations of the foreign minorities. 31 Their work simultaneously creates place signification and builds upon it, not simply reflecting upon but producing place affects in a double movement of ‘as-

Alexander the Greek. From his entire work was absent the Mediterranean where he wrote and spent most of his life—Egypt, or the Arab Mediterranean. See Essential Cavafy, translated by Raymund Keele (New York: HarperCollins, 1996). 31 Robert Ilbert, ‘International Waters,’ in Alexandria 1860–1960: The Brief Life of a Cosmopolitan Community, eds Robert Ilbert and Ilios Yannakakis (Alexandria: Harpocrates, 1997), 10

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cription-appropriation’. 32 This movement consists of the imaging of the Arab world and its culture as ‘Mediterranean’ and the development of cities as ‘Mediterranean’ in a related, oft-symbiotic relationship. While this convergence of Arab culture and urban development as Mediterranean is reflected in literary work, it is also the case that literary work develops and circulates what has come to be identified as a ‘symbolic geography’, the Mediterraneanization of Arab culture and city. In tracing the way the idea of the Mediterranean is instrumentalized, we can grasp how it has become a heuristic device. The Mediterranean has become performative: it is less about its shared traits than the play of ‘claims and knowledges about those shared traits,’ a utopic catalyst for new lives and languages in a cosmopolis welcoming multiple identities. In Franck Salameh’s Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon (2010), Mediterraneanism is cast as a form of identitarian resistance to the confines and reductionism of Arabism, but in fact it simply urges supplanting one identity for another, in that Mediterraneanism has its own identity ‘obligations’. Mediterranean identity is positioned as a more authentic, primary identity, with a longer lineage, which liberalizes, loosSee Nigel Thrift, ‘Literature, the Production of Culture, and the Politics of Place,’ Antipode 15, no. 1 (1983), 21. He writes, ‘Places have meanings and meanings are always produced, never simply expressed, as part of a wider process of cultural creation. Literature is one way in which such meanings are produced within a culture and ascribed to place, just as place is often appropriated to produce meanings in literature.’ This double-sided process of ascription-appropriation is not neutral… Representations of space are not unmediated, but are inextricable from construction of social space. See Michael Keith and Steve Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1993). Keith and Pile explain that Walter Benjamin’s cities were not only ‘real and metaphorical works,’ but they were also acts of ‘representation that were consciously, cognitively, and politically marked rather than the evocations of a purely aesthetic spatiality’ (33). 32

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ens the straw man of a purported Arab identity that is essentialized as inhospitable to free thinking, as opposed to the intellectual hospitality of the cosmopolitan Mediterranean. The representation of the Mediterranean as contented multicultural utopia and the sea as connective force and a zone of encounter have been sustained and have resurged in contemporary Mediterranean Studies, but the grand narrative of the Mediterranean has worn itself out. By locating the frontier that the Mediterranean has created, much intellectual work challenges the resurgence of Mediterraneanism, locates its irony, and explores motivations and strategies of its culturally deterministic and essentializing resurgence. For example, Predrag Matvejevic has highlighted the North-South divisions troubling notions of Mediterranean unity and connectivity, arguing that it is not even possible to consider the Mediterranean a single sea without accounting for the conflicts and ruptures in its ‘meeting points.’ 33 Other research that takes to task Mediterraneanism and apprehends the binarized construction of the current-day Mediterranean includes Driessen’s ethnography of undocumented migrants that counters the romantic image of the Mediterranean. Shafer contrasts the EU-created frontier in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and the EU-Med cultural initiatives to create a cultural dialogue and find commonalities. Much work, indeed, seeks true engagement with a sea crossed by thousands escaping persecution rather than contribute to its folklorization in developing a Mediterranean brand, undergirded by clichés of ‘homecoming’ and ‘bridges’, as well as current reiterations in the form of ‘partnerships’ and ‘unions’. 34 Predrag Matvejevic, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, translated by Michael Heim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 34 For works that apprehend the binarized construction of the Mediterranean, see: Henk Driessen, ‘A Janus-Faced Sea: Contrasting Perceptions and Experience of the Mediterranean,’ MAST/Maritime Studies 3, no. 1 (2004), 41–50; Thomas Christiansen, Fabio Petito, and Ben Tonra, ‘Fuzzy Politics Around Fuzzy Borders: The European Union’s “NearAbroad”’, Cooperation and Conflict 35, no. 4 (2000), 389–415; Isabel 33

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It has been noted that the instrumentalization of the Mediterranean toward narratives of Western modernity has tended to blur this division. For example, the south and east Mediterranean are both ‘recuperated as discursive origins of Western modernity (birthplace of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian civilizations, from which Western modernity supposedly derives) and as the Other against which Northern European identity could be constituted (against regions formerly part of the Arab/Ottoman empires, i.e., North Africa, Turkey)’. 35 The theoretical constructions of the Mediterranean as Self or Other to the West are not exclusive but have had a mutually constitutive relationship, particularly informed by colonial relations. The view of the Mediterranean as cradle of civilization and birthplace of philosophy and democracy has also aligned with a view of the Mediterranean as birthplace of rationality undergirding European modernity and validating colonial efforts that have since established global hierarchies and inequalities. This theoretical construction of the Mediterranean contact zone, on which current definitions of the southern borders of Europe are determined, has been intertwined with the development of European modernity, defined by Mediterranean scholar Iain Chambers as ‘nationalist in its form and imperialist in its reach’. 36 As colonial power relations determined representations of the Mediterranean in the modern period, the region was imagined as starkly divided between two incommensurable spaces and civilizational models.

Schäfer, ‘The Cultural Dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Partnership: A Critical Review of the First Decade of Intercultural Cooperation,’ History and Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2007), 335–352; Adrian Grima, ‘The Melting Pot That Never Was,’ in Africa and the West, ed. Badra Lahouel (Oran, Algeria: Dar El Quds El Arabi, 2009). 35 Edwidge Tamalet, Modernity in Question: Retrieving Imaginaries of the Transcontinental Mediterranean, PhD Dissertation (San Diego: University of California, 2009), 8. 36 Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 15.

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By challenging Mediterraneanism, this book does not attempt to deny these exchanges across the Mediterranean that have bound its shores. It is these links disturbing the binaries of North and South (Europe and Africa) that this book aims to retrieve. Instrumental in the process of retrieval is analysis of a representational, cultural, and political ecology that reveals traveling cultures’ multi-directional influences (not unidirectional with the south of the Mediterranean serving as mere staging ground for Western civilizational roots) and North participation in putting in momentum a hierarchy creating the need to migrate in the South, as we will read in undocumented migration literature from Africa, specifically Morocco, Egypt, and SubSaharan transmigration in Morocco, along its Mediterranean shores. It is these connections that evoke the denial of participation and responsibility of a common ecology—global ‘relational interdependency … of unevenly negotiated relations which disrupts the inside/outside binary of contemporary Western geopolitical imaginaries’ 37—wrought by beach-border scenes that distinguish two separate worlds and wherein travelers from the South are represented as the world that is alien, uncanny, unfamiliar, and—not merely without documents—but without any legitimate claim of belonging. Rather than denying a history of transactions across the Mediterranean, this book asserts this history resides side by side with its divisions. The Mediterranean as familiar site through tourism, escape, adventure, ‘metissage’, and cosmopolitanism still remains unaffected by its current reinvention as unfamiliar site of criminality, illegality, shadowy networks. Both are different ends of a utopic continuum for a precise ordering of Mediterranean land—one a nostalgic retrieval of an ‘authentic’ cosmopolitan past, the other containment for future governmental reterritorialization. Amanda Crawley Jackson, ‘Cette Poetique du Politique: Political and Representational Ecologies in the Work of Yto Barrada,’ L’Esprit Createur 51, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 66.

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However much the instrumentalization of the Mediterranean has blurred the division along the North-South axis, the Mediterranean’s mark of alterity, its construction as Other, since the colonial period cannot be ignored. Periodized analyses of Europe’s accelerated marginalization of south and east Mediterranean countries range from the colonial period to the post-ColdWar era, 38 but they predominantly attribute to the post-9/11 era a marked resurgence of marginalization of these Mediterranean countries as a security threat subject to policies of containment, securitization, and anti-immigration policies. This movement of alterity involves reinscribing a new form of European identity through the construction of a new Mediterranean Other as a zone of conflict. 9/11 features not only as altering the intensity of the Mediterranean’s threatening image, but the symbolic geography that positions the Mediterranean, On criticism of the EMP, specifically the EU-Med positioning the Mediterranean as Europe’s Other, see: Hein de Haas, ‘The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities of African Migration to Europe,’ Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008): 1305–1322; Isabel Shafer, ‘The Cultural Dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Partnership: A Critical Review of the First Decade of Intercultural Cooperation,’ History and Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2007): 335–352; Pinar Bilgin, ‘A Return to “Civilizational Geopolitics” in the Mediterranean?’ Geopolitics 9, no. 2 (2004): 269–291; Thomas Christiansen, Fabio Petito, and Ben Tonra, ‘Fuzzy Politics Around Fuzzy Borders: The European Union’s “Near-Abroad”,’ Cooperation and Conflict 35, no. 4 (2000): 389–415; Nikolaos Tzifakis, ‘EU's Region-Building and Boundary-Drawing Policies: The European Approach to the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans,’ Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9, no. 1 (2007): 47–64; Stephan Stetter, ‘The Politics of De-Paradoxification in EuroMediterranean Relations: Semantics and Structures of “Cultural Dialogue”’, Mediterranean Politics 10, no. 3 (2005): 331–348; Paul Balta, La Méditerranée Réinventée. Réalités et Espoirs de la Coopération (Paris: La Découverte, 1992); Jean-Claude Tourrett, ‘Les Regions Actrices et Partenaires de la Construction Méditerranée,’ La Pensée Midi 21, Quelles Régions pour Dmain? L’Example Méditerranée, eds Bruno Etienne and Thierry Fabre (Aries, France: Actes Sud, 2007). 38

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constituted now more by Arab cities, in opposition to Europe, ‘the other side of the shore’. As Hein de Haas and Ali Bensaâd have argued, 39 the number of African migrants coming to Europe is relatively small in the context of global migration trends. However, the ‘paranoid Eurocentric vision’ of migration has led the EU to transform relations greatly in the Mediterranean, not only by limiting inward migration but also investing substantially in the policing of its boundaries. Thus, the Mediterranean is ordered and partitioned through new frontiers, regulations, and increasingly rigid identities tied to specific forms of passage: touristic, trade, military and otherwise. The New Mediterranean is a globalized project that must be read in conjunction with the shifting self-understanding of the EU, whose Euro-Med Partnership projects aim to discipline diverse ethnicities, cultures, affiliations in the Mediterranean into a fixed space. In an effort to secure the porous borders of Europe from North Africa, post-9/11, the European Commission issued the Hague Programme, a five-year plan designed to ‘protect the field of freedom, justice, and security,’ driven by an agenda to counter terrorists and ‘illegal’ immigrants (whom the document conflates into a common threat to Europe). 40 Undocumented migration has been on the rise since 1995 when several EU nations enacted the Schengen Accords to soften internal EU borders and fortify external ones. Spain ended Moroccans’ privileged status of entry into Spain without a visa in 1985. 41 But, Hein de Haas, ‘The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities of African Migration to Europe,’ Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008): 1305–1322. Ali Bensaâd, ‘The Militarization of Migration Frontiers in the Mediterranean,’ in The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North Africa, eds Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes (Barcelona: Actar, 2006). 40 European Council, The Hague Programme: Strengthening Freedom, Security, and Justice in the European Union. 2005/C53/01, OJ C53/1, 3.3.2005(a). 41 The requirement was not implemented until 1991. For more information on Moroccan migration to Spain, see Taieb Belghazi, ‘Economic 39

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with undocumented migration, entry into Spain guaranteed passage to nearly any other EU nation—hence, the appeal for many Moroccan migrants. 42 The current place narrative of the Mediterranean still maintains it as a liberatory site, but now also reveals migration northward as a paralyzing trap rather than a liberating process. This is the new Mediterranean—a globalized project to be read in conjunction with the shifting self-construction of the EU, whose security initiatives, anti-immigration policies, and even Euro-Med Partnership projects aim to discipline diverse ethnicities, cultures, affiliations in the southern and eastern Mediterranean into a fixed space and monolithic heritage model, by reinscribing the Mediterranean as Europe’s Other. 43 The Mediterranean construction is currently transforming and in-flux, determined by the creation of new anti-immigration policies and erection of new borders being reworked back into the EU to monitor the flow of undocumented migrants across them, in the service of the EU’s construction of its Self in relation to its Other. However, the binarized optic of the Mediterranean amidst

Martyrs: Two Perspectives on Lahrig’, in The Cultures of Economic Migration: International Perspectives, eds Suman Gupta and Tope Omoniyi, 87– 100 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007). 42 The ‘sea of death’ has become a common description for the Mediterranean, which has recently seen many deaths of migrants attempting to circumvent border controls by traveling on flimsy crafts. The phrase has been common in journalism: see ‘Sea of Death Claims At Least 1500 Lives,’ Times of Malta, 2/1/12; ‘Over the Sea to Spain,’ The Economist, 8/10/00. 43 On criticisms of the Euro-Med cultural dialogue initiatives, see Isabel Shafer, ‘The Cultural Dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Partnership: A Critical Review of the First Decade of Intercultural Cooperation,’ History and Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2007): 335–352. Also, see Raffaelia Del Sarto, ‘Setting the Cultural Agenda: Concepts, Communities, and Representation in Euro-Mediterranean Relations,’ Mediterranean Politics 10, no. 3 (2005): 313–330.

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the EU’s policy transformations, whether post-9/11 or much more recently post-Arab Spring, has only grown exponentially. This book retrieves the new trans-Mediterranean undocumented migrant literary figure from an Afro-Arab terrain embodied by this period’s paradox: what I refer to as both an attraction of cosmopolitanism and a repulsion of containment. After all, it is only after reading the novels wrought through perspectives of undocumented migrants that I have apprehended this double Mediterranean between which the figures always seemed to be navigating. My arguments regarding this paradox are based on the premise of the Mediterranean as an invention, performative in the sense that it is less about shared traits than the play of ‘claims and knowledges about those shared traits.’ Undocumented migration and its cultural productions do bear on the resurgence of the Mediterranean, or what has been called ‘Mediterraneanism’, in academic fields. There is sometimes a disjuncture between representation of Mediterranean places in modern literature and transformation of Mediterranean places into a singular topos in studies of the Mediterranean, which endangers turning place into a site of memory disconnected from the present, into a spectacle. I take on the constructivist view of Mediterranean-ness as that which is not based on an originary moment or a culturally distinct essence, but as the repetition of symbols that accumulate to represent identity, which revert back to the notion of its origin and uniqueness, where regional identity is naturalized through a repeated performance of presumed ‘norms.’ In terms of its cosmopolitanism, I contend that its essentializing properties have long ago made up the Mediterranean narrative in a ‘history of travel culture attracted by freedoms, by different and dangerous mores associated with the region’, 44 which has identified it as a liberating escape and a cos-

Mike Crang, ed., Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 160.

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mopolitan utopia for the appealing disorder of its diversity. 45 That is, it is associated with the idealized dynamism and flux of the cosmopolis, marked by the incessant arrival and departure of the ‘stranger.’ 46 The ideal narrative of the Mediterranean’s attractions continues to this day, but a polarizing narrative emerges alongside it: the repulsion in the containment of the Mediterranean. While the attraction of the Mediterranean is associated with an appealing disorder of diversity, summoning its cosmopolitanism, the repulsion of the Mediterranean comes from identifying it as a ‘zone of conflict’, demanding its containment. While this binarized construction of the Mediterranean is apprehended by various theorists on whom the irony of its mythic connectivity, despite its current reconstruction as a fronHerzfeld urges us to treat attributions of Mediterranean culture not as literal statements but as performative utterances, in J. L. Austin’s sense (as explained in How To Do Things with Words): ‘they do not so much enunciate facts as create them.’ Herzfeld suggests that in this way we can discern claims of Mediterranean unity as ‘excuses expressive of, and enmeshed in, a global hierarchy of value in which “Mediterranean” comes somewhere between “modern” and “primitive”’. See Michael Herzfeld, ‘Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to Eating,’ in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. William Vernon Harris. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.) 46 The cosmopolis is an urban utopia characterized by its ability to receive the ‘stranger.’ It is a model of a pluralistic, open society unbound by the exclusions of nationalism. The openness to the stranger makes explicit the notion of hospitality as a cosmopolitan virtue. While there are different conceptions of cosmopolitanism that assign differences of the stranger to a group and the host to another, I take on understanding of the relationship between strangers and urban life as one in which ‘strangeness is a condition shared by everybody rather than a property of some-bodies.’ (76). In ‘Strangers in the Cosmopolis,’ Kurt Iveson writes: ‘Every individual is a ‘partial stranger’ because arrivals (and departures) are incessant, with these displacements calling forth a never-ending series of responses and adjustments’ (76). Kurt Iveson, ‘Strangers in the Cosmopolis,’ in Cosmopolitan Urbanism, ed. Jon Binnie (New York: Psychology Press, 2006). 45

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tier, is not lost, the attraction and repulsion of the contemporary Mediterranean narrative in juxtaposition through its heterotopic literary forms has yet to be analyzed or theorized as such. Engaging Foucault’s conception of utopia as controlling, disciplining, and restrictive, I assert both narrative claims of the Mediterranean are utopic, not in the idealizing sense, but in a restrictive, controlling, disciplining sense of the utopic: 47 the order of containment projects a desire for a place and time to come, to be discovered, to be exposed and explored through the partition of the sea, the regimentation of mobility flows. To enforce the order of the ideal society, ‘the utopic perpetually verges on the dystopic, the dysfunctional utopia, the more modern these utopias become,’ 48 thus, in its very conception utopia is inherently rigid, authoritarian, hierarchical, restrictive, and exclusionary. Foucault’s utopia contrasts with conceptions of utopia, such as Henri Lefebvre’s, as positive, productive for criticism and self-reflection, in perpetual process as a counterhegemonic force. 49 Utopia’s disciplinary gaze of a Mediterranean inscribed as the Other to the EU is particularly Foucauldian: ‘They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.’ 50 Utopia is imposed upon a social space severing its links with history, tradition, and the disorderly patterns of the everyday— abstracted as a non-place. We can see this de-substantialization and de-historicization with conceptions of enduring heritages of Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (‘Des Autres Espaces’), Diacritics 16, no.1 (1986), 22–27. 48 Elizabeth Grosz highlights the main point of Meg Whitford’s work on utopia in ‘The Time of Architecture,’ in Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, eds Amy Bingaman, Lisa Sanders, and Rebecca Zorach (New York: Routledge, 2002), 268. 49 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (London: Verso, 2002), 241. 50 Foucault, 1986, 24. 47

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the Mediterranean wielded by grand narratives of EU-Med cultural dialogues. The utopic compulsion to order and decontextualize (deplete of history and social relations) the Mediterranean has resonance with Thomas More’s Utopia and its interconnected themes of territory and exclusion—mapping a perfected social order onto an artificial island. The tightly organized spatial form was the means by which potentially disruptive forces could be excluded in order to maintain social order and stability. Its relations with the outside world were closely monitored or surveilled, but it largely functioned as an isolated coherently organized space. The internal socio-spatial ordering of the island stringently regulates a disciplined, stabilized, immutable society. But in the case of the newly ascribed ‘Mediterranean’ territories, the spatial isolation is not ‘self-regulated’ by the Middle Eastern (east) and North African (south) countries that it now strictly signifies, but rather the call for isolation and containment into a transparently and coherently organized space is the fantasy of the other, the ‘zone of peace’, the EU. As the EU names, contains, surveils its Mediterranean Other, might we not consider it open visually, perspectivally, for surveillance like a panorama, and closed, isolated, cordoned off, contained, territorially? This openness and closure, not so much an ambivalence of utopia but its complementary parts, constitute Foucault’s conception of the totalizing vision and disciplinary power of the panopticon, that ‘utopia of the perfectly governed city’, as he referred to it. 51 But in what ways has the Mediterranean as a seductive, rather than a strict authoritarian, utopia emerged through literary itineraries? It flashes a seductive monolithic narrative of travel adventure, sensuality, spirituality, diversity, and authentic heritage that has traditionally encompassed a remarkably diverse number of nations and cultures occupying the three continents that surround the Mediterranean Sea. Cosmopolitanism, particular in its branding of the Mediterranean as frontier of travel and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 198.

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escape for its ‘sensual pleasures,’ its ‘authentic heritage,’ its ‘mythical vices’, is also controlling, disciplinary in the sense that it too is based on discovery and exploration for the purpose of ordering—and, tourism’s retrieval of these properties. Utopias are used as a heuristic device, as an exploration of what might be possible or impossible, and the Mediterranean is the site wherein desire of exploration is projected: cosmopolitanism as a means of exploring or becoming familiar with something known in the past and containment being the means of re-making familiar something now unknown. 52 For example, one of Cavafy’s depictions of the Mediterranean—as a unit—is composed like a list, fluid and logical, but with the sensual and sensuous juxtaposed with the civilizational, humanistic, and classical: ‘The whole Mediterranean—the sculptures, the palms, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers—all of it seems to rise in the sour pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as cold as waWhile Foucault’s focus is on conditional utopia’s connection to the potential of language, as opposed to ‘real’ spaces in ‘The Language of Space’, it too suggests a literary recourse to convention, a predetermined order of discourse, which is fruitful in considering the means of ordering the Mediterranean, discursively: it is a ‘fantasy of origins’ to which one returns, it permits an ordering of speech, while heterotopia desiccates speech. Utopia as a site of memory that promises regimentation of both discourse and movement is figured by ancient Alexandria, Foucault’s site for classical thought, origins, authenticity—a predetermined order to which one is ‘bound’ to return. Foucault refers to a binding, repetitive return and an adherence to chronological formalism and narrative coherence to demonstrate the discursive effects of utopia: ‘Homeric return … Alexandria, which is our birthplace, has mapped out this circle for all western language: to write was to return, to come back to the beginning to grasp again the first instance; it is to witness anew the dawn. Hence, the mythical function of literature to this day, hence its relation to the ancient: hence, the privilege it has granted to analogy, to similarity, to all the marvels of identicality. Hence, above all, a structure of repetition which indicated its very existence’ (24).

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ter.’ 53 The recitation of the list of totems or familiar objects reduced to an enduring and universal taste almost resists inquiry or interrogation, implying not only a sensual connection to the Mediterranean’s ancient past but also suggesting that all one would need to know about the Mediterranean lies in its reassuring, but disjointed, narrative rendered like a formula or an incantation. Taking on its putatively ‘natural’ form through a repeated performance, the erotic Mediterranean is likewise delivered by Bowles and his literary circle, Tennessee Williams and Williams S. Burroughs, as sexually permissive especially for gay litterateurs, but not due to an ideological connection to the Mediterranean’s ancient past of a free, open sensuality, as expressed by Durrell, but due to sexual commerce sustained by material desperation and colonial beliefs about a simultaneously permissive and virile Arab-African sexuality, especially during the Interzone period. A fantasy of origins also applies to the Mediterranean by way of its discursive potential to order language, of attaching narrative coherence to a place that not only no longer exists, but might have never existed, and finally integrating properties that may not belong to it that would ultimately function as a site of return—for authenticity, spirituality, sensuality, classical humanism, rationality. Of course it has been argued that it is not even possible to consider the Mediterranean a single sea without accounting for the conflicts and ruptures in its ‘meeting points.’ 54 This book attempts to retrieve these troubled and troubling ‘meeting points,’ which not only problematize the unity of the Mediterranean, but lie like splinters within, agitating against, contesting, de-authorizing recuperative imaginings of migration across the Mediterranean, which have figured the coming generation of migrants as ‘pioneers,’ crossing physical, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries to rejuvenate old Europe and to ultimately prefigure Lawrence Durrell, Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape of Manners of the Island of Corfu (London: Faber & Faber, 1945), 1/14/38. 54 Matvejevic, 25. 53

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a new Mediterranean supranational space: ‘another promise, another dream, the opening of another space: the Mediterranean community.’ 55 This supranational space promoted by official papers, speeches, programs, and scholarship, through ideals of mobility residing within globalization, theoretically lies at the end of a global capital flow and circulation of labor, products, ideas, people, but has not been materially or pragmatically attuned to transforming the figure of the migrant to cultural ‘pioneer’—mobile, free, able enough to dissolve the boundaries that obstruct a utopic Mediterranean community. This book attempts to retrieve these submerged and unauthorized ‘meeting points’ that agitate against and discompose the official chain of transmissions that have made up Mediterranean literary and cultural imaginaries. It does so not only through analysis of literary accounts of migration whose crossings come to define the sea by its North-South axis, but through an intersection of un-authorized travel imaginaries— undocumented migration literature—and their oft-skeptical deauthorization of absolute, unquestioned, transmitted Mediterranean narratives of unity, timelessness, cooperation, and identitarian fluidity. Moreover, the texts’ polarized apprehensions of the Mediterranean have compelled a problematization of the Mediterranean as a frame of analysis. Free from this chain of transmitted knowledge, authors open up the space of articulation for various, mutually contradictory, compossible Mediterraneans—but without losing sight of their divisive ‘meeting points,’ in this era. The paradox of the Mediterranean between which migrants are caught is conveyed in undocumented-migrant literature through the migrant journeys’ reflection upon distinct utopias: a tenacious colonial, Orientalist archive through revisited performances; a tradition of European tourism colliding with the carceral mobility of African migration; a utopic place-narrative un55

Begag and Chaouite, 18.

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dermined by its heterotopic re-signification—the depiction of sites contradictory and disturbing to utopia as they contest the Mediterranean’s homogenous figuration—the Mediterranean as a liberating frontier for ‘dropping out’ takes on new meaning for undocumented migrant figures, whose lives and stories are plunged and submerged into anonymity, when faced with exponential obstructions of travel as the Mediterranean Sea itself becomes more recognizably a fortressed frontier between the North and South. In some narratives this paradox is wrought through intertextuality: the use of literary inventions of the Mediterranean within overlapping traditions of twentieth and twenty-first century colonial and postcolonial literature to invent and theorize subjectivity in relation to the new space of the Mediterranean, to undermine fantasy of Mediterranean freedom of movement and adventure and create a larger transnational space of identification. The intertextuality that the literature establishes is often guided by the journey’s trans-Mediterranean boat and its passengers to convey and to connect two Mediterraneans operating simultaneously. In his memoir Yawmiyyāt Muhājir Sirrī (2005), Rachid Nini’s wandering through Spanish territory imbued with the historical memory of the lost paradise of Andalus is bitterly rendered and ironically juxtaposed against his modern displacement. Associated with the tradition of voyage and the ubiquity of mobility as a constitutive Mediterranean trait of the universal figure of the exile, Nini’s wandering does not align with the productive concept lying at the source of encounters between cultures in the Mediterranean contact zone. Wandering in pursuit of invisibility and stability actually leads to homelessness for Nini. The historical narrative of Tariq Ibn Ziad and his military conquests that initiated the Andalusian era is woven through both Nini’s memoir and Laila Lalami’s novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005). Lalami’s novel and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Partir (2009) integrate the literary history of the expat era: the narratives of William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and their Beat-Generation cohort are symbols of the Mediterranean and Morocco for tourists and readers alike. One of the main ve-

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hicles of performing the Mediterranean is the retrieval of a lost paradise, a cosmopolitan and liberatory frontier for ‘sensual pleasures,’ ‘authentic heritage,’ and ‘mythical vices’—which these authors of another era represent. Nostalgia is about reclamation of a time and place and a place in time, and thus concern with a suspended future stuck in the past. Nostalgia in the literature allows for an intertextuality that sets up older familiar tropes of Mediterranean adventure and carefree tourism with newer unfamiliar tropes of a Mediterranean increasingly fragmented, increasingly Other to Europe and the West, despite the caché that the sea’s connectivity once earned and continues to represent up to this day. The construction of the Mediterranean not only counters and negates the region’s ubiquitous romantic imagery, but integrates it as a useful fiction that contemporary accounts of trans-Mediterranean routes often put to task. I explore how the undocumented migrant’s contemporary optic of the Mediterranean journey is juxtaposed against a predominant and ubiquitous view of an enduring Mediterranean that is utopic and nostalgic. The evocation of the Mediterranean is nostalgic itself. It is always implying that we have lost something: the end of a utopia. In Chapter 1, ‘Memory Work in the Mediterranean Crossing: Nostalgia in Morocco’s Migration Literature’, while the main novels discussed, like Laila Lalami’s and Rachid Nini’s, seem anti-nostalgic in the midst of the perilous reality of sunk boats in the Mediterranean and the homeless wandering that ensues on the other shore, as in much undocumented migrant literature, it redeems the nostalgic perspective as much as it undermines it. Thus, it is counter-nostalgic in the way it weaponizes nostalgia to suggest an alternative Mediterranean and an alternative Morocco. Nostalgia is not a sentimental yearning for times past, but a tool that takes into account the past as productive and subversive of dominant memories. The productive role of nostalgia lies in its capacity to provoke a critical sensibility. Like counternostalgic texts, the novel wants to delve back with some yeaning only to complicate, unravel, hybridize the past that sometimes appear whitewashed of ‘them’.

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Just as intertextuality allows the unpacking of nostalgia’s yearning, the alternating layers of real and fantastical narrative deconstruct a more future-oriented yearning—the yearning inherent in ‘the immigrant dream’. In Chapter 2, ‘The Immigrant Dream: “Dream? Nightmare, More Like”’, I analyze the novel Cannibales (1999) by Mahi Binebine as a realist narrative overlaid with fantastical interpretations. As much as the novel abides by realism, as it portrays in detail the contemporary brutality of Mediterranean borders, it is the fantastical interpretations of the characters that permit doubt and suspend belief about the ‘immigrant dream’, a narrative of material success and social ascent, providing an opportunity for a critique of its internal contradictions. In Chapter 3, ‘Imagining the Mediterranean and Its Migrants: The Ambivalence of the Uncanny’, we encounter again how the fantastical cements the failure of realism to apprehend the story of migrants. In Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Partir (2006), it is not just the fantastical interpretations of characters woven through a foundational realist narrative that shakes the reliability of realism in undocumented trans-Mediterranean narratives. But it is also the dissolution of a realist novel into a fantastical one that points to the reliability of the ‘immigrant dream.’ Fantasy frames the novel to highlight the discrepancy between migrant characters’ imagined geographies on the other shore and the adversity they experience there. But, Ben Jelloun not only invokes the fantastic to unravel the certainty of the immigrant dream. Through intertextuality, he also unearths the Orientalist narratives that cast Morocco, the Mediterranean, the ‘Orient’, Africa in a spectacular light: when its inhabitants arrive on the other shore, they are also reduced to the bizarre, fantastic, freakish, uncanny. In doing so, he critiques the colonial effects of migration. In Chapter 4, ‘Mediterranean Frontier, Mediterranean Circuit: Undocumented Migration in Egyptian Literature’s Double Imaginary’, I explore Egyptian undocumented migrant literature through an ecology of globalization. The texts reveal a circulation of capital, products, and ideas that have become ‘liberated,’ as a result of globalization, at the same time that the movement

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of people, and certain categories of labor in which they engage, have become more subject to control. The globalized Mediterranean has become a place designed to encourage free circulation of capital and a blockade discouraging human mobility. I liken the current dual Mediterranean to geographer Doreen Massey’s notion of the double global imaginary where space is imagined as free and unbounded but subject to material controls. 56 These anomalous, incompatible images of the Mediterranean in the double global imaginary have been captured in Egypt’s undocumented migration literature. While not as extensive as the Maghreb’s, where the phenomena has a longer history, Egyptian undocumented migrant literature has sought to intervene in the Mediterranean narrative by showing culture, even in remote villages, to be far from atemporal and preserved but rather an effect of an already violently dynamic globalization. Utopic cultural tourist sanctuaries are also exposed as staged mirages dependent on a network of global capital manipulation. These works reveal the Mediterranean’s globalized spaces through material processes of control and marketplace practices, concealed behind the finished product of ancient, enduring culture. Unlike Maghrebian undocumented migrant literature concerned with the outsider migrant figure in Europe, Egyptian literature focuses on homeland and journey, revealing the aspiring migrant as outsider in the privileged spaces of his society—nationally symbolic sites marked by concentrations of wealth and power—and revealing global participation in the structures that produce in the global South the poverty, political disenfranchisement and exclusion that give rise to the will to migrate. But like its Maghrebian counterpart, this body of work shows undocumented migrants creating heterotopic spaces by undermining the binary of the inside/outside their societies, navigating between the imDoreen Massey, ‘Imagining Globalisation,’ in Global Futures: Migration, Environment, and Globalization, eds Avtar Brah, Mary Hickman, and Mairtin Mac, 27–44 (Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan, 1999).

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agined and the real place, between the fantasy and a geographical entity, between absolute utopias and the places where outsiders dwell—city slums, Delta villages, flimsy crafts on the Mediterranean. Lastly, because these works draw the parameters of migration around the homeland and journey, as opposed to a European state, they subvert the dominant discourse of globalization celebrating flows, streams, circulations, by equating it with limited and suppressed movement. Chapter 5, ‘Saharan-Mediterranean Transits: Impossible “Arrival”’, explores the undocumented migrant journey in transit where the route from sub-Saharan Africa stops in transit in Morocco en route to Europe. In Sefi Atta’s short story ‘Twilight Trek’ (2010), the Saharan-Mediterranean route is echoed in the following chapter, which focuses on Marie NDiaye’s novel Trois Femmes Puissantes (2009). The short story centralizes themes of citizenship, subjectivity, and self-representation around the exodus trope. The trope’s perpetual deferment of arrival, liberation, and survival (a nightmare of marginality and discrimination) sets the parameters for the figure of the undocumented, occupying a limbo state in between worlds and nations, gesturing toward an unfinished citizenship. The thwarted arrival reverberates in the following chapter, as well, where the Saharan-Mediterranean link establishes a deflected and interrupted circuit of political representation, where they are shown to be intercepted by the media and locked down in media signifiers like flood, deluge, nameless mass, not only on the other side of the Mediterranean but within African territory. My research locates the identity of undocumented migrants in a discursive gap of subjectivity in the context of democratic rights and equality. Political accounts are structured by aesthetic modes of representation, the ‘mimetic economy,’ which evinces a political reality through acts of representation. Theories of representation, engagement with reading and writing, are in circuit not only with epistemological commitments but political thought. But within the realm of the legible/intelligible, what has once been ‘pre-discursively sanctioned’ has been preempted into the discursively unrecognizable, inscrutable, illegible, a signifier without a referent, effectively locking down the circuit

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between the discursively pre-sanctioned in schemas of representation and the politically and juridically recognizable. The interrupted circuit of the mimetic economy, political action and representation of people without a signifier, the anomic, the nameless are then caught in the construction of fear when it comes to media signifiers such as immigration flood, or deluge, of the nameless. Chapter 6, ‘Death at the Border: Making and Unmaking the Migrating Body’, also explores the Saharan-Mediterranean route and anti-migration rhetoric of invasion and contamination by establishing the anxious interconnectedness of the material and metaphoric/ideational in apprehending the border, focusing on Marie NDiaye’s novel Trois Femmes Puissantes (2009), which weaves together the trials of three loosely connected women, revealing the traffic links between France and Senegal. Set apart from other critiques of the novel, this chapter focuses on the last ‘strong woman’ of the triptych—Khady Demba—as an allegorical figure of today’s African migrants pushed out of a homeland that refuses to provide for them and toward perilous journeys. I focus on how the abstract is subject to play in the novel— literalized metaphors and the figurative highlight the way language and the ideational intersect with and even affect and shape the material. Thus, this draws attention to the categories in which the world is represented and the way these conventions shape social reality. The migrant characters’ self-conception of their journey, by which they fashion the Mediterranean into a heterotopic space, one in which multiple identities and modalities of space/mobility converge, is determined through a variety of fantastic, utopic, uncanny elements. In one way or another, the fantastic prevails, whether in the counter-nostalgia of Murad’s tale of Ghomari and Jenara in Chapter 1, the metamorphoses and crossdressing in Chapters 2 and 3, the Kafka-esque refashioning of Egyptian landscapes in Chapter 4, the ‘proleptic imaginary’ of Chapter 5 and its grounding in the nested Exodus narrative, or the corporeal transformations of Chapter 6. In Chapter 1, the counter-nostalgia of Murad’s tale of Ghomari and Jenara reveals the illegitimacy of historical memo-

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ries because they deny the divisions of the Mediterranean upon which contemporary struggle is contingent, and the way the characters allow for a heterotopic reflection upon the utopic Mediterranean and the one to which they are privy. In Chapter 2, the social and generic fantasies reflect upon each other. The fantastic hermeneutic and metatextual narrative interrogate realism to deliver an account of the forces that cohere to drive people to immigrate. The uncanny and its doubles shed a light on social fantasies, so doubt is introduced about the meaning of the sea, of the Mediterranean, and immigration itself. In Chapter 3, the fantastic hermeneutic allows for a rendering of both hell and paradise of the Mediterranean as they ironically pursue the immigrant dream. In Chapter 4, the undocumented migrants capture a bizarre Egyptian landscape as they create heterotopic spaces by being both inside/outside their societies, navigating between the imagined and the real place, between the fantasy and a geographical entity, between absolute utopias and the places where they dwell. In Chapter 5, the unreal space of the Mediterranean is revealed through the dialogic space of the desert, as well as through the hidden spaces of the undocumented Sub-Saharans in the Mediterranean coastal town, reflecting a heterotopic porosity. Secrecy and undetectability extend from the desert to the town on the Mediterranean. In this story, too, the social and generic fantasies interact. The proleptic imaginary nested in the Exodus narrative, which reveals the desert as both continuous with and distinct from the Mediterranean, uncovers social fantasies of nativism, revealing the entire SaharanMediterranean route as a passage manqué. Unlike other chapters where there is a discussion of the fantastical as giving life to the heterotopic imagination, and where the social fantasy interacts with the genre-based fantasy to do so, in Chapter 6 the only perception of impact of social fantasy, as it interacts with genrebased fantasy, is on the material, the corporeal, the breaking bodies of migrants. The focus is on the impact of the discursive (including metaphors of social fantasy) on social reality. In this way, the migrant figure constructs the Mediterranean, by showing its simultaneous seductive and abject utopias, its past and present depiction, its unitary and divided qualities, its

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aestheticized and material constructions, its dissonance between the spaces he occupies and the spaces occupied by ‘legal’, documented travelers. The fantastic, utopic, and uncanny textual elements become the means for migrant characters to make the Mediterranean into a Foucauldian heterotopia, both fantasy as a wish or hope or social imaginary, or its literary fulfillment. And this literary fulfillment through the text’s hermeneutic layer often takes the social fantasy (sometimes native, sometimes colonial, sometimes simply nativist) and subverts it to show, rather than a utopic fantasy, a heterotopical fantasy—painfully wielded by the revelations of a heterotopic Mediterranean—in all its subverted glory. All of the texts in this book are the focus of a Mediterranean binary, and while they are invested in revealing the asymmetricality of two Mediterraneans (with which this introduction begins), they are also invested in revealing how they are and have been in dialogue with each other by deconstructing the binary. In fact, the binary of the Mediterranean is portrayed in narratives touched by globalization: Like Yawmiyyāt Muhājir Sirrī, recent Egyptian novels, like Khālid Al-Khamīsī’s Safīnat Nūḥ (2010) and Ayman Zuḥrī’s Baḥr Al-Rūm (2008), charting undocumented, trans-Mediterranean journeys planned in small villages far from the sea but still susceptible to the adventures of physical and social mobility it carries, are also invested in the discontinuity between the material and discursive construct of the Mediterranean that migrant movements put in sharp relief. This dissonance is sharply rendered in Egyptian writer Fārūq Jūwayda’s poem ‘Hadhī Bilādu Lam Ta‘ud Kabilādī’ (2009), wherein the sea is rendered both as socially constructed site of trespass and natural barrier, through an intimacy of human practice and as an elemental wild zone, disconnected from human agency. The texts situate the tradition of the voyage and the imaginary genealogy of exile at the center of intersecting and uncontrollable flows of capital, goods, and ideas marking (and marketing) the Mediterranean’s global modernity. But despite the texts’ glimpse into a trans-Mediterranean circulation of migrants, stowaways, smugglers, diaspora narratives, and capital, (non-controllable mobility), they foreclose on narrations of

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displacement on the other shore, calling attention to the unevenness of mobility between the proximate North and South. But, moreover, focus on the South points to the ways the North already participates and insinuates itself in the South despite tendencies to fortified societies. It focuses on an unevenness and hierarchy of mobility in which the North participates in structures producing poverty and disenfranchisement, while occluding its own responsibility for—and participation in—the very structures that produce in the global South the poverty, political disenfranchisement and sense of injustice or exclusion that give rise to the maligned and feared will to migrate. Lying at the source of encounters in the current-day Mediterranean contact zone, the interconnections between North and South, is not only the mobility of people, but the mobility of commodities, employment, disenfranchisement, commodification, and poverty. Even though the narratives appear intent on setting up an opposition between the North and South, Africa and Europe, their intertextuality, scenes conveying multidirectional influence, a political and representational cultural ecology revealing a past and present of not only Europe in Africa, but Africa in Europe, are just as intent on deconstructing them as binaries. Thus, in a deconstructivist mode, they undermine the binaries of North and South, Africa and Europe, by demonstrating how one route of ‘antithesis secretly inheres within the other.’ 57 Although one can say that readership (Francophone, Anglophone, Italophone, Hispanophone) in the diaspora determines how intertextuality plays out in terms of a writer’s attention to cultural referents, the eclipse of history succeeds in achieving exactly what those writers critique in their work— asymmetrically drawing the south Mediterranean as a passive stage and playground (in the manner of Cavafy and Durrell), leaving no impression or influence beyond its shores. Arab commentators, as well, are especially attuned to a semblance of Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 11.

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symmetry in terms of traveling cultures across the Mediterranean to Europe, rather than merely representing it as a stage for western thinkers to retrieve a western civilizational grounding. And, they do so in light of the division proposed by the European Union, the Mediterranean Union, Euro-Med cultural partnerships, that have created frontiers in the Mediterranean making migrants and their movements across ‘illegal.’ The past few years have seen a rise in cultural and literary critiques addressing undocumented migration from Africa. However, many address how European texts, films, and discourse reflect on hospitality to African migrants, becoming part of French, Spanish, British, and other national literatures. Many are dedicated to the immigration experience after Europe’s fortress has been ‘breached’ and shores reached, wherein the journey across borders is markedly absent. Moreover, while the binarized construction of the Mediterranean is apprehended by various non-literary theorists, the dual Mediterranean as reality and trope motivating the symbolic geography, microtopographies, and mobility of the characters and narrative do not feature in literary analyses of undocumented migration, excluding the topos of south of the Mediterranean. Integrating into a project on trans-Mediterranean undocumented migration texts that engage the Mediterranean topos and its multiple frontiers as a trope of mobility, mobility through space and time, with a contemporary historical referent on Mediterranean border crossing is integral. First, it reveals that one contemporary historical moment of the Mediterranean sparks a range of narratives, from the utopic to the abject. Second, the totality of the Mediterranean as a cultural topos allows us to think of the utopic and the abject, both determined by border thinking, as unified and mutually constitutive. Third, and paradoxically, it also demonstrates that the utopic and abject figure of the Mediterranean resides in its connectivity and mobilization. Even though this project focuses on modern productions of the southern Mediterranean, it takes into consideration the performative Mediterranean’s compressions of space and time, many regions and periods, conveyed by one historical and cultural referent, resurgent in iterations of Mediterraneanism.

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The totalization takes in the disjunctures of time and space in the Mediterranean as part of a developmental narrative and sublates them into a fiction of resolutions. The large body of work on the undocumented in Europe has been extremely valuable in apprehending intersections of Eurocentricism, citizenship, and subjectivity, as they align to construct a modern-day migrant identity, particularly since I discuss the nascent identity of undocumented migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa in Morocco since the recent and unprecedented period of intense migration policing and border patrolling within the continent (Chapter 5). Also, focus on the undocumented in Europe is nationally, historically, and movementspecific, but it also limits the exploration of literary narratives to a European site, excluding the legitimacy of itinerant narrations from homelands south of the Mediterranean. 58 This asymmetFor example, the movements of the ‘sans papiers’ in France, the ‘sin papeles’ in Spain, and the ‘clandestini’ in Italy have their own strong body of analysis. In France, the sans-papiers movement began after the enactment of the Pasqua laws in 1993 at the instigation of Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, whose strong support of ‘zero immigration’ set the tone for recent French policy in refugee, asylum, and migration issues. Deemed by supporters as an effective tool against undocumented immigration, the legislation encompassed new severe measures: toughening of visa requirements, reduction in number of visas, increase in police enforcement powers, expansion of detention period, and narrowing of administrative review scheme. These and other provisions caused a significant number of legitimate migrants to become illegal. The affaire des sans-papiers (sans papiers’ affair), or lutte des sans-papiers (struggle of the sans-papiers) began when on March 18, 1996, three hundred undocumented African immigrants occupied the Saint Ambroise Church in Paris. Forced by police to withdraw on March 22, they moved into the Jappy gymnasium. In Abdoulaye Gueye’s ‘The Colony Strikes Back: African Protest Movements in Postcolonial France,’ he writes of the forced movement of the sans-papiers’ protest that garnered media attention: ‘Forced to move repeatedly, they were first hosted in the Théâtre La Cartoucherie at Vincennes. Then a closed-down warehouse owned by the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (the national rail58

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rical and unbalanced perspective often eclipses the migration narrative itself, a journey that cannot be reducible to arrival. Concerning diasporic identity, Hamid Naficy observes that people in the diaspora have an identity in their homeland before their departure, and their diasporic identity is ‘constructed in

road company) on Pajol Street in the eighteenth arrondissement was put at their disposal by members of the union, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT). Eventually, on 28 June, on their own, they occupied the Saint-Bernard Church in the eighteenth arrondissement. In order to draw public attention to their cause, unannounced sit-ins in public places like the eighteenth arrondissement police precinct and hunger strikes took place. On 26 August, using axes and rams to tear down the door, the French police forced their way into the Saint-Bernard Church before news cameras, helping the sans papiers’ cause to gain the media limelight’ (231). See Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 26, 2 (2006). For further critiques focusing on the sans-papiers movement and identity in France, see: Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Mireille Rosello, ‘Fortress Europe and Its Metaphors: Immigration and the Law,’ Working Paper Series in European Studies 3, no. 1, 1999, Center for European Studies, University of Wisconsin; Mireille Rosello, ‘New Sans-Papiers Rhetoric in Contemporary France’, in Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France, eds Susan Ireland and Patrice Proulx, 187–200 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001); Didier Fassin, ‘“Clandestin” ou “Exclus”? Quand les Mots Font de la Politique,’ Polîtix 34 (1996), 77–86; Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetic, translated by Steve Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010); Jacques Derrida, ‘Derelictions of the Right to Justice,’ in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2000, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg, 133–146 (Stanford: Stanford Press, 2002); Christian O’Connell, ‘Plight of France’s Sans-Papiers Gives a Face to Struggle over Immigration Reform,’ Human Rights Brief 4, no. 1, The Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Washington College of Law, American University http://www.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/v4i1/pasqua41.htm

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resonance with this prior identity.’ 59 Naficy argues that the diaspora is a collective, in both its origination and its destination, and thus the collective memory of the homeland is required in its narration. The unbalanced body of critiques and texts, albeit with exceptions, often achieve the equivalent of the European media archive of photographs to which I alluded earlier. The images undergird the discourse on undocumented migrants—it is the migrants who do not belong rather than the beachgoers, whether they are tourists or nearby residents. Images not only expose the migrants but reveal them as the ‘detritus’ and excess that should have remained hidden; they were once seen as merely working bodies, but now those working bodies are no longer contracted or sought out in European metropolises, they are advised to stay where they are. They portray migrants as out of place, unfamiliar, unexpected, unrooted, alien strange arrivals without a journey or history, a ‘prior identity,’ which would at least render a representational ecology or what Ursula Biemann has called ‘sustainable representation’, practices that convey the story of how everything we do around the world is interconnected here and now, i.e., how the western lifestyle, known to have an effect on climate change, also has an impact on herdsmen in the Sahel. […] Images are not excluded from this process. As social relations, representations that constitute meaning in one place are locked into the signification of another. 60

Localization attempts to not only give the characters ‘roots’, a nation, a locale, but it also individuates them rather than presenting them as a disembodied, abstract mass, part of a distant, spectacular scene on the news. This is why the book focuses on Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exile and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 14. 60 Ursula Biemann, ‘Dispersing the Viewpoint: Sahara Chronicle,’ 58. http://www.geobodies.org/books-and-texts/texts 59

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journey narratives. Its main purpose is to contribute toward addressing the imbalance in the research literature by focusing literary analysis on African narratives and poetry that charts the migration from the homeland, across the Mediterranean frontier, to the European shore. The chapters are dedicated to national literatures that chart the African trans-Mediterranean undocumented journey from Morocco, Egypt, Senegal, Nigeria (and other transit locales, like Mali). Journey narratives often show migrant characters not as ‘out of place,’ an embodied unfamiliar excess on a European shore, but part of a journey, with roots and a ‘prior identity,’ allowing for the mapping of an interdependent relationship of uneven development that connects the northern and southern shore. This project reflects the authors’ investment in how distinct nations map the journey across the Mediterranean, casting the literature as both national and diasporic, emergent from and part of the African Mediterranean rather than about it. The ecology of an interconnected global capitalism is illuminated by the provocative notion of ‘human waste’ (Bauman) and ‘detritus of globality’ (Spivak) to describe migrants catapulted from the margins of the South to seek livelihood North, the center of exploitative global capitalism, a neocolonialism that has given rise to uneven development and a hierarchy of mobility. Spivak writes: In the new diaspora … the new scattering of the ‘seeds’ of ‘developing’ nations so that they can take root on developed grounds means: Eurocentric migration, labor export both male and female, border crossings, the seeking of political asylum, and the haunting in-place uprooting of ‘comfort women’ in Africa and Asia. 61

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 357. 61

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Spivak also urges us to acknowledge that migrancy is a result of the margin wanting to be a part of the center: ‘[we] cannot use “cultural identity” as a permission to difference and an instrument for disavowing that Eurocentric economic migration … persists in the hope of justice under capitalism.’ 62 In other words, cultural identity cannot be used to grant different rights to different people, as is the case in migration policies of most, if not all, nation states. Spivak also urges acknowledgment of South-North migration as the result of a desire to become part of the dominant for both the intellectual and the ‘subaltern’ migrant. According to Spivak, migration is the attempt of the margin to enter the dominant. In the same vein, Zygmunt Bauman argues that the modern period is constituted by boundaries between the normative and the disposable, giving rise to policies dedicated to policing borders between citizens and refugees. Our ‘liquid modernity’, according to Bauman, is ‘a civilization of excess, redundancy, waste and waste disposal’, 63 one producing refugees as ‘the waste products of globalization’. 64 Although border crossing is often depicted as a clandestine activity occurring in the mythologized ‘borderlands,’ research highlights interconnectedness between migrant crossings and larger politicaleconomic forces such as EU migration policies and security measures, global markets, and North-South inequalities. 65 ReSpivak, 395. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 97. 64 Bauman, 66. 65 While I discuss the violent asymmetry in globalization practices in Chapter 4 on Egyptian migration, I would like to point out the ways that this plays out in Morocco. Using investment and government data, Amanda Crawley Jackson discusses the flow of tourists, images, narratives and products into Morocco, post-Schengen, an agreement which has restricted the travel and migration of Moroccans to the EU, in ‘Cette Poetique du Politique: Political and Representational Ecologies in the Work of Yto Barrada,’ L’Esprit Createur 51, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 53–67. She writes, ‘If, since Schengen, Moroccans have been largely unable to 62 63

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search also clarifies the way in which the process of migration has been commoditized and exploited to serve various interests, where migration to Europe is one form of exploitation of labor by capital within the global economy. Migration benefits capital on a global scale—its maintenance depends on its ‘use value’ for global capitalism. 66 Inasmuch as the Mediterranean has been undermined as an invention—less about shared traits than a play upon claims and knowledges about those shared traits—the heterotopic narratives of the Mediterranean wrought by undocumented migrant accounts also show how their mobility, or its suspension, constructs the Mediterranean with every obstruction, every drowning, every undocumented step on ‘the other shore’. These moments of transnational (im)mobility are represented by the characters as a dynamic dialectical relationship between the travel to the West, the West continues to flow into Morocco, bringing with it images and narratives of wealth and opportunity that will always remain beyond the border, frustratingly close but always out of reach. For example, the satellite dishes and information technologies (which, ironically, emerged around the same time that Europe closed its external borders) have enabled an unprecedented circulation of images, information, and dialogue across national boundaries, streaming the West more than ever before into the homes of Moroccan nationals’ (60). Moreover, the ‘volume of international trade passing through Morocco’s factories and ports and the numbers of Western businesses locating to Morocco have grown substantially’, since Morocco’s promotion an attractive host to international investment. Lastly, the growth of tourism and the settlement of Westerners in Morocco has been and continues to be a key motivator for domestic growth. More generally, the asymmetry and hierarchy of mobility can be discerned in globalized labor practices: ‘local communities, particularly those in the global South, provide a static and stable source of labor’ for the ‘cosmopolitan tastes of Western consumers, who are able and free themselves, for the most part, to circulate across the globe. 66 David McMurray, In and Out of Morocco: Smuggling and Migration in a Frontier Boomtown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 131.

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inside and outside of destination sites, or ways of heterotopically being both internal to, a part of, norms regulating the cultural spaces that they other, and external to them. Although the Mediterranean has been described, in a legitimate backlash against its utopic politics of erasure and forgetting, as a ‘fiction,’ 67 I maintain, through a double movement of ‘ascriptionappropriation’, that while the Mediterranean has been appropriated as a performance, an invention, and a ‘fiction,’ it is also the construction, the invention, ascription of the undocumented migrant figure, in a broader context of place signification and cultural creation: ‘Places have meanings and meanings are always produced, never simply expressed, as part of a wider process of cultural creation. Literature is one way in which such meanings are produced within a culture and ascribed to place, just as place is often appropriated to produce meanings in literature’. 68 Representations of space are not unmediated, but are inextricable from construction of social space: the literature of undocumented migration exposes spaces of the border—the detention center, checkpoint, fence, blockade, boat—creating their own place-narrative of the Mediterranean, not one of vague and unified multicultural contentment, but one of division, fragmentation, and irregular mobility. The migrant figure constructs the Mediterranean, by showing its simultaneous seductive and abject utopias, its past and present depiction, its unitary and divided qualities, its aestheticized and material constructions, its dissonance between the spaces he occupies and the spaces occupied by ‘legal’, documented travelers.

Gil Hochberg, ‘“The Mediterranean Option”: On the Politics of Regional Affiliation in Current Israeli Imagination,’ Journal of Levantine Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 2011), 57. 68 Thrift, 33. 67

CHAPTER 1. MEMORY WORK IN THE MEDITERRANEAN CROSSING: NOSTALGIA IN MOROCCO’S MIGRATION LITERATURE In Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), a novel on the various experiences that compel a group of migrants to occupy a single boat that crosses the Mediterranean from Morocco to Spain, the competing narratives of the Mediterranean as bridge and border feature within the span of the first couple of pages. The dramatic description of the crossing appears to reflect the dominant narrative of Mediterranean migrationsmugglers, a flimsy boat overcrowded with migrants traveling under cover of night, Moroccan migrants and sub-Saharan asylum seekers, drownings, and the Guardia Civil waiting along the Spanish coast. The struggle of the migrants is suddenly displaced by the historical weight that Murad, the first narrator, detects. He marvels at the short distance between Morocco and Spain: ‘Fourteen kilometers… he wondered how fourteen kilometers could separate not just two countries but two universes.’ 1 Through a historical memory, Murad highlights the narrow space that holds centuries of ‘cultural contact, regional and imLaila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2005), 1.

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perial aggression, and transnational identities’. 2 Like other analyses of the novel, this chapter focuses on the theme of historical memory. 3 But this chapter especially focuses on the way historical memory reveals the duality of the Mediterranean—of a shared history of travel and conquest between Spain and Morocco opens up the bridge narrative of the Mediterranean within the border narrative (of the Mediterranean boat crossing) established by Lalami. Certainly, the real and the utopic aspects of the Mediterranean collide, insofar as its would-be migrant characters, like Murad, force them to collide. In doing so, the heterotopia of the Mediterranean—what the ‘real’ sites perform in relation to the ‘utopic’ sites, or how the image of the ‘border’ performs in relation to that of the ‘bridge’—is brought to the fore, first due to Murad’s evocation of historical memory, followed by other types of productive and problematic memory work, real and fantastical. The nostalgic reclamation of historical memory is held up as a problematic affair in the novel, as well as in other Moroccan texts that apprehend the duality of the Mediterranean in light of today’s undocumented crossings. Anti-nostalgic sentiments in the texts abound, not only when asserting the illegitimacy of historical memories that undermine the divisions of the Mediterranean upon which contemporary migration struggles are contingent, but also when nostalgia is weaponized in the form of Orientalism. However, in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, the potential of delving into the past is not completely ir‘The Deterritorialised Self in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits’, The Journal of North African Studies 21, no. 2 (2016), 184. 3 See Ahmed Idrissi Alami, ‘“Illegal” Crossing, Historical Memory and Postcolonial Agency in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits’, The Journal of North African Studies 17, no. 1 (2012); Rima Abunasser, ‘The Deterritorialised Self in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits’, The Journal of North African Studies 21, no. 2 (2016) ; Soudeh Oladi and John Portelli, ‘Traces of the Deleuzian Nomad in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits’, The Journal of North African Studies 22, no. 4 (2017). 2

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redeemable when the return functions as a ‘counter-nostalgic’ strategy of challenging dominant histories and nostalgic narratives so as to ‘reflect on the present in critical ways’, as Jennifer Ladino has argued. 4 Reflection on the present by delving into nostalgic narratives in the novel is inseparable from the duality of the Mediterranean and the modes of mobility it engenders. Claudia Esposito has asked, ‘is not the literary Mediterranean a fundamentally nostalgic reminisce of times past …?’ 5 Evocation of the Mediterranean can be a nostalgic sentiment in itself. The implication is that we have lost something: a cosmopolitan paradise. Certainly, the past can be a myth, but that doesn’t mitigate yearning for its return. Undocumented migration literature often cannot bypass the way nostalgia shapes an understanding of the Mediterranean, considering its contradictions are shaped by the way its current re-invention is complicated by a yearning to its past mythical character. In the first few pages, Lalami reveals memory work as inherent to the imagining of the Mediterranean narrative. At first, Lalami shows Murad exposing the Mediterranean as a border zone devoid of topographical markers and absent of historical and social relations: the first chapter, titled ‘The Trip,’ features the boat journey and its parameters. ‘The Trip’ is set apart from the rest of the novel, which is made up of individual narratives that explore the personal histories that led the migrants to this point on the boat, suggesting ‘the trip’ is isolated, detached from its specific local surroundings. Within ‘The Trip’, the Guardia Civil detention center where migrants are hauled after washing ashore is marked, in the Augean sense, by the non-place: 6 it Jennifer Ladino, ‘Longing for Wonderland: Nostalgia for Nature in Post-Frontier America’, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (2004), 91 5 Claudia Esposito, The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 163. 6 See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (New York: Verso, 1995). Augé designated ‘non-places; as sites with no topographical relations, no historical connections to other 4

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shows no relation to the coast marking the 14 kilometers across the Strait of Gibraltar, the beach upon which the migrants wash ashore, nor the hotels and houses which the Guardia Civil watch vigilantly. The only continuity between spaces is the familiar appearance of boatmates; the rest of the space discourages human interaction as it is regulated by a clock on the wall, doctors wearing masks, and police officers wordlessly hauling migrants from points within, to shore to van to center to cell. At the same time, Lalami shows Murad constructing the Mediterranean as a place deeply incorporated into the web of relations of the region. During the crossing from Tangier (Morocco) to Tarifa (Spain), Murad represents the trip as ‘the return of history’ 7: Murad can make out the town where they’re headed. Tarifa. The mainland point of the Moorish invasion in 711. Murad used to regale tourists with anecdotes about how Tariq Ibn Ziad had led a powerful Moor army across the Straits and, upon landing in Gibraltar, ordered all the boats burned. He’d told his soldiers that they could march forth and defeat the enemy or turn back and die a coward’s death. The men had sites, and no human identification because the human presence therein is designed to be random and circumstantial. some of these transit zones are part of a topographical web of relations, meaning that there is a historical and cultural connection to the surroundings of these zones. That is, the transit zone and border, as revealed by undocumented migrant sites, often represent a fluid and also indefinite sense of social space as the border is often implemented in everyday spaces. 7 In The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration, Daniela Flesler argues that Spain’s contemporary anxiety about Maghrebian immigration is rooted in the specter of the medieval ‘Moor’, including the ebb and flow between the two regions due to the Andalusian Empire, the Inquisition, the Crusades, then later, Spanish colonization of Morocco, and the immigration of Spaniards to Morocco in the first part of the twentieth century. See Daniela Flesler, The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008).

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followed their general, toppled the Visigoths, and established an empire that ruled over Spain for more than seven hundred years. Little did they know that they’d be back, Murad thinks. 8

From the middle of an isolating, barren sea, Murad identifies site-crossing markers: ‘Tarifa’, ‘fourteen kilometers’ between the shores, ‘the cargo ship,’ other ‘harraga’ swimming past. 9 The sea is not without geohistorical specificity. The historical figure of the Amazigh leader Tariq Ibn Ziad and his legendary burnt ships feature as a testimony to a Maghrebian memory of bravery and triumph: Tariq Ibn Ziad was a Muslim commander who drove the conquest of Spain (711–718) by leading an army across the Strait of Gibraltar. Upon arrival, he gave his troops an ultimatum: they could keep marching and defeat the enemy or retreat and die a coward’s death. Then he had all his ships burned. The troops marched forth, defeated the Visigoths, and established an empire that ruled over Spain for seven hundred years. Collective identities are established through historical memory or the telling and retelling of travel narratives. Maurice Hawlbachs has written that the role of communal memory in collective identity formation is one of ‘groups who conceive their unity and particularity through a common image of their past.’ 10 And, a national or regional nostalgia, according to Svetlana Boym, can encourage a sense of a shared past as ‘a place of sacrifice and glory’ by creating a kind of ‘collective belonging that…transcend[s] individual memories’. 11 The historical figure of Tariq Ibn Ziad and his legendary burnt ships feature as a collective memory of Maghrebian bravery and triumph that Murad wishes to project on the flimsy boat he and his fellow migrants use to cross the sea. Lalami, 2–3. Ibid., 2–3. 10 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 15. 8 9

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Instead, the passage reveals the irony of the immigrants’ modern predicament in that the return of those who had been powerful in the past is contrasted with their modern return, wherein they are powerless, needy, hunted. Lalami resignifies this collective memory into an ironic statement regarding today’s hidden ‘return’, a jarring present of feeble rafts and disoriented and thwarted travelers. Memory work in the novel allows us to grasp the two different Mediterraneans, bridge and border, while understanding that the Mediterranean conception as a bridge is not necessarily in the past, but at play in the present. Certainly in this novel, memory work is a problematic affair, as Lalami puts forth memories and undermines them at the same time—through scenes of globalized spaces like the Mediterranean and their undocumented sojourns, in an anti-nostalgic sentiment. Memory work, for one, eclipses an undesirable present condition—so that looking back, we forget that this is the impoverished present—we're already here, and this is it. Spaces of the undocumented like the sea and the Spanish detention center Murad and his boatmates experience do more than appear side by side with historical memories as emblems of a homeland that travel with migrants; they reflect upon them as utopic excursions into a Maghreb of powerful heritage and cosmopolitan roots. This relationship between sites of the undocumented and historical memory is heterotopic by presenting the ‘joint experience’ of the Mediterranean image and relation of self to the image: undocumented sites rendered through disjunctive episodes of uncertainty, isolation, immobility, and hypermobility reflect upon and shatter the myth of a unified Mediterranean. 12 And this bordered Mediterranean is crucial to the peril of nostalgia (at least in its restorative form), which Murad exemplifies at first in his embrace of this memory as absolute truth and its use in a reconstruction of a lost home (once found in Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (‘Des Autres Espaces’), Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), 24.

12

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Spanish Andalusia). After all, nostalgia in its restorative form, according to Svetlana Boym, is not only capacity of memory to reclaim the past but to reclaim space in time: ‘restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time’. 13 Thus the association of nostos (return home) with restorative nostalgia implicates Andalusian Spain as the return destination for Murad, before he casts it in an ironic light. Indeed, collective memory reveals a nostalgia for a past of adventure and exploration, affirmed by heroic, virtuous travelers through which readers reimagine their individual and collective identities. Classics of Arab and North African travel, such as Ibn Fadlan’s Mission to the Volga and Ibn Battuta’s Travels, reinforce the virtues of expansion and provide collective solace through national, regional, or ethnic identification. And, indeed Moroccan literature of undocumented migrations also lingers on recollections of a long history of travel and conquest, but in order to undermine the nostalgic imagining of a lost ‘home’ to be found in migrating to the other Mediterranean shore. The Moroccan journalist and editor Rachid Nini wrote Yawmiyyāt Muhājir Sirrī Sirī based on his experiences traveling undocumented across Europe after receiving an invitation for an Amazigh Conference in the Canary Islands, he claims in his book. While the veracity of his account as an undocumented migrant who had outworn his welcome has been questioned in the Moroccan press, his account has not been disproved and stands as another testament to the way undocumented migration and its sites are constructed in Moroccan national memory. Nini’s days as an undocumented migrant are distinguished by places, cities, towns where he seems to be caught in a cycle of carceral mobility conveying immediacy, uncertainty that reflects disdainfully upon a distant mythologized past. The same disjunctive structure can be found in Āḥmad Al-Jalālī’s Al-Harāqa, which is partitioned into sections identified by the storytellers, who recount similar epi13

Boym, 49.

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sodes of urgency and disorientation on Spanish soil, leaving an impression of an uncertainty that has no capacity to withstand a unified narrative. 14 Wandering from orange groves in Spain to kitchens in Parisian restaurants to construction sites in Italy, Nini states that the narrative of wandering has passed on from Jews to Arabs: ‘The Jew is no longer wandering. The era of wandering for the Jew has ended, and the era of wandering for the Arab has begun.’ 15 Also featuring in Nini’s account is the legend of Tariq Ibn Ziad, who burned his ships so his troops would have no choice but to remain and fight for Andalusia, instilling in them a sense of bravado born out of the impossibility of return: Now I know why the migrants burn their passports/identity papers once the lights of al-Andalus/Andalusia are illuminated for them and they toss them away at sea. They do this so they don’t return to the other side alive. So it’s death or the spoils of victory. Burning a passport isn’t much different from burning a ship of return. It appears that the lessons of history persist through the ages in a miserable/tragic way. But what’s really laughable in this story is that there are no spoils of victory. 16

Nini responds to the legend of Moroccan claims to political authority and cultural centrality with the undocumented-migrant story. The legend of adventure has been replaced with a jarring present of burned passports and an aimless, fruitless wandering. Nini’s wandering through Spanish territory, imbued with the historical memory of the lost paradise of Andalus, is a bitterly rendered anti-nostalgic trope. The anti-nostalgic trope of wandering is deemed discontinuous with the productive concept Āḥmad Āl-Jalālī. Al-Harāqa (The Harraga). Qenitra, Morocco: Gharb Media, 2003. 15 All the passages of Rachid Nini’s text are my translations in this chapter. Rachid Nini, Yawmiyyāt Muhājir Sirrī (Journal of a Clandestine) (Morocco: Manshūrāt ‘Akāḍ, 2005), 115. 16 Ibid., 170. 14

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lying at the source of encounters between cultures in the Mediterranean contact zone (associated with the tradition of voyaging as a constitutive Mediterranean trait). Wandering in pursuit of invisibility and stability actually leads to homelessness for Nini. Again, the discontinuity between the material and discursive construct of the Mediterranean is put in sharp relief by migrant (im)mobility. Both Nini and Lalami gesture back to Maghrebian historical memories. But they resist nostalgic tropes of Mediterranean travel. They turn a skeptical eye toward their glorification and transform nostalgia into historical reflection—this is the present, the foil of the loot and the booty of a past is not to be glorified, but to be seen for what it is: homelessness, panic, an unmooring from roots. Opposition to nostalgia is transformed into a wrenching into the present, wherein a description of the beauty of the Mediterranean suddenly transforms into an exploration into what it means today to cross it, as opposed to what nostalgia calcifies the memory to do: remember the past as though pieces of it could be regenerated into the present. Nostalgic conquest and regional heritage are turned on their head as the reality of undocumented migration, the numbers who escape from Africa to the other shore, is rendered as a lesson in sacrifice. It is a return to a time and a place that cannot be restored but in commodifiable artifacts, relics, and snapshots for national memory and tourist culture. The certainty of this nostalgic reterritorialization is countered by the deterritorialized uncertainty of the clandestine passage, as it is set apart as a time ‘lived’ rather than a commodified abstraction. The nostalgia toward a national legend is incommensurable to the defeat and tragedy of contemporary boat crossings. It would seem that representations of undocumented migration sites—Lalami’s perilous boat crossing and Nini’s undocumented wandering—hold up ironic reflections upon nostalgic recollections to insist upon the historical present and on the need to confront problems therein, rather than by endless invocations of past glories of bravery and triumph. Nostalgia for a distant, mythologized past, referencing Mediterranean claims to cultural

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significance and centrality, is juxtaposed against a tragic present. This anti-nostalgic tendency can be attributed to the way Maghrebian discourse has been a space of lamentation for a lost history of adventure and triumph on the Mediterranean. Tunisian poet and columnist Al-Muṣbāḥī laments the loss of the sea’s connectivity to yield ‘cultural dialogue’ 17 and cosmopolitanism. Al-Muṣbāḥī’s nostalgia for the shores’ connectivity is deeply tied to the writers and scholars who straddled them: St. Augustine, Ibn Khaldun, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Constantine Cavafy, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. By reconstructing Maghrebian triumphal legends sailing the sea, he expresses longing for the shores’ connectivity that made cosmopolitanism and its arts thrive. In the end he mourns the transformation of cosmopolitanism, the connectivity of the shores, and adventurous, masculine, intellectual triumph into poverty, terrorism, and undocumented migration, and finally the sea itself, transformed into a site of death and conflict. The Maghrebian lamentation for a lost history of adventure and triumph that unified the Mediterranean (represented by Tariq Ibn Ziad and Ibn Battuta) is countered by contemporary literature’s mourning over being dispossessed of the Mediterranean Sea and the identity and history it has yielded. For example, in the poem ‘Li Matha La Yamoot al-Bahr?’/’Why Doesn’t the Sea Die?’, Bin-Yūnis Mājin wonders ‘if the sea carries our identity and lays its head against our soil / and flows over our country’s map / then it’s our sea with its blue, salt, and fish / Is it not? / So why does it eat our sons and daughters / and devour

Ḥasūna Al-Muṣbāḥī, ‘Min Ajl Ḥiwār Thiqāfī Bain Bildān Ḍufatī AlBaḥr Al-Abyaḍ Al-Mutawaṣṣiṭ’ (‘For a Cultural Dialogue between the Countries of the Mediterranean’). Aawsat.com. December 27, 2003. https://archive.aawsat.com/details.asp?article=209714&issueno=916 0#.XWGZipMza9Y

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the boats of death / and then spit out its passengers / I wonder / Is it wreaking vengeance upon us?’ 18 When asked to describe how his generation will be remembered, author of the short-story collection Escape, Abd al-Wahid Asṭīṭaw, eschews lament with a brutal allusion to a fragmented migrant identity—‘schizophrenia’: We are a generation of escape and confrontation. Succeed to fail. Fail to succeed. Clandestine immigration, for example, is not a solution, not a confrontation. It is an escape. But the escape of a later confrontation, and conflict, and finally unexpected success, without going into details of the term ‘success.’ This in order to make some money and to try not becoming ‘human wreckage.’ Despite all this, many are transformed in the blink of an eye to corpses in the straits of Spain… Schizophrenia and migration and escape and confrontation. 19

In shattering a generational and national identity that is averse to collectivization, Asṭīṭaw displaces lament with clear-eyed possibilities, reducing the hopeful image of the shores’ connectivity to ‘human wreckage’: bodies washed ashore, people conflicted by the potential of migration, escape that does not elude ‘confrontation’, whether death, arrest, or ambiguous ‘success.’ Nostalgia in its restorative form is not only the capacity to reclaim the past but to reclaim space in time. This reclamation, the effort to ‘conquer and spatialize time,’ is determined by a utopic ordering of territory, in the past and future. Nostalgia territorializes the Mediterranean so it is reduced to a site of memory, a commemorative landscape in service of a reclaimed future. Anti-nostalgia allows for an intertextuality that sets up All the passages of Bin-Yūnis Mājin’s text are my translations in this chapter. Bin-Yūnis Mājin, ‘Li Mādhā Lā Yamūt Al-Baḥr?’ (‘Why Doesn’t the Sea Die?’), in Dīwān Al-Ḥrīg (Cairo: Dār Aktab, 2009). 19 All the passages of ʿAbd Al-Wāhid Asṭīṭaw’s text are my translations in this chapter. Interview with Saʿīd Al-Khayāṭ. Hespress, December 28, 2009. http://www.hespress.com/?browser=view&EgyxpID=17622. 18

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the familiar tropes of Mediterranean adventure, conquest, primacy, and unity with unfamiliar tropes of a Mediterranean increasingly disconnected and isolated from the world despite the cache that the connectivity of its sea and ports once earned. Heterotopically, the unfamiliar, marginal places of clandestinity or the undocumented are shown to perform in relation to familiar, visible sites of nostalgia. The certainty of nostalgic reterritorialization is countered by the deterritorialized uncertainty of the clandestine passage, as it is set apart as a time ‘lived’ rather than an abstraction. Yet, in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, could we also claim that nostalgia is more effective than reducing the Mediterranean to a site of memory that paralyzes those it captures and, worse, only serves to energize the tourist experience that characterizes the Mediterranean’s reduction to a commodified abstraction, present in this novel and other literature on undocumented migration across the Mediterranean? There are various modes of memory work in the novel—historical memory, collective/cultural nostalgia, Western Orientalist nostalgia, and counter-nostalgia—that collapse past and present not to suggest immobility and paralysis in looking back but rather to reimagine an alternative complex history. According to Ladino, both official nostalgia and counter-nostalgia share yearning to return to a time or place in time, but she emphasizes that counter-nostalgia is determined by a ‘longing to return home that can be felt, wielded, manipulated, and retold in a variety of ways’, 20 so that the narration of this ‘return’ ends up rather than certain uncomplicated is ‘ambivalent, ironic, localized, contingent, and potentially subversive.’ 21 So, let’s return to the first pages of Hope and Dangerous Pursuits, because the issue of whether nostalgia functions simply as a sentiment to oppose or a critical tool to re-imagine the past and present in the novel remains puzzling. Although the boat 20 21

Ladino, 89. Ibid., 90.

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migrant Murad strikes down the historical memory of Tariq Ibn Ziad’s invasion that initiated the Andalusian Empire that occupied Spain, suggesting an anti-nostalgic stance, his ‘reappropriation of official nostalgia through creative, often literary, means’—in his case, irony and ambivalence, suggests a counternostalgia. 22 That is, rather than just being opposed to ‘official nostalgia [that] encourages its adherents to return to a celebrated origin to find both comfort and justification for the present,’ Murad returns to the memory to ‘reflect on the present in critical ways’, a key feature of counter-nostalgia, according to Ladino. 23 First, Lalami holding up the historical memory invoked by Murad only to have him strike it down in the beginning of the novel presents nostalgia as an ambivalent instrument of narrative control rather than a self-defeating one. Lalami shows the present reality of undocumented migration undermining nostalgia as insubstantial to affect change in the present, but it also shows Murad’s (albeit ironic) nostalgia effectively countering official nostalgia for a Europe pre-globalization (through the representation of the Mediterranean Sea), while Murad’s own ironic nostalgia counters that perhaps Europe has always been global. The way Murad envisions the Mediterranean is not strictly as an EU-controlled border zone devoid of topographical markers and absent of historical and social relations, but as a place deeply incorporated into the web of relations of the region and the cities in which they are plotted, from the northern shore to the southern shore. In Murad’s nostalgic interlude, the historical figure of the Amazigh leader Tariq Ibn Ziad and his legendary burnt ships ensured the Maghrebian presence across the sea. After all, the Strait of Gibraltar that Murad and his boatmates try to reach is named after Tariq Ibn Ziad himself—the name derived from Jabl Tariq. From the middle of the sea, Murad identifies site-crossing markers that connect the present to the past Ibn Ziad initiated: ‘Tarifa’, the southern Spanish town on 22 23

Ibid., 90. Ibid., 91.

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which they wish to land was named after Moroccan Amazigh military leader Tarif ibn Malik, who took over southern Spain in 710, ensuring its position as Islamic Andalusia. Moreover, the Moroccan town of Cabo Negro where Murad, still in the inflatable Zodiac, envisions buying an apartment bears the name of the Spanish presence in north Morocco decades after independence. In this way, nostalgia when first used by Murad is indeed ironic, but it also significantly highlights the connection of the two coasts (‘only fourteen kilometers’ apart, as Murad repeats from the middle of the Mediterranean) that official nostalgia for a European past uncorrupted by globalization denies—not to mention the continuity of that link into the present. The temporal simultaneity that Murad evokes does not necessarily establish nostalgia for transhistorical values. Indeed, Murad deeply ironizes the sense of nostalgia evoked by Tariq Ibn Ziad’s invasion by claiming the present is indeed different for Moroccans, but the irony does not just render ‘the return to a celebrated origin’ of Spanish-Moroccan relations as an object of critique (because it clearly highlights the absurdity of the ‘return of the Moor’ trope in present circumstances). Rather, it counters with the memory of ‘another landscape’, an always globalized world— eclipsed by nationalist nostalgia that myopically registers the incursion of globalization as a modern affliction. 24 Counter-nostalgia sets its sights on a Mediterranean ambivalently rendered by Europe, both the frontier guarding nationalist nostalgia and the link to exploring Orientalist nostalgia. To illustrate this duality, Lalami performs another type of memory work—one that puts the memory of not only Moroccans up to a light and unravels them in the age of globalized mobilities but compels forth the memory of Westerners where Moroccans feature but don’t necessarily have control. What happens when Moroccan nostalgia based on historical memory of Maghrebian collective identity accompanies an Orientalist nostalgia? Lalami lays side by side collective Maghrebian memories and memories 24

Ibid., 96.

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of the West that feature Maghrebians and Arabs and ArabAfricans to reveal systems of control of the past, for one, but also the present and the future. Lalami reveals that Orientalist nostalgia unravels a static, allochronic view of cultural difference. 25 The allochronic is invested with the construction of an ‘us’ and ‘them’—the Western, European, Christian and the African, Arab, Muslim (the Other, backward, primitive, archaic, whose time has passed). One would think that in the way that nostalgia is about longing for a time as well as place, allochronic thinking is also temporal and spatial, so that travel to remote places does indeed encourage allochronic thinking. But the novel’s allochronic moments arrive not only in Morocco but also in Spain, suggesting that the border between ‘us’ and ‘them’ does not really require physical, national borders to be crossed in order to be animated. The allochronic evokes an Orient that is a form of Orientalism, which Said calls ‘a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.’ 26 This theatricality is part of the ‘repertoire’ of ‘odalisque dreams’ that the only female character who made it to the other side pulls up in her new life as a prostitute in Spain. Faten, a religious young girl from Rabat, survives the perilous trip to Spain as an undocumented migrant made more illegal when she becomes a prostitute to earn a living. She represents an extreme saint-whore duality: she appears at first in Morocco as the pious friend to the daughter of a westernized, secular, corrupt official and then later in Spain as a prostitute who fulfills Spanish men’s Orientalist fantasies of Muslim womanhood. Fleeing to the West in the hope of obtaining freedom from the repression of class and gender, she again finds herself subjected to an identity imposed upon her from the colonial West, whereby she becomes objectified by the male gaze. But it is a particular male gaze: nostalgia for the Other, or the sensation that the Maghreb needs Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 26 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 63. 25

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to be pieced together in the European imagination, 27 is demonstrated when one of her clients coaxes her into fulfilling his Maghrebian fantasies—by re-fantasizing herself to him. Although unwilling at first, Faten concedes to re-fantasizing herself through a ‘repertoire’ of ‘odalisque dreams,’ familiar to both: ‘Where did you grow up?’ Martin asked. ‘In a Moorish house.’ ‘With your parents?’ ‘I didn’t see much of my father. I spent all my days in the harem.’ ‘With your siblings?’ ‘With my six sisters. They initiated me into the art of pleasing men.’ 28

None of this is true about Faten. She imagines a scenario that fulfills her client’s fantasy. Faten’s client recreates the cultural border wherein she is located on the other side as Other, inscrutable, unknown, mysterious. He locates her on the other side of this cultural border by asking her to recreate a stereotypical fantasy of Arab women. Just as national borders utilize the fantasy that on one side of the border a nation exists in one phase of temporal development while on the other side another functions in a different stage of temporality, Faten’s client fantasizes her, and forces her to re-fantasize herself to him, as though she just traveled from the 19th century, by providing a theater of representation to conform to tourist itineraries. As a space of nostalgia, Morocco is conceived outside of the progression of time, unaffected by changes elsewhere, progressive social mores or the development of technologies or modern institutions. In the persistent formation of Morocco as a nostalgic site, past and present collapse. In Belated Travelers, Ali Behdad refers to the lamentation associated with ‘the disappearing Other’ as a sense nostalgia exhibited by Western travelers in the Middle East for an Orientalism effaced by forces of modernity. 28 Lalami, 148. 27

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Faten draws upon familiar global imagery, ‘odalisque dreams,’ to localize (through the ‘Moorish house’) and authenticate (through the ‘harem’) herself in creating a stabilizing ‘repertoire’ familiar to her client. Faten comes to realize that part of her appeal in the west arises from Orientalist fantasies of the odalisque, the centuries-old role of the female maid or slave of the Ottoman harem. 29 The liminal quality of the border in separating border crossers from a sense of ‘place’ is re-enacted by Faten: she re-fantasizes herself as someone separated from the real lived space of her Moroccan home; she uses her body to act out the tourist theater of representation wherein familiar imagery is a nostalgic touchstone for Otherness. The sexual performance expected from Faten on the other side of the Mediterranean represents another border; it is a liminal zone wherein re-fantasization involves separation from the lived space she remembers and the burden of an imagined place she carries from shore to shore. In one sense, she becomes a modern Shehrezade who tells tales of a harem girlhood ‘as part of a repertoire she learned by heart and had to put up with in order to make a living’. 30 While Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits reflects on border crossing and a divided Mediterranean, it also shows that when the characters finally cross to the other side, they confront boundaries far from the Spanish national border—cultural borders in which they confront how Morocco is nostalgically fantasized by the West. Lalami instrumentalizes nostalgia to show that while the national border is crossed in secrecy, other borders dispersed in various forms, such as culture, race, class, and gender, are revealed. In order for these borders to be delineated, a line must be drawn between the inside and the outside, between the Self and Other. In popular use, the word odalisque also may refer to a mistress or concubine. During the 19th century, odalisques became common fantasy figures in Orientalist artwork and featured in many erotic paintings. 30 Lalami, 148. 29

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To reiterate, it is through various types of memory work— productive and problematic, real and fantastical—that the Mediterranean is shown to be heterotopic, and with Faten, it is not only through fantasy but the perception of self in fantasy, that this relationship between the ‘real’ and ‘utopic’ sites (and those assigned to them) is most intensely brought to light. By definition, heterotopias exist in reflective dialogue with the real and utopic, that which is real and that which is ‘absent’, as Foucault would have us imagine it—a mirror scenario: In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. 31

Like the act of confronting a mirror, heterotopia forces a definition of the self in relation to the image. Through a gaze that passes through a virtual and unreal space, the position of the viewer is reconstituted. This concept is productive in thinking of the way undocumented characters both perceive space and perceive themselves in a given space. This perceptual and material process of ‘counteraction’ speaks to the friction, the movement, between sites of clandestinity and both utopic sites of cosmopolitanism and regimented surveillance in the microtopographies of crossing. I refer to ‘friction’ because it is in the process that het31

Foucault, 1986, 24.

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erotopias are formed. As Hetherington explains, ‘Heterotopias do not exist in the order of things, but in the ordering of things’. 32 That the subject both re-interprets the space of the Mediterranean and takes on the space to re-interpret themselves, allowing for a position that is mutually constitutive, highlights the impact of re-fantasizing the Mediterranean on the clandestine characters in the novels and vice-versa. Like mirrors, clandestine spaces create an unreal space, sites where Mediterranean fantasy is enacted, and in turn, force a definition of the self in relation to that image. The Mediterranean and its towns on ‘both sides of the shore’ are not in and of themselves heterotopic, but rather migrant routes make them heterotopic: spontaneous and disorderly spaces of crisis borne of a fear of detection and created by an illicit, panicked, constant movement porous to institutional order and vigilantly closed to it. In a discussion of the relational quality of Foucault’s heterotopia, Andrew Thacker argues, Certain commentators have interpreted heterotopias as simply sites of resistance to the dominant ordering of sociospatiality found in marginal places and locations … Heterotopias are not sites of absolute freedom or places where marginal groups always resist power … the importance is not the places themselves but what they perform in relation to other sites. 33

The interpretation of heterotopias here as a site of ambivalence is by virtue of its relational quality rather than as an inherent site of resistance. So, the client’s nostalgic fantasy allows Faten to realize how she is expected to embody both the Mediterranean ‘bridge’ and the ‘border’. She represents as the ‘odalisque’ now in Spain, on one side, the clandestine, the subversive, the Kevin Hetherington, ‘Identity Formation, Space, and Social Centrality’, Theory Culture Society 13, no. 4 (1996), 38. 33 Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2003), 29. 32

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illicit, and on the other, the familiar, the known, the accessible. When it comes to nostalgia and fantasy, as new as the Mediterranean (and its sexual representatives) seems upon observation, they are still meant to convey a sense of the familiar. While nostalgia is certainly ‘a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed’, it is also ‘a romance with one’s own fantasy’, as Boym points out. 34 And we see this fantasy fulfilled by an allochronic, Orientalist ‘repertoire’, indicated by Faten’s performance of ‘odalisque dreams’ with her client. And, we see it in Murad’s traditionally fantastic folktale he spins for American tourists who frequent the shop he works in Tangier, which he has decided to call home at the end of the book. But it isn’t until Murad tells the tale to unsuspecting tourists that we realize it operates counter-nostalgically with Faten’s scene. Sensing frustration over tourist nostalgia for an American history they never experienced, Murad tells tourists a fantastic Arabian-Nights type of story that presents exactly the type of scenario wherein Faten’s client tries to position her—a folktale, a remnant of a vanishing culture fallen victim to the incursion of modernity and progress: the folktale is about Ghomari, the poor rug-weaver who meets a beautiful woman, Jenara. 35 The king’s midget sees her face one day and informs the Sultan that the beloved of a mere rug-weaver is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. Outraged that another man has a more beautiful mate, he arranges to have her kidnapped. Ghomari weaves a tapestry with Jenara’s image wielding a knife. The Sultan decides he must have it and have Ghomari executed. The day before his execution, Jenara wakes up the Sultan with a knife to his throat. While he is screaming for help, she hides herself against the tapestry of her own image to escape detection and the palace, after which she reunites with Ghomari. 36 The real Jenara and the imagined Jenara (in the form of an image on a Boym, xii and xiii. Lalami, 181–184. 36 Ibid., 189–192. 34 35

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rug) become fused. Her most powerful tool in gaining her freedom is her ability to go undetected, to become clandestine. In one sense, this is a play on the Maghreb so infused with storytelling and mystery that tales set there, particularly for tourists, often have an air of the fantastic. But a cautionary tale comes to life: the image is perceived powerless and immovable, yet behind the image stands a real person who uses the very image to regain their freedom and self-authority. First, the tale operates counter-nostalgically to displace the Orientalist nostalgia presented by Faten’s client because it is a tale a fiction, suggesting an equivalence between the two. This is not actual ‘nostalgia for lost origins [that] can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism,’ 37 as Spivak has noted. I want to be very clear here by restating that Murad’s folktale is, by definition, a fiction—he is not trying to reclaim lost origins, but rather to counter nostalgic fantasy (of Orientalism) with his own fantasy. Second, Lalami uses the nostalgic tale of a less modern, more innocent, more romantic time to forge a connection between Faten and Jenara that reinforces the liberatory aspect of Faten’s own self-concealment through the tactical use of counter-nostalgia: it allows Murad to imagine a past where women like Faten and Jenara—captive, powerless women—are recognized for possessing the wit and agency to seek their own liberation. Here the memory of ‘another landscape’, another story, displaces the one to which Faten’s client and other men imagine her to be naturally bound. Fantasy shows the ways the Mediterranean is heterotopic in that it allows for the emergence of the interrelationality between the real and the utopic. The fantasy that captures Faten reflects Jenara’s own— indeed, different uses and modes of fantasy, but their navigations of the real and the ideal image are mirrored. Like Faten,

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 87. 37

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Jenara shows her image in the tapestry is as real and beguiling as her true self, but is ultimately not. Within the story featuring Maghrebian fantasies comes to life a jarring cautionary tale: the utopic image is perceived powerless and immovable, while the story of the image is told to impact tourist consciousness heterotopically. Heterotopias rob us of our nostalgic certainty and trust in utopian (or dystopian) narratives, revealing how spaces are created and manipulated and thwarting societal efforts (like those of politicians such as the Sultan) to construct narratives that make them feel in control. But what of this image that Faten projects, mirrored by Jenara’s tapestry image, which she also uses to hide behind? Faten thinks she must ‘visualize herself in the way he saw her, the way he wanted her to be—that was the price she would have to pay every time if she wanted to see him.’ 38 A double consciousness, in the vein of DuBois, 39 that demands Africans and Arabs see themselves in the way that Westerners and Europeans see them or don’t see them—or rather see through them—leads Faten to wear a mask wherein she stands outside herself: like Jenara, Faten takes advantage of the intricate threads of fantasy woven for her, and uses them to hide her real, integral self. But creative subversion of Orientalist nostalgia is not the only goal of storytelling. Those repertoires and folktales function as vehicles for reimagining a past and perhaps the present when a prospective migrant is defined by living for the future—an allconsuming affair for Murad: He’d been so consumed with his imagined future that he hadn’t noticed how it had started to overtake something inside him, bit by bit. He’d been living in the future, thinking of all his tomorrows in a better place, never realizing that his past was drifting. And now, when he thought of the future, Lalami, 149. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 38 39

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he saw himself in front of his children, as mute as if his tongue had been cut off, unable to recount for them the stories he’d heard as a child. He wondered if one always had to sacrifice the past for the future, or if it was something he had done, something peculiar to him, an inability to fill himself with too much, so that for every new bit of imagined future, he had to forsake a tangible past. 40

The ‘past was drifting’; the past was ‘tangible’; the past still had the capacity to be subject to ‘sacrifice’. The past was active, subject to animation. While Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, like most novels about undocumented migration, thematizes the hopes, dreams, and future orientation of prospective migrants braced on the southern shore of the Mediterranean awaiting for their future to unfold, its structure refuses progression. Like most undocumented migrant novels, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits begins in media res and does not move forward but rather reverses in time to uncover the path that led each character to the tip of the Mediterranean. This commitment to the past transcends character development, and touches upon the very triggers of the creative subversions in which the text engages—the repertoire and the folktale—to not only undermine the temporal dissonance of the Orientalist allochronic, but to write against its erasure of a historical Morocco, bruised by the violence of modernity and progress. Timeless Morocco, untouched by the incursions of modern time, is evoked when Murad crosses paths with American tourists seeking out the literary heritage of American BeatGeneration writers by literally retracing their footsteps (going to their writing spots or drinking haunts). At first, Murad is shunned by the tourists, but when they later encounter him, not realizing he had offered his services earlier that day, they ask where they could find a Beat-Generation landmark:

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THE TWO-EDGED SEA ‘Do you know where the Café Central is?’ she asked. So he had been right about them after all—they’d come to Tangier looking for the Beats. How easy it would be for him to insert himself into their trip now—he could show them the café where Burroughs smoked kif, or the hotel where he wrote Naked Lunch. But he was past all that now; he was already thinking about his new beginning, in a new land. He pointed down the street. ‘This way,’ he said. ‘Across from the Pension Fuentes.’ Then he turned back to wait for his order. 41

William S. Burroughs was considered part of the Beat Generation that took Tangier by storm in the 1950s. American modern classics like Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, along with William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, engaged the ways that Tangier provided the freedom that the Beat Generation sought. 42 The writers and artists of the Beat Generation came to Tangier to drop out of society—as if there was no society to drop into or engage with in Morocco by, for example, linking up with other Moroccan counter-cultural or political movements, like the Moroccan anti-colonial movements of the time. Morocco was more of a landscape upon which they could satisfy their interests of things not American rather than a landscape filled with people with which they could interact. In the way writers and artists of that time, for the most part, eclipsed the subjectivity of Moroccan writers and artists, contemporary tourists dismiss, ignore, neIbid., 141. In the 20th century Tangier became a transnational city as a result of the International Zone, effectively establishing it as distinct from the rest of the country, which was still under Spanish and French protectorate status (1912–1956). In 1924, the new Statute of Tangier established a compromise between the Western countries that allowed Morocco to be subject to interference by several European governments. For the next few decades, Morocco existed as a Western outpost. It was during this time of loose governance, from 1924 until Moroccan independence, in 1956, that Tangier earned its reputation as an expatriate playground.

41 42

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glect Moroccan social and cultural life to myopically focus on the landmarks that made up the travel and writing itineraries of the Beat Generation before them, effectively repeating their travel trajectories. Moroccan history, as evoked by Murad in the beginning of the novel with Tariq Ibn Ziad, is bypassed in favor of American literary heritage: Morocco is more of a landscape to be explored only insofar as it offers up Murad in a djellaba, a fleabag motel, and the old quarter (all indications of a presumed authentic Morocco), rather than Moroccan writers and artists. Thus, the western gaze effectively divides the city into spaces of intellectual heritage (Western) and spaces of an unchanging Morocco (sans intellectual heritage or cultural context or historical memory). Morocco exists outside of linear temporality, untouched by social changes. In the formation of Morocco as a nostalgic museum, past and present are collapsed. At the end of the novel, while Murad entertains another set of tourists at his friend’s shop, he decides to use this second encounter with tourists to provide the tools to understand that for Morocco there is an image and there is a reality. We realize he seeks to weaponize nostalgia with his own creativity, his own narrative control against the erasure of historical time. Although it appears at first that he embraces the dissonance of the allochronic by telling a folktale, the moral of his rug-weaver story is clear: the Sultan’s men believed that they were familiar with Jenara but could not distinguish the real, live, unpredictable Jenara from her timeless, immovable tapestry image. And so, Morocco, as new as it seems upon observation to the tourists, is still meant to convey a sense of the familiar, so that whatever reality they encounter, it is overcome by the image. But, will they know to tell the timeless image from historically everchanging reality when the time comes? Much Moroccan literature about undocumented migration is indeed anti-nostalgic, urging us away from the diversion of the backward glance, bringing forth past Maghrebian glories across the Mediterranean, and instead toward much-needed attention to current material realities. Indeed, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits seems anti-nostalgic as much as other undocumented migrant literature, but I contend it is also counter-

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nostalgic in the way it weaponizes nostalgia to suggest an alternative Mediterranean and Morocco. In the novel, nostalgia is not just a sentimental yearning for times past, but a tool that takes the past into account to subvert dominant memories and critique historical narratives. The productive role of nostalgia lies in its capacity to provoke a critical historical sensibility. That there is much opportunity to critique dominant narratives evoked by nostalgia on the Mediterranean points to the way the evocation of the Mediterranean is nostalgic in itself. Some would say the Mediterranean evokes nostalgia now more than ever because today it rests at the juncture of its past and present—at the juncture of its current dual role as border and bridge.

CHAPTER 2. THE IMMIGRANT DREAM: ‘DREAM? NIGHTMARE, MORE LIKE’ Originally published in 1999, Mahi Binebine’s Cannibales was translated in 2003 (by Lulu Norman) to Welcome to Paradise. Like Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, it opens with a group of migrants in the process of crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Huddled on a Tangier beach, the group (six men from Mali, Algeria, and Morocco, and one woman with a child) waits for the signal to board the boat. Having given all their money to a nameless human trafficker, they now share a single goal: to escape their hopeless situation by starting a new life in Europe—to live the ‘immigrant dream’. Cannibales, like Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, employs a social realism that portrays in detail the contemporary brutality of Mediterranean borders: a mix of poor North and sub-Saharan African migrants, both men and women, even a child, a flimsy Zodiac on the shore, a ruthless human trafficker who leads the group—a story ripped from the headlines, so to speak. In fact, both novels’ plunge into the past (a resistance to forward movement) reveals a shared commitment to presenting each character as an individual with a past, a background, a history, a story, which is characteristic of social realism: the novels tap into the collective European imaginary of migrants as one nameless mass threatening to descend on Europe (think of the migrant ‘flood’ evoked by alarmist nativist media). Merged in the media as a nameless mass en route to Europe, via popular photography’s portrayals of a pile of indistinguishable bodies on 71

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a boat at sea, migrants are stripped of individuality and presented as a single body of societal problems and ails rather than various individuals with histories, agency, hopes, desires. By releasing a multiplicity of stories, the narratives appear to not only tap into the collective imaginary but also disrupt it by restoring individuality to the migrants with multiple narratives. As a realist novel, we find that Cannibales strives to ‘uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society’, in the words of Georg Lukács. 1 Jed Esty and Colleen Lye write that Lukács significantly ‘located a text’s realism in its aspirations to totality, with “totality” defined not as something out there but as a demand to consider interrelations and interactions between disparate phenomena.’ 2 That which has been rendered perceptible in the migrant narrative (piles of bodies in photographs and nativist rhetorical tropes) is not to be fully trusted. What is required is an excavation of the hidden reality behind the images. For Binebine, like many postcolonial novelists, realism certainly offers the appeal of a vision of social totality of undocumented trans-Mediterranean migration—woven through phenomena like poverty, dispossession, desperation, impending exploitation, and the validity of the ‘immigrant dream’—but especially insofar as it presents an opportunity for a critique of its internal contradictions. But one way Cannibales reveals the contradictions of the totalized narrative of migration is to cast doubt upon the ‘immigrant dream’, a stable narrative of material success and social ascent, and to do so with evocations of the fantastical: it certainly portrays migrants who dream of a transformative entry into the EU paradise, but the realities of undocumented migrants who arrive on the other shore or encounter its people are evoked by migrant characters through fantastical Georg Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance,’ in Aesthetics and Politics, eds Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977), 38. 2 Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, ‘Peripheral Realisms Now,’ Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 73, no. 3 (2012), 277. 1

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tropes of monstrosity and savagery. In fact, it is through the fantastical that the novel reveals, rather than the fulfillment of hope for a transformative entry into a welcoming paradise, the fear of one continuous passage from a devouring sea to a state of violent ravaging on the other shore. As much as the novel abides by realism to uncover the hidden and ‘not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society’ (because after all what is more hidden than clandestine migrants?), and more specifically the disparate phenomena that make up trans-Mediterranean migration, it is the fantastical interpretations of the mundane by the characters that allows for a suspension of belief, an introduction of doubt about the ‘immigrant dream’, so that contradictions within this totalized narrative may come to the surface. In essence, the novel maintains a realist foundational narrative overlaid by fantastic interpretations of the characters. Moreover, the fantastical hermeneutic of real events relies on Moroccan and Arab cultural signifiers. But the novel does not indulge in translation of cultural signifiers, forcing cultural translation to uncover their meaning for the uninitiated. The significance of culturally rooting the characters’ fantastical interpretations to challenge the reality of migration is to introduce unsettling doubt—not about the authenticity of events—but doubt about the stability of the ‘immigrant dream’ narrative. But more significantly, cultural signification of a fantastic hermeneutic privileges the fear of the immigrant upon touching the other shore (rather than the fear of the host country) and the subversive resistance potential of the fantastic to monologic political and cultural narratives of immigration as a hospitable welcome. The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpretation in texts concerned with problems of representation regarding the ideals of migration and the EU. Rather than visions of migrants descending upon Europe, this novel is invested in how visions of EU hospitality gone awry are depicted through the eyes of migrants as fantastical, ghoulish, grotesque, beyond the bounds of what is knowable. This narrative, rather than suggesting a successful closure to the perilous journey promises more menace, a horrific consumption by the other on its shore,

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an incorporation tied to the other culture, the other as host to the self as guest. The reluctance of the narrative to go forward in time perhaps suggests that the present has foreclosed upon the future for the migrants, despite their hopeful gazes toward Edenic Europe. In the beginning of the novel, encounters with the other shore (the European one) are tied to fantastical depictions of the Mediterranean Sea in stories told by village elders, foreshadowing the characters’ relationship to it and the ‘paradise’ on its other shore: Back in the village, the old people were always telling us about the sea, and each time in a different way. Some said it was like a vast sky, a sky of water foaming across infinite, impenetrable forests where ghosts and ferocious monsters lived. Others maintained that it stretched further than all the rivers, lakes, ponds and streams on earth put together. As for the wise old boys in the square, who spoke as one on the matter, they swore that God was storing up the water for Judgment day, when it would wash the earth clean of its sinners. 3

At the end of the dystopic, ‘infinite, impenetrable forests where ghosts and ferocious monsters lived’, where pandemonium reigns (the wild disorder and chaos of the sea emerging as ‘a sky of water’), a re-birth into paradise is expected by the migrants. On one hand, arrival in Europe is imagined as an entry into paradise, but on the other, entry requires passage through an underworld shaped by God’s divine wrath. If the fossilized binaries about the Mediterranean gave us the representational bridge and border, as well as cosmopolitanism and containment, then the characters in the fantastical hermeneutical layer of this novel fashion a heteropic space out of the Mediterranean through the juxtaposition of ‘several sites that are in themselves incom-

3

Binebine, 1.

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patible’ in the strange, wondrous, extreme topographies of heaven and hell. For the would-be migrants, the tension between the heaven and hell of Europe resonates throughout the novel: paradise is invoked at the mention of Europe, but the fantasy yields to fears of a hellish, degraded bestialization. When Aziz’s cousin Reda mistakes the roaming lights of the Spanish coastguard for the Spanish coastline, the Algerian Kacem Judi jokes, ‘If paradise were that close, son, […] I’d have swum there by now’. 4 Uncertainty about the paradise that awaits in the successful-migrant narrative presents itself early on. Even before the boat journeys across the Mediterranean, and despite the way the novel gives the migrants each an identity and a past, Aziz notes early on that paradise is not what it seems, because to learn how to be a refugee is to ‘learn to keep in the background, to be nobody: another shadow, a stray dog, a lowly earthworm, or even a cockroach. That’s it, yes, learn to be a cockroach’. 5 He implies migration will likely result in a dehumanizing transformation into negligible, disposable life, and once again the novel’s best efforts to humanize the characters, give them individual identities and histories, surrenders to a fear of dehumanization and bestialization in Europe, not so different from the brutish, wild, fantastical world of ‘impenetrable forests’ and ‘ghosts and ferocious monsters’ 6 that characterizes Europe’s threshold, the Mediterranean Sea. Aziz gestures toward a passage of wilderness, ferocity, inhumanity that leads the way from North Africa’s shores to Europe. This is because arrival in Europe does not herald the promised paradise but rather reveals itself as a precarious and prolonged wasteland, a no-man’s land for the migrants—who must lurk ‘like a shadow’ at the edge of society and at the margins of its rights and protections. The marginal stage extends across the Ibid., 17. Ibid., 66. 6 Ibid., 1. 4 5

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sea and, correspondingly, shapes and ultimately overwhelms the relationship to Europe. We are reminded the English title of the book (Welcome to Paradise) ironically gestures toward the essence of dehumanization in Europe made central by the title of the French original (Cannibales) upon reading anguished dreams of cannibalization that visit an undocumented worker. Deported from Europe three times, Morad (or Momo) works in a trafficking network to recruit aspiring migrants from Café France in Marrakesh. The dream merchant responsible for feeding would-be migrants ‘dreams’ of Europe they relish before ‘ingest[ing]’ is afraid to sleep lest he dream a dream that undermines migrant fantasies. 7 He tells the others in the café about being repeatedly visited by a nightmare, inspired by the restaurant Chez José where he worked in France. It begins when he and his boss José sit drinking at a café and José’s incessant chatter starts to mesmerize him: Mr. José talks and talks. Momo can’t hear him, all he can see is his outsize, open mouth where, instead of teeth, there’s an infinite number of forks. The glittering, grinding stainless steel thrashes out a cascade of muddled words whose vague echo Momo begins to catch, just about; the voice is metallic yet soft, harsh and bewitching, irresistible. Momo lets himself be swept along, opens his heart, swallows the words, absorbs their sense and inevitably, agrees with them. 8

The dream—which Aziz re-considers (‘Dream? Nightmare, more like’ 9)—turns more gruesome. Momo is ‘willingly’ devoured by his boss in exchange for mobility up the restaurant hierarchy and possibly toward citizenship: ‘Anyway, a finger, what’s that? A little bit of nothing, a pathetic scrap of flesh and bone that sooner or later will end up food for worms, a complete waste’. 10 Ibid., 32 and 33. Ibid., 96. 9 Ibid., 95. 10 Ibid., 97. 7 8

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He is promoted from dishwasher to waiter for two toes. The rest of his toes, his thumbs, and a part of his buttocks yield improvements to his living conditions. His arm will garner a raise. What else can be devoured to have his status legalized? At sea or on the other shore, the migrants are to expect the fantastical to surpass reality—‘ferocious monsters’. 11 This time, it is one with ‘an infinite number of forks … glittering, grinding stainless steel’ for teeth, which dismember, fragment, ingest Momo until there’s hardly a recognizable human body left. 12 Eventually, what remains of Momo is his head. Reward is undercut by dehumanizing, objectifying sacrifice. Much has been made of Momo’s dream, pointing to the metaphorical consumption of migrant life in the host country. 13 Of course the cannibalism dream functions as a metaphor of Momo’s reduction to plundered flesh, extracted as absolute resource. Not only is Momo a laboring migrant but also an undocumented one, incorporated into Parisian life through the consumption of body and labor without legal constraints upon the consumer—José, the restaurant, Parisian society—so he is overworked (works 11 hours a day), lives in the back of the restaurant, lurks at the edge of Paris life. More significantly, the dream merchant Momo cannot help but share his nightmare to disrupt the ‘immigrant dream’/the conscious fantasy of the would-be migrants. The narrator alludes to the paradoxical nature of the ‘immigrant dream’ (the conscious fantasy) when referring to Momo’s unconscious dream: ‘Dream? Nightmare, more like.’ 14 Ibid., 1. Ibid., 96. 13 See Sharae Deckard, Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden (New York: Routledge, 2009). Deckard explains that Momo’s nightmare is an allegory of the first world consuming the third. Also see Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo and Jesus Benito Sanchez, Hospitality in American Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017). They argue that Momo’s dream reverses the African cannibalism narrative in this postcolonial novel (89). 14 Binebine, 95. 11 12

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Wielded through fantastical figurations of exploitation and incorporation by the European other, the instability of the ‘immigrant dream’ pervades the waking and sleeping life of migrants. The oneiric depiction is a conscious conversion into language (from unconscious imagery). The disparity between the dream and its retelling or interpretation in conscious, waking life is difficult to measure, since dream images are rendered textual. In fact, Sigmund Freud asks, ‘what value can we still attach to our memory of dreams?’ 15 when we cannot distinguish between what was already in a dream and what we have filled in with ‘additions and embellishments’. 16 As soon as we begin to remember a dream, we begin to revise it. Thus, the novel suggests that fantastical interpretations vacillate between the conscious interpretation and the unconscious dream process. Moreover, the liminal nature of the dream in the novel is evident when dreams interpenetrate into waking life as the symbol of incorporation echoes in other scenes. This is not to say that the fantastical is made up of perceptible events to the characters or that we as readers are led to believe they are, but rather they are modes of interpretation. 17 We do not have to suspend belief Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, edited and translated by James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 77. 16 Ibid., 75. 17 Indeed there are various modes of representation concerning awareness and perceptibility of the European encounter—dream, reality, fantasy, and later potential hallucination—shot through with fear and menace, rather than pure idealization. Of course the reader surely makes a distinction between the common use of dream-as-metaphor and the literal dream: a metaphor that stands for an envisioned desire or longing is the dream of migrants (to live a decent life in Europe) already. This dream-as-metaphor represents a fantasy or an idealized vision seen as a real possibility. So, while the waking dreams of migrants tap into an imaginary of an ideal paradise, the sleeping dream of Momo taps into a repressed fear that emerges through the unconscious. The former is a metaphor for the hope born of imagination, and the latter is a literal dream capturing the dangerous failure of that hope. 15

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at the fantastical elements in the dream, which by definition is not factually reliable, but its correlative tropes of consumption in waking life open up the text to hesitation and doubt—not as to whether they happened but what they are trying to challenge about reality for the characters: will they be consumed by the ‘other’? The oneiric depictions and the waking confusion or fancies interpenetrate as the fear of consumption in the latter emerge in scenes of the former—especially because Binebine refers to both as ‘dreams’, with different meanings (the unconscious dream and the conscious fantasy). Binebine reveals that the waking fantasy is already riddled with contradictions, and is shot through with the same threatening tropes that mark the nocturnal dream. When Aziz is taken in by nuns as a boy, he describes his new room as ‘a dream’: ‘It was a dream room, more comfortable than I could ever have hoped: a proper bed, a teacher’s desk, an electric lamp, mauve velvet curtains, a wardrobe made of precious wood, and lastly a door that led to a shower room tiled all the way up to the ceiling. Cold water. Hot water. What bliss!’ 18 But a few pages later, he is gripped by fear and feels the bedding is swallowing him: When I sat down on my bed I had the fright of my life, a crazy, indescribable feeling of falling. I felt I was being swallowed up by the bedding, trapped by my own struggling. Trembling, I clutched at the edge of the bed to stop myself sinking. But the more I fought, the farther I fell, as though I

The fantasy of migration to paradise gestures toward wish fulfillment, while the dream undermines wish fulfillment. The sleeping dream tells them more about reality than their waking perceptions. Thus, what the novel sets up is the development of an ideal through a common metaphor while awake and the apprehension of an all-too violent twentyfirst-century reality while asleep. Repeatedly visiting Momo, the nocturnal dreams work to disrupt the waking fantasy. 18 Binebine, 85.

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The mundane (going to bed for the first time in a new home) reflects the contradictions of a ‘dream’ (come true) through the emotional fancies and fantasies of a young boy imagining being helplessly consumed, ‘sucked under by an octopus,’ in his new bed and ‘dream/y’ room: contained within the idealized vision is menace, contained within the mundane is the strange, unfamiliar. The uncanniness of this encounter, in the Freudian sense of the familiar appearing strange, is the uncanniness of the encounter with otherness—the remnants of colonialism, the home of French nuns. According to Freud, the ‘uncanny’ belongs to ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ 20 Freud explains that the word unheimlich, the uncanny, the unhomely, etymologically slips into its opposite, the heimlich, or the homely: ‘Heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a subspecies of heimlich’. 21 What is known as ‘old and familiar’, 22 the heimlich, ‘belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand, it means familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’. 23 The ‘empty’ landscape perceived by the colonizer is shadowed by an uncanny double, a landscape traversed by the ‘nonexistent’ colonized. 24 But here do Ibid., 86. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Pelican Freud Library, translated by James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14 (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), 340. 21 Ibid., 347. 22 Ibid., 340. 23 Ibid., 345. 24 Samira Kawash, ‘Terrorists and Vampires,’ in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony Alessandrini (New York: Routledge, 1999), 253. 19 20

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we grasp the inversion of the uncanny in this sense? Is the landscape now shadowed by an uncanny double, traversed by remainders of the colonizer? The dream-realized (the room) is never to be absolutely trusted; it is offered by French nuns in their own home in Morocco; it is a devouring threat, the realization of other catastrophic possibilities in the home of the ‘other’ on Moroccan soil. He is being consumed by a more comfortable life than the one he had in his Moroccan family home and cannot contain his wild imagination. He continues: ‘Here I was, having only known hard straw mats and carpets woven by my mother, tricked by the treacherous springs of a wire bed! It didn’t last long, but long enough, at any rate, for me to decide to sleep on the floor, that first night at the School on the Hill.’ 25 The menacing encounter with otherness, first signified by Momo’s dream of cannibalism as an undocumented migrant worker in France, echoes here as a scene of hospitality and altruism by French nuns in their French home on Moroccan soil—a giddy dream-realized for the narrator as a child—transformed into a fearful, fevered hallucination where consumption by an unknown creature (perhaps an ‘octopus’) is swallowing the child in bed. Both the dream (nightmare of immigrant cannibalism) and the dream-realized (the ‘dream room’ as the fulfillment of the hope of better living conditions provided by the French nuns in Morocco) reflect the guest-host relationship of hospitality, as a concept applied to the immigrant, Momo in France, and to the lodger, little Aziz in the nun’s home. Both reflect submerged fears of consumption, co-optation, incorporation by a bizarre and ultimately unknown other in the guise of hospitality. Hospitality as the dream-come-true for little Aziz, as for Momo, is charged with contradictions. Mireille Rosello proposes the metaphor of hospitality is used by states to secrete powers they impose as receiving countries that regulate immigrant flows for economic or demographic purposes: ‘the vision of a migrant as guest is a metaphor that 25

Binebine, 86.

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has forgotten it is a metaphor.’ 26 Secreting power relations that regulate the needs of a labor market in a shroud of statesponsored goodwill and generosity tends to obscure further abuse of power: what does the migrant, especially the labor migrant who no longer thinks of himself or herself in this hospitable milieu as a valuable asset to the labor market but rather a welcome guest, need to do to repay this generosity? Rosello argues that the state ‘has transformed a welcoming gesture into a demand of dissolution’. 27 Indeed, assimilationism is one way of ensuring dissolution, according to her: ‘If the host strips the guests of his or her identity, then it can be said cannibalism has occurred.’ 28 But the function of labor migration—offering one’s labor, so to speak—also serves to strip the guest of his or her identity, by separating humans from their labor, doing away with individual identity for the purpose of offering a service, offering one’s labor, until they become disposable—like Momo, who in his dream is literally disposed of in a trash dump. For Momo and little Aziz, encounters with Europe and Europeans is a double-edged sword. The dream and the dream-realized of hospitality is replete with rewards that are undercut by menace and threats of cannibalism, consumption, loss of self, and disposability. But little Aziz’s fanciful, hallucinatory fear of consumption and loss of control on his first night with the nuns serves to proleptically gesture toward a real event later in the novel, suggesting displacement of trauma and subsequent preoccupations with loss of subjectivity. We learn the narrator’s teacher at the ‘School on the Hill’ who was responsible for arranging his housing with the nuns, Mr. Romanchef, visited him in his room and sexually assaulted him on the bed. The scene of being consumed sexually by the French teacher is reminiscent of the scene on the Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3. 27 Ibid., 31. 28 Ibid., 31. 26

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child’s first night in the nuns’ bed. The narrator recounts Mr. Romanchef’s visits when he was a child: Then I thought of my friend Mr. Romanchef and his visits at night to the School on the Hill. He’d bring me books and chocolate and American tobacco and sometimes he’d go over my math homework. After that he’d sit by my side on the bed, take off his glasses, which he chewed at the ends, and in one leap jump on top of me as if to catch me and his conscience unawares, then start trembling as he stroked my penis. It was the kind of thing cats do, which I thought was funny, because I saw it coming a mile off, and because I never resisted. I never, ever refused Mr. Romanchef anything, not just because I owed him my new life and new world, but also—and above all—because of his milky, smooth skin, which aroused such desire in me, his spicy fragrance you never smelled anywhere else, and his mouth that was like a pitted cherry. Mr. Romanchef had the marvellous gift of being able to transform me into a cock, a huge, awesome cock, which contained my whole being, all my madness, passion, and pride in its hardness. Responding to a call from deep inside him, I let myself be swallowed up body and soul by the corridor of scarlet flesh that offered itself, welcoming and imploring. And I’d lose myself in it as you lose yourself in a deep, shadowy, thick forest, seeking secret folds and hidden clearings, tracking the spark of pleasure in the sin, the glimpse of paradise, a cry of shrill ecstasy that we both suppressed when, suddenly still, we lay fused together like a creature with two torsos, breathless and radiant and fulfilled. 29

The thematic symmetry suggested by the recurring consumption trope through different modes of consciousness—dream, hallucination, reality, memory—organized into different narrative levels, diegetic and hypodiegetic, allows us to grasp how the con29

Binebine, 155–156.

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tradictions of a dream—the immigrant dream, the dream of a new room, the dream—end up being displaced into different cognitive frames. The inarticulable horror of little Aziz’s first night with the nuns (‘I bit the sheet so as not to cry out’) and his sexual encounters with Mr. Romanchef (‘a cry of shrill ecstasy that we both suppressed’) suggests a confrontation with the uncanny, that class of fear which is familiar. However, we must ask how reliable is the chronology of the narrative? Does the memory of the fear of being ‘swallowed up’ by the bed retrospectively gesture toward the sexual trauma of being ‘swallowed up’ that follows later? What happens first—the event or the fear of the event condensed into an encounter with a devouring unknown (is it the bed, the bedding, an octopus)? Is there a predictable relation between cause and effect? Does the uncanniness of the initial encounter then unravel or exponentially increase? The only consistent element in the unstable chronology is the fantastic apprehension of consumption, incorporation, cooptation by a bizarre and ultimately unknown other: does the sexual trauma of the young boy ‘swallowed up body and soul by the corridor of scarlet flesh that offered itself, welcoming and imploring’, violated, devoured in bed in Morocco, by a French authority figure only echo the trauma of the first night in a new place, with the French nuns, or does it also gesture toward the trauma of undocumented migrant life consumed (‘swallowed up’) in the body of French political and economic authority? Does the flesh as it appears ‘welcoming and imploring’ undercut the pleasure of ‘a glimpse of paradise’? Certainly not, the scene of sexual engulfment is no doubt replete with pleasure—as is Momo’s nightmare of cannibalization because as frightening as it is, the process of being devoured isn’t without its rewards. The only question then becomes, to what end? Parallel traumas of transgressed boundaries between the self and the other, the dissolution of the self in the other, are displaced onto different cognitive realms. Indeed, most novels thematizing undocumented migration obsessively pore over the hopes and fears of migrant characters before they sail toward ‘paradise’, the other shore, but in Cannibales the characters’ fears consume the entire novel. The characters do not embark until

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the end of the novel, which at that point has been replete with dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, memory, reality—various modes of representation concerning migrant desire and repulsion organized into different orders of consciousness and perceptibility. The weight of the fear is dispersed across lines of consciousness and distilled through fantastic interpretations of its realization. Indeed, the characters establish the dream, or waking fantasy, as a space of discord rather than as a reliably solid space: ‘This what we said: each of our dreams is guarded by an angel on the right and a djinn on the left, two entities in perpetual conflict’. 30 Dreams, or waking fantasies, must be guarded until they are realized. While fantastical interpretations introduce doubt about ideal narrative of migration in the face of absolute dissolution, their cultural coding—the appearance of the djinn— stands as a counterpoint to post-enlightenment western rationalist narratives, specifically of migration and more broadly European values. The immigrant dream and the reliability of hospitality narratives of migration are flawed, urging reliance on a locally cultural lens of apprehension and caution—the djinn, the unpredictable figure of possession and incorporation. The djinn of dreams is mentioned earlier almost casually by the narrator. Noticing the Malian migrant flailing about the beach while waiting to embark on the journey to the other shore, the narrator at first considers it a ‘seizure’. Otherwise, why would such a stable, stolid figure be flailing about uncontrollably? He then introduces the possibility of djinn possession, casting doubt on whether the narrator perceives the Malian migrant Pafadnam to be possessed by a djinn or whether he really thinks Pafadnam was simply acting possessed or whether he thinks Pafadnam was having a seizure. Once again, potential encounters with the other shore are filtered through symbols of incorporation—a djinn that signals an unreliable, unpredictable figure will overtake the self. While the entire novel is not cast in a fantasy genre, it uses 30

Ibid., 69.

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some of its techniques by first integrating elements of fantasy into an otherwise realistic setting and more importantly creating doubt about the perception of an event, as evident in the ambiguous depiction (seizure/djinn possession) of Pafadnam’s hysterical reaction to flashing lights. The uncertainty, the hesitation about the nature of the event, is key in the apprehension of the fantastic to interpret it, in a Todorovian sense: the narrator hesitates between two contradictory understandings of events (scientific or supernatural), and experience unsettling doubts. The question of belief is central here, this hesitation stemming from the clash of cultural systems of interpretation within the narrative, which hesitates between belief in extrasensory phenomena and the rationalist, realist mode that traditionally exclude them. The transformation of Momo’s boss into a cannibalistic ghoul—both an Arab and Moroccan supernatural figure often referenced in the most mundane way like telling children not to wander off and stray far from home—reveals the waking fears of exploitation and incorporation through the fantastical that become reflected in dreams. The ghoul or demon or genie, like José in the dream, is capable of shape shifting into human form and deluding travelers (like Momo) to lead them astray and ravage and kill them in a wasteland (Europe)—within the mundane emerges the fantastic, within the familiar rises the unfamiliar, the uncanny. Perhaps the immigrant dream is itself uncanny, holding ‘two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand, it means familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’ 31— keeping out of sight or secreting the vicissitudes of labor markets in the façade of hospitality policy. But it emerges out of the corner of one’s eye—the European encounter, familiar and practiced to any would-be African migrant only 20 kilometers away, made as unfamiliar, eerie, ghoulish, unknowable, as possible. And it defamiliarizes this encounter with a Moroccan African31

Freud, 2010, 345.

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Islamic fantastic cultural lens through which the reader is urged to apprehend its inarticulable horror. Certainly, the migrant characters in this novel, like ones in other chapters, construct the Mediterranean with ‘two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory, are yet very different’, by showing its simultaneous seductive and abject utopias, its past and present depiction, its unitary and divided qualities, its aestheticized and material constructions, its dissonance between the spaces he occupies and the spaces occupied by ‘legal’, documented travelers. And, the subversion of the fantastical—the strange, bizarre, uncanny— becomes the means for migrant characters to make the Mediterranean into a heterotopia. With cultural signification of a fantastic hermeneutic, the characters not only question the immigrant dream and the hospitality narrative but ways of perceiving and interpreting. The novel never lets us forget that its narrative about undocumented migration is from the perspective of Moroccan and other African characters. This feature is an apt reflection of the entire aim of the book which seeks to uncover the stylistic features of voices emergent from the African continent itself rather than about it— the moments on the way to the trans-Mediterranean journey, throughout the journey, rather than afterwards, the afterthought on the other side. We often are kept in the loop about European fears of cultural dissolution (Eurabia, etc.), but in this novel the African-migrant fear of dissolution take center stage: the fear of Moroccan and other African migrants being consumed in other ways, related to labor exploitation, social invisibility, sexual trauma. Paradoxically, the novel relies on the fantastic to apprehend the constructedness of national narratives of immigration this unflinching realism strives for: ghoulish cannibalism, consumption, djinn possession significantly render the encounter with Europe as a sustained and uncertain, unknowable, inhospitable dispossession—at the mercy of one monster or another.

CHAPTER 3. IMAGINING THE MEDITERRANEAN AND ITS MIGRANTS: THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE UNCANNY The ‘immigrant dream’ washes up against fantasies of the Mediterranean. Paradoxically, fantasies rival each other in uncovering the reality of the traffic between Africa and Europe. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s 2006 novel Partir, translated to Leaving Tangier in 2009, begins with immigrant dreams of leaving and ends with a fantastic account of return. The dream-like first and last chapters frame realist narratives that unravel the dream but strive for a coherent picture of what goes in the making of the undocumented trans-Mediterranean traffic—smuggling, prostitution, rape, murder, corruption. Fantasy, illusion, and imagination frame the novel to emphasize the discrepancy between migrant characters’ imagined geographies on the other shore and the adversity they experience in Europe, the fantasy of an ideal Mediterranean north of Morocco in discord with the broken and flawed European societies to which they are subject. Indeed social and generic fantasies reflect upon each other in the novel, not only to unravel the certainty of the ‘immigrant dream’, but to reveal the multi-directionality of fantasy: migrants are also conceived of as subjects of fantasy, just as they are subjects of the colonial effects of migration. In the novel, aspiring migrants must submit to Orientalist narratives that cast Morocco in a spectacular, bizarre light in order to secure passage to the other shore—where they are also bound to the fantastic, freakish, uncanny—not newly strange but familiar in their strangeness, their 89

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belonging in un-belonging. The novel’s convergence of travel/tourism narratives and immigrant ones shed further light on the multi-directionality of fantasy: if Orientalist travel narratives expose a desire looking for a lost origin—and the pain of that loss and the pleasure of return—then, in this novel, they reveal the way these Orientalist narratives are instrumentalized to manage the travel and immigration of its subjects where they remain bound to these fantasies even after arrival on the other shore. Branded with a fantasy, characters are subject to a demand that they recapitulate and fulfill the fantasy they are presented. There, they remain bound to the fantastic, familiar in their strangeness—uncanny. The competing fantasy-bound narratives are perfectly positioned to highlight the fantasy, the uncanniness, the familiarity of their strangeness that define the characters on both shores. Perhaps that is why the fantastic frames the novel: the fantastic overcomes the main realism of the book, generically, to reflect on the ways fantasy overcomes reality, culturally, within an entangled web of Orientalist and immigrant fantasies. The uncanny, the fantastic, the carnivalesque establish the failure of realism to apprehend the story of migration. In many undocumented-migrant narratives in this book, travel and tourism narratives have been used to put in sharp relief the difference in mobility between tourists and aspiring migrants. But in Partir, mobility of people is not the only and primary topic, but also the mobility of ideas and ideologies that work to immobilize the migrants in Orientalist narratives, wherever in the world they are. The dreams of would-be immigrants initiate the text and nihilistically foreshadow the death of the dream before its contents are unpacked: ‘In Tangier, in the winter, the Café Hafa becomes an observatory of dreams and their aftermath.’ 1 The rest of the chapter, in its morbid, dream-like rendering and fantastical allusions, compounds the unsettling doubt surrounding the Tahar Ben Jelloun, Partir (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Leaving Tangier, translated by Linda Coverdale (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 3.

1

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fulfillment of the immigrant dream into reality. The protagonist Azel, a would-be migrant, and others like him stare at the Mediterranean Sea—a familiar point of reference throughout their lives as Tangerines—only to defamiliarize it with tales of a strange sea spirit, Toutia, who dwells there. With the invocation of fantasy, the transformation of the familiar into the strange sets the stage for the rest of the narrative. The sea siren who ‘feasts on human flesh’ 2 is a means of defamiliarizing the familiar insofar as the strangeness of a once-familiar sea is maintained. But in the tales Toutia is transformed into a friendly spirit who warns of the sea’s volatility, ‘especially when the sea has tossed up the bodies of a few drowned souls.’ 3 Fantastic tales of the paradoxical creature circulate in Azel’s kif-induced haze as a precursor to his contemplation of the sea’s paradoxical nature through his own intoxicated, stupefied, dream-like portrayal of its most current trope as a ‘sea cemetery’: As if in an absurd and persistent dream, Azel sees his body among other naked bodies swollen by seawater, his face distorted by salt and longing, his skin burnt by the sun, split open across the chest … Azel has decided that this sea has a centre and that this centre is a green circle, a cemetery where the current catches hold of corpses, taking them to the bottom to lay them out on a bank of sea weed. 4

That which has been familiar to them all their lives as a source of water, life, regeneration, mobility, freedom, has been transformed into a death trap and a burial ground. The sea has become ‘uncanny’ in the Freudian sense, as belonging to ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ 5 The ambivalence is rooted in the fantastic herBen Jelloun, 4. Ibid., 4. 4 Ibid., 5. 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Pelican Freud Library, translated by James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14 (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), 340. 2 3

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meneutic that frames the novel, for, as Brian Attebery has succinctly put it, ‘Fantasy invokes wonder by making the impossible seem familiar and the familiar seem new and strange.’ 6 As with Mahi Binebine’s Cannibales, Partir draws the Mediterranean Sea as one inhabited by spirits and monsters, through fantastical interpretations of its characters. Like Cannibales, Partir’s realist foundational narrative is threaded with fantastic interpretations of the characters and various para- and meta-texts (for example, the stories characters tell and the narrative’s selfreflexive interrogations). Within this realist text, they hint at the fantastic but never allow it to overcome the text (until the end). In Partir, the journeys are shown to be multidirectional, from travelers of all kinds across that simultaneously familiar and estranging Mediterranean Sea, and reveal that the fantastic generic elements not only reflect on fantasies of an ideal Europe. The itinerary of fantasy is also multidirectional: the fantastic generic elements inversely reflect on cultural fantasies of an exoticized Mediterranean, and they do so most remarkably in Ben Jelloun’s hometown, Tangier—the site par excellence of social fantasies. Like Laila Lalami in the US, Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan writer in the diaspora whose work is mostly set in Morocco but delivered from his home in France. And like Lalami, Ben Jelloun demonstrates intertextuality with Western expat and travel narratives otherwise absent from Maghrebian undocumentedmigrant literature. Western sojourn narratives in Morocco yield currency in the American literary imagination: Ben Jelloun’s references to known American writers in search of sexual exploits, 7 as well as their fictional reincarnations; Lalami’s depiction of tourist quests for an American Beat past in Tangier. They Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition: From Irving to Le Guin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 3. 7 In Partir (Leaving Tangier), one of Ben Jelloun’s characters recalls the American writers, perhaps recalling Bowles or the Beat poets, isolating themselves in hotels and venturing out to the city to arrange for sexual exploits. 6

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tap into Orientalist-Mediterraneanist fantasies of recovery: western cultural narratives of a ‘wishful liberation of fantasies’ 8 in remote places and times, sites of great religions and cultures in ruins, inhabited by exotic natives. It is this familiar cultural fantasy of the Mediterranean and its dynamic cities, celebrated for openness and utopic cosmopolitanism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and literature, which Lalami and Ben Jelloun access. Decades after it was established as an International Zone—effectively separated from the rest of Morocco and ‘loosely administered by eight nations whose citizens lived tax free while the locals serviced everything including their sexual needs’ 9—Tangier functioned as a western outpost: it was during this time of loose governance that it acquired its reputation as a land of fantasies. The subsequent relationship between American counterculture and Tangier in the 1940s–1960s is certainly owed to Paul Bowles: his writing about the city’s drugs, pimps, and prostitutes influenced other writers who were to become part of the Beat Generation, like William S. Burroughs who joined Bowles in Tangier and there wrote Naked Lunch. 10 For Paul Bowles in Tangier, the Mediterranean featured as a model cosmopolis—an urban contact zone able to well-receive the ‘stranger’; a pluralistic, open society unbound by nationalist exclusions. The cosmopolis is where ‘every individual is a partial stranger because arrivals (and departures) are incessant’; 11 Harvie Ferguson, The Lure of Dreams: Sigmund Freud and the Construction of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1996), 205. 9 Michael Mewshaw, Between Terror and Tourism: An Overland Journey Across North Africa (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2010), 351. 10 Certainly, Tangier was apprehended in the western imagination by various writers and artists before the Beat Generation, like Samuel Pepys, Antoine De Saint Exupery, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Matisse, Delacroix, etc. 11 Kurt Iveson, ‘Strangers in the Cosmopolis,’ in Cosmopolitan Urbanism, eds Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington, and Craig Young (London: Routledge, 2006), 76. 8

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hence, openness and hospitality constitute the cosmopolitan virtue. Bowles’s Tangier-based travelogues, short stories, and novels represent the Mediterranean narrative par excellence—replete with travel narratives and multicultural encounters. But the Mediterranean is essentialized not only by a ‘history of travel culture attracted by freedoms,’ a contented freely mobile cosmopolitanism, but in the social vice and visceral experience that ‘dangerous mores associated with the region’ offer, according to Mike Crang. 12 Although Bowles wrote about Tangier’s picturesque qualities for tourism magazines, his stories described an urban contact zone that was far from tame—a border town at the crossroads of diverse nationalities and cultures with a seductive lawlessness. 13 Criminality and chaos abound in his stories, but there is safety in permissibility, an order in the disorder, a comfort in knowing that its bustling cosmopolitanism, the flow of people coming and going, made it possible to hide out, lose oneself, become ‘clandestine’ without legal repercussions. Bowles’s towns represent a liberating frontier for escape and criminality, as well as places of simplicity, spiritual immanence, transcendence, and creative inspiration for those seeking to ‘drop out’ of society. The Mediterranean is performative in the sense that it is less about shared traits than the play on ‘claims and knowledges about those shared traits,’ according to Crang. 14 One of the main vehicles of performing the Mediterranean is the retrieval of a lost paradise, a liberatory frontier for ‘sensual pleasures,’ ‘authentic heritage,’ and ‘mythical vices’. The Mediterranean as a seductive utopia emerges through literary itineraries. It flashes a Mike Crang, ed., Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in the Age of Banal Mobilities (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 160. 13 On Bowles’s themes of lawlessness and chaos in Tangier, see Without Stopping (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999); ‘Monologue (Tangier, 1975)’, The Threepenny Review 13 (Spring 1983), 11–12; ‘Hugh Harper,’ The Threepenny Review 21 (Spring 1985), 3. 14 Crang, 160. 12

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seductive monolithic narrative of travel adventure, sensuality, spirituality, diversity, and authentic heritage that encompasses a remarkably diverse number of nations and cultures occupying the three continents that surround the sea. Branding of the Mediterranean as frontier of travel and escape for its ‘sensual pleasures,’ ‘authentic heritage,’ ‘mythical vices’ is utopic in the Foucauldian sense—controlling and disciplinary—as it is based on discovery and exploration for the purpose of ordering these properties and retrieving them upon arrival. Utopias are used as a heuristic device with the potential to lend order to the Mediterranean narrative, giving narrative coherence to a place that no longer exists or might have never existed. As new as it seems upon observation, it is still meant to convey a sense of the familiar. Ben Jelloun captures these familiar touchstones of the Mediterranean, and specifically Tangier, through themes of sexual tourism. As Michael Walonen puts it in his reading of Partir, ‘for Ben Jelloun, the specters of the International Zone era are far from quiescent.’ 15 The return of those specters is borne out of economic necessity and imposed through sexual predation: deprived of economic opportunities and surrounded by political corruption, Azel and his sister try to save themselves from a fate at the bottom of the ‘sea cemetery,’ like their cousin Noureddine, by securing safe and legal passage to Spain through the help of a benefactor—Miguel, the Spanish art dealer. But, as Walonen explains, pure altruism doesn’t guide the art dealer, as he ‘embodies some of the more maleficent aspects of the long shadows cast by the expatriate era.’ 16 In Tangier, Orientalist phantoms of eras past return to inflict further humiliation through Ben Jelloun’s perspective: the tales of expatriate artists and their sex scandals in eras past are relayed as a historical Michael Walonen, Writing Tangier in Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature (New York: Routledge, 2016), 132. 16 Walonen, 132. 15

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referent to the current moment in which Azel finds himself. The narrator mentions an ‘old concierge in apartment building where an American writer and his wife lived said it best’: That type, they want everything, men and women from the common people, young ones, healthy, preferably from the countryside, who can’t read or write, serving them all day, then servicing them at night. A package deal, and between two pokes, tokes on a nicely packed pipe of kif to help the American write! Tell me your story, he says to them, I’ll make a novel out of it, you’ll even have your name on the cover: you won’t be able to read it but no matter, you’re a writer like me, except that you’re an illiterate writer, that’s exotic—what I mean is, unusual, my friend! That’s what he tells them, without ever mentioning money, because you don’t talk about that, not when you’re working for a writer, after all! They aren’t obliged to accept, but I know that poverty—our friend poverty—can lead us to some very sad places. 17

The jab Ben Jelloun takes at Bowles and his wife Jane is clear, for Bowles’s ‘translations’—no mere translations but recordings of oral transmissions in the Moroccan darija that were translated to English and edited—opened the author up to controversy. Brian Edwards wrote, ‘Bowles’s role exceeded that of mere translator, since the books that bear Mrabet’s name as author exist only in translation, and their title pages list a variety of roles for Bowles, including editor, translator, and the person who tape-recorded Mrabet.’ 18 Edwards also explains that as early as 1972, Ben Jelloun wrote an article in the French paper Le Monde in which he declared Bowles’s translations a ‘bastard lit-

Ben Jelloun, 41. Brian T. Edwards, ‘The Moroccan Paul Bowles,’ Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. L, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 196.

17 18

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erature.’ 19 Edwards discusses the critique Bowles garnered for his literary collaborations: For Ben Jelloun, Bowles practiced a ‘technique of rape’ (the column ran under the headline ‘Une technique de viol’), and though Ben Jelloun did not explicitly accuse Bowles of sexual relations with his Moroccan interlocutors, he certainly suggested that the violation was more than literary. And many in Morocco got the hint. 20

Indeed this is not the only reference to Bowles in the novel: for example, Miguel finds, upon reading his father’s journal, that he had also heard about Paul and Jane Bowles when he left Spain and began living in Tangier: ‘At the time people also talked about an American writer who lived there several years with an illiterate Moroccan boy, while his wife set up house with a peasant woman.’ 21 Later, Genet’s love of young Moroccan boys, especially ones who rob him, is dropped into conversation almost casually when Miguel complains about Azel to his sister Kenza: ‘Azel thinks I’m Jean Genet, you know—that French writer who used to come often to Tangier, a rebel, a great poet, a homosexual who has served great time in prison for theft; he loved to be robbed by his lovers, a betrayal he found reassuring or exciting …’ 22 References to the expatriate era and its sexualization of Moroccan boys and men appear not only to critique the writers and artists of the era, but to indicate through various characters that their memory resonates up to the present, to underscore how the shadows cast by the expatriate era have never receded. One way of reflecting on this continuity is by replaying this familiar expat trope, represented by Azel’s relationship with Miguel, until it culminates in a scene of humiliation: Miguel holds a party themed ‘Orient: Think Pink!’, where the fantasies of the Edwards, 199. Ibid., 199. 21 Ben Jelloun, 199. 22 Ibid., 161. 19 20

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Orient and the Mediterranean are animated. While Miguel is dressed a ‘vizier of the Arabian Nights’ and ‘most of his friends wore Moroccan jellabas or Turkish jabadors and serouals in every shade of pink,’ 23 Azel is ordered to wear a woman’s formal costume—‘a caftan, a wig that was almost red, a belt embroidered with gold, babouches, and a veil.’ 24 Feminization is supposed to be a source of humiliation, but one which Azel embraces, as he not only wears the clothes but makes his face up ‘like a bride’ and properly adjusts his wig. The result is entrancing to the other visitors, who confirm the value of the spectacle: ‘But what a lovely statue!’ ‘And such a perfect mélange—half woman, half man! Isn’t Miguel just spoiling us!’ ‘Oh—the mustache! And look at that stubble! It’s simply so exciting!’ ‘The loveliest catamite of the Maghreb!’ 25

The spectacle is attributed not only to the gender binary but to the shadows long cast both by Orientalized sexualization, as well as precursors to Orientalism: referred to as a ‘catamite,’ a young boy in a sexual relationship with an older man in ancient Greece and Rome, Azel is specifically identified in a Mediterranean context. So the social fantasies of Orientalism and its feminizing sexualization—animated in this party by Miguel himself—also appear to be specifically Mediterranean. Eager to escape his impoverished life, Azel re-fantasizes himself not only to Miguel, a wealthy Spanish Maghreb-ophile sampling the country’s art and sexual industry, but also allows himself to be paraded as a fantasy for Miguel’s tourist guests: Azel’s performance of the simultaneously sexually exotic and traditional becomes a site of tourism, stabilizing through heritage, community, authenIbid., 105. Ibid., 105. 25 Ibid., 106. 23 24

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ticity, and distraction from the material and mundane. Azel does all this to remain in Miguel’s good graces so that he can obtain a visa for him and his sister, Kenza. Aspiring migrants, like Azel, tap into Orientalist-Mediterraenanist fantasies so they can be liberated from the prison site of their fulfillment (Morocco) and immigrate elsewhere to fulfill the immigrant dream. More importantly, they do all this to secure safe passage and avoid a fate at the bottom of the sea cemetery, like their cousin Noureddine. However, what once was familiar—the expatriate era of Orientalized sexualization—is no longer familiar: rather than French, British, American expats from historically wealthy countries, the patron predators are Spanish. Having the Spanish take on the role of their historically wealthy northern European neighbors opens up the text to an examination of the historical relationship between southern European countries, their wealthier European counterparts, and North Africa. And indeed Ben Jelloun’s characters lay bare the contrasts of the 1990s era in which the novel is set and the previous modern eras of Spain’s role in Europe and North Africa. When Azel expresses his desire to immigrate to Spain to Miguel, the man shares an experience of a different Spain in more recent memory: ‘I had the same dream when I was your age, although my circumstances were different. Spain was unlivable. Franco just wouldn’t die, and his religious and military regime infested everything … All Spain smelled moldy. People were choking. The country came alive only for soccer and corrida.’ 26 In a reading of Partir, L. DotsonRenta explains Moroccan-Spanish relations amidst Spain’s decline earlier in the twentieth century: Morocco had watched its ostensible neighbor slide into decline and stasis, leading to a sense of estrangement from a country it had such long-standing ties with. Interestingly, the novel expresses that the Moroccans began to view Spain the way Spain had long been viewed by the rest of ‘old’ Europe—as a place of nonprogress, the keeper of a foreign past 26

Ibid., 45.

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And indeed, Ben Jelloun provides many allusions to the irony of Spain’s resurgence in the political and economic sphere, considering Moroccan and western European views of Spain were in alignment earlier in the twentieth century. For most of the twentieth century, Spain was a country of transit for migrating Africans because it was considered as poor and ‘backward’ as their country of origin. 28 Moreover, the book reveals up until relatively recently, especially since Spain became part of the European Union, the traffic across the Mediterranean was multidirectional. In fact, while Miguel is reading his father’s journal, he discovers that he and his friends arrived in Tangier to escape repression in Franco’s Spain in the 1950s. In fact, they arrive under the pretense they are fishermen who simply lost their way at sea, but in reality they are the ‘first boat people’ from Spain, as Miguel’s father describes it, leading Miguel to exclaim, ‘Would you have ever believed there were already illegal aliens in 1951, but going in the opposite directions from today’s boat people?’ 29 Ben Jelloun captures the familiar touchstones of the Mediterranean, Orientalism, the expat era and reworks them so they are both familiar and strange. The ‘American writer[s]’ and ‘French writer[s]’ and their lascivious pasts in Morocco menLara Dotson-Renta, Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Re-routing of European Muslim Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 42. 28 Please see Hakim Abderrezak, Ex-centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). Abderrezak writes, ‘The Iberian Peninsula was often considered no better off socioeconomically than the countries of the Maghreb were. To the question “Why not Spain?,” a common answer among prospective migrants was, “I might as well stay in Morocco!” This mindset has shifted in the past several years, making Spain a coveted destination’ (6). 29 Ben Jelloun, 200. 27

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tioned various times in the novel have been replaced by the Spanish. The social fantasies are familiar and maintain continuity, but their historical referents seem new and unfamiliar, at times. Moreover, these countries share a history of the Mediterranean and the its stigmatization by Western European countries, with all the stereotypes the region entails. It is difficult to apprehend this change without comparing Spain in the past (part of the Mediterranean) with the Spain in the present (part of the EU). What should be taken into consideration is the refashioning of the geographic imaginary and its attendant identifiers of alterity (who is now ‘us’ and who is now ‘them’) in the age of the EU. As much as Ben Jelloun reaches back to the familiar past through paratexts (tales and gossip characters tell and Miguel’s father’s journal entries of Moroccan migration transposed onto a seemingly linear narrative) to align it with the present through themes of sexual tourism, expat predation, Orientalism, Mediterranean fantasization, we find that the fantasies of the bygone era are in discord with their contemporary reiterations. As I mentioned, even though the refashioning of the geographic imaginary and its attendant identifiers of alterity (Who is now ‘us’? Who is now ‘them’?) have been transformed in the age of the EU so that northern Mediterranean countries like Spain are now in absolute opposition to their southern Mediterranean neighbors, it is still difficult to imagine they are completely free from the stigmatization shared by Mediterranean countries/regions, especially as it continues to this day. Moreover, the fantasies, as animated by the Think Pink! party organized by Miguel, are overtaken by the object of fantasy, not only because Azel takes over a role meant to humiliate him at the party, but also because Azel uses the party and Miguel and all their attendant fantasies in order to escape the prison site of their fulfillment—Morocco. Thus, aspiring migrants ironically tap into OrientalistMediterraneanist fantasies of expats and tourists to be liberated from them—by avoiding the undocumented boat journey and a fate at the bottom of the sea cemetery. Utopic literary itineraries are undermined, along with their utopic place-narrative, by heterotopic re-signification to convey

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counter-sites that simultaneously represent, contest and invert all other places within society by acting as a mirror to society. Just as Ben Jelloun undermines the reliability of cultural fantasies, popular narratives of the Mediterranean, he makes formal gestures toward the fantastic that unravel his own literary narrative—that which fuses the familiar with the unfamiliar, suspends belief, introduces doubt, compels hesitation about factual authenticity. Just as Ben Jelloun captures the familiar touchstones of the Mediterranean only to unsettle them, he invokes the fantastic to unravel the certainty of an otherwise realist narrative. Because after all, Ben Jelloun uncovers all the phenomena associated with undocumented migration: the smugglers, deaths in the sea cemetery, poverty, dispossession, desperation, impending exploitation, and the validity of the ‘immigrant dream’—and in extreme cases, as in Partir, drugs, prostitution, imprisonment, rape, and sexual tourism. But he also uncovers the cultural fantasies they require as evident with the Think Pink! party. This is because, as has been discussed, within the realist narrative unwind the cultural fantasies of the Mediterranean. And just as there is an element of the familiar and unfamiliar in the fantastic, there is an element of familiarization and defamiliarization of cultural fantasies that Ben Jelloun engages. Thus, it appears that the subversion of the world as we know it is exponential. The thrust of the fantastic into a realist narrative, especially at the end when the fantastic subsumes the entire narrative, to point to the element of fantasy in a realist perspective—to undermine the epistemic coherence and authenticity of his own realist narrative (‘his own’ is never his own: it integrates other elements hinging on the culturally fantastic that ‘other’ him into abjection). Ben Jelloun points to the dissonance between realism and the fantastic to suggest the significance of ways of narrating immigration to the process itself. The structure of the novel gives an indication of the relationship between mobility and ways it is conveyed and transmitted. Partir is divided into eponymous chapters (Azel, Malika, Flaubert, etc.), relating its characters’ stories about why they wanted to immigrate, how they came to immigrate, what happened on the other shore—typical

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of quite a few North African novels of undocumented boat migration. Only the first and last chapter are not eponymous and are entitled ‘Le pays’ and ‘Revenir.’ ‘Le pays’ (country) refers to Morocco, and ‘Revenir’ means return. The novel begins with dreams of leaving and ends with a fantastic account of return. Both chapters framing the novel not only take on a fantastical and dream-like quality in stark contrast to the realist narrative in between, but they are the only chapters which detail the process of traveling, of mobility across the sea, of a journey with a sea vessel, once again calling attention to the relationship between travel and immigration and its discursive potential, in its often bizarre, eerie, strange manifestations. Indeed, the mobility of the Mediterranean is conceived in the telling—both by western expats and travelers and Moroccan and other African immigrants: acts of communication and narration construct the way the Mediterranean is experienced and the way it shapes different subjectivities. Moreover, that the novel begins with dreams of leaving and ends with a fantastic account of return also suggests the act of leaving holds as much significance as the act of return. But in which way is ‘return’ conceived? Indeed, the return points to the ‘march’ home to Morocco that unravels at the end. But both chapters framing the novel—‘The Country’/‘Morocco’ and ‘Return’—also highlight the return of specters and doubles and copies to the multidirectional Mediterranean traffic to and from Morocco—whether they are remnants of the expatriate era, western fantasies of Morocco, or historical figures refashioned in contemporary form. Cultural western fantasies collide with African immigrant fantasies. At the heart of the fantastic accounts, both the cultural and the generic, is the encounter with doubleness, iterations, repetition, and return, wherein the familiar seems new and strange, invoking both the ambivalence of the uncanny and the subsequent hesitation of the fantastic. Beyond, but significant to, ways of narrating immigration, the wavering between the real and fantastic reveals the liminal quality of the novel in the return of the double—the embodiment of liminality. The novel is threaded with literary doubles, only hinting at its liminal status in confounding the gritty real-

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ism the rest of the text conveys. The ambivalence and the hesitation it compels are dependent on the disorientation resulting from the attempt to align the original with its iteration. This disorientation charges the narrative before it even begins: the return of historical literary figures in contemporary disjointed iterations begins in the epigraph that mentions the narrator’s Cameroonian friend named Flaubert: My Cameroonian friend Flaubert says, ‘Here I am!’ when he’s leaving and ‘We’re together!’ to say goodbye. A way to ward off bad luck. In this novel, those who leave aren’t planning to return, and when they leave someone, it’s for good. Flaubert, who studied a few pages of Madame Bovary in school has promised to read this entire book as soon as summer vacation begins, when he goes home. 30

The epigraph highlights the significance of narrating mobility and immigration: the act of leaving or the process of immigrating becomes significant with the way it is communicated or narrated. The character making this link between narration and mobility compels us to wonder at his own connection as a literary double: Flaubert the Cameroonian immigrant, a namesake of the writer who hails from the metropolis that has subjected his land to colonization, has not read Madame Bovary, the most important and popular book by the French writer he was named after, but he has promised to read the narrator’s book on African immigrant life. From the outset, Ben Jelloun creates discord between the familiar historical name and its contemporary live iteration. In fact, Ben Jelloun not only rewrites Flaubert but also Zola and Don Quixote: just like Flaubert, they are contemporary reiterations but disjointed ones, for how does the undocumented Cameroonian immigrant align with the French writers Gustave Flaubert? How does Flaubert’s cousin, Emilezola the librarian compare to Emile/his predecessor? How does Don Quixote compare to an undocumented worker? 30

Partir’s epigraph.

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Flaubert re-emerges in the novel first in Spain, then on a boat on the Mediterranean. In Spain, he meets up with Azel and indicates the importance of communicating about the process of mobility: the tonton is a tradition that signifies the relationship between the community and immigration and accountability—a rite of passage that sets the stage for the rest of this relationship. But African immigrant life is not one of solidarity or unity as revealed in the novel. Ben Jelloun reveals this ugly side of African immigration and Moroccan racism: the wayward Azel does not consciously bait the Cameroonian but asks insensitive, racist questions: he identifies the Cameroonian with black sub-Saharan Africans in Morocco as though they are a monolith and Flaubert is their representative. The liminal quality of the text is conveyed through historical literary figures and their doubles that gesture toward double meanings, double constructions of other elements in the text. The sea occupies a dual position at the beginning of the novel, proleptically gesturing toward the liminal quality that the text takes on with literary doubles and the last chapter conveyed as it is through a fantastic lens. Just as the sea features in the beginning of the novel as a familiar topographic referent for Azel and the other Tangerines in the café, it transforms into an uncanny feature of the landscape—the ‘uncanny’ in the Freudian sense as belonging to ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’. 31 The sea is inhabited by a monstrous sea spirit who ‘feasts on human flesh’, 32 Toutia, whose name the café goers are even afraid to mention lest they invoke her presence: ‘Everyone is quiet. Everyone listens. Perhaps she will show up this evening. She'll talk to them, sing them the song of the drowned man who became a sea star suspended over the straits. They have agreed never to speak her name: that would destroy her, and provoke a whole series of misfortunes as well. So the men watch one other and say noth31 32

Freud, 340. Ben Jelloun, 4.

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ing… Sometimes, hearing the echo of a cry for help, they look at one another without turning a hair.’ 33 The horror of being punitively dispossessed from what one has known all their lives is at first silencing, assimilated peripherally—‘they look at one another without turning a hair.’ They are so fearful at times, they avert their gaze to highlight an inarticulable horror, and stop starting at the sea—on which they usually fixate obsessively and which has been a source of, life, regeneration, mobility all their lives up to that point. They still look from the corner of their eyes because just as soon as they identified its monstrousness and willed themselves not to even invoke the spirit’s presence (as something not quite settled, fixed, easily definable, or even articulable), they begin to align her with something less eerie, strange, dangerous than a witchy sea siren—a sea with a ‘beneficient voice’ sea that warns them ‘tonight is the night, that they must put off their voyage for a while’ 34 —something they learned to ‘read’ all their lives, or at least trust those who know how to do so. Therein lies the unease caused by the uncanny, the multidirectional slipperiness of the unheimlich as the emergence of the familiar from within, or to the side, of the unfamiliar. What is known as ‘old and familiar’, 35 the heimlich, ‘belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand, it means familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’. 36 As Freud explains, the term unheimlich, uncanny, unhomely, etymologically slips into its opposite, heimlich, or homely: ‘Heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a subspecies of heimlich’. 37

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 4. 35 Freud, 340. 36 Ibid., 345. 37 Ibid., 347. 33 34

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Inherent to the brothers Grimm’s explanation of the concept of the heimlich is an act of separation: From the idea of ‘homelike’, belonging to the house, the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret […] Heimlich in a different sense, as withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious [… or] that which is obscure […] The notion of something hidden and dangerous […] is still further developed, so that ‘heimlich’ comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to ‘unheimlich’. Thus: ‘At times I feel like a man who walks in the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is heimlich and full of terrors for him.’ 38

Perhaps we can linger here a moment to appraise the entirety of the Mediterranean in which the novel is set (both sides of it, Morocco and Spain) as a fantasy at whose heart lies the unheimlich, the familiar and unfamiliar, that which ‘belongs in the house’ and that which evokes ‘terror’ out of the corner of one’s eyes—precisely the doubleness Ben Jelloun compels forth in the Mediterranean’s making. The unheimlich itself is embodied by Azel in Spain—as both belonging to the house and that which evokes terror. With the help of Miguel, Azel legally travels to Spain, but his visa runs out so he becomes ‘illegal.’ The Spanish authorities entrap him in a scheme that would ensure his legal residence in Spain (belong to the house) but would also endanger his life by posing as a would-be-terrorist (evoke terror). Azel as embodiment of the unheimlich is a feature of the Mediterranean fantasy with which I opened this chapter: he is both the center of a sexual exotic fantasy characteristic of Mediterranean imagery at home in the Mediterranean but he is also at the center of its more relatively contemporary iteration—as den of terror. After all, one doesn’t become free of fantasies simply by moving: on the side south of the Mediterranean Azel inhabits one fantasy, and on the north side of the Mediterranean he in38

Grimm’s dictionary quoted in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, 340.

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habits another—the fantasy of the Mediterranean as a hub of cosmopolitanism and the fantasy of the Mediterranean as a den of terror worthy of containment. While the attraction of the Mediterranean is associated with an appealing disorder of diversity, summoning its cosmopolitanism, the repulsion of the Mediterranean comes from identifying it as a ‘zone of conflict’, demanding its containment. The Mediterranean Maghreb as familiar site through tourism, escape, adventure, and ‘metissage’ (hybrid, multicultural) cosmopolitanism still remains unaffected by its current reinvention as unfamiliar site of obscure networks, criminality, and terrorism. Both are different ends of a utopic continuum for a precise ordering of Mediterranean land—one a nostalgic retrieval of an ‘authentic’ past, the other containment for future governmental reterritorialization. The doubleness operating throughout Partir is perhaps illuminated by the double global imaginary, geographer Doreen Massey’s notion of a globe imagined as free and unbounded but in reality subject to material controls (a circulation of capital, products, and ideas that have become ‘liberated,’ as a result of globalization, at the same time that the movement of people, and certain categories of labor in which they engage, have become more subject to control.) 39 The unheimlich (‘withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious [… or] that which is obscure […] The notion of something hidden and dangerous’) as a manifestation of doubleness in the realist text consumes it at the end: the terror of the sea (its uncanniness) takes on a further dimension in the last chapter, ‘Returning’, wherein the uncanny threaded throughout is gathered in a melancholic carnivalesque culmination: costumes, songs, paroI liken the current dual Mediterranean to geographer Doreen Massey’s notion of the double global imaginary where space is imagined as free and unbounded but subject to material controls. I refer to as both an attraction of cosmopolitanism and a repulsion of containment. See Doreen Massey, ‘Imagining Globalisation,’ in Global Futures: Migration, Environment, and Globalization (Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan, 1999), 39. 39

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dies, processions, spirits, a coffin delivered to a wake. In a liminal novel (wavering between fantastic and realistic), fantasy overtakes the text at the end. Everything and everyone becomes strange. The chapter begins with the procession of immigrants trying to find their way home as if in a desperate trance to the call of the sea: compelled by an ‘irresistible longing’, they walk along, crossing cities, chilly wastelands, forests, fields. They walk day and night, driven by a force of such unsuspected strength that they feel no fatigue, not even the need to eat and drink. Borne along by winds bound for home, they advance without questions, without wondering what is happening to them. They believe that destiny is there, in that march, drawing them back to their roots, to their native land, a destiny that has appeared to them as a kind of command, an indisputable order, a time outside time, the ascent to a mountaintop, a wonderful promise, a shining dream, pressing on, heading over the horizon. They take to the road, heads high, with a warm breath at their backs: the wind of freedom. Sensing that this is the moment, this is the hour. This is their season, a season for no one but them, for all those who have suffered, who have not found their place in life. Without a single regret, they've left everything behind and have already forgotten why they ever left home. They head for the port, where a familiar inner voice tells them to embark on a boat christened Toutia, a modest craft aboard which the captain has planted a flowering tree with a sweet perfume, an orange or a lemon tree. 40

Is the march to an unheard call for port in a hypnotic state through a ‘time outside time’ an indication of an alternate time, a parallel world, an outside reality, a double parallel universe or multiverses they appear to occupy? The characters ‘returning’ to Morocco are not only strange to each other but strange to us: some seem not to greet others they appear to have known well 40

Ben Jelloun, 252.

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in the rest of the novel, and some of the returning characters are not only unrecognizable to others but unrecognizable to the world we live in as though they occupy a parallel world: Toutia, the hungry sea spirit we became acquainted with in the first chapter, appears to be an interchangeable element in the last chapter—ship of return, former model, captain’s wife, ‘a word that means nothing.’ 41 Moreover, the narrator claims that he suddenly has lost both his name and his face (254). He is familiar to others, but the absence of his identifying features (name, face) also makes him a strange stranger to them. In this fantastic account, the characters have become uncanny—familiar and unfamiliar, concealed, mysterious. The uncanniness is compounded by the migration of literary figures to this text—the ‘return’ of their contemporary iterations (a return of a return) in this fantastic account. (As Freud explains in his definition of the uncanny, ‘withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious [… or] that which is obscure […] The notion of something hidden and dangerous’). Flaubert is back in this bizarre scene gesturing toward literary predecessors to highlight his difference from the writer after which he is named. And, in this fantastic account of a parallel world, he calls attention to the one we have and the one we have narrated by delivering a criticism of realism’s history and lineage. By his very presence, a black African undocumented worker named Flaubert recalls his own absence from realist texts like Madame Bovary in the mid-nineteenth century when France was entrenched in Africa as a colonial power. He himself represents not only an absence, but an absence that has returned. Flaubert is recalled from the corner of our mind—not just returning to the country, the continent, but returning from a literary absence that is a feature of European realism. Perhaps the characters—in being ‘withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious […] that which is obscure […] hidden and dangerous’—have been rendered uncanny by the historical record of realism. 41

Freud, 340.

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The uncanny, the fantastic, the carnivalesque establish the failure of realism to apprehend the story of migrants. Their journey is not festive, in the sense that the spectacle of carnival motifs is not celebratory in the Bakhtinian sense, but it is carnivalesque in the sense that the characters appear unified by turning the known, familiar world on its head. The manifestation of the doubles works to debase, to make the high forms low, and to ultimately interrogate the narrative of the colonial effects of migration. 42 Like the sea, the uncanny here is a means of return to what was once familiar. Like the sea of life that turns into a cemetery, the boat on the Mediterranean that was familiar to the narrator turns strange, unknown: ‘This boat seems both familiar and strange to me: perhaps it isn’t a boat, only a model, some trompe-l’oeil, a simple image projected out onto the water …’ 43 Nothing is as it seems. In fact as Ben Jelloun’s unraveling of cultural fantasies reveals, nothing was as it seemed to begin with and fantasies don’t linger without consequences. To the Mediterranean narrative, heterotopic resignification becomes disruptive. If utopia is a site of memory that promises regimentation of both discourse and movement, then its connection to the potential of language is a ‘fantasy of origins’, as Foucault conceived it, a predetermined order to which one is bound to return. An adherence to chronological formalism and narrative coherence. If its permits an ordering of speech, then heterotopia devastates speech. It undermines the language used to perform the Mediterranean. It shatters its common names and familiar properties. It destroys syntax in advance, and that which holds it together: the Mediterranean as a liberating frontier for ‘dropping out’ into sexual tourism and spiritual journeys takes on new meaning for A Janus-like face operates in carnival, not simply in Bakhtin’s terms of the simultaneous presence of official and unofficial aspects to this form, but also between celebratory and noncelebratory aspects of popular excess. 43 Ben Jelloun, 254. 42

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undocumented migrant figures, whose lives and stories are plunged and submerged into anonymity, when faced with exponential obstructions. Ben Jelloun’s unraveling of cultural fantasies reveals the epistemic coherence of the MoroccanMediterranean narrative has been thoroughly undermined by new parallel narrative worlds, ones that interrogate the one we have and create new fantastical ones with ‘talking trees,’ flying letters and syllables, a resurrected Don Quixote and Panza his servant, and the most wildly fantastic of all—the absence of demands for IDs and traveling documents!

CHAPTER 4. MEDITERRANEAN FRONTIER, MEDITERRANEAN CIRCUIT: UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION IN EGYPTIAN LITERATURE’S DOUBLE IMAGINARY In Ayman Zuḥrī’s Baḥr Al-Rūm (2008), 1 a self-published Egyptian novel on undocumented migration, a paradoxical vision of the Mediterranean as both a mediated spectacle and a tomb of hyperborders is conveyed through the eyes of the protagonist, an aspiring migrant. Before he is smuggled across the Mediterranean, Saber travels from his village to Alexandria. Upon arrival at the Alexandria station, he and his friends head to the beach. Upon seeing it for the first time, he reflects that the sea before him is indeed the one he had learned about in school. Once he is settled in a slum, he deviates from his usual route and unexpectedly spies the sea again: ‘… as we got nearer to the beach and the slums got further behind us, beautiful Alexandria,

‘Baḥr al-Rūm’, referring to the Mediterranean Sea in Modern Arabic, is more commonly used on Islamic and older Arabic texts to mean ‘the Roman sea’, wherein Roman means Byzantine. I translate the Arabic title, Baḥr Al-Rūm, to Roman Sea. 1

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the one that we had seen on television, appeared before us.’ 2 The next time the Mediterranean waters feature is after he embarks on a flimsy, overcrowded boat to Italy where he suddenly notices a sea of floating dead bodies surrounding the craft: after fourteen hours of sailing the Mediterranean Sea, the narrator recounts seeing ‘bloated’ and ‘floating bodies’ in the water: ‘Black and white bodies, bodies of men, women, and children, all on a quest on the sea in search for a better life …’ 3 The first view reveals Saber’s lack of familiarity with the sea—second-hand knowledge from a school textbook is his only means of orientation. The second view is consciously filmic, spectatorial, ‘unreal’, iconically touristic—for him, an image of the sea evocative of slick movie scenes from Alexandria’s carefully maintained shores, jarringly different from the slums he occupies. It reveals one effect of utopia: decontextualization—a material, touristic, privileged site is reduced to a site of memory—the filmic image is deployed as a phantasmic, evocative, discursive site, accessible as any familiar image, but just as frozen. As iconic as the site is, it is not particularly as instrumental as Saber’s work route or his smuggling route out of Egypt. The last reveals the product of the utopic limits of exclusion, frontiers, hyperborders—the site of floating dead bodies. The dead bodies at sea not only signal the thin border between life and death for migrants on the boat, and the limits of dispossession, poverty, social repression at home, but they are markers of the frontier drawn in the middle of the Mediterranean. The site of dead bodies appears to the migrants as the final border between their fantasy of the Mediterranean and its diffusion into reality. If, like Saber, we turn our gaze from the reassuring trope of an aestheticized Mediterranean heritage on Alexandria’s manicured shores towards the sea’s unfolding modernities, the soAll the passages of Ayman Zuḥrī’s text are my translations in this chapter. Ayman Zuḥrī, Baḥr Al-Rūm (Roman Sea) (self-published, 2008), 22. 3 Ibid., 67. 2

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cial, economic, political and cultural characteristics of the Mediterranean, the composed and pacified images fall apart before our eyes. That Saber renders incompatible representations— unfamiliar, culturally familiar, and then deadly—of one place in sequence rather than all at once demonstrates the distance required to construct today’s geographical imaginaries of the Mediterranean. Zuḥrī calls attention to the protagonist’s awareness of the protected, fantastic spaces of the iconic Mediterranean of blue shores, white beaches, clean, homogenous order, and moreover, the poverty and disorder it attempts to keep out of sight. He is both privy to this filmic, unchanging, frozen space, but also excluded from it, insofar as his movement is restricted by economic necessity to a route between the slums and his fruit-vending location. He observes a particularly artificial, scenic Mediterranean-Egyptian identity where he, as an Egyptian, is supposed to be reflected, but from which he is absent. In the Foucauldian sense, he thus occupies a double position, one of being heterotopically internal to the society regulating the cultural spaces that it ‘others’ but also external to them. That is, if heterotopia is ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’, when the protagonist encounters ‘society itself in a perfected form’ in the utopia of Alexandria’s manicured beaches—unreal places—he realizes the discrepancy between the space he occupies and the idealized site from which he is excluded. 4 Foucault writes of this sense of renewed self-awareness in locating the utopic: In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (‘Des Autres Espaces’), Diacritics 16, no.1 (1986), 24.

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There’s an implicit sense of enchantment that must be shaken off in order to ‘begin again’ and ‘reconstitute [the] self’ which is identifying the heterotopic relation between the imagined and a real place, a site of fantasy and a geographical entity. The concept of utopia shares common elements: ‘the utopic is always conceived as a space, usually an enclosed and isolated space— the walled city, the isolated island, a political and agrarian selfcontained organization, and thus a commonwealth.’ 6 The Southern Mediterranean is ‘isolated’ and ‘enclosed,’ in the manner of a utopia, inasmuch as bounded and fortified Northern European shores impose an impasse on the sea’s frontier. The utopian is not exactly what would be identified as ‘positive’ but what does inhere to a severely controlled spatial organization, whether of a fantastic, carefully maintained cultural idyll symbolic of Alexandria’s Mediterranean shores or an effect of disciplined borders and bodies on the Mediterranean Sea. The utopian paradox of the current Mediterranean narrative, which Zuḥrī deploys in incompatible images conveyed through his protagonist, highlights the shocking discrepancy between an aestheticized representation of the Mediterranean from iconic and touristic Alexandrian shores, as conceived and captured on film, and a repre-

Foucault, 24. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 134. 5 6

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sentational space of the ‘sea cemetery,’ 7 as lived, experienced, changed by those who encounter it. But this paradox is inherent to utopian visions in that ‘the utopic perpetually verges on the dystopic, the dysfunctional utopia, the more modern these utopias become.’ 8 That is, in order to enforce the order of the ideal society, utopia becomes necessarily rigid, authoritarian, hierarchical, restrictive, exclusionary. The images of the Mediterranean Sea in Baḥr Al-Rūm precisely call attention to the limits of exclusion through the eyes of the excluded from the privileged spaces of the nation and the protected spaces of international borders. Moreover, the utopia of the Mediterranean Sea emerges as a site of memory (a cultural idyll evocative of a familiar film) that promises regimentation of both discourse and movement, thus immutability, a dead-end to potential, newness, change. Elizabeth Grosz identifies the foreclosure on future potential in utopic thinking: While a picture of the future, the utopic is fundamentally that which has no future, that place whose organization is so controlled that the future ceases to be the most pressing concern. These utopias function as the exercise of fantasies of control over what Foucault has called ‘the event,’ that which is unprepared for, unforeseeable, singular, unique, and transformative, the advent of something new. 9

The transformation of the Mediterranean Sea to a ‘cemetery,’ due to the many deaths caused to evade detection, is mentioned in texts on recent Mediterranean undocumented migration. For example, see: Jørgen Carling, ‘Migration Control and Migrant Fatalities at the Spanish-African Borders,’ International Migration Review 41, no. 2 (2007), 316–343; Grace Russo Bullaro, ed., From Terrone to Extracommunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema (Leicester, England: Troubador Publishing, 2010), 51; Alassandro Dal Lago, NonPersons, translated by Marie Orton (Milan, Italy: Ipoc Press, 2009), 246. 8 Grosz, 135. 9 Ibid., 138. 7

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From the image of place as a dead cultural artifact, preserved cultural idyll, to the scene of dead floating bodies, blockade to human mobility, the Mediterranean Sea emerges in its affective dimension as the dead-end to potential, possibility, newness, change—a future—what has ultimately been reduced in its new coinage to ‘a sea cemetery.’ Although Mediterranean static utopias—one culturally immutable, the other materially bounded, fortified—feature in Baḥr Al-Rūm, the latter utopia imposing a human blockade is connected to another in the novel—the utopia of unbounded freedom, sustained by global ‘flows’—of capital, narratives, and styles coursing down from the Northern shore. The beginning of the novel gestures toward the circulation of all three around the story of a local migrant’s burial, drowned in the Mediterranean in pursuit of the ‘Euro’. The narrator recounts a village grieving the loss of four youth: he admits that although the villagers are mourning the tragedy of their deaths, they are also mourning as much the loss of the youths’ remittances back home to their families. 10 Only a few families in the village had managed to escape poverty when their sons who ‘immigrated illegally’ to the ‘Paradise of Europe’ and married once finances permitted and planted in farm lands concrete columns and towers decorated in the colors of the Italian flag. 11 At first, the currency of the ‘Euro’ and the territory of ‘Euro,’ referring to Europe, become interchangeable in the novel, evoking circulation of wealth in a territory of unbounded freedom and beyond—all the way to Egypt in the form of remittances. But, Zuḥrī cynically reveals how the villagers have come to adopt the inevitability of their bodies being capitalized and traded to sustain the community’s construction and consumption. Global ‘flows’ of the free market, communication, and culture stream into the small, neglected Delta village, promising the utopic exponential bounty of unfettered freedoms on the 10 11

Zuḥrī, 7. Ibid., 7.

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Northern shore. Despite village fears that ‘dreams’ of abandoned poverty have been buried along with the drowned man, in the same soil rooting remittance buildings, towers, and houses, the circulation of stowaways, smugglers, capital, and journey narratives do not come to a halt. In fact, the burial initiates the narrative of Baḥr Al-Rūm, feeds meta-narratives, fosters further journeys, suggesting local construction, and the global flow of capital, commodities, and the greater number of drowned bodies it demands, rests on the withdrawal of the village’s ‘own.’ 12 Zuḥrī establishes a predatory globalization in opposition to a utopic mobility of capital and commodities from Europe’s ‘paradise’ 13 imagined by the village, wherein mourning is not for the dead as much as for the village’s loss of resources and deprivation from linkage to the global economy. With the opening scene, Zuḥrī reveals the double imaginary of globalization, a conflicting prism of open transnational markets and closed, bounded territory, through which the villagers have come to see themselves (in the flow of remittances, construction, development and the blockade in the middle of the Mediterranean deflecting migrants back in caskets). This is a far cry from the celebratory discourse of globalization that locates liberatory potential in cross-border ‘hybrid’ subjectivities relatively free from the constraints of nationalism wielding power over its subjects, imagined not only by economists but postcolonial theorists in redemptive utopic narratives. 14 Zuḥrī displaces the mobile imagery of ‘flows’ and ‘routes,’ which villagers associate with an ascent of social mobility, with arborescent, rooting, and consuming counter-imagery of descent: the fruits of migration and capital are rooted in the same ‘soil,’ a plain ‘casket’ and ‘houses’ and Ibid., 7. Ibid., 7. 14 For utopic conceptualizations of transnationalism, see Bill Ashcroft, ‘Outlines of a Better World: Rerouting Postcolonialism,’ in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, 72–85 (London: Routledge, 2010). 12 13

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‘towers,’ 15 demanding exponential growth in the form of further journeys, narratives, bodies, and capital. In fact, the village’s self-objectification, subsumed under a commodifying ideology, in which bodies are ‘withdrawn’ in exchange for commodities resonates in the manner in which the protagonist Saber subjects himself to starvation to fit on a flimsy smuggler’s boat, to sustain this ‘flow,’ to maintain the village’s ascent of social mobility, in essence—to keep it afloat. Zuḥrī shows the village to be already ‘suffering’ from capitalist globalization in that Saber’s treatment as a shrinkable object of transport for smugglers is an extreme extension of the village’s self-commodification—erasure or displacement of the human behind the surface of (future accumulated) objects mourned (instead of the dead) at a migrant’s funeral. The Mediterranean has been seen as a Janus-faced sea: at the same time that a circulation of capital, products, and ideas have become ‘liberated,’ the movement of people, and certain categories of labor, have become more restricted. 16 Whereas capital, products, and ideas have become more ‘liberated,’ as a result of globalization, the movement of people, and certain categories of labor in which they engage, have become more subject to control, renewing border restrictions, challenging the celebratory notion that denationalization of economies leads to the deterioration of the nation-state. Already globalized, the Mediterranean has become a place designed to encourage free circulation of capital and a blockade discouraging human mobility. 17 The Janus-faced sea, the dual Mediterranean, can be likened to the double global imaginary, wherein space is imagined as free Zuḥrī, 7–8. See Henk Driessen, ‘A Janus-Faced Sea: Contrasting Perceptions and Experience of the Mediterranean,’ MAST/Maritime Studies 3, no. 1 (2004), 41–50. 17 See Natalia Ribas-Mateos, The Mediterranean in the Age of Globalization: Migration, Welfare, and Borders (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005). 15 16

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and unbounded but subject to material controls, as a result of globalization: 18 There are two apparently evident self-truths, two completely different geographical imaginations, which are called upon in turn. No matter that they contradict each other because it works. And so in this era of globalization we have sniffer dogs to detect people hiding in the holds of boats, people die trying to cross the Rio Grande, and boatloads of people precisely trying to ‘seek out the best opportunities’ go down in the Mediterranean. That double imaginary, in the very fact of its doubleness, of the freedom of space on the one hand and ‘the right to one’s own space’ on the other, works in favour of the already powerful. They can have it both ways. 19

Globalization has been characterized as an inevitable process of growing interdependence—an intensification and deepening of social, political and economic relations based on ‘free market’ trade policies and realized through technological developments in transport and communication. For Massey, this definition obscures dramatic imbalances in the global political economy and disingenuously conflates free market economics with democratic processes. So while the Mediterranean narrative and its attendant bridge clichés continuously get re-accessed and circulated as if re-inventing the Mediterranean as a globalized space, the free-market’s inherent restriction on people’s movement has created two competing narratives: the past’s cultural connectivity and the present’s division into two culturally incommensurable spaces—the Northern shore, Christian and European, and the Southern one, Muslim and fundamentally non-Western. These anomalous, incompatible images of the Mediterranean in the double global imaginary have been captured in Egypt’s Doreen Massey, ‘Imagining Globalisation,’ in Global Futures: Migration, Environment, and Globalization, eds. Avtar Brah, Mary Hickman, and Mairtin Mac, 27–44 (Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan, 1999). 19 Massey, 39. 18

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body of work on undocumented migration. While not as extensive as the Maghreb’s, where the phenomena has a longer history, the work of Egyptian writers has sought to intervene in the Mediterranean narrative to show culture, even in remote villages, to be far from atemporal and preserved but rather an effect of an already violently dynamic globalization. Utopic cultural tourist sanctuaries are also exposed as staged mirages dependent on a network of global capital manipulation. These works reveal the Mediterranean’s globalized spaces when its material processes of control and marketplace practices are concealed behind the finished product of ancient, enduring culture. Concealment of displacement’s violence to preserve an image of sanctity is integral to ‘utopian organization’: the double movement of securing and obscuring undergirds capitalism’s deliberate process of creating distance between product and its site of production. Indeed, the ‘double imaginary’ of globalization, which offers an imagined unbounded space on the one hand but a material process of control on the other, resonates with Foucault’s definition of heterotopia as both a utopian and real space. In the same way that the ‘double imaginary’ reveals the idealization of globalization through utopian discourses, heterotopia also reveals the social production of space as utopian. Thus, the anomalous images of a Mediterranean and the inequality it produces are secreted in the discourse, purposely creating what Massey calls ‘a geographical imagination which ignores its own real spatiality’. 20 However, the focus of this literature is not operable on a distinction between Egyptian migrants on the outside looking in and the interior fortified European space, as is sometimes the case of the Mediterranean imaginary in Moroccan clandestine literature, but rather the focus is on the abjection of Egyptian national space whose animation of its transnational ideology in Alexandria becomes more poignantly dissonant with reality 20

Ibid., 37.

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when it is the prime site of departure for the migrants. Unlike Maghrebian undocumented migrant literature concerned with the outsider migrant figure in Europe, Egyptian literature focuses on homeland and journey, revealing the aspiring migrant as outsider in the privileged spaces of his society—nationally symbolic sites marked by concentrations of wealth and power—and revealing global participation in the structures that produce in the global South the poverty, political disenfranchisement and exclusion that give rise to the will to migrate. But like its Maghrebian counterpart, this body of work shows undocumented migrants creating heterotopic spaces by undermining the binary of the inside/outside their societies, navigating between the imagined and the real place, between the fantasy and a geographical entity, between absolute utopias and the places where outsiders dwell—city slums, Delta villages, flimsy crafts on the Mediterranean. Lastly, because these works draw the parameters of migration around the homeland and journey, as opposed to a European state, they subvert the dominant discourse of globalization celebrating flows, streams, circulations, by equating it with limited and suppressed movement. The migration literature in this case is not the national literature of the new land, but the homeland. As much as there is an orientation toward a transnational Mediterranean space based on the flows between Western and Eastern scholarship, culture, and information, the ideology of Mediterranean affinity remains utopic, as the transnational links occupy what Foucault refers to as a ‘placeless place’, 21 a site of memory that is accessed but does not materialize. The regimenting, controlling order of utopia in fact seems to not only refer to a placeless place, a nonplace, but in fact is deployed by the authors as an aim that results in deterritorialization. The literature is constituted by heterotopic compositions because it represents, from within the nation, the characters’ own external relationship to the homogenous space of ideological transnationalism, whether materially 21

Foucault, 24.

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objectified in redevelopment or not. The homeland is the heterotopic space from which the migrants move within the central dominant spaces and move out, while simultaneously representing, contesting, and inverting them: I maintain that the Mediterranean is a heterotopic site on which multiple identities and modalities of space/mobility converge. But the authors maintain an ambivalent relationship to its representation: by associating the Mediterranean with deterritorialization, the literature of Mediterranean migration engages it with utopic transnationalism in order to disengage the Mediterranean from utopianism. and moreover disengages the transnational from the utopic. To understand the relevance of the ‘double imaginary’ of the Mediterranean for Egypt, it is significant to explore the modern history of apprehending the Mediterranean. Intellectual trends in the early twentieth century emerged from Egypt asserting its historically continuous Mediterranean cultural alliance with Europe. Both Egyptian and Western intellectuals maintained there was an enriching continuous, natural orientation toward the Mediterranean, with the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria at the center of their assertions. For example, cultural reformer Ṭāhā Ḥusayn argued that the culture of Egypt was historically Mediterranean and part of Western culture: How can this sea create in the West an outstanding, superior mind and at the same time leave the East without any mind or with one that is weak and decadent? There are no intellectual or cultural differences to be found among the peoples who grew up around the Mediterranean and were influenced by it. Purely political and economic circumstances made the inhabitants of one shore prevail against those of the other. The same factors led them to treat each other now with friendliness, now with enmity. Egypt has always been part of Europe as far as an intellectual and cultural life is concerned. 22

Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, originally published in 1938, The Future of Culture in Egypt (Washington, DC: American Council of Learned Societies, 1954).

22

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Affinity is naturalized via the sea. Embrace of Western culture, according to Ḥusayn, was a homecoming, a return to roots, due to its historical legacy of Greek philosophy and Pharaonic, Roman, Byzantine, Ptomelaic roots. Other Egyptian intellectuals, like literary critic Yaḥya Ḥaqqī, have likewise asserted a Mediterranean affinity via deployment of Egypt’s geographical proximity to Europe. ‘The cultural similarity among the peoples of the Mediterranean basin,’ claimed Ḥaqqī is one such naturally predetermined, eternal cultural ‘bridge.’ 23 The claim of a Mediterranean cultural affinity with Europe has been criticized for its un-historicized alliance with the West, elision of Arab-Islamic identity, and polarization of Western and Eastern identities. 24 Most significantly, the collapse of ancient into modern Egypt has been criticized for its resilience, ‘lend[ing] itself readily to this recurrent ideological attempt at (re)orientation, especially when packaged in the soothing nomenclature of a (re)invented and reified Mediterranean cultural space.’ 25 Ḥusayn advocated a curriculum aligned with building a secular, modern nation-state and put forth the theory that Egyptian culture was more closely linked to a wider Mediterranean civilization. 23 Ḥaqqī is quoted in Muhammad Siddiq, Arab Culture and the Novel: Genre, Identity, and Agency in Egyptian Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2007), 29. The text quoted is from Yaḥya Ḥaqqī, Fajr Al-Qiṣṣa AlMiṣrīyya (The Dawn of Egyptian Fiction), originally published in 1960 (Cairo: Al-Ḥayāt Al-Miṣrīyya Al-‘Āmma lil Kitāb, 1997). Ḥaqqī connects the influence of European literary models to the aesthetic sensibility of the first generation of Egyptian fiction writers by way of a naturalizing metaphor: ‘The winds blowing from Europe carried into Arab society an unfamiliar seed, that of the story’ (Siddiq, 28). The ‘bridge’ as a cliché to represent relations between Mediterranean countries across the shores has centralized past and current discourse on affiliations and ‘cultural dialogue.’ 24 Siddiq, 170. 25 In his critique of early 20th-century Egyptian intelligentsia’s Mediterranean affinity, Siddiq identifies a similar cultural revival more recently: ‘Recently, not only the novelist Amitav Ghosh, but also the mightier European Union seems to have (re)discovered the topical relevance of

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The grand narrative of the Mediterranean is again under construction, in line with national monuments, buildings, urban centers wrought from imported concrete, to lay claim to an ancient past. In the last decades, Egypt invested in revivalist projects in homage to a glorified Mediterranean history owed to a classical Graeco-Roman tradition. Mediterranean affinity preached by Egyptian intellectuals in the early twentieth century resonates in the re-orientation of Egypt toward Europe today. Today’s architectural, cultural, and literary revivalist projects range from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, rediscoveries of the ancient city through the Pharos Lighthouse and the Royal Harbour, to a variety of worldly memoirs by Alexandrians recapturing the city’s past. Return to Mediterranean identity is also represented by a plethora of cultural initiatives, like the Cairo Mediterranean Literary Festival, Farah El-Bahr, the Anna Lindh Annual Cultural Festival, 26 in the service of ‘bridging’ contemporary Egyptian culture to its Mediterranean ‘roots’. So intertwined is Egypt’s Mediterranean revival, culturally in the EuroMediterranean Partnership’s creative programs, architecturally in developments gesturing toward ancient Alexandria, and politically in the form of the Union of the Mediterranean that it has been referred to as the ‘return of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn.’ 27 In aspiring S.D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society: the former in his novel In An Antique Land (1992), then later in the (1995) EU–Mediterranean Partnership’ (170). 26 Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures is a €7 million EU-funded project which aims at bringing people and organizations of the region closer and promoting dialogue, by offering them opportunities to work together on projects in the fields of culture, education, science, human rights, sustainable development, the empowerment of women and the arts. The Foundation is the first institution to be jointly created and co-financed by all member countries of the EuroMediterranean Partnership. 27 See Muḥammad Sāliḥ, ‘Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-l-itijāh nahwa AlMutawassiṭ’ (‘Taha Hussein and the Orientation toward the Mediterranean’), Al-Ahram 44381, June 6–10, 2008.

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toward becoming a global city tasked with development of transnational cultures, Alexandria self-Mediterraneanizes through revivalism projects that optimize a transcultural heritage. 28 While the Mediterranean bridge narrative is mobilized today, another narrative has emerged alongside it. While Mediterranean métissage is romanticized for its cultural transgressiveness (crossing cultures and languages), the migrant crossing from the southern to the northern shores of the Mediterranean has become more controlled than ever. Central to current reinventions of the Mediterranean have been initiatives from the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, which relies on the contradicThe library entered this narrative by seizing on Alexandria’s composite heritage, Greco-Roman, Ptolemaic, Pharaonic, Islamic. It also entered the narrative by embodying the Mediterranean’s mediating role on a global hierarchy of values—between Eastern and Western, Southern and Northern, particular and universal, primitive and modern. The library became another monument to a narrative privileging Mediterranean cultures for hybridity, mixture, syncretism: situated between the universal and particular in criticisms, it signals a Eurocentric return to origins identified with Western ‘ethno-philosophy,’ on one hand, and a universal rather than ethnically specific claim on Hellenistic heritage, on the other. 28 Its mix of ‘ancient mimicry and futuristic illusions’, as Beverly Butler put it in Return to Alexandria (2007), produces the composite effect of a return to Alexandria of Hellenistic foundational civilizations and progression toward a futuristic hypermodernism of global cities. The Mediterranean region, its cities, and cultural productions, like the relatively new library, have become interchangeable with métissage, fusion of heritages, hybridization of forms. The Mediterranean caché in Egypt and Alexandria Library would not hold without a gesture toward syncretism of Western and Eastern, European and Arab, cultural markers—this perception of mixture alarmingly signals development, progression, mobilization toward a softer international, inclusive identity. Mediterraneanism is used to mobilize a telos of progress wherein the Arab world’s incorporation of European cultural values is key to development, globalization, inclusivity—eclipsing the current globalization to which the region has been subject. 28

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tory notion of opening up cultural exchange while sealing shut the gates of Europe. 29 The EMP’s cultural initiatives have sought to sustain a ‘dialogue between cultures’ in service of a EuroMediterranean identity by invoking a common cultural heritage while at the same time pursuing policies on security, migration, and enlargement that draw a clear frontier in the middle of the Mediterranean. 30 The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership or the Barcelona Declaration, initiated in 1995, is composed of three chapters. The first concerns political and security partnerships, seeking to establish regional stability; the second focuses on economic partnerships, seeking to establish a free-trade zone; the third is concerned with the social and cultural domains. 30 Projects focusing on the Mediterranean’s heritage include the Euromed Heritage Programme focusing on material and immaterial heritage preservation, the Euromed Audiovisual Programme, concerned with enhancing media audiovisual heritage. On the cultural dimensions of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, Isabel Schäfer asks, ‘with the establishment of a cultural partnership, an artificial, prestige-seeking reinvention of a Mediterranean limited to its historical past and leaving aside the realities of present-day socio-cultural difficulties …?’ See Isabel Schäfer, ‘The Cultural Dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Partnership: A Critical Review of the First Decade of Intercultural Cooperation,’ History and Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2007), 342. Schäfer also addresses the way the EMP’s cultural-dialogue initiatives treat culture on the southern Mediterranean shores as immutable, as though immune from the free-market principles to which it is subject: ‘There is agreement on the idea that the ultimate objective of cultural cooperation is not to change peoples’ ways of life, but uniquely to understand one another better (European Commission 2002), forgetting that the Barcelona Process has effects in both the mid term and the long term on societies to the south and east of the Mediterranean and neglecting the fact that the introduction of a free trade zone will in any case change peoples’ ways of life’ (341). In addition to Schäfer, for criticisms of the Euro-Med cultural dialogue initiatives, see, see Raffaelia Del Sarto, ‘Setting the Cultural Agenda: Concepts, Communities, and Representation in Euro-Mediterranean Relations,’ Mediterranean Politics 10, no. 3 29

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On one hand, in fixating on the Mediterranean’s cultural past and aesthetic value to the point of eclipsing present material realities, the EMP’s cultural programs render a socio-historical decontextualization of the Mediterranean narrative, reinventing it as an untouched idyllic utopia. The aesthetic value attached to the Mediterranean detracts from the actual territorial regimentation and control to which it is subject by the EU. On the other hand, the EU’s own self-invention is partly established by constructing ‘the Mediterranean as distinct from, and even opposite to, Europe,’ so much so that, ‘to speak of or to deal with the Mediterranean has come to refer to the ensemble of issues and problems between Europe as a whole and non-European Mediterranean countries (Arab countries, Turkey, Israel).’ 31 Part of Europe’s own identity construction hinges on a counter‐image. The construction of Europe’s Other has come to signify both an unchanging, familiar, culturally valuable Mediterranean rooted in the past and a volatile, unfamiliar, politically charged Mediterranean present. 32 This reification of the Mediterranean as(2005), 313–330. Also see Emanuel Adler, ed., The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 31 Claudia Fogu, ‘From Mare Nostrum to Mare Alorium: Mediterranean Theory and Mediterraneanism in Contemporary Italian Thought,’ California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010), 11. 32 On criticism of EU-Mediterranean partnerships, specifically the EUMed positioning the Mediterranean as Europe’s Other, see: Hein De Haas, ‘The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities of African Migration to Europe,’ Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008), 1305–1322; Pinar Bilgin, ‘A Return to “Civilizational Geopolitics” in the Mediterranean?’ Geopolitics 9, no. 2 (2004), 269–291; Nikolaos Tzifakis, ‘EU’s Region-Building and Boundary-Drawing Policies: The European Approach to the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans,’ Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9, no. 1 (2007), 47–64; Stephan Stetter, ‘The Politics of De-Paradoxification in Euro-Mediterranean Relations: Semantics and Structures of “Cultural Dialogue”,’ Mediterranean Politics 10, no. 3 (2005), 331–348.

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sures separation of culture from neoliberalism’s present-day material realities, in which deterioration of human rights becomes facilely attributable to a culture still undergoing civilizational developments, rather than to one being altered by the EUMediterranean free trade. Discourse on the Mediterranean simultaneously acknowledges and conceals the globalization that the region has undergone. Since the 1990s the re-emergence of the term ‘Mediterranean’ from different international organizations was a result of the growing perception of the south and east Mediterranean as a security threat. The increase in migration from Africa, in particular, has added another dimension to the Mediterranean narrative. Despite the revived narratives to invent a globalized Mediterranean space, a globalized economy is already in place. As is the case with Baḥr Al-Rūm, Safīnat Nūḥ (2008), which can be translated to Noah’s Ark 33, by Khālid Al-Khamīsī, is invested in uncovering the ‘a geographical imagination which ignores its own real spatiality’—or rather purposefully conceals it. Al-Khamīsī depicts ‘remote’ villages already linked to the global economy, which is rooted in their soil as much by way of towers and columns ‘painted colors of the Italian flag’ 34 as by a global smuggling network: a large group of village men gather for an introductory meeting in a café to discover how they can sign up with the smuggling ring upon payment. Both are invested in unpacking the material and networks that enter into the production of the undocumented migrant inasmuch as global capital and its discourse obscure social relations upon which this production is contingent to continue enacting the violence global capitalism produces. The production of the migrant exemplifies the absolute height of alienated labor in that his concealment, his status as an undocumented migrant, an object of the labor All the passages of Khālid Al-Khamīsī’s text are my translations in this chapter. Khālid Al-Khamīsī, Safīnat Nūḥ (Noah’s Ark). Cairo, Egypt: Dār Al-Shurūq, 2010. 34 Zuḥrī, 7. 33

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that goes into his production, constitutes his primary identity. In order for his identity to survive, the labor of his production as an undocumented migrant cannot be fully erased: indeed, his ‘old’ identity, his passport, ID cards, smuggling networks and resources are discarded, so that entry into the labor market on the other shore can be ensured, but actually, to remain undocumented and ‘pass,’ he must remain simultaneously committed to his identity (and its concealment of labor contributed to its creation) and alienated from the labor that produced it. As revealed in Safīnat Nūḥ, even before the migrant crosses to the other side to participate in this economy he is subject to alienation in the form of self-objectification. On a sinking boat en route to Italy, a Delta villager Wihdan falls dead not by drowning but heart failure. His boatmate realizes at once his death sentence began at home: ‘When I saw Wihdan drowning before me, I said, ‘Oh God, was the operation where they removed his kidney the reason?’ Wihdan was the first on the boat to die. The man beside me holding the water flask said, ‘He didn’t die because of drowning, he died because his heart stopped.’ His heart, apple of his mother’s eyes he was, couldn’t take it.’ 35 He becomes involved in an organ trafficking ring and sells his kidney to afford the cost of boarding a flimsy boat to Europe. Legal scholar Charles Fried has stated, ‘when a man sells his body he does not sell what is his, he sells himself … the seller treats his body as a foreign object.’ 36 Ironically, in order to be a participant and a subject in the economy in which he wants to participate, he must treat his body as a foreign object, commodify and alienate it. If exploitation of migration to Europe is considered to benefit capital on a global scale—its maintenance depends on its ‘use value’ for global capitalism—then Wihdan’s exploitation quite literally becomes the commodification of the migrant body. But it is significant to also note that whether in Al-Khamīsī, 199. Charles Fried, Right and Wrong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 142.

35 36

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Egypt or Europe, his use value transcends borders in the same way his value is seen as a transcendent commodity based on potential labor, body parts, and, finally, exportability. That is, alienation does not suddenly manifest on the other shore, but rather it constitutes the journey from the homeland to the other shore. Moreover, Safīnat Nūḥ is intent on revealing how alienation created by social dispossession in Egypt reflects the alienation of the undocumented on the boat and the other shore. Safīnat Nūḥ encompasses migrant narratives whose attempts to leave Egypt intersect, thus the title refers to the Egyptian characters of various backgrounds—regional, class, or otherwise—in collective exodus out of a deluged and consuming homeland, highlighting the connection of a collective national identity, experiencing various forms of social dispossession, to undocumented migration by equating the alienation of Egyptian migrants to Egyptians at home. Al-Khamīsī incorporates the scriptural myth of Noah’s Ark draws comparisons between the figure of Noah and the undocumented migrant who jumps on the boat and drifts to escape the catastrophe to which the nation has succumbed—a flood of poverty, desperation, stark inequality, lost potential. In Safīnat Nūḥ, alienation from one’s own land and community is tied to the displacement and deterritorialization as a result of consolidating national heritage sites, utopic cultural idylls to signify civilizational continuity, endurance, for touristic and broader transnational appeal. As in Baḥr Al-Rūm, the double geographical imaginaries of cultural sanctuary and globalized space feature as utopias in harmonious collaboration of the sign (the grand monumental space) and its vehicle (fluid economy of immaterial production in financial services, tourism, culture) in Aswan Nubian territory, a national site of otherness. Although Aswan is not continuous with Mediterranean identity in Egypt, it has resurged in cultural revivalism projects from ‘Aswan’s soil to Alexandria’s soil,’ places interpolated as tourism heritage sites, highlighting an instrumentality merely reduced to site of

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memory. 37 Both non-Nubian Egyptians and British tourists visit Aswan and impose upon it a utopic social order immune to change. On an organized tourist boat trip, juxtaposed against the novel’s violent and chaotic boat trip, an Egyptian migrant who has returned home expresses his approval of the area’s historical continuity and its absence of ‘foreign,’ outside forces, global commodities he disdains in Egypt’s cities. To Murtaḍā, revival of Alexandria’s and Aswan’s development into tourism sites signifies retrieval of authenticity, heritage, continuity, return to ‘simple living’: he feels for the first time in his life that he is on his own land. He feels that he ‘possesses everything he lays his eyes on. This overwhelming feeling was filling his heart. For even in his village, all the tools were foreign, as were the cars, the cement, the iron, and even his clothes. But here, the boat he is on was made by the Ancient Egyptians, the clothes of Ḥasūna [the tour guide] were made by an Egyptian as they had been for thousands of years …’ 38 He continues, awed by his thoughts of enduring heritage, ruminating about how the houses were made from stones carried from that very area, how the houses were made in the traditional Nubian way, and how their colors were created by Egyptians, as with the ropes, the statues, etc. 39 But, the Nubian village tour guide displaces this romantic notion of enduring, continuous culture on one’s ‘own land,’ 40 a national inheritance belonging to all Egyptians. The Nubian territory is actually parceled off to real-estate speculators and appropriated by the government, notwithstanding the flooding caused by the Aswan Dam erected by the state. The Nubians no longer own their land, he explains, and the tourism company that hired him has laid him off after it was sold off. Behind the Beverly Butler, ‘Egypt: Constructed Exiles of the Imagination’ in Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, and Place, eds Barbara Bender and Margot Winer (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 111. 38 Al-Khamīsī, 290. 39 Al-Khamīsī, 290. 40 Ibid., 290. 37

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mirage of continuity, lineage, inheritance of Nubian monuments, relics, ancient sites, lie expropriations, displacements, and transfers conjointly managed by transnational companies and the state. 41 So now the village tour guide aspires to go forward as an undocumented migrant. The Egyptian tourist was shown as unaware of the way global capital conceals its mechanisms in an idyllic cultural heritage space even as it achieves a violence of displacements, deterritorialization, expropriations. Al-Khamīsī exposes its momentum, especially in tourism sites— simultaneously infused with religious, metaphysical symbolism and manipulated by capital machinations. Ironically, constructing national heritage sites works to disrupt genealogy and sever links to heritage by alienating people from their land. In these novels, sites of memory are inextricably linked with deterritorialization and dislocation: whether on Zuḥrī’s scenic and spectacular Alexandria’s shores or AlKhamīsī’s tourist sanctuary of Nubian territory, culturally preserved sites actually displace their inhabitants onto a neighboring slum in the former, or sever the indigenous’ historical connection to the land in the latter. Bounded and hierarchalized spaces, they are managed through artifice and subterfuge. Concealment of displacement’s violence to preserve an image of sanctity is integral to ‘utopian organization’: securing spatial orderings requires ‘disruption, misery, poverty, exclusion,’ part of the ‘interplay between securing and obscuring processes of On the various and gradual displacements of the Nubians, see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Jennifer Derr, ‘Drafting a Map of Colonial Egypt,’ Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, eds Diana Davis and Edmund Burke, 136–157 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). On displacement and the tourism in Nubia, see Derek Gregory, ‘Colonial Nostalgia and Cultures of Travel: Spaces of Constructed Visibility in Egypt,’ Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism, ed. Nezar Alsayyad, 111–151 (London: Routledge, 2001). On the Nubian heritage campaign, see Butler, chapter 3.

41

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utopian organization.’ 42 Like the double geographical imaginaries upon which it depends, the double movement of securing and obscuring undergirds capitalism’s deliberate process of obscuring of its production. A discipline of spaces, borders, and bodies is the effect of not only ‘illegal migration’ but tourism in the novel, producing both the desire for the ideal and the repulsion of unwanted forces. As I mentioned previously, as opposed to a literature of burning (the sea, identity cards, national identity) in Morocco, undocumented migrant literature captures deterritorialization by representing Egypt as a site of deluge and drowning. Not only does deterritorialization imply the loss of a wandering subjectivity driven from the homeland on a boat adrift, with the deterritorialized nation forming a diaspora, but it expresses the grief of a flooded and drowning nation. Because national imagery is interpellated into the journey, the journey is merely an extension of a process of global displacement and disorientation at home. The Mediterranean Sea and land are reflections of one another through processes of globalization: in Baḥr Al-Rūm, Saber describes Egypt’s cities in terms of population excess, and then boards a boat packed in excess of its capacity; 43 the national allegory of flood in Safīnat Nūḥ is substantiated into the abyss of the migrant’s ‘boats of death’ and ‘journey of death;’ 44 the Martin Parker, Utopia and Organization (Cambridge: Blackwell Publications, 2002), 120. 43 A recent USAID study estimates approximately 40% of the Egyptian population live below the poverty line. The study also reveals that Egypt suffers from a high chronic unemployment rate of 15–25 % and a lack of public participation in political life. According to the World Bank's World Development Indicators for 2006, 43.9 per cent of all Egyptians live on less than $2 a day while prices continue to rise at unprecedented speed. See USAID, Egypt Economic Performance Assessment, 2008. 44 The phrase ‘boats of death’ to describe the flimsy crafts in which many die crossing the Mediterranean each year has become common. See Muḥammad Karīm, ‘Qawārib Al-Mawt … Fuqara’ Miṣr ḍiḥāyā 42

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‘living death’ characters experience at home transforms to real death at sea. I began this chapter with two juxtaposed images: the image of place as a dead cultural artifact and preserved cultural idyll, and then the image of a sea of dead floating bodies, a blockade to human mobility. Both are ends of a utopic continuum for a precise ordering of the Mediterranean: one a nostalgic retrieval of an ‘authentic’ past on land, the other for a present and future of border regulation at sea. These scenes of dispossession, and the alienation it induces, paralleled at home and sea (Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea) also emerge in Fārūq Jūwayda’s poem about undocumented migration. ‘This Land Is No Longer Like Mine’ 45 (2009) is a boat-passage poem replete with national imagery disorienting the sea migrant. He dedicates the poem to ‘Egypt’s youthful martyrs, swallowed by the waves on the beaches of Italy, and Turkey, and Greece.’ Far from home on the border waters of the Mediterranean, and before ‘the waves crash over his head’, the migrant’s voice wavers between life and death at the same as it wavers between the site of the boat and the homeland. He shifts between performing his own and dying Musalsal Kawārith La Tintihī,’ Alaraby.co.uk, September 23, 2016. https://www.alaraby.co.uk/politics/2016/9/22/-‫ﻣﺼﺮ‬-‫ﻓﻘﺮاء‬-‫اﻟﻤﻮت‬-‫ﻗﻮارب‬ ‫ﯾﻨﺘﮭﻲ‬-‫ﻻ‬-‫ﻛﻮارث‬-‫ﻣﺴﻠﺴﻞ‬-‫ ﺿﺤﺎﯾﺎ‬Also, see Aljazeera.net, ‘Qawārib Al-Mawt Fil Mutawaṣṣiṭ’, October 6, 2014. https://www.aljazeera.net/knowledgegate/newscoverage/2014/10/6/ ‫اﻟﻤﺘﻮﺳﻂ‬-‫ﻓﻲ‬-‫اﻟﻤﻮت‬-‫ ﻗﻮارب‬Describing the trip as a ‘journey of death’ has also become common: see Ṣabrī Al-Ḥaw, ‘Al-Ḥayāt Al-Ta’iha Fi Al-Baḥr AlAbyaḍ Al-Mutawaṣṣiṭ: Min Al-Mas’ūl,’ Hespress, May 15, 2012. http://hespress.com/writers/53912.html; Muṣṭafā Hāshim, ‘Al-Hijra AlGhayr Al-Shir‘iya Min Miṣr: Riḥlat Al-Mawt Baḥthan ‘Al-Ḥayāt’, DW.com, April 29, 2015. https://www.dw.com/ar/-‫ﻣﻦ‬-‫اﻟﺸﺮﻋﯿﺔ‬-‫ﻏﯿﺮ‬-‫اﻟﮭﺠﺮة‬ ‫اﻟﺤﯿﺎة‬-‫ﻋﻦ‬-‫ﺑﺤﺜﺎ‬-‫اﻟﻤﻮت‬-‫رﺣﻠﺔ‬-‫ﻣﺼﺮ‬/a-18417264 45 All the passages of Fārūq Jūwayda’s poem are my translations in this chapter. Fārūq Jūwayda, ‘Hadhī Bilādu Lam Ta‘ud Kabilādī’ (‘This Land Is No Longer Like Mine’), in Mādhā Aṣabak, Ya Waṭn (Cairo: Dār AlShurūq, 2009), 8–16.

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Egypt’s eulogy, mourning the loss of ‘the clamor of horses, the joy of holidays’ as he mourns the loss of his own life: ‘I yearned for the return of my country one day / But it has disappeared and we have disappeared…’ His mother in ‘mourning clothes’, the migrant calls into question whether his voice is that of the dying imagining his funeral or the dead whose spirit returns home to witness the scene he left behind. But that there seems to be no distinction between the dying and the dead is taken for granted, as his death on the boat seems to already be a ‘fact’, in that the homeland has already decided on his life and death. In the beginning, the migrant faces his ‘executioner’ and laments the fallen homeland driving him to take the dangerous trip: …where is the true face of my country? Where are the palm trees? And where is the warmth of the valley? Nothing appears in the sky in front of us, Except the sky and the image of the executioner He does not disappear from sight Because he is like fate Like the day of Judgment and the day of birth.

Further on, he reveals that he has already faced the executioner ‘at home’: ‘On every corner of my land/ the image of the executioner appears before me…’: the image of the executioner on the ill-fated boat he sees is the same one he has seen ‘on every corner of [his] land …’ The executioner on the boat re-appears later in the poem as the executioner glimpsed at home. The distinction between the dying and the dead is ambiguous insofar as condemnation puts into momentum the ‘threshold life’, insofar as exclusion is a ‘living death’ sentence. 46 At the executioner’s In Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, Andrew Norris presents the figure of the ‘living dead man’ to illuminate the threshold life both inside the legal order as its death can be allowed by that order and outside as its death can constitute neither a homicide nor a sacrifice. Threshold lives lack ‘almost all the rights and expectations that we characteristically attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive …

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condemnation to a ‘living death’ through ‘oppression, corruption, antagonism’ at home, ‘his life is no longer his own.’ This threshold existence at home is merely continued on the border waters. Moreover, by extension of the executioner’s presence above the homeland and the migrant’s boat, the nation and the migrant, both having glimpsed the executioner, have been sentenced to drowning descent, their ‘lives’ no longer theirs, given that death has become inescapable and they remain only alive while awaiting ‘execution.’ The border waters and the homeland merge in the migrant imagination, the only link between the two, showing the exceptional space of the boat to be as fluid, chaotic, and deadly as the homeland—just as the country ‘has sold its tender youth’, likewise ‘the sea has no mercy on the innocence of [the migrants’] youth’. The relationship between the transnational and national order of dispossession, corruption, repression is drawn through the boat’s navigation of the Mediterranean’s double global imaginaries. As I have mentioned, both of these imaginaries of the Mediterranean, aqua nullius and cultural bridge, are ends of a utopic continuum for a precise ordering of the Mediterranean: one a nostalgic retrieval of an ‘authentic’ past on land, the other for a present and future of border regulation at sea. From immigrant dreams of eu-topia (‘good place’) to immigrant reality of an ou-topia (‘non-place’, ‘nowhere’), the Mediterranean Sea emerges as a ‘placeless place,’ the dead-end to potential, possibility, newness, change—a future—what has ultimately been reduced in its new coinage to ‘a sea cemetery.’ The Mediterranean, which the migrants had sought as a form of liberation, is a ‘placeless place’: it ends up being a nowhere which exists only situated at a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in which they were no longer anything but bare life.’ Using the prisoner under medical experimentation as a contemporary homo sacer figure, Norris explains that once condemned, he has already lost his life: ‘his life is no longer his own, and in that sense he is a ‘living dead man’… Indeed, it is precisely insofar as he awaits execution that he remains alive’ (11).

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within the realms of fantasy. In the same way, Mediterranized Egypt has also turned out to be a ‘placeless place’, a nowhere which exists only within the realms of fantasy and has foreclosed on the future of its people. Zygmunt Bauman characterizes our era as one of ‘liquid modernity,’ as ‘a civilization of excess, redundancy, waste and waste disposal,’ 47 one that produces refugees as ‘the waste products of globalization’ 48, constituted by boundaries between normative and disposable. In Safīnat Nūḥ, if the scriptural figure of Noah represents a remnant from a system that preceded the decreation of the world and the only person entrusted to create another, his literary descendants represent a modern remnant, what Spivak calls the ‘detritus of globality,’ one signifying the ambivalence plaguing globalized modernity, of spaces of incommensurability. 49 He would emerge to expose the contradictions of his intellectual ascendants, the antinomies of the Mediterranean bridge ‘between cultures,’ an orientation toward a Mediterranean space in Egypt based on promotion of flows between Western and Eastern scholarship, culture, and information that remains utopic in organization—securing and concealing within its re-invented Mediterranean cultural package global participation in structures that produce poverty, political disenfranchisement, and exclusion that give rise to the much feared will to migrate in the southern Mediterranean. As an undocumented migrant on the northern shore, he would emerge as a figure from the globalized margins infiltrating the smooth surface of global development at the center. He would be a reminder of dead young people at sea, of migrant internment camps. His position would be discrepant by pointing to the unevenness of the dominant discourse on globalization. He would Ibid., 97. Ibid., 66. 49 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 87. 47 48

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come to embody sites of contradiction from which he hails, a village already globalized, thus threatening the stability of modern representations of global European identity against which migrant identity is apprehended.

CHAPTER 5. SAHARAN-MEDITERRANEAN TRANSITS: IMPOSSIBLE ‘ARRIVAL’ In the short story ‘Twilight Trek,’ part of a 2010 collection entitled News from Home, Nigerian-American writer Sefi Atta charts the journey of an unnamed migrant from an unknown African country across the Sahara Desert en route to a European destination, a journey thwarted when he finds himself stuck in an informal encampment atop the mountains on the Moroccan Mediterranean coastline. And indeed it is this transitional space in the process of transmigration, or transit migration, that Atta attempts to capture through a border chronotope marked by inbetween-ness, permanent transit, and deterritorialization. This transmigration narrative is initiated with one word that marks a mid-point on a journey that has already begun: ‘Gao’. 1 The narrator has already traveled alone to Goa, Mali, to link up with other migrants and smuggling networks that take him north. But this is not just a migration-journey narrative; it is a narrative of undocumented migration defined by a lack of identification. What follows are the defining marks of the journey of the undocumented—false ID (papers): ‘An agent hands me a fake passSefi Atta, ‘Twilight Trek,’ News from Home (Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2010), 81.

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port—my name is not Jean-Luc. I’m not from Mali and I’m definitely no Francophone’. Still in Africa, he identifies his location, but never his name nor his origins. That the story of the journey depends on resistance to self-identification to continue reveals the extent to which secrecy and invisibility are crucial to the undocumented migrant’s route and literary journey. The story henceforth is marked by obscurity in vigilance of detection— everything is set in motion to escape fixed attribution and identifiable location. Indeed the lack of documentation changes the border chronotope, specifically the Mediterranean Sea border areas. So while certain topoi feature, like the Mediterranean Sea, the Sahara Desert, and the Malian city of Gao on the undocumented route, the lack of documentation and the lack of traceability produce a border chronotope shot through with holes: for example, the main setting of the story is a Moroccan mountain that is never named. Another explanation for the unnamed Moroccan mountain is the story’s foregrounding of the Saharan Desert as the starting point of the journey, rather than the Mediterranean Sea (like other texts), which emerges as another transit point to the destination, Europe. In fact, this chapter and the following chapter mark a shift in the book wherein the desert is centered, as opposed to the Mediterranean Sea. But to return to the analysis, the lack and absence of identification that defines the border chronotope in the story functions as a reflection of the void of recognition—political and social—that affords border crossers human rights, on African territory before the other shore is reached, indeed. The chronotope also forecloses on migrant recognition if the European shore is reached through a proleptic imaginary that succumbs to the narrative’s deterministic temporality, its loops, endowing a sense of inevitability to failure, suggesting that failure of the process of recognition in which they plan to participate is, rather than a disruption or a flaw, a part of the design. The nonchalance, the absence of concern, with which the narrator maintains the secrecy of his name throughout the story is matched by the detachment with which he relates his secret past of familial exploitation—he reveals casually that his mother

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had tried to sell him off to one of her clients: ‘“He’ll only touch,” she promised.’ I ran away from home after that, lived on the street, played football with a group of louts and discovered just how professional I was at the sport. In fact, for a while before I warned them to stop understating my talent, my football friends were calling me … What’s his name? Pele?’ 2 While he is not yet in exile, his detachment functions as preparation, an exercise, in being exiled—he is not looking for roots, he is seeking distance in order to maintain a carefully preserved disconnection, a lack of care and concern for both who he is and who he was. The entire story is marked by an intentional lack—of names, of origins, of exact locations beyond a city or an area. The absence of names (of characters and their origins) in the narrative reinforces their condition as undocumented (without ID or identification). The lack, the condition of negativity and absence, has been noted to mark the identity of the undocumented, the sans-papiers, the without. 3 The absence of the narrator’s ‘real’ identity is highlighted in the beginning of the story, in Gao, before he crosses the Sahara. And, indeed, amidst dangerous elements of the Sahara and its smugglers and the mountain on the Mediterranean and its rag-tag group of migrants desperate to reach Europe, the narrator-in-transit would be cautious about revealing his real identity. However, it must be noted that from the beginning of the story—before he even crosses the Sahara with other migrants—he never reveals his name. That is, even while on his own, where presumably there would be no need to have his guard up against the curiosity of others, his name remains unknown. Therefore, Atta submits a preemptive strike of illegibility on her narrator. By ‘preemptive strike’, I mean epistemological closure on migrant identity and its subseAtta, 82. For an interrogation of the status of being ‘without’, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Derelictions of the Right to Justice’, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2000, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg, 133–146 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Press, 2002).

2 3

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quent political recognition and subjectivity. And it must be clear that this not just about affording anonymity to the nameless characters, places, origins, but rather this is about how anonymity is a part of their anomic status, which not only divests name but, in a Rancierian sense, the political recognition and ‘sensibility’ that the name and identification provide across nationstates. The absence of the narrator’s true identity is not just a reflection on the dangers of transparency during the journey, but a reflection of his illegibility, whether in Africa or in Europe. Atta’s foreclosure upon migrant identity—and by association, political recognition—before the other shore is reached is further illuminated by her instrumentalization of a trope casually tied to migration out of Africa, whether in the media or scholarship—‘exodus’. Various narratives of African migration link the journey within and out of Africa to an ‘exodus,’ with its liberatory potential of escaping oppression. Today’s perilous Sahara crossing could be conceived as Moses’ wilderness before the redemptive journey to the Promised Land, the transMediterranean voyage to abundant labor markets in the north, can begin. But, Atta subverts the trope’s redemptive potential when her characters are thwarted from salvation to occupy a limbo on the Moroccan mountain at the end of the story. The original exodus narrative ends in triumphal return—a return from history’s exile, but for undocumented migrants in the story, triumph in the form of liberation or arrival is thwarted, because they never arrive at their European destination, but rather remain stranded in the Moroccan mountains. Because the journey narrative does not ‘end’ with the anticipated destination (the EU), but rather another transit point, the Moroccan coastal encampment, the narrative does not provide redemptive closure in the form of arrival. Rather than arrival, the migrants are figured into an uncertain, unlocatable, volatile process where an exponential, permanent transience marks the end of the story. In effect, the foiled closure forecloses on the possibility of the narrator regaining an identity and, therefore, access to political recognition and subjectivity, in his desired destination. He remains nameless indefinitely. Anonymity is not restricted to characters and their origins, but it also marks the transit spaces

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they occupy, suggesting cultural identities being reshaped under conditions of a post-colonial geography, whereby the production of space is intertwined with the production of identity. The lack of names and identification of places is a disorienting consequence of the reconfiguration of African territory in the modern age, a product of migration and migrant identity. Moreover, while the end of the story is marked by immobility and obstruction, the story’s proleptic imaginary reveals that anticipation of arrival on the European shore does not necessarily deliver salvation to the narrator to regain an identity. The wilderness of the exodus could extend from one shore to another, with no Promised Land in sight. Arrival does not ensure regaining an identity and the access to the political recognition and subjectivity it accords, and it could very well offer more of the same—a dead end at the intersection of identity, citizenship, mobility. The limbo is not only related to the thwarted endpoint of their journey but to the suspense surrounding the true identity, the real name, of the narrator. Allusions to an exodus begin during the desert crossing when the narrator meets a woman who begins to read to him the story of Moses from a pocket Bible. 4 The woman, Patience, becomes the narrator’s companion in the informal encampment up a Moroccan mountain, where she continues to obsessively read verses about salvation to block out the devastation around her (‘she says it’s only God that can save us now’). 5 When the narrator realizes the proximity of the sea and the distance to Europe, he tries to tell Patience, but she halts the exchange with a verse from Exodus: ‘I have heard the complaints of the Israelites. Tell them at twilight they will have meat to eat, and in the morning they will have all the bread they want …’ 6 In Exodus, the desert wilderness functions as the passage from exile to salvation and the homeland. The wilderness/desert functions not only as a site of punishment but also Atta, 86. Ibid., 90. 6 Ibid., 93. 4 5

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salvation where God transforms the barrenness into a Paradise, or rejuvenation of the spirit through recognition of God. 7 Salvation is often identified with desert imagery, because the wilderness-desert operates as the testing ground of morality in the face of adversity and danger that would ultimately deliver redemption. But after crossing the desert, the providentially mandated moment of salvation does not arrive for the undocumented migrants in the story. They are dumped off at the foot of a Moroccan mountain close to the Mediterranean coast, where they find an informal encampment set up by migrants who had been waiting to cross the Mediterranean for months, even years. Emerging through the desert-wilderness, the characters do not become liberated, become political recognizable, much less powerful, and many don’t even assume their real names. Rather, the migrants retreat further up the mountain to hide from surveillance, police detection, subsequent detention and deportation, while the narrator remains without a true name or identity, becoming further illegible, discursively, perceptually, and politically. The topographical division that the story presumes to set up from Gao to Sahara Desert to Moroccan mountain encampment through an optic of redemption from the desert’s interminable wandering and loss of identity disintegrates as Atta sets up a continuous zone of limbo, hiatus, and retreat, suggesting that the journey of suffering toward the point of salvation is not bound by place, namely the fearful desert, but is prolonged interminably. Because the narrator’s mother has lodged herself in In Paul and Apostasy, Escahtology: Perseverance, and Falling Away in the Corinthian Congregation (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), B.J. Oropeza discusses the centrality of the wilderness to ideas of retreat and eschatology: in opposition to Paul, who saw the desert as a place of danger, the wilderness was interpreted differently as a place of retreat, or ‘hiatus between the ‘historical’ exodus … and the eschatological conquest of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel: ‘the wilderness was seen in terms of a purification which would culminate in the conquest of the land of Jerusalem … Eschatological preparation in the desert was a means to that end’ (122). 7

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his mind, he imagines her horrified reaction to the transit camp as a type of limbo, purgatory, wherein migrants wander between worlds: This place is no stop, my mother says; it is the anteroom to hell. It is where spirits wait to pass to another world. It is the only time left for those who have stopped living and are yet to be pronounced dead; the ground between madness and reason; the Mountain of Babel, where Africans speak in foreign and nothing they say makes sense, so I need not listen. How is it possible, she asks, that I be denied asylum in Spain when this place resembles the aftermath of a war zone? 8

The narrator imagines his mother saying that the camp appears as ‘the anteroom to hell’, but this purgatory does not feature as a limbo between African hell and European heaven, African heaven or European hell, or in exodus terms, dangerous exile and salvational return. Atta forecloses on the possibility of salvation offered by the exodus trope and the integration of its narrative (read by Patience) into the larger transit migration narrative when the Sahara Desert crossing (associated with the suffering of the scriptural wilderness) does not end in redemption, but rather exponential wandering—the desert crossing is replayed without relief on the mountains around the Mediterranean where migrants are interminably crossing back and forth without ‘stop’ between heaven and hell, life and death, discursive reason (intelligibility) and madness (‘babbling’ upon ‘Babel’). Even the Tower of Babel loses its name, its identity, its ability to be recognized and is jarringly renamed (like the narrator) the ‘Mountain of Babel,’ and like the undocumented who is separated from his proper name becomes less discursively recognizable, less linked to its original referent. The ‘Mountain of Babel’ is not exactly an incoherent reference, yet it does bear the imprint of a past story’s theme of incoherence but in its present form.

8

Atta, 89–90.

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The theme of incoherence and unintelligibility in a biblical narrative is revisited upon the contemporary analogy and its analogue. A consequential, punishing incoherence in a past story is revisited on its present analogy, suggesting the discrepancy between the story narrative and the exodus narrative, clouding the correspondence between the signifier and its referent in the omission of the Mt. Sinai. The renaming of the mountain as Babel Mountain indicates they are far up Babel, nowhere near Mt. Sinai, exiled to incoherence itself—the ‘apex’ (so to speak) of the clandestine or sans-papiers juridical and epistemological predicament. Atta’s ‘anteroom to hell’ appears to be an apt description of the condition of the undocumented: a perpetual deferment of arrival, liberation, and survival, has been analyzed as a purgatory, a state of limbo, between worlds and nations, claiming an unfinished citizenship. In Lydie Moudileno’s analysis of the undocumented, or sans-papiers in France, this limbo is defined by a lack of belonging to any nationality: unable to freely cross borders, the sans-papiers finds himself thwarted from returning to his country of origin. At the same, his stay in the host country is precarious and conditional upon concealing his true origin. 9 Therein, he remains stuck, but without the rights of citizenship. In ‘Twilight Trek,’ the limbo of the migrants is not fixed—it is narrated in Morocco, but anticipated in Europe, as well, where the undocumented will experience an unfinished path toward citizenship, and the political representation and subjectivity it accords, without proper identification. The elusive ‘endpoint’ of the migrant’s final destination reflects upon the deferred, negative, absent status of the undocumented’s subjectivity, toward which the narrative proleptically gestures. In The Poetics of Political Thinking, David Panagia explains the lack of identitification of undocumented migrants, the sanspapiers in France, in terms of a lack of political signification, In Fuzzy Fiction, Jean-Louis Hippolyte attributes these ideas to Moudileno through the conversations they’ve had (26).

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representation, and subjectivity related to democratic rights and equality. 10 Lacking a name (because without papers and hence without a fixed signifier), they exist in a mimetic economy that denies them currency. In a Rancierian reading, he discusses how political accounts are structured by aesthetic modes of representation, the ‘mimetic economy’, which evinces a political reality through acts of representation. Theories of representation are in circuit not only with epistemological commitments but political thought. 11 What once been ‘pre-discursively sanctioned’ 12 has been preempted into the discursively unrecognizable, inscrutable, illegible—a signifier without a referent—effectively locking down the circuit of representation to the politically and juridically recognizable. In fact, the portrayal of migrants as nameless hordes— inscrutable and illegible—has been linked to media signifiers, such as floods and deluges, which have contributed to nativist fear and panic in Europe. Jacques Lacan has claimed that this fear is tied to the feeling of being deluged by the unnamable, potentially immense hordes, masses and streams of ‘others’ who threaten to negate the existing and familiar world, or even, to make it disappear. 13 This influx of ‘others’ is considered overwhelming in the perceived context of a shortage of space for identity construction. The influx of the unnamable is considered Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 120–121. 11 The mutually constituted discourses of the juridical and the popular with its literary conventions are also analyzed for their construction of the undocumented in Mireille Rosello’s ‘Fortress Europe and Its Metaphors: Immigration and the Law’ (1999). 12 Panagia, 2010, 121. 13 Henk van Houtum and Roos Pijpers, ‘The European Union as a Gated Community: The Two-Faced Border and Immigration Regime of the EU’, Antipode 39, no. 2 (March 2007), 297. The authors were referring to Lacan’s L’Angoisse, Le Seminaire, Livre X (2004) and Roberto Harari’s Lacan’s Seminar on ‘Anxiety’: An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2001). 10

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and imagined to be dangerous for the fulfilment of being ‘European’ in terms of authority, citizenship and identity, and for the economic well-being and public safety (protection) of Europeans. The discursive heart of juridical and social practices for the undocumented is articulated by Didier Fassin: ‘Words do not only name, qualify or describe. They found actions and orient policies. By calling “clandestins” those foreigners who are on French soil and in an irregular situation, we place them in a category that conjures up certain images—for example, that of the worker who has illegally entered the country—and justifies policies preventing or repressing such acts of transgression. These images and policies are in some way fashioned after our process of naming.’ 14 The apocalyptic scenario of a destructive wave of migrants flooding Europe to the point of recognizability resonates in policies that have externalized the European border onto African territory and its governance. The externalization of the border has contributed to the reconfiguration of African territory and mobility, so that it is currently rendered unauthorized from within various of Africa to the EU. French philosopher Etienne Balibar analyzes the intersection of the EU’s border and identity management in Africa, where it has erected a fence reinforced by ‘fortifications, including ditches, roads, towers of observation, the cutting of trees, and leveling of hills, on both sides of the border separating the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar.’ Balibar briefly discusses the historical transformation of border management from within to its current displacement to the ‘other side’: [The fence is] located on the South Bank of the Mediterranean and divid[es] from its environment a European (or more generally Northern) enclave, whose existence results from complex colonial processes and vicissitudes, and [acquires] now a broader function. My hyperbolic suggestion is that [it] Didier Fassin, ‘“Clandestin” ou “Exclus”? Quand les Mots Font de la Politique,’ Politix 34 (1996), 77.

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can be viewed as [a] section of a ‘great Wall of Europe’ under construction, except, and this is very important, that the Great Wall of China was built over the centuries inside the Empire. The great Wall of Europe is built on the other side (but in fact what this shows is also that we find ourselves in a geo-historical situation in which the location of the border, and therefore also its concept, is a complex and equivocal notion). 15

The Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, Europe’s only land border with Africa, have been transformed into ‘aggressively defended fortress cities, enclosed by security fences that are patrolled by the Moroccan army and Spain’s Guardia Civil’ 16 and reinforced with ‘infrared cameras […] as well as tear gas canisters, noise and movement sensors and control towers.’ 17 Balibar has described the African-European border as ‘a normalized state of exception,’ in which ‘the violent police operations continuously performed by some European states (with the help of neighboring non-European subject states, such as Libya or Morocco) on behalf of the whole [European] community, including the establishment of camps, amount to a kind of permanent border war against migrants.’ 18 As Ali Bensaâd explains, Europe has increasingly tried to ‘deport’ migration controls, ‘mustering the Maghreb countries into the role of a sub-contractor for represEtienne Balibar, ‘Strangers as Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias of Citizenship,’ Working Paper no. 06/4 (Hamilton, Canada: Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University, 2006). 16 Amanda Crawley Jackson, ‘Cette Poetique du Politique: Political and Representational Ecologies in the Work of Yto Barrada,’ L’Esprit Createur 51, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 55. 17 ‘World’s Barriers: Ceuta and Melilla,’ BBC News, November 5, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8342923.stm 18 Etienne Balibar, ‘At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in Translation?’, European Journal of Social Theory 13, no. 3 (August 2010), 315. 15

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sion delocalized far from European borders.’ 19 Morocco, in particular, has become a ‘deterritorialized site of filtration,’ coerced through agreements and financial aid into acting as Europe’s gendarme. 20 The transformation of Morocco into a borderland and more broadly the reconfiguration of territorial and mobility in Africa is also taken up in Atta’s tale of lack. What is significant is that this lack defines not only the characters’ names and identities but also those of the spaces they occupy. of identities and names (not to mention destination endpoints) is that it is not just the undocumented who are divested of their proper names, but the mountain where they set up camp is never named (Gourougou Mountain). Instead, As I mentioned, the narrator’s internal dialogue attempts to describe by making biblical allusions, like the Tower of Babel. But even then, he misses the mark because the Tower of Babel is then distorted into ‘Mountain of Babel.’ The mountain is doubly made illegible to coherently describe the conditions of the mountain upon which they are stranded. And, while the exodus trope is embraced by the story to some point, it does not feature the Sinai Mountain, or even some distortion of its name, but rather a ‘Mountain of Babel/Babble’, highlighting the incoherence visited upon the encampment by virtue of their political, representation illegibility. The dissonance between the mountain and encampment, place and people, suggests that not only have the characters become illegible but the spaces of Africa, as well. As I mentioned, current migration narratives link the journey within and out of Africa to an ‘exodus,’ with its liberatory potential. But many narratives also ignore the currently redrawn African territory—be it the Sahara, the North African Mediterranean coastal cities, or the cites south of the Ali Bensaâd, ‘The Militarization of Migration Frontiers in the Mediterranean,’ in The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North Africa, eds Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes (Barcelona: Actar, 2006), 18. 20 Jackson, 54. 19

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Sahara—as passages of potential captivity on the road to liberation (from poverty, war, familial pressure). But for the undocumented migrants in the story, the exodus does not end in triumphal return—a return from history’s exile—but rather liberation and arrival are endlessly deferred—an exodus that remains in rotation, a movement captured in suspension. This is because the Promised Land has redrawn the map of Africa into chaotic rather than redemptive zones for its aspiring migrants. Atta reflects further on the un-recognizability and illegibility of the continent for its internal migrants by highlighting the contemporary transformation of the Mediterranean from one port of call among many in a journey into a dead-end and a trap. The Mediterranean Sea, mythologized as the center of movement and travel across many eras, ends up offering immobility and paralysis for migrant characters, who live in the encampment for years, waiting for the right moment to bypass the newly erected barriers, so they may cross. In contrast, as inhospitable as the Sahara seems to those crossing, it offers a mobility that the encampment at the edge of the Mediterranean does not. Historically, the Sahara has featured as Africa’s Other, as Ann McDougall discusses: the perception that would see the Sahara as ‘other than’ the real Africa, as home to those who perpetuate violence on it. It accentuates, by inference, the concept of the Sahara as ‘enemy’ to that real Africa, providing an ideal canvas on which to play out any number of scenarios. 21

According to McDougall, the Sahara as Africa’s Other, inhospitable chaos, gap, a chasm, abyss, in its evacuation of meaningfulness and coherence, is at the same time in its emptiness subject to be filled with meaning, to be inscribed with the potential imposition of order. McDougall traces this archaeology of Anne McDougall, ‘Constructing Emptiness: Islam, Violence, and Terror in the Historical Making of the Sahara,’ Journal of Contemporary African Studies 25, no. 1 (2007), 25.

21

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knowledge, construction of emptiness and its (re-) signification as Africa’s Other, to the current imposition of order in the form of War Against Terror campaigns now targeting the Sahara Desert. 22 But in Atta’s rendering of the Sahara, it is not inhospitable and not emptied of meaning—abject Other, expelled from Africa for its lack of trustworthiness, its criminality, its fearsomeness. The most criminal aspect of the desert crossing—besides the desert border crossing itself—is the Tuareg smuggler who demands extra funds mid-journey across the Sahara. The desert, typically theorized as a homogenous pure space of possibilities for traveling, hiding, smuggling, wandering, ‘losing oneself’ 23 to the point of disorientation, a space engulfed by the real place of the surrounding territories, is depicted in ‘Twilight Trek’ as a production of histories of African and African-Arab border control, monitored by members of the surrounding nations, corrupted by power struggles, and overlaid with a transnational smuggling network. The traditionally conceptualized fantastical ‘void’ of the Sahara Desert is realistically conveyed as a ‘worldly’ place. Moreover, the desert offers and fulfills its promise of movement, because it is here rather than the Mediterranean Sea where the migrants are able to move freely, despite fear of restrictions by border police. And, even when the fearsome natural elements McDougall notes the conceptual alignment between the Sahara and a site, home to ‘terror’ and ‘terrorists’, not to mention the war launched upon them. The current coup in Mali to create a Tuareg state, Azawad, is evocative of this construct, since the developments of the overthrow are too couched in terms of ‘chaos’. Linking ‘Islam’ with the Sahara (both contemporary ‘ambivalent’ topics, McDougall claims) ensures that both Islam and the Sahara will ‘continue to have an uneasy, potentially threatening relationship, with the area defined as “Africa”.’ 23 See Lidia Curti’s reading of the Sahara Desert from a ‘westerner’s’ perspective in Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky as a path to ‘losing oneself’ or ‘going native,’ the ultimate path to ‘zeroing the ego’ in ‘Death and the Female Traveler: Male Visions’ in The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, eds Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), 125. 22

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(sand and heat) seem to overcome the characters, they are able to have a voice as much as they feel choked by heat and sand. It is here where signifiers and their referents correspond, in opposition to the confusing and jarring site, and its name ‘Mountain of Babel,’ by the Mediterranean Sea. So, although the desert and sea may appear as one contiguous secreting passage, a dangerous exilic ‘wilderness’ stretching interminably ahead for the migrants, the desert offers a mobility that the encampment at the edge of the Mediterranean, a site of immobility, does not. In fact, the Sahara in the narrative is what the Mediterranean would have been in the past. One would think that because the narrative begins with a transit point (before the journey across the Sahara) and ends in a transit point (the journey across the Mediterranean), this time of transit and waiting would link these spaces, suggesting a conceptual parallel evocative of David Abulafia’s notion of the Sahara Desert as a ‘Mediterranean’ construct. He writes: The Sahara was a true Mediterranean in the sense that it brought very different cultures into contact, and across the open spaces they brought not merely articles of trade but ideas, notably religious ones, and styles of architecture appropriate to the Muslim culture they implanted on the northern edges of Black Africa. We talk of the Mediterranean and of the Mediterranean Sea, and we often assume we mean much the same thing. But here lies the root of a significant confusion. ‘Mediterranean’ means that which is between the surrounding lands. Yet histories and geographies of ‘the Mediterranean’ may concern themselves mainly with the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea and the peoples who have inhabited them, to the extent of paying rather little attention to the bonds that have linked the opposing shores of the Mediterranean world … 24

David Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans,’ in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. William Vernon Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64.

24

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The Sahara as a structural ‘Mediterranean’ in itself is evocative of the desert networks of mobility allowing people and cultures to travel across Africa in the story, effectively undermining the emptiness, void, and chaos of the Saharan-Desert-as-Other that captures and subsumes networks and their movements. However, Atta’s story reflects that this is no longer the case: despite the mythical mobility of the Mediterranean, it is the desert that offers meaning in the journey, a correspondence of signifiers, and moreover, movement, which the Mediterranean and its encampment lacks in the story. The temporality of the last transit point in the story, the encampment on the Mediterranean Sea itself, mythologized as the center of movement and travel across eras, ends up offering immobility and paralysis for migrant characters, who live there for years waiting for the right moment to cross, waiting to gather enough money. However, both sea and desert are mirrored to some extent, in that the heterotopic imagining of the Mediterranean in this story is possible through imagining the desert and vice-versa. The heterotopic potential of the relationship is that the desert is not only the Mediterranean’s ‘other’, it also disrupts its utopic imagining. It is through the relationship between the desert and Abulafia uses the Mediterranean as a template to be applied to ‘Middle Seas’ in other parts of the world, like the Sahara, which is characterized by ease of contacts between very diverse cultures. This not only puts to task the divide separating North and sub-Saharan Africa and the tendency to view the Sahara Desert as an impenetrable barrier dividing the continent into the northern ‘white’ and sub-Saharan ‘black’ Africa, but he explores the shared history and culture among the regions of Africa linked by the Sahara Desert through centuries of continued exchanges and interactions. Contact among the Sahara and its peripheries continue to this day to be platforms of interconnected peoples and cultures. Despite trans-Saharan cultural contact spanning centuries, this inaccurate perception of Africa as two distinct zones separated by an empty wasteland of desert continues to influence the way people think about this region and the continent as a whole.

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the sea that either is imagined in the text. For example, it is the desert that in fact unravels the utopia of the Mediterranean as a site of exchange and mobility. Indeed, the Mediterranean coastal town is not a site of travel, ease of movement, networks—not like the desert imagined in the story. If heterotopias ‘always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable’, 25 then it must be emphasized that neither are absolutely enclosed systems—they are open unto each other. Just as it is through the porous sites of the utopic cosmopolitan Mediterranean open to the thwarted and suppressed mobility of the undocumented on the Mediterranean that these sites heterotopically reveal the fantasy of the Mediterranean, then it is through the thwarted and suppressed mobility of the undocumented crossing the desert that the utopic Mediterranean is revealed. Reconfiguration of territory through the erection of borders has given rise to the undocumented, the unnamed within Africa, suspended not only between places but between perceptual, epistemological, and juridical ‘sanctioning’. They could be seen but not seen as bound by laws to political representation. Atta’s pre-emptive closure of epistemological recognizability for migrants who have yet to reach a future shore is not a typical foreshadowing because the story closes not at the expected destination but at a transit point in the journey, but rather it is a revelation of what is to come after the story ends. Atta positions the speculative figure of the unnamed and unrecognized narrator as a reflection of a possible, future scenario—exponential divestment of political recognizability (in the EU) after the story ends. In a sense, inevitability is a design of the future EU arrival she has her narrator imagine. The narrative begins with a transit point and ends in a transit point, seeming to loop the journey in rotation and in suspension, suggesting one continuous limbo. While the story ends with the characters in limbo on the Moroccan mountain, it still gives us glimpses of a possible future for 25

Foucault, 1986, 26.

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these transmigrants (migrants in transit) once they are delivered from this limbo—one in which they are not quite freed from illegibility/incoherence/inscrutability. This future-oriented gaze characteristic of the story is first indicated by the contrast between the absented social topography of Morocco and the attention the narrator accords the microtopographies of its borders that mark the trip ahead: ‘the barbed wire fence,’ ‘Ceuta,’ ‘Melilla,’ and the Mediterranean’s ‘saltwater’. 26 Because transit migration is more of an uncertain process that introduces the possibility of a ‘continuum between emigration and settlement’, it is perceived as a ‘contingency’, which explains the lack of perceptual engagement with Morocco as an uncertain locale. The absence of a current social topography also works to orient the reader back to the microtopography of passages that lead to their future—the fence, the water, the Spanish-occupied enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, separating the migrants from their destination/destiny (essentially, features that mark Morocco as the EU’s externalized borderland). One gets a sense of what awaits him on the other shore when his mother’s voice, in his mind, urges vigilance toward past stories and headlines that point to the gap between arrival, in terms of a spatial destination, and an arrival, in terms of citizenship, documentation, legal identity, and political representation. She begins, ‘Here are real stories from a modern African exodus’: … man from Rwanda, came by truck with his family. This was long before the barbed wire was erected around Ceuta. The family got into Ceuta all right; then they were kept in detention for months, waiting for their lawyer to prove that they were really from Rwanda. What about the Sierra Leonean who, shortly after the barbed wire went up, tried to scale it several times, until his skin was practically shredded? He decided to swim the sea to get 26

Atta, 93.

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to Spain. He had only one hand, by the way. The saltwater stung his skin; he still made it to shore. His missing hand was there to prove that he was fleeing a civil war. What about the Nigerian who secretly regretted that her own homeland was not war-torn, and hoped that the baby in her belly would be considered worthy of asylum … 27

The narrator’s mother, or rather what he thinks his mother would say if she were with him, recalls the past stories of crossing migrants as figures of what is to come, a short-circuiting of the boundaries between the past belonging to public discourse, the present belonging to the narrator’s conscience, and the future belonging to those on the other side of the Mediterranean. Ultimately, she urges vigilance to the difference between a spatial end and a political and legal closure of the undocumented identity, whether it will be of illegibility, insensibility, deferment, documentation, citizenship, or unfinished citizenship. As Panagia concisely sums up in his Rancierian reading of border crossings, the regime of the page imposes itself with actuarial rigor through the narratological demand that we justify our movements in and across borders. That demand is premised on our cultural, aesthetic, and political competence in telling a story and to have that story make sense—that is, count as sensible. Those not fluent in the credentialing skill of narrative accountability will inevitably be questioned, suspicion will arise, and the possibility of access will fall into limbo. The narratological expectations that accompany border crossings are a partition of the sensible that count as the perceptual criteria for circulation within a set spatio-temporal distribution that is a nation. In the case of the sans papiers, as I have argued elsewhere, the possibility of part-taking in crossings becomes further complicated by their anomic stature: without papers, the sans papiers are also without names. 27

Ibid, 93.

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THE TWO-EDGED SEA Thus it’s not only the case that they can be denied entry, they are also unaccounted for as sensual intensities worthy of perceptual attention, and hence insensible within the current system of mimetic representation that could afford them their human status. 28

The narrator’s mother leaps toward the future, at least in his conscience, indicating that even once the ‘Promised Land’ is reached, Africans will still have to ‘justify [their] movements in and across borders’ and entry is premised on ‘cultural, aesthetic, and political competence in telling a story and to have that story make sense—that is, count as sensible.’ But, how does the narrator count as ‘sensible’, or worthy of ‘perceptual attention,’ when he doesn’t even have a real passport or name? How will he ‘justify’ his own border crossing when he cannot even speak French while his passport states he comes from a Francophone country, thus not ‘fluent in the credentialing skill of narrative accountability’? Even those for whom asylum should be legally guaranteed must possess ‘cultural, aesthetic, and political competence in telling a story and to have that story make sense—that is, count as sensible,’ to be accountable for their claims. As border subjects, they not only have to cross national borders but also the ‘partition of the sensible’ to remain in the new host country. Just as the unreal space of the Mediterranean is revealed as such through the dialogic space of the desert, the hidden spaces of the undocumented Sub-Saharans interact with the Mediterranean coastal town, reflecting a heterotopic porosity. The transit point is by no means a closed one. Secrecy and undetectability extend from the desert to the town on the Mediterranean. While this story holds less fantastical features than other texts I have analyzed, like other texts it deals with generic fantasy—the proleptic imaginary nested in the Exodus narrative, which reveals the desert as both continuous with and distinct from the Mediterranean—to uncover the social fantasies of nativism, which Panagia, ‘The Improper Event: On Jacques Rancière’s Mannerism,’ Citizenship Studies 13, no. 3 (2009), 301. 28

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render the entire Saharan-Mediterranean route into a passage manqué, with no end in sight. In essence, the story foils the nativist fantasy by foiling the exodus trope, because the migrant characters are abandoned in a limbo of political unrecognizability. The migrant ‘tides’ and ‘floods’ and ‘exodus’ of nativist social fantasy are appropriated in the text, and revealed through the proleptic imaginary as an empty social fantasy, since the migrants are left adrift in limbo. The proleptic imaginary of the story suggests that the illegibility and incoherence and ‘sensibility’ of the migrants as they begin their journey across the Sahara and into Morocco will only reveal a passage manqué that extends from shore to shore, a wilderness that imposes further incoherence, inscrutability, and illegibility upon the migrants, with no Promised Land in sight. Before the story ends, the unnamed narrator realizes his new friend, Patience, had taken the money he gave her to reserve both of their ‘spots’ for the trans-Mediterranean journey and fled, leaving her pocket Bible behind. Stranded at the encampment on the edge of the Mediterranean, he flicks through it furiously, from ‘Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus’ up to ‘Revelation,’ without finding the biblical sign as to why she fled and without finding the story of Moses leading the Israelites she told him. He reads over the lines she quoted and does not recognize them or realize they could be found, for one, in the Book of Exodus, suggesting a discrepancy between what he heard and what he can locate right in front of him. A breakdown of the correspondence between that to which is referred and its referent ends the story just as it began (in the same way that the beginning of the story reveals the discrepancy between the name on his ID and his own real name). In the sense that what may be is contemplated as though it were already in actual existence, the story submits to the anticipatory, proleptic imagination by suggesting possibilities of the future based on the past (the stories of African migrants ‘ripped from the headlines’, so to speak, are an indication of the future toward which the narrator is heading). Why even offer a futureoriented gaze when the story is bound by suspended temporality (limbo) as it relates to suspended identity (contingent nameless-

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ness) which leads to suspended citizenship (undocumented status in Africa and Europe)? Why offer a future that concedes the resumption of movement when the ending of the story foreclosed on its narration? It is not just that the migrants can be denied entry to Europe, but also perceptual attention, rendering them ‘insensible within the current system of mimetic representation that could afford them their human status’, once they cross. I submit that inevitability is part of the design of the migrant’s path and process, as Atta sees it. If reconfiguration of African territory into a European borderland has worked to promote the discipline of the invasion of ‘nameless hordes’ to Europe, 29 then creating a sense of inevitability to failed migrant crossings is also a means of promoting the discipline of borders in the public’s imagination, allayed by replayed media affirmations of deferred migrant crossings, reduced to filmed interceptions of flimsy boats on the Mediterranean to display the everpreserved integrity of European borders. 30 The apprehension of migrant mobility constitutes different means of European space production—one anticipatory, policy-based, and preemptive of territorial invasion by migrant masses, and the other retrospective, media-staged, performative, and redemptive of territorial integrity from invasion. Enlisted in the management of European borders, Morocco has played part in the invasion drama. 31 In Atta, 97–98. Biblical references to the military characteristic of locusts advancing like a well-organized army, their concentration in numbers as they swarm and congregate to the point of eating their own weight in food, and, subsequently, transforming the Garden of Eden into desert waste, their plague-like effects, are plentiful. In Exodus, the Lord brings a powerful east wind to carry locust swarm from the desert into the developed areas, destroying and ravaging pastureland and agricultural fields. See John Beck, Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 158. 31 Pacts between the EU and North African states have given rise to a general anti-immigration stance. Mass border charges occur at Ceuta 29 30

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the Tangier newspaper Al-Shamal, a 2005 article describing subSaharan Africans trying to scale the security fences separating Morocco from the Spanish-ruled enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla featured the headline ‘“Black locusts” are taking over Morocco!’ 32 Moroccan authorities banned Al-Shamal for using racist language, but the European and North African press continued to use terms like ‘massive invasion’ and ‘plague’ to describe migrants. 33 Migration ‘invasions’ and ‘swarms’ fit into apocalyptic visions of nation-state obsolescence: the well-organized military advance of swarms emerging from the biblical Abyss leave utter irrevocable devastation in their wake activated by the Apocalypse. Yet, EU’s own fortress anxieties, often expressed through apocalyptic images of migrant ‘exodus’ and ‘floods,’ have transformed Morocco into an outsourced EU border-patrol nation. 34 and Melilla involving the loss of lives. Moroccan authorities have intensified internal anti-immigration campaigns, deporting migrants and abandoning others in the Saharan desert. Libya has also come under severe criticism for playing the EU’s police in Africa. Xenophobia has fueled strict internal measures against illegal immigrants. 32 Al-Shamal, September 12, 2005. 33 Elie Goldschmidt, ‘Storming the Fences: Morocco and Europe’s AntiMigration Policy,’ MERIP 239 (Summer 2006). http://www.merip.org/mer/mer239/storming-fences 34 Analysts of African migration to the EU, like Hein de Haas and Sarah Collinson, have pointed out the ‘apocalyptic imagery’ (de Haas, 1305), including ‘exodus,’ ‘plagues,’ and ‘floods,’ in discourse of migration to the EU. See de Haas, ‘The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities of African Migration to Europe,’ Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008): 1305–1322. See Sarah Collinson, Shore to Shore: The Politics of Migration in Euro-Maghreb Relations (London: RIIA, 1996). Collinson discusses the ‘paranoia complex … which centered on apocalyptic images of a Europe under siege’ (40), where the threat of Islam, combined with the rising North African demographic, was deemed most serious. Also, see Please see J. David Cisneros, ‘Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of “Immigrant as Pollutant” in Media Representations of Immigration’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008), 569–601; David Shariatmadari, ‘Swarms, Floods, and Marauders: The Toxic Metaphors of the

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Clearly the EU’s borders dynamic and discourse have had resonance in Morocco. In the EU, migration panic and anxiety are simultaneously generated and contained within recurring media images intent on delivering an endpoint to the clandestine journey narrative through a perpetual loop of stranded migrants captured in the process of interception, showing apprehended transgressors never reaching their destination. Ursula Biemann refers to this media event-compression in clandestine migration imagery’s ‘fixed spatial determination’ as a cinematographically staged ‘shot,’ wherein ‘reality is no longer represented but targeted … [and] this particular shot becomes the symbol that encapsulates the meaning in the entire drama’ of EU territorial redemption. 35 The staccato of western media images capturing intercepted migrants simultaneously evokes European anxiety in discovering migrant ‘invasions,’ yet also brings satisfying spectacular closure to territorial transgressions by showing them resolved—migrant ‘tides’ and ‘floods stemmed, an ‘exodus’ averted. These apocalyptic projections of EU obsolescence in the midst of migrant plague-like ‘tides’, ‘floods’, ‘exodus,’ and the ensuing disorder ironically function in the media also as a means of ordering and disciplining the coming ‘invasion’ and its inevitable destructive influence. So while western media images replay the ‘end’ of migration, endlessly deferring arrival beyond European shores for migrants and the apocalyptic end, the closed-circuit imagery directs the audience gaze backward toward the endlessly deferred ‘endpoints’ of a clandestine African ‘exodus,’ intercepted on the Migration Debate’, The Guardian, August 10, 2015. Lastly, Jean Raspail’s 1973 French novel Camp des Saints (Paris: Laffont, 1973), The Camp of the Saints (trans. Norman Shapiro, Petoskey, MI: Social Contract Press, 1994), which warns of an approaching apocalypse in the form of non-European migration floods, is a precursor to contemporary apocalyptic migration discourse. 35 Ursula Biemann, ‘Dispersing the Viewpoint: Sahara Chronicle’, 79. http://www.geobodies.org/books-and-texts/texts

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edges of an already endangered Europe, which still implicitly (since the eschatological analogy still stands) views itself as the ‘Promised Land.’ The media aesthetic’s elusive ‘endpoint,’ the cinematographically recursive foiled border crossing, assures that appearances remain as they are in a ‘timeless time’. This— the continuity of ‘appearance’ generated by the media—is the power of circulation itself, in Rancierian terms. According to Jacques Rancière in his exploration of aesthetic politics, the ‘policing’ power of circulation assures a continuity of appearance, scene, aesthetic, a paradigm of visuality that orients the attention in such a way that what emerges as relevant is that which makes ‘sense’, what is available to sense perception, what is already sensible (as what is available to bodily sensations and comprehension). 36 For Rancière, politics is what The ‘partition of the senses’ is discussed further in Jacques Rancière’s Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004). Rancière asserts that politics arise as the dissensus that disrupts the flow or circuit of the sensible, that which is counted as sensible (audibility and visibility of new political subjectivities is the source of a fundamental dissensus). But dissensus is not quite reduced to dissent or antagonism. For Rancière, aesthetic acts are ‘configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity’ (9). Thus, political subjectivity is understood in terms of actions, silences, thoughts, dreams, perceptions, or enunciations, not in terms of social content, but as the production of formal arrangements and forms of sense distribution, which are aesthetic. Rancière provides a historical example of the plebeian secession on the Aventine Hill in Ancient Rome in 1830, when the plebeians demanded a treaty with the patricians which was denied on the basis that plebeians did not have human speech, to illustrate dissensus as simultaneously the disruption of the sensible/perceptible and the emergence of a political subjectivity. In an interview with Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’ (2000), Rancière explains the narratological demand to justify right to speech begins not with an argument but a mandate to ‘invent the scene upon which spoken words may be audible’ (116), and this in his formulation is politics-as-dissensus: the emergence of a subjectivity whose 36

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interrupts the index of knowledge/sensible, what he refers to as a dissensus that entails a ‘discomposition’ of the ‘correspondences of signification’ that disrupts the assignation of value, identity, or reference to an object. 37 I bring dissensus up in the field of visibility and audibility established by the circuitous loop of interceptions because although the objects are made visible/audible in the shots, they only emerge therein as subjects (demanding political subjectivity) at the border of the EU, as border subjects, clandestine, un-ID’d, undocumented, and unnamed, whose anomic stature also render reigning modes of perceptibility to be suspended at the border. By ‘border subjects,’ I do not mean subjects who inhabit and traverse territorial and cultural borders as part of the everyday, but I mean subjects who are identified with the border as frontier, the border’s excluded, those who attempted to disrupt the circulation of appearances as they were in a mobility-media regime, the consensus, by not only crossing the border but the ‘partition of the sensible.’ But for migrants, those who cross the border and enter without ‘proper’ identification, the possibility of perceptual attention as a condition to political subjectivity is also suspended, internally, within borders. The temporality of border subjects in the media closedcircuit loop of interceptions (also policing reassurance that things appearances remain as they are, a consensus of an uneasy, dying Europe) is a temporality of deferral, waiting, an elusive endpoint—just as it is for Atta’s characters. And, it is one that she imagines reproduces itself in the condition of undocumented migrant existence even after arrival, a limbo between perceptual attention/sensible/partition of the sensible, political representation, and citizenship. The power of circulation, to appearance, determined by their own construction of a scene for ‘political interlocution,’ is insensible because, according to phenomenological preconditions they do not possess human speech, so it cannot register according to the reigning modes of perceptibility. 37 Panagia, 2009, 299.

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keep things appearing as they are, consensus, on the border is continuous within, not collapsing the border dynamic, but releasing the border dynamic within, to seeing migrants as borders. Arrival in Europe will not herald the promised transformation into legible and sensible, but will rather reveal itself as an unresolved exodus, a precarious and prolonged wilderness— at the edge of society and what it deems coherent and sensible, outside of the realm of rights and legal protection. The wilderness of the insensible will extend to encompass the passage across the sea and, correspondingly, shapes and ultimately overwhelms the encounter with Europe. The story ends at a transit point, just as it began, sustaining a transience that leads to exponential transience. The temporality of deferral, waiting, elusive endpoint reproduces itself in the condition of undocumented migrant existence even after arrival, a limbo between perceptual attention, political representation, and citizenship.

CHAPTER 6. DEATH AT THE BORDER: MAKING AND UNMAKING THE MIGRATING BODY 1

In her 2009 tripartite French novel Trois Femmes Puissantes (translated to Three Strong Women in 2012), Marie NDiaye explores the trials of three loosely connected women, who reveal the traffic links between France and Senegal. 2 In the first part, Parisian lawyer Norah reluctantly returns to visit her ailing father in Senegal. In the second, Fanta's troubled French husband narrates his reasons for convincing her to migrate from Senegal to rural France. In the last, young and impoverished widow Khady is forcefully deposited in the hands of a smuggler by her mother-in-law to be trafficked to France (presumably so she can stay with her cousin Fanta and send money back to her in-laws). Thus, it is a novel at once about the African diaspora in France and the undocumented journey from Africa to European territory. In creating these linked, albeit not interchangeable, characters who are in various stages of the ‘journey’ in their sense of French identity and belonging, NDiaye reveals a presumption of This chapter was first published in the ‘Essays of the Forum Transregionale Studien’ (2/2016). 2 The novel was translated to Three Strong Women by John Fletcher in 2012. The text I quote is from the translation, with the exception of one section he omits translating. 1

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validity and licitness that the women bear as Africans in their relationship to France—whether their journey is undocumented or not. Set apart from other critiques of the novel that equally analyze all three characters, 3 this essay focuses on the last ‘strong woman’ of the triptych—Khady Demba. Although it focuses on Khady as an allegorical figure of today’s African migrants pushed out of a homeland that refuses to provide for them (due to unemployment, poverty, corruption) and into perilous journeys, it also draws on the other two ‘strong women’ to demonstrate how gender, race, and class limit these women—whose survival presumably depends on their strength. The other ‘strong women’ function as a socioeconomic counterpoint to Khady, who is impoverished and does not have access to the material resources and social capital available to the other women. In their European-African journeys, the border is not neutral, but rather a site of power that privileges and marginalizes— certainly based on axes of race, nationality, and gender, but also on class. Due to the material restrictions on Khady’s trek North, on foot and in the back of trucks, across the African continent, through the Sahara, and toward the Mediterranean, NDiaye forecloses on the possibility of neglecting the material effects of specific borders: there is no cookie-cutter airport to homogenize the journey into one unforgettable global experience. In Khady’s story, the actual journey across borders is not an afterthought in the new homeland, as it is with the other women in the novel, but rather it encompasses her entire narrative. With Khady, NDiaye focalizes the specifics of a Saharan border topography See Anna-Leena Toivanen, ‘Not at Home in the World: Abject Mobilities in Marie Ndiaye’s Trois Femmes Puissantes and NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names’, Postcolonial Text 10, no. 1 (2015); Deborah Gaensbauer, ‘Migrations and Metamorphosis in Marie Ndiaye’s Trois Femmes Puissantes’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 38, no. 1 (2014); Anne-Martine Parent, ‘À leur corps défendant: défaillances et excrétions dans Trois femmes puissantes de Marie NDiaye’, L’Esprit Createur 53, no. 2 (2013). 3

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that puts into momentum Khady’s narrative until the denouement: from the border town suffocated by the sand of the Sahara (a ‘town infested with sand, with low sand-colored houses and with streets and gardens covered in sand’) 4 to the haphazard camp set up by undocumented sub-Saharan migrants in a ‘makeshift tent of plastic and foliage’, 5 deep in a Moroccan forest atop the Mediterranean whose branches the migrants use to build a ladder to climb atop the razor-wire fence separating Morocco from European territory, the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Like the last chapter, this chapter also delves into transit migration. But unlike the last chapter, the focus here is not on the distinction or similarity between the Sahara Desert as the starting point of the journey and the Mediterranean as the transit point. In fact, the entire journey is one continuous passage of assault on Khady’s body. This enduring passage is significant because here we do away with place difference and the character’s reflection upon it. If migrant routes make the Mediterranean or Sahara Desert and towns on either sides heterotopic by creating a dialectical relationship between the inside and outside of their destination sites, simultaneously internal to, a part of norms regulating the cultural spaces they other, and external to them, then Khady’s route signals her continuous passage of exclusion from beginning to end. There is no apprehension of being an insider in any site she crosses. Certainly, Khady represents the abject from the start, but it also appears that NDiaye signals that we are now woefully beyond any heterotopic imagination. NDiaye suggests that for women like Khady, there has never been an open, adventurous, Africa or Mediterranean, free of interminable obstruction. It has to be emphasized that places outside the norm, the utopic, do not make up heterotopia, but rather their subjective relationality to insider, utopic places that Marie NDiaye, Trois femmes puissantes, Paris: Gallimard, 2009; Three Strong Women, translated by John Fletcher (New York: Knopf, 2012), 716. 5 Ibid., 744. 4

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makes them heterotopic by the migrants. So as bleak as it seems, this is it, this is where we are: perhaps for some, ‘we were never heterotopic,’ so to speak. Unlike other chapters where there is a discussion of the fantastical as giving life to the heterotopic imagination, and where the social fantasy interacts with the genre-based fantasy to do so, here the only perception of impact of the social fantasy, as it interacts with genre-based fantasy, is its impact on the material, the corporeal, the breaking body of Khady. The focus here is the impact of the discursive (including metaphors of social fantasy) on social reality. In detailing Khady’s journey, it is not that NDiaye projects such a hyper-focus on the everyday violence of borders that she completely detaches from the abstract, metaphoric, and discursive aspects of borders that articulate lines of difference and identity. In fact, she poses all her characters on the brink of various discursive and ideational borders to mark various steps in identity formation. Rather, NDiaye highlights the interconnectedness of the material and metaphoric/ideational in apprehending the border. She does this by playing with the abstract—literalizing metaphors and the figurative to highlight the way language and the ideational intersect with and even affect and shape the material. In doing so, she draws attention to the categories in which the world is represented and to the way these conventions shape social reality. And, NDiaye does this by appropriating a nativist social fantasy and then taking it apart, while allowing the fantastic hermeneutic of the novel linger. The device of shape shifting allows for a variety of discursive borders to be established in the novel. Shape shifting from human to bird gestures toward a border other than the national one the characters straddle: the border between the human and nonhuman. After all, the transformation of the women to fungible, commodified, consumable objects also lies at the center of the novel: certainly for Khady who never loses sight of her ‘un-

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shakeable humanity’ 6 despite being trafficked and prostituted, but also for Norah and her sister who, as children, are treated by their father like disposable objects that could be exchanged with his wife for a son he considers indispensable enough to abduct. Moreover, it also gestures toward an ethnic identity and affiliation metamorphosis for Norah and one based on development and resiliency of independence and individuality for Fanta. Fantastical avian imagery is dispersed throughout the novel. But, especially in a brief ‘Counterpoint’ at the end of each section, Khady and the other women metamorphose into birds, signaling both death and rebirth. The first section opens with Norah, standing outside her Dakar childhood home, flustered by the appearance of her ancient, decayed, birdlike father who seems to have ‘flitted down’ 7 from a poinciana tree. In response to her father’s summons to Senegal, Norah arrives expecting to find the father she remembers from childhood—a fashionable, arrogant, successful businessman: ‘[…] this man who […] had worn none but the chicest of perfumes, this haughty and insecure man.’ 8 Instead, she finds an unkempt old man that she compares to a ‘plump old bird,’ 9 giving ‘the effect of his being too heavy a bird, one that fell over each time he landed’. 10 In the ‘Counterpoint’, a birdlike Norah has joined her father in the poinciana tree: […] perched among the branches now bereft of flowers, surrounded by the bitter smell of the tiny leaves; she was there in the dark, in her lime-green dress, at a safe distance from her father’s phosphorescence. Why would she come and alight on the poinciana if it wasn’t to make peace, once and for all? 11 Ibid., 840. Ibid., 10. 8 Ibid., 30. 9 Ibid., 30. 10 Ibid., 13. 11 Ibid., 80. 6 7

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When she ponders, ‘Poor soul, who'd have thought he'd wind up a plump old bird, clumsy flying and strong smelling?’, 12 she could have hardly thought that she too would end up transforming into a bird, turning into her father. Her metamorphosis is identitarian, perhaps indicating a liberating reconciliation in terms of her troubled relationship with her father and her paternal heritage. Or, her death is a metaphor of her single homogenous French identity, her rebirth a reconciliation of her varied, syncretic identities—French and Senegalese, as suggested by Deborah Gaensbauer in her essay ‘Migrations and Metamorphosis in Marie NDiaye’s Trois Femmes Puissantes’. Gaensbauer acutely captures the use of fantasy to bring women’s ‘migration struggles’ to the fore of a discussion on dehumanization: ‘Their experiences of dispossession, elucidated by means of an innovative use of the literary fantastic, are reflective of the traumatically dehumanizing, unequal power relations governing contemporary women’s migration struggles.’ 13 Michael Sherringham claims that the fantastical is a common element in NDiaye’s work, which ‘makes very different modes of understanding coexist—the real and the fabulous (or the fantastic), science and folklore (or superstition), the European and the non-European.’ 14 In the second section, a teacher in her native Senegal, Fanta ends up isolated in the south of France due to her white French husband's scandalous fight with students at the Dakar high school where they both taught. In the ‘Counterpoint’, rendered Ibid., 30–31. Deborah, Gaensbauer, ‘Migrations and Metamorphosis in Marie NDiaye's Trois Femmes Puissante,’ Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 38, no. 1 (2014), 1. 14 This is Gaensbauer’s translation from the French in the same article, 5. The original states ‘…fait coexister des modes de compréhension très différents—le réel et le fabuleux (ou le fantastique), la science et le folklore (ou la superstition), l’européen et le non-européen.’ Michael Sheringham, ‘Mon cœur à l’étroit: espace et éthique,’ in Marie NDiaye: l'étrangeté à l'œuvre, eds Andre Asibong and Shirley Jordan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Septentrion, 2009), 175. 12 13

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through the perspective of a neighbor woman of whom her husband is contemptuous, a birdlike Fanta appears waving toward the neighbor in a gesture of solidarity: […] her neighbor's long neck and small delicate head that seemed to emerge from the bay tree like a miraculous branch, an unlikely sucker looking at Madame Pulmaire’s garden with big wide eyes and lips parted in a big, calm smile […]. She waved to Madame Pulmaire, she waved to her slowly, deliberately, purposefully. 15

Through this birdlike metamorphosis NDiaye suggests that, despite her troubled husband and the vagaries of a racist French society, Fanta is poised for resiliency—the ability to recover her autonomy after a vertiginous ‘uprooting’ from Senegal, as also suggested by Gaensbauer in her critique of the novel. 16 Her fantastical metamorphosis, like Norah's, is also based on the death of an old identity and rebirth into a new one. In the last section, Khady’s transformation into a bird in the novel takes on a value beyond metaphor, as suggested by the real—rather than metaphorical or identitarian—death of her body. The appearance of birds mark various stages of Khady’s migration—as symbols of her fellow migrants’ squalor and torment, for one: as she starts out on her journey, Khady hears the shrieking of crows ‘in their fury at being always hungry.’ 17 Birds also symbolize her traffickers’ ferocity and as signs of illusory episodes: suffering from exhaustion and hunger, she perceives the similarity between the trafficker’s round sunglasses and agitation and nearby crows, wherein the trafficker transforms into a terrifying crow ‘subtly changed into a man in order to carry Khady off.’ 18 Birds also function as memory triggers: seagulls hovering over migrants pushed toward a flimsy boat provoke a flashback to a childhood NDiaye, 587. Gaensbauer, 10. 17 NDiaye, 632. 18 Ibid., 644. 15 16

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memory of birds at the fish market where she bargained on behalf of her grandmother, a memory that fortifies her ‘unshakable humanity.’ 19 Trois Femmes Puissantes ends with Khady leaving the forest atop the Mediterranean beach, rushing the barbed wire fence separating Morocco from Spain, clambering to the top with other sub-Saharan migrants while hearing border guards firing into the air on either side, and finally falling—a descent without end. Her story ends with her ‘letting go, falling slowly backward, and thinking then that the person of Khady Demba—less than a breath, scarcely a puff of air—was surely never to touch the ground, but would float eternal, priceless, too evanescent ever to be smashed in the cold, blinding glare of the floodlights.’ 20 As her head hits the ground after her fatal fall, she sees a bird with long gray wings above the fence: ‘[…] that's me, Khady Demba, she thought in the bedazzlement of that revelation, knowing that she was that bird and that the bird knew it.’ 21 The brief ‘Counterpoint’ section following Khady’s story reveals the thoughts of a restaurant worker in France, Lamine—a man who betrayed Khady on her travels: he would think of her and thank her, as a ‘bird would vanish in the distance.’ 22 Khady’s metamorphosis into a bird is set apart from those of the other ‘strong women’ in the novel: her transformation signals a death and rebirth that are not identity-based or premised on difference and subjectivity in the migration process. Here, there is a merging of the real and the fantastical. While the other women transcend the boundaries of who they once were to become other types of women in the context of their migrations, her transcendence is from life to death to a rebirth into another life. The death of her body is literal, rather than Ibid., 840. Ibid., 757. 21 The translator, Fletcher, did not include this significant paragraph, the last before the ‘Counterpoint’, in his translation. 22 NDiaye, 759. 19 20

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metaphorical. Unlike critiques that center shapeshifting as a way of arguing for the relatedness of the African migrant women despite vast differences between their social and economic positions, I argue that shapeshifting marks Khady apart from the other ‘strong women’. Her literal death before metamorphosis takes place does not afford her the indeterminacy and ambiguity that the metaphoric death and rebirth of the other migrant women allow. While the women are connected by avian imagery, it functions as a metaphor in the novel until Khady Demba appears to transform into a bird upon her falling death. This is the point where the fantastical element of the novel is assured. That is because when there is a suspension of the real and uncertainty emerges—did Khady die or transform into a bird?—is the fantastical element apparent. So indeed the fantastical supports and strengthens the metaphorical connections. In literalizing symbols, figures, and metaphors, NDiaye reveals the divide between representational elements of displacement and the border zone and their material-historical reality. By ‘representational’, I mean the abstract, metaphoric, and discursive aspects of social and spatial categorizations. One concern is the use of the concept of borders to articulate difference and subjectivity in social and cultural studies to the point that the term slides into metaphoric usage. 23 Cultural geographers Keith Woodward and John Paul Jones III address the depolitici-

One example (cited in Keith Woodward and John Paul Jones III, ‘On the Border with Deleuze and Guattari’, in B/ordering Space, eds Henk van Houtum, Oliver Kramsch, and Wolfgang Zierhofer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005) is John Welchman, who states: ‘No longer a mere threshold or instrument of demarcation, the border is a crucial zone through which contemporary (political, social, cultural) formations negotiate with received knowledge and reconstitute the ‘horizon’ of discursive identity’ (John C. Welchman, ‘The Philosophical Brothel’, in Rethinking Borders, ed. John C. Welchman [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 177–178). 23

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zation at the heart of a representational and discursive use of space for critics and theoreticians: […] when critics and theoreticians turn to the concept of borders as an apparatus for articulating various lines of difference and subjectivity in social and cultural studies (e.g., Anzaldua, 1999; Kirby, 1996; Welchman, 1996), the term may slide into metaphoric usage. According to Smith and Katz, this maneuver can introduce absolutist and Euclidean versions of spatial thinking that may dematerialize and therefore depoliticize social space, as if borders did their work solely within the netherland of abstract neutrality. 24

Indeed, these are criticisms lodged at theorists and critics, removed from the realm of novelists. 25 However, holding the migrant up as a metaphoric prism for the broader narratives of humanity—the migrant-as-metaphor trope or displacement as a trope—has been a fashionable literary tactic for fiction writers up until recently. In 1985, Salman Rushdie wrote that the migrant is the ‘defining figure of the 20th century’. According to Rushdie, ‘this century of wandering’ has produced refugees and writers carrying ‘cities in their bedrolls’, where ‘migration’ is not limited to the act of crossing borders and frontiers but functions as a prism through which other acts can be understood: Migration across national frontiers is by no means the only form of the phenomenon. In many ways, given the international and increasingly homogeneous nature of metropolitan culture, the journey from, for example, the Scottish Highlands to London is a more extreme act of migration than a move from, say, Bombay. But I want to go further than such literalistic discussion: because migration also offers us one of the richest metaphors of our age. The very word metaphor, Woodward and Jones III, 237. Many theorists like David Harvey are critical of the use of theoretical, abstract, metaphoric, and discursive aspects of the social and spatial to the detrimental neglect of the material effects of borders.

24 25

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with its roots in the Greek words for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images. Migrants—borne across humans—are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us. We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant peoples. 26

Moreover, he suggests that migrants model what it was to be human due to the loss of what renders their humanity—roots, culture, social knowledge—and their attempts to create new ways of being human. Migration here of course alludes not specifically to displacements of people across frontiers but to a state of displacement that is universal and generally befalls humankind. Salman Rushdie is certainly not the only writer drawn to the creative and liberatory connotations attached to migration: Parul Sehgal's article ‘New Ways of Being’ recounts how various writers of the past century have made migration-as-trope a determining feature of their literature and politics. Roberto Bolaño once asked, ‘Can it be that we're all exiles?’ Aren't the themes of immigrant literature—estrangement, homelessness, fractured identities—the stuff of all modern literature, if not life? ‘Is it possible that all of us are wandering strange lands?’ Kafka spoke to everyone when he wrote in a (possibly apocryphal) diary entry: ‘Enclosed in my own four walls, I found myself as an immigrant imprisoned in a foreign country; […] I saw my family as strange aliens whose foreign customs, rites and very language defied comprehension; […] though I did not want it, they forced me to participate in their bizarre rituals.’ 27

Salman Rushdie, ‘On Günter Grass’, Granta 15 (March 1985). http://granta.com/onguntergrass/ 27 Parul Sehgal, ‘New Ways of Being’, New York Times, March 10, 2016. 26

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Skepticism toward the migrant-as-metaphor has been more prolific in the past few years. 28 Rushdie and others have been subjected to various critiques for making of the migrant one of the reigning literature and of displacement as a trope, revealing, in opposition to the likes of Bolaño that the terrain of migration, is not merely an internal psychic landscape. 29 Trois Femmes Puissantes is part of a wave of literature that shows the optimism of the migrant novel—complete with upward-mobility narratives accompanied by nostalgia for the In response to Rushdie's claim that migrancy is characteristic of humankind, Amitava Kumar states: ‘[…] [the trope of migrancy] emerges as an obsession in the pages of a writer like Rushdie. For him, in fact, “the very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek words for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images”. Rather than oppose the metaphorical to the literal, it is the idea of the metaphorical itself that Rushdie renders literal and equates with a universal condition […].’ Kumar adds: ‘There is a danger here in migrancy becoming everything and nothing.’ Kumar suggests that this obsessive celebration of migrancy is a result of the shame of having to represent the Other to the west without having much to represent, a shame of not living up to the tokenism foisted on the nonwestern writer. Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos (Berkeley: UC Press, 2000), 13. See Aijaz Ahmed, ‘Rushdie’s Shame: Postmodernism, Migrancy, and Representations of Women’, Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 24 (1991). Also, see Shailja Sharma, ‘Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Migrancy’, Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 4 (Winter 2001). https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G191653352/salmanrushdi etheambivalenceofmigrancy 29 In Sehgal's ‘New Ways of Being’, she writes about Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways ‘[…] recount[ing] the stories of Indians making a miserable transition to life in England—from the costs of the journey (much dignity, one kidney) to the caste politics at either end to the first beating, the first sight of snow.’ In addition, undocumented migrant narratives, like Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Sefi Atta’s ‘Twilight Trek’, and Tahir Ben Jelloun's Partir, cast a more skeptical eye toward migration and throw more of a focus on the politicized nature of borders. 28

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homeland and animated by the protagonist’s struggle to balance demands of individualism and community orientation—is waning. Part of this more skeptical literature involves revealing the harsh material realities of the journey to migrate and settlement in the new land. Another part involves shining a light on various anti-migrant sentiments. And another involves interrogating the metaphors that make up the migrant in the national imaginary. NDiaye’s task of metaphor play and literalizing metaphor is not restricted to sentencing Khady to death before her shape shifting takes place while the other women are sentenced to a more identitarian ‘death’— again, revealing that the consequences of migration are life threatening, rather than merely threatening to familiar ‘roots, culture, social knowledge’. NDiaye's task of literalizing metaphors also extends to the antiimmigrant imaginary wherein various metaphors are at work. 30 This interrogation of the anti-migrant imaginary and its metaphors are featured in other trans-Mediterranean undocumented migrant narratives: for example, in Sefi Atta's short story about a Nigerian migrant who crosses the Sahara to find that a forest atop the Mediterranean is where many migrants have camped for as long as years to cross the sea, ‘Twilight Trek,’ she integrates the tropes of apocalypse that undergird anti-migrant public discourse—like migrant ‘tides’, ‘floods’, and ‘exodus’ stemmed and averted—into a story that allegorizes the quest of Moses for a Promised Land in Revelations. 31 Trois Femmes Puissantes also plays with anti-migrant tropes, such as the metaphor of contamination that is literalized through Khady’s ailing and See J. David Cisneros, ‘Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of “Immigrant as Pollutant” in Media Representations of Immigration’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008), 569–601; David Shariatmadari, ‘Swarms, Floods, and Marauders: The Toxic Metaphors of the Migration Debate’, The Guardian, August 10, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/10/migration debatemetaphorsswarmsfloodsmaraudersmigrants 31 Sefi Atta, ‘Twilight Trek’, News from Home (Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing, 2010). 30

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contagious body pushing through border after border until she arrives at the edge of the Mediterranean. Disease after disease befalls Khady as she crosses one border after another. She is perceived to not only be infected but to infect many. In the novel, each border marker, from sea to checkpoint, trigger a fresh layer of illness, pain, and suffering. The vicissitudes of the journey—intersecting at the border and the pain it inflicts—tear her body apart. First, on a rickety docked boat prepared to breach the border of the Mediterranean Sea on the way to Europe, she injures her calf on a nail while scrambling out once she becomes alarmed the boat was becoming crowded. At first, she cannot see the injury in the dark, only feels the blood running down her leg. In the morning when she wakes up on the beach, a man asks her about her wound, which she is able to see for the first time: ‘It was a gaping wound, encrusted with dried blood covered in sand.’ 32 The man, Lamine, befriends her and they pair up, as she finds he plans to head across to Europe, as well. In a truck hurtling across the Sahara, Khady’s wound has still not healed. At a checkpoint, the couple encounters soldiers who assault Lamine and terrify Khady to the point that she hands over the rest of her money to save Lamine. After surviving the checkpoint, Khady is left without money and works as a prostitute in a small room at the back of a ‘chophouse’ she and Lamine find in a small border town on their route across the Sahara. Khady prostitutes herself to secure enough money for their trip across the Mediterranean to Europe, and there her body suffers: it's unclear whether she contracts a sexually transmitted disease, but ‘some customers would complain, saying that it had hurt, that the girl was infected’, 33 because ‘a recent attack of pruritus that made Khady’s vagina dry and inflamed also caused [their] penis some discomfort.’ 34 In the small border NDiaye, 682. Ibid., 727. 34 Ibid., 726. 32 33

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town marked by a checkpoint, she becomes an assemblage of pain: the calf wound from her first injury, ‘swollen and foul smelling’; 35 an ‘attack of pruritus that made Khady’s vagina dry and inflamed’; ‘multiple shooting pains in her back, her lower abdomen, and her calf’; 36 ‘her burning vulva.’ 37 When she accumulates a little bit of money, she finds one day that Lamine has disappeared with it. Anti-migration rhetoric of potential contamination at the hands of outsiders is figural and usually gestures toward a political, cultural, and ideological compromise of the nation or region's purity from incoming hordes that presumably seek to infect with their social practices. (This does not mean that the social body is not also represented as vulnerable to physical contamination, as well.) The figural collapses into the literal through Khady’s body in Trois Femmes Puissantes. Khady’s sickness and potential infectiousness come to literalize the anti-migrant ‘plague’ metaphor, as she crosses borders to reach the Mediterranean and carry out the final stage of her journey to Europe. The trope of containment against contamination that frames undocumented immigration situates those within borders as expressing acute anxiety over the encroachment of outsiders. As recently as 2015, outrageous newspaper columnists used words like ‘cockroaches’ to describe the migrants. 38 While it's easy to discount the effectiveness of certain columnists for their general outrageous behavior, politicians like UK PM David Cameron have referred to the migrants in terms of ‘swarms.’ Allusions to infestation are drawn to task for dehumanizations and

Ibid., 730. Ibid., 730. 37 Ibid., 728. 38 Katie Hopkins, ‘Rescue Boats? I’d Use Gunships to Stop Migrants’, The Sun, April 17, 2015. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/suncolumnists/katiehopkins/ 6414865/KatieHopkinsIwouldusegunshipstostopmigrants.html 35 36

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allusions to infestation. 39 We can turn to less recent instances such as when ‘governing parties in Spain’ 40 referred to undocumented migration as an ‘antisocial plague’ 41 in 1990. And the construction of these symbols and associations is not restricted to Europe. In the Arabic-language Tangier newspaper Al-Shamal, a September 12, 2005 article describing sub-Saharan Africans trying to scale the security fences separating Morocco from the Spanish-ruled enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla featured the following headline: ‘“Black locusts” are taking over Morocco!’ 42 Moroccan authorities banned Al-Shamal for using racist language, but terms like ‘massive invasion’ and ‘plague’ to describe the migrants' attempts to escape from Africa into the territory of the European Union continued being used. The polluting, degenerative, contaminating figure of the migrant operates centrifugally in terms of symbolizing the extent to which the conceptions of a nation's purity are bound in the discursive construction of national communities. In an effort to secure the porous borders of Fortress Europe during the ‘Age of Terror’ (or the specter thereof), the European Commission issued the Hague Programme, a five-year plan de-

Jessica Elgot and Matthew Taylor, ‘Calais Crisis: Cameron Condemned for ‘Dehumanising’ Description of Migrants’, The Guardian, July 30, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/uknews/2015/jul/30/davidcameronmigr antswarmlanguagecondemned 40 Maria Petmesidou and Christos Papatheodorou, Poverty and Social Deprivation in the Mediterranean: Trends, Policies and Welfare Prospects in the New Millennium (London: Zed Books, 2016). 41 Ministerio de la Presidencia, Situation of Foreigners in Spain: Basic Guidelines of Spanish Foreigners’ Policy, Communication to the Congress of Deputies, Madrid, 1990. Cited in Petmesidou and Papatheodorou, Poverty and Social Deprivation, 2016. 42 Al-Shamal, September 12, 2005. 39

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signed to ‘protect the field of freedom, justice, and security’, 43 driven by an agenda to counter terrorists and ‘illegal’ immigrants. Undocumented migration has been on the rise since 1995 when several European Union nations enacted the Schengen Accords to soften internal EU borders and fortify external ones. The razor-wire fence separating Morocco from Spanish enclaves—from which Khady falls to her death—is the result of European plans to ‘deport’ migration controls to African territory on the Mediterranean. 44 The Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, Europe’s only land border with Africa, have been transformed into what have been described as ‘aggressively defended fortress cities, enclosed by security fences that are patrolled by the Moroccan army and Spain’s Guardia Civil’ and reinforced with ‘infrared cameras […] as well as tear gas canisters, noise and movement sensors and control towers.’ 45 Etienne Balibar has described the African-European border as ‘a normalized state of exception’, 46 in which […] the violent police operations continuously performed by some European states (with the help of neighboring nonEuropean subject states, such as Libya or Morocco) on behalf of the whole [European] community, including the establishment of camps, amount to a kind of permanent border war against migrants.

See European Council, The Hague Programme: Strengthening Freedom, Security, and Justice in the European Union, 2005/C53/01, OJ C53/1, March 2, 2005(a). 44 Ali Bensaâd, ‘The Militarization of Migration Frontiers in the Mediterranean’, in The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North Africa, eds Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes (Barcelona: Actar, 2006). 45 ‘World’s Barriers: Ceuta and Melilla’, BBC News, November 5, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8342923.stm 46 Etienne Balibar, ‘At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in Translation?’, European Journal of Social Theory 13, no. 3 (August 2010), 315. 43

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The notion of the pure body of the European Union under threat of ‘invasion’ and deadly degeneration by the specter of migration is a significant and abundant metaphor, which is used to envision and shape the political border. The bodily discourse that shapes anti-immigration stances constructs the figurative ‘national body’ or ‘regional body’ as an organism that must be protected from contamination or infection by contagion that the migrant body represents. Julia Kristeva's theory of ‘abjection’ addresses the boundary between the inside and outside of the body and the anxieties produced by transgressions of that boundary. ‘Abjection’ defines simultaneously the fear, loathing, and fascination experienced when the bodily is expelled or rejected. She draws a similar metaphoric relation between the body and cultural formation. The space of the border and the figure of the border crosser are reflective of a collective border anxiety: this border anxiety is over the collapse of the border between subject and object, between the living and the corpse, between seeing the migrant as human or subhuman/superhuman. It is the ambiguity of the border zone that elicits anxiety, as Kristeva explains: ‘It is thus not lack of health or cleanliness that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.’ 47 According to Elizabeth Grosz, the abject demonstrates ‘the impossibility of clear-cut borders, lines of demarcation, divisions between the clean and the unclean, the proper and improper, order and disorder.’ 48 Thus the abject is not literally lack of health or uncleanliness but the implications of the abject, as drawn by Kristeva— disruption of order, the indistinguishability of inside from the outside, the instability of the border itself. In Trois Femmes PuisJulia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 48 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Body of Signification’, in Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, eds John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1990), 89. 47

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santes the abject is literalized via Khady’s body—her flesh, tears and bleeds, compelling a ‘seepage of a foul, reddish liquid’, 49 her gums bleed onto the bread she eats, her inflamed vagina is suspected of contamination and infection. Her body is sacrificed to the literal—it leaks wastes and fluids in violation of the ‘clean and proper body’, in a quite extraordinary series of illnesses. Cultural fears of both a physiological and cultural contamination of the clean and social body are mapped onto Khady’s body. Why use Khady’s body to literalize the metaphor of national contamination and the implications of abjection? NDiaye calls attention to the boundary breakdown between the figurative and the literal, the metaphor and its literalization, between the rhetorical and the material/physiological, between the making of the border as pure and contaminable in anti-migrant rhetoric and the making of Khady’s diseased body in Trois Femmes Puissantes. Here, the boundaries between rhetoric and substantiation dissolve. In doing so, NDiaye suggests that the figure of contamination has become literalized in the public sphere already— migrants are thought of as physically contaminated, diseased, and contagious. Border politics’ naturalization of the trope is already in place to mark their un-belonging. Khady’s body has already been used as an allegory for a gendered, racialized, and nationalized body politic. NDiaye’s literalization, Khady’s disintegrating body, highlights the links between the rhetorical figure and the body. She is both the abject that lacks health and the abject that disturbs order (of the border). Perhaps this evokes Nietzsche's notion of the slippage between figurative and literal language, the dismissal of a direct ‘correspondence’ between reference and referent, the unreliability of language to adequately account for that which lies outside language. 50 But, because ‘metaphorization of the literal, by NDiaye, 801. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979). 49 50

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drawing attention to the literal […] to words themselves, signals a distance between word and world’, 51 literalization compels the opposite: figurative distance here is closed and indeterminacy is checked, as the gruesome details of Khady’s sickness gradually become more focalized throughout the novel. NDiaye’s literalization of the figurative highlights the connection between the making of the border as pure and contaminable in anti-migrant rhetoric (border politics) and the making of Khady’s diseased body (degeneration and disappearance). That is, this correspondence closes the wide gap between the theoretical instrumentalization of the border—‘border talk’— and the real geopolitical implications mapped on the bodies of migrating women like Khady. Certainly, borders are signifiers with much potential for border metaphors to reimagine identity and representation but a lone emphasis on the ‘textual character of space’ that explores the representational aspects of social space often eclipses the ‘brute force underlying social structures’ in materialist analyses of a global border regime. 52 But, Trois Femmes Puissantes is in no way a text reflecting the cleavages between the ideational and material preoccupations of social space and borders. In fact, NDiaye is portraying ‘a world in which language and experience are indivisible.’ 53 The literalization of the figurative involves NDiaye’s subversive literalization of an othering metaphor—of disease and contamination by those who harbor anti-migrant stances—upon the target—the poor and victimized figure of Khady. NDiaye wrestles the vehicle from the tenor by suggesting that a central aspect of the figurative—that which determines contagion, the border— has consequences: it has made Khady a metaphor come to life. NDiaye has appropriated the metaphor and explored the way it Neil ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's ‘Midnight's Children’ (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2005), 59. 52 Woodward and Jones III, 235. 53 Peta Mitchell, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity: The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2012), 163. 51

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leaves an imprint of literalization on those it captures in its sites—interminable illness, potential contagion, death. Indeed, a feature of allegory is the literalization of metaphor. And, one can certainly say that Khady is an allegorical figure of the ‘plague’ and ‘pollution’ threatening Europe's purity, in racist anti-migrant rhetorics and imaginaries. Through the character of Khady, NDiaye makes literal what in the pretext is metaphorical. But beyond the figure of Khady, the possibility of an allegorical reading wherein correspondence is achieved throughout the entire narrative falls apart. The structure of the plot reinforces the connection between language effects and experience as the exponential breakdown of Khady’s body the further she ventures forth on her journey is determined by the order of the borders she crosses. The border puts in motion processes of illness, contamination, and death. Her sickness is not completely arbitrary and natural, but rather a product of crossing the border, a manmade site of violence. Although the narrative does not make explicit that she crossed the border into Morocco, it is clear that after she leaves the desert border town, she begins living in a ‘makeshift tent’ in a forest bordering the Mediterranean, but sicker than ever (presumably the Gourougou forest in Nador close to the border of the Spanish enclave of Melilla, where several sub-Saharan migrants have been known to be living, for as long as a period of several years, awaiting the right moment to climb the fence and into European territory). If her previous encounters with the border zones had resulted in the bleeding of her flesh, a bleeding of her possessions had apparently gone into effect while she was sick and unconscious in the forest. When she wakes up from her feverish state, she realized she has been divested of all her possessions and IDs: ‘Khady’d noticed she had nothing anymore: no bundle, passport, or money.’ 54 Crossing borders, her humanity is gradually stripped: her ID cards and documents disappear, her money is gone, her ‘bundle’ is no longer, her immune system 54

NDiaye, 836–837.

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is degenerated, her body wastes away as her skeletal figure indicates. Khady’s continuous assertions of her own ‘unshakable humanity’ 55 on the journey fortify her already indomitable sense of self—‘that she was indivisible and precious and could only ever be herself’, 56 ‘that she, Khady Demba, was strictly irreplaceable.’ 57 But also, on the journey these assertions float to the surface of her consciousness in response to her interminable objectification as a trafficked and prostituted woman—‘human cargo’, ‘human traffic’, ‘human capital’—all that which is paradoxically both human and simultaneously fungible, commodified, consumable, inhuman. At the start of her journey as she is being shuttled from place to place, she relaxes because: ‘She was herself, she was calm, she was alive.’ 58 Through a veil of misery, she thinks that ‘she would never forget the value of the human being she was.’ 59 After she is prostituted for years, she tries to make her way North once again and in the back of another truck across the Sahara, she catches sight of herself in the rearview mirror: ‘[…] a gaunt, gray face with matted, reddish hair, a face with pinched lips and dry skin that happened, now, to be her own and of which, she thought, one couldn’t be sure it was a woman’s face, any more than it could be said that her skeletal body was a woman’s’. At that point, she counters her image with the unassailable sense of self that emerges from her consciousness: ‘[…] yet she was still Khady Demba, unique and indispensable to the orderly functioning of things in the world.’ 60 Wounded and ill, Khady keeps venturing forth on her dangerous journey wherein she asserts her humanity to herself repeatedly. She is physically being broken down piece by piece at each border and her response to this dehumanization— Ibid., 840. Ibid., 678. 57 Ibid., 676. 58 Ibid., 712. 59 Ibid., 794. 60 Ibid., 829. 55 56

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continuous assertions of her humanity—only serves to highlight the space of the border as a deliberate site of degeneration and disappearance. NDiaye commits to the rendering real of what is usually conceived of as a figure of speech—immigrant as ‘plague’, ‘vermin’, ‘disease’—and, thus language is endowed with a distinctly material presence in the figure of Khady, thereby exemplifying the power of words to effect a social reality. In doing so, she carries the logic of the power of rhetoric to its final conclusion: if she literalizes the metaphor of the migrant by mapping it on the body of Khady, riddling her with one illness after another, gesturing toward the power of government and popular rhetoric to make one diseased, abject, and unassimilable, then she also recognizes the power of government and popular rhetoric to create the border zones that leave their imprints on her body. The boat on the beach, the checkpoints, the border towns, the forest atop the Mediterranean beside the Moroccan/European border effect a literalization/realization of the metaphors that its governments assign into an assemblage of irredeemable waste: ‘seepage of […] foul reddish liquid[s]’, 61 ‘gaping wound[s]’, ‘encrusted […] blood’ 62—that to which Khady is reduced despite her assertions of unassailability, unshakability, indispensability, preciousness, uniqueness, humanity. As with other chapters, the interplay between social and generic fantasy is apparent. Nativist fantasy is inflicted on Khady’s body and breaks it apart. Her body shows the very real consequences of social fantasy. But ultimately, this signals both an embrace of and a break from a fantastic hermeneutic. The literary fantastical, the avian imagery interspersed throughout the novel (especially Khady’s transformation into a bird during her fall), points to Khady’s very real demhumanization, an exponential breaking-down of her body after each border she crosses. 61 62

Ibid., 802. Ibid., 761.

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It is not as if metaphor alone makes reification possible, but what has been made effable in its objectification in metaphor was now potentially real due to metaphor. The danger in metaphor lies in the ‘puncturing of its figurative life’, 63 investing in present and future metaphors their potential for realization. In a discussion on the impact Nazi-Germany rhetoric has had on subsequent political rhetoric, James Edward Young explores the slippage of metaphor into reality: After the Holocaust, we might ask whether by making something imaginable through metaphor, we have also made it possible in the world. That is, to what extent does ‘imaginative precedent’—the kind we effect in metaphor’—prepare the human sensibility for its worldly reification? […] one might ask to what extent […] the repeated figurative abuses of the Jews in Nazi Germany prepared both killers and victims for the Jews' literal destruction. 64

Although I do not make any claims on periodizing this slippage between rhetoric and reality, I do make a claim on the interconnectedness of the figurative and literal in shaping migration (‘the plague at the border’) upon which NDiaye capitalizes to convey the novel's various borders shaping the physically degenerated, polluted figure of Khady as she migrates across. The final scene of the novel, with which I began the chapter, is a denouement of the border zone throughout the novel: Khady’s drop from atop the border fence down to her death is simply the last step in the processes of degeneration, dissipation, and disappearance that the border put in motion. It also provokes another assertion of her humanity and unassailable sense of self: atop the barbed-wire fence tearing her fence, she is climbing and then James Edward Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 93. 64 Ibid., 93. 63

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[…] letting go, falling slowly backward, and thinking then that the person of Khady Demba—less than a breath, scarcely a puff of air—was surely never to touch the ground, but would float eternal, priceless, too evanescent ever to be smashed in the cold, blinding glare of the floodlights. 65

Her death and rebirth into a bird she spots in the sky are real (not identitarian or ideational or symbolic), as suggested by the ‘Counterpoint’ where her traveling partner claims he feels her gaze through the bird hovering above him in France (where he was able to successfully migrate). In this case, the device of shapeshifting deviates from the realism of the novel—where previously shapeshifting was metaphorical, it has been literalized in Khady’s demise. But even up to this last bizarre moment of the text wherein shapeshifting and reincarnation take place, our attention is drawn to the power of literalization and language—as it is being called into question by a bizarre reality constituted by literalized metaphors and, yet simultaneously, as it points to its own textual performance of how reality is put into motion by language. While NDiaye constructs a variety of border transgressions in the text relating to ethnic and national identity—as well as personal and individual—through representations of characters crossing a border between life and death into an ultimate rebirth, she gradually hones in on the micro-topography of the border and border towns she represents Khady crossing. In doing so, she detaches from the metaphor and the figurative perspective of the border to embrace the literal dimensions and scope of such a voyage. At the same time as she focalizes the material realities of this specific border, she apprehends the way metaphors have a way of shaping the material reality of the border. She suggests the two are inextricable as represented through the breakdown of Khady’s body—the product of unrelentingly violent machinations of the border, established and shaped by government rhetoric and popular anti-migrant 65

NDiaye, 846.

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sentiment that are also often figurative in scope. NDiaye’s insistence on making metaphors and figures of speech literal is an act of transgression that highlights the rules governing literal and figurative language use. The literalization of figurative language draws attention to the categories and conventions within which the world is perceived and represented and to the way these conventions shape social reality. The repetition of symbols in the popular imagination have accumulated to represent the migrant identity as a source of contamination from which Europe needs protection and containment.

CONCLUSION Compelling narratives of the immigrant experience after arrival on another shore abound. But the significance of journey narratives (and their build-up) in the broader work of diaspora narratives cannot be underscored enough. The migration narratives that I have explored reveal the importance of the journey when the border, the shore, the fortress have been crossed, highlighting that the narrative cannot be reducible to arrival and its afterlife. It has been noted that diasporic identity is ‘constructed in resonance with this prior identity,’ 1 this prior identity having developed in the homeland before immigration. Diaspora is a collective, not only in its destination but its origination. Thus, the collective memory of the homeland is required in its narration. Migrant narratives reducible to arrival achieve the equivalent of the portrayals of migrants washing ashore—dead or alive—on European beaches, with which I opened this book. The images I discussed successfully portray a popular discourse on undocumented migrants: it is the migrants who do not belong rather than the beachgoers. The images portray migrants as the ‘detritus’ and excess that should have remained hidden. The body of work on migrant narratives that reduces it to the afterlife of arrival often achieves the equivalent of the European media archive. They portray migrants as out of place, unfamiliar, Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exile and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 14. 1

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unexpected, unrooted, alien strange arrivals without a journey, history, or ‘prior identity,’ which would at least render a representational ecology or what Ursula Biemann has called ‘sustainable representation’, conveying …the story of how everything we do around the world is interconnected here and now, i.e., how the western lifestyle, known to have an effect on climate change, also has an impact on herdsmen in the Sahel. […] Images are not excluded from this process. As social relations, representations that constitute meaning in one place are locked into the signification of another. 2

All the narratives analyzed in this book encompass the routes to migration, as well as journey itself. These attempts at localization not only give characters ‘roots’, a nation, a city, a locale, but they also individuate them rather than presenting them as a disembodied, abstract mass, part of a distant, spectacular scene on the news. Journey narratives often show migrant characters not as ‘out of place,’ an embodied unfamiliar excess on a European shore, but part of a journey, with roots and a ‘prior identity,’ allowing for the mapping of an interdependent relationship of uneven development that connects the northern and southern shore. Thus, this book reflects the authors’ intent in mapping the journey across the Mediterranean, casting the literature as both national and diasporic, emergent from and part of the African Mediterranean rather than about it. Although border crossing is often depicted as a clandestine activity occurring in the ‘borderlands,’ research highlights interconnectedness between migrant crossings and larger politicaleconomic forces such as EU migration policies and security measures, global markets, and North-South inequalities. 3 ReUrsula Biemann, ‘Dispersing the Viewpoint: Sahara Chronicle,’ 58. http://www.geobodies.org/books-and-texts/texts 3 While I discuss the violent asymmetry in globalization practices in Chapter 4 on Egyptian migration, I would like to point out the ways that this plays out in Morocco. Using investment and government data, 2

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search also clarifies the way in which the process of migration has been commoditized and exploited to serve various interests, where migration to Europe is one form of exploitation of labor by capital within the global economy. Migration benefits capital on a global scale—its maintenance depends on its ‘use value’ for global capitalism. This book has unraveled the optimistic stance wherein globalization represents the end of the nation-state and the emergence of cultural relationships marked by multicultural contentment—a celebration of difference and hybridity. The journey narratives have migrant characters charting the interdependent relationship of uneven development that connects the northern and southern shores (aiding in the proliferation of borders that reinforce a hierarchy of mobility). As heterotopia inAmanda Crawley Jackson discusses the flow of tourists, images, narratives and products into Morocco post-Schengen, an agreement which has restricted the travel and migration of Moroccans to the EU. She writes, ‘If, since Schengen, Moroccans have been largely unable to travel to the West, the West continues to flow into Morocco, bringing with it images and narratives of wealth and opportunity that will always remain beyond the border, frustratingly close but always out of reach. For example, the satellite dishes and information technologies (which, ironically, emerged around the same time that Europe closed its external borders) have enabled an unprecedented circulation of images, information, and dialogue across national boundaries, streaming the West more than ever before into the homes of Moroccan nationals’ (60). Moreover, the ‘volume of international trade passing through Morocco’s factories and ports and the numbers of Western businesses locating to Morocco have grown substantially’, since Morocco’s promotion as attractive host to international investment. Lastly, the growth of tourism and the settlement of Westerners in Morocco has been and continues to be a key motivator for domestic growth. More generally, the asymmetry and hierarchy of mobility can be discerned in globalized labor practices: ‘local communities, particularly those in the global South, provide a static and stable source of labor’ for the ‘cosmopolitan tastes of Western consumers, who are able and free themselves, for the most part, to circulate across the globe.’

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corporates diverse places, moving between them and across them, and revealing the processes that link together different topoi, we can say that undocumented migrant characters make the Mediterranean a heterotopic space: they reveal the Mediterranean to be a heterotopic site on which multiple identities and modalities of space/mobility converge, while at the same time highlighting the utopic lens through which the Mediterranean is seen. It is utopic in projecting a desire for a place and time to come—of the familiar to be discovered, exposed through the partition of the sea, the regimentation of mobility flows, on one hand, and the retrieval of an ‘authentic’ past, on the other. The former undergirds containment and the latter cosmopolitanism. Both project realizable desires, to become familiar with something known in the past and to re-make familiar something that is now unknown. The paradox encompasses both the attraction and repulsion of the contemporary Mediterranean narrative, the utopic and abject: the attraction of cosmopolitanism (the appealing disorder of diversity and adventure) and the repulsion of containment (the ‘zone of conflict’ to be ordered and contained). Undocumented migration literature reflects on the Mediterranean paradox of perception through different levels of mobility, which point to the way the Mediterranean is suspended between cosmopolitanism and containment. The importance of heterotopia in the ‘Mediterranean narrative’ is not about how its past and present places compare. But rather it is about how unfamiliar, marginal places of clandestinity perform in relation to more familiar, hypervisible, sites of tourism and redevelopment. The unfamiliar and liminal are not only effects of central and visible sites but (re)construct these sites upon which they reflect and form the dynamic heterotopia of the ‘Mediterranean narrative’ in lieu of a suspended narrative that looks backward. The Mediterranean and its towns on ‘both sides of the shore’ are not inherently heterotopic, but it is rather migrant routes that make them heterotopic by creating a dialectical relationship between the inside and outside of their destination sites, simultaneously internal to, a part of norms regulating the cultural spaces they other, and external to them.

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While the Mediterranean has been instrumentalized through performance, rendering it a ‘fiction,’ 4 it is also the product, the invention of the undocumented migrant figure. The literature of undocumented migration defines the spaces of the border—the detention center, checkpoint, fence, blockade, boat—creating its own place-narrative of the Mediterranean, not one of vague multicultural contentment, but of division and irregular mobility. Spaces are not inherently ordered. In their ordering, spaces are practiced and lived rather than simply inhabited. Thus, the migrant figure constructs the Mediterranean, every step tracking its seductive and abject utopias, its past and present depictions, its unitary and dividing qualities, its metaphoric and material representation, its dissonance between the spaces he occupies and the spaces occupied by documented travelers. These narratives that seek to disrupt the state's imagined geography of a homogenous space of leisure or alternatively state control function as counter-geographies, where discourses on place and identity are challenged, undermined, and replaced. In these narratives, the undocumented migrant character redraws the borders of the state, transforming them from ‘placeless places’ (Augé) devoid of topographical markers and absent of historical and social relations to places deeply incorporated into the web of relations of the region by way of its collective memorialization (Lalami, Nini). Or, they redraw the borders as one continuous passage that extends from a devouring, monstrous sea to a state of violent ravaging—migrant consumption—on the other shore, to share with other migrants a less optimistic view of destinations than ‘immigrant dreams’ are willing to reveal (Binebine, Ben Jelloun). The routes of migrants from the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and further south, in enabling so many exchangGil Hochberg, ‘“The Mediterranean Option”: On the Politics of Regional Affiliation in Current Israeli Imagination,’ Journal of Levantine Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 2011), 57. 4

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es, work against the image of chaos and disorder promoted by popular discourses on undocumented migration. Achille Mbembe indicates that undocumented migrants interact on an ordered, practical cosmopolitan level, rather than through chaos and disorder. ‘The cosmopolitanism of migrants,’ Mbembe argues, ‘has entailed the proliferation of illegal or clandestine spaces’ through spatial strategies of varying networks, flexible practices, and a straddling of identities. 5 This pragmatic cosmopolitanism does not suggest a recuperative model of undocumented migration powerful enough to transcend authority. Rather, it points to the complexity of organizing new forms of community in a carefully constructed but always uncertain obscurity. ‘Illegal immigrants,’ Mbembe points out, ‘generate material and cultural resources in conditions of permanent instability and quasi-absolute uncertainty.’ 6 They do not simply remain aimless outsiders once they cross the border, but rather integrate into different networks, provide linkage between country of origin and reception by way of commute, and mobilize between different local identities while negotiating ‘traffic with the global.’ 7 But to be clear, networks and south-north linkages do not fully enable the creation of a diaspora that can magically transcend the borders and walls erected by nativism and racism on the northern shore. Once the national border is crossed, we must understand that other borders proliferate beyond it. Both the northern-southern shore linkage and the thresholds beyond the national border are fleshed out in in the prose poem ‘Conversation about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, and, later, its revision in the poem ‘Home’, by British-Somalian author Warsan Shire. Just as the continuous passage of ferocious savagery that extends from southern to northern shore, and characterizes the Achille Mbembe, ‘Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism,’ African Studies Review 44, no. 2 (2001), 11. 6 Mbembe, 11. 7 Ibid., 11. 5

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sea between, shapes Binebine’s novel, the entire journey from dangerous homeland to perilous sea to violent land of arrival is encompassed in Shire’s poem and its revision. Shire opens and closes the poem with the ‘mouth of a shark’: in the beginning, she writes, ‘No one leaves home in the mouth of a shark’. 8 In the former, she ends with ‘now my home is the mouth of a shark.’ This metaphor of the dangerous watery passage reveals that even if the refugee tries to escape—she ends right back at where she started. 9 The circular passage connects the peril of Somalia to the violence of the new land: in both works, she commits to an accounting, a calculus of violability on both shores. In ‘Conversation about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, she writes: The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.

In ‘Home,’ she writes of exchanging the perilous place at sea during the journey, the ‘mouth of a shark’, with racial slurs: go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants This phrase can be found in both ‘Conversation about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’ and the revision ‘Home’. See Warsan Shire, ‘Conversation about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (London: Flipped Eye Publishing, 2011), 55. Also see, Warsan Shire, ‘Home’, in Long Journeys. African Migrants on the Road, eds Alessandro Triulzi and Robert Lawrence McKenzie (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), xi. 9 Shire, 2011. 8

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THE TWO-EDGED SEA asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their own country and now they want to mess up ours how do the words the dirty looks roll off your back maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child’s body in pieces.

An accounting of the linkages and of the diaspora’s borders beyond the national one reveal that the border is not crossed once but mediated through encounters that promise a lingering sense of displacement beyond a singular transitional space in the making of a diaspora. So where does the transitional space begin and end if the sense of displacement lingers permanently? The transitional space demands an erasure of identity. Stripping the self of identification is considered part of the process of undocumented migration, as the passage through transit is achieved by way of itinerancy, ‘passing through,’ and ‘passing’, divestment of marks of identification. 10 Since this book’s focus on undocumented miAccording to Augé, the non-place is characterized as a subject’s propulsion or projection forward, in the individual’s relation with ‘moving

10

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grant literature from Africa has reinforced the significance of the narrative journey and its transit spaces to rendering a diasporic identity, it has also revealed undocumented migration, hrig or burning in Maghrebian dialect, as both a more sustained incineration of identity and as an explosion of a hierarchy of geographic and social mobility in the border zones to animate the recreation of identity. Of course all undocumented migration literature is marked by a transit space—the flimsy craft stuck at sea, the detention center on the other shore, the camps bordering the Mediterranean. By focusing on the function of the transitional space in the diaspora, the writers in this book resist the idea of migrations and their diasporas as seamless, singular border crossings. Rather they highlight that the crossing is fragmented, dispersed, mediated, thus becoming the metaphorical site of conceptualizing the diaspora. Written in the temporary journey motifs of transit, limbo, and rootlessness is a more permanent, scarring landscape of alienation. Like the ‘mouth of a shark’ that begins and ends the poems, the narratives in this book that portray transit spaces of the national border and ones that extend beyond it have undermined migration, mobility, border crossing as a singular event, rather on,’ ‘passing through,’ ‘passing over,’ a mobility that aims to suppress the difference that place contains. Orientation is one effect of the nonplace: mobility, speed, and spectator position mediate the experience of passing through or passing over ‘places’ to authenticate the identity of the traveler as spectator by ‘partial glimpses’ of terrain, ‘landmarks, a ‘sequencing’ of landscapes. One aspect of this orientation is displacement: this double movement can also be identified as the non-place experience and its effect of placelessness. The non-place is not only a space but the effect of the space, a double movement that traces the points of itinerancy and its effects on the itinerant, so that the passage is constitutive in erasing any trace or memory of the migrant’s identity. The stripping of identity required of the passengers, indistinction, indeterminacy, anonymity, a form of ‘passing’ regulated by trafficking in creating a place as well as a people unmoored from a topographical web.

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than a journey mediated throughout the multiple borders and displacements that constitute the life of the diaspora—a contradiction that cuts across recuperative imaginings of migration across the Mediterranean, which have figured the coming generation as ‘pioneers,’ 11 crossing physical, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries to deliver old Europe a new trans-cultural and transnational infusion that will ultimately prefigure a new Mediterranean supranational space: ‘another promise, another dream, the opening of another space: the Mediterranean community.’ 12 This supranational space touted by official papers, speeches, programs by the Schengen Convention and Euro-Med Partnership missions, through ideals of mobility residing within globalization, lies at the end of the global capital flow and circulation of labor, products, ideas, people, but does not necessarily make the figure of the migrant a cultural pioneer, that is, mobile, free, and able enough to dissolve the boundaries that obstruct a utopic Mediterranean community from forming. Against the political reality and official histories scripted by laws, declarations, and wishful scholarship, wherein, for example, the metaphor of the Mediterranean as a cultural bridge is naturalized into the sediment of the Mediterraneanist imaginary, undocumented migration narratives stake out an oppositional and creative space. Through retrieval of stories drowned at sea, cultural creations also redefine the meaning of the Mediterranean space. In these works, the fictional space of the Mediterranean Sea also becomes an archive of narratives, identities, documents, IDs, a fluid repository of submerged lives, where official scripts of a unified Mediterranean and banal clichés of cultural bridges interact with distinct narratives of borders, transgressions, and a contested global hierarchy of mobility, which often

Azouz Begag and Abdellatif Chaouite, Écarts d'identité (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 18. 12 Begag and Chaouite, 18. 11

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finds migrants on both sides of the Mediterranean, on shore or on land, in the ‘mouth of a shark’. Indeed, there has been an increase in literary and other cultural accounts that capture a transgressive diaspora through its undocumented journey narratives from Africa across the Mediterranean since the 1990s. The narrations conceptualize a transnational space of the Mediterranean with its distinctive mythologies and historical dynamics, displacing it as a singular entity that the resurgence of Mediterranean studies as a unified space has inspired. These cultural productions constitute fictionalized, narrated, lyricized, artistically rendered imaginations of globally circulating narrations and images released back into the global flow of images that inform discourses of crossing the Mediterranean, in its North-South divergences and crossroads. These transnational productions, at once vehicles and embodiments of traveling images and narrations, then symbiotically represent and construct the imaginations that give rise to a new Mediterranean and its coming migrations.

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INDEX ‘Twilight Trek’ 32, 34, 141–149, 152–162, 166–167, 154, 180– 181 Augé, Marc 47, 199, 202

1–9 9/11 18–19, 21 A abject 34, 37, 87, 102, 122, 154, 171, 186–187, 199 Āl-Jalālī, Āḥmad Al-Harāqa 3–4, 51–52 Al-Khamīsī, Khālid Safīnat Nūḥ 35, 130– 136, 139 Alexandria 11–13, 25, 113– 115, 122, 126–127, 132–134 allochronic 59, 64, 67 alterity 16, 18, 20, 23–24, 29, 59–61, 78–81, 84, 102, 115, 129, 132, 149, 153–154, 156, 188 American 64, 67–69, 92–93, 96–97, 99–100, 141 Andalus 9, 28, 51–52, 57– 58 apocalypse 150, 163–164, 181 Atta, Sefi

B Balibar, Etienne 150–151, 185 Bauman, Zygmunt 42, 139 Beat Generation 28, 67–69, 92–93 Ben Jelloun, Tahar Partir 28, 30, 89–93, 95– 112 Bible (biblical, scriptural) 132, 139, 145, 147– 148, 152, 161–163 Bibliotheca Alexandrina 126–127 Binebine, Mahi Cannibales 30, 71–87, 92, 199, 201 border 2–4, 8–10, 16–17, 19–20, 30, 33, 37–38, 41–47, 50, 57, 59–61, 63, 70, 74, 113–114, 116–117, 119–120, 225

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132, 135–136, 138, 141–142, 149–152, 154, 157–159, 162– 167, 170–172, 176– 178, 182–193, 195– 197, 199–200, 202– 204 Bowles, Paul 10, 26, 28, 68, 93–94, 96–97 Braudel, Fernand 5, 10 Burroughs, William S. 26, 28, 68, 93 C cannibalism 76–77, 81–82, 84, 86–87 capital 27, 30–31, 35, 43, 108, 118–120, 122, 130–131, 134, 170, 190, 197, 204 capitalism 41–43, 120, 122, 130–131, 135, 197 Cassano, Franco 8–9 Cavafy, Constantine P. 12– 13, 25, 36, 54 cemetery, sea 91, 95, 99, 101–102, 111, 117– 118, 138 Ceuta 150–151, 158, 163, 184–185 citizenship 8, 32, 38, 42, 76, 145, 148, 150, 159, 162, 166–167 collective memory (see ‘memory, collective’) colonialism 13, 16, 18, 26– 28, 30, 59, 68, 80–81, 89, 104, 110, 150

neocolonialism 41 consensus 166–167 containment 17–18, 21–25, 74, 108, 183, 194, 198 contamination 33, 181, 183–184, 186–189, 194 cooke, miriam 6–8 cosmopolitanism 10–13, 15, 17, 21–22, 24–25, 29, 54, 74, 94, 108, 124, 157, 198, 200 counter-nostalgia 29, 33, 46–47, 56–58, 64–65, 69–70 D diaspora 35–36, 38–41, 92, 135, 169, 195–196, 200, 202–205 disease 182, 187–188, 191 dissensus 165–167 documents (see ‘IDs’) dreams (oneiric) 76–86, 91 dreams (wishes, nononeiric) 9, 27, 30, 34, 59–61, 64, 71, 73, 76–87, 89–91, 99, 103, 109, 119, 138, 165, 199, 204 ‘immigrant dream’ 30, 34, 71, 73, 77–79, 84–87, 89–91, 99, 199 Durrell, Lawrence 8, 10–13, 26, 36 dystopia 23, 74, 117

INDEX E Egypt 11–13, 17, 30–31, 33–35, 41, 113–116, 118–127, 130–137, 139 Alexandria 11–13, 25, 113–115, 122, 126– 127, 132–134 Egyptian 11–13, 30–31, 35, 115, 122–126, 132–134 Europe-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) 15, 18–20, 24, 37, 126– 130, 204 exile 9, 12, 28, 35, 143– 145, 147–148, 153, 155, 179 exodus 144–148, 152–153, 158, 160–164, 167, 181 expatriates 13, 92, 95, 97, 99–101, 103 F fantasy genre 30, 34–35, 73–75, 78–79, 85–87, 89–92, 102–103, 105, 108– 112, 160, 172–177, 191 cultural 30, 32, 34–35, 46, 59–66, 72–73, 76–80, 85, 89–90, 92–93, 97–99, 101– 103, 107–109, 114, 116, 123, 139, 154,

227 157, 160–161, 172, 191 flood 32–33, 71, 133, 135, 149–150, 161, 163– 164, 181 folklore 15, 64–67, 69, 174 djinn 85–87 monsters 73–75, 77, 87, 92 sea spirits 91–92, 105– 106, 109–110 shapeshifting 86, 172, 177, 181, 193 Foucault, Michel 4, 23–25, 62–63, 111, 115–117, 122–123 France 8, 33, 38–39, 76, 81, 92, 110, 148, 169, 170, 174, 176, 193 French 37–39, 80–82, 84, 96–97, 99–100, 104, 150, 160, 169, 174–175 Paris 38, 77 Parisian 52, 77, 169 Freud, Sigmund 78, 80, 86, 91, 93, 105–107, 110 G Genet, Jean 97 globalization 27, 30–32, 35, 41–43, 50, 57–58, 108, 118–123, 130–132, 134–135, 139–140, 196–197, 204–205 Greece 8, 11, 98, 136 Greek 9, 12–13, 125, 179–180

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Graeco-Roman 16, 126– 127 H Hague Programme 19, 184– 185 Hawlbachs, Maurice 49 hell 34, 75, 147–148 heterotopia 4, 23, 25, 28, 31, 33–35, 43–44, 50, 56, 62–63, 65–66, 87, 101, 111, 115–116, 122–124, 156–157, 160, 171–172, 197– 198 Horden, Peregrin, and Purcell Nicolas 5–6, 8 hospitality 10, 15, 37, 73, 81–82, 86, 94 Ḥusayn , Ṭāhā 54, 124–126 I Ibn Ziad, Tariq 28, 48–49, 52, 54, 57–58, 69 IDs (documents, papers, cards, passport) 3, 17, 52, 112, 131, 135, 141–145, 148,–149, 158–159, 160, 166, 189, 204 intertextuality 28–30, 36, 55, 92 Islam (Muslim) 49, 59, 121, 154–155 K Kristeva, Julia 186 L

Lalami, Laila Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits 28–29, 33–34, 45–51, 53, 56–70, 71, 92–93, 199 limbo 32, 144–148, 157– 159, 161, 166–167, 203 Lukács, Georg 7 M Mahfouz, Naguib 13 Mali 41, 71, 141–142, 154 Malian 85 Massey, Doreen 31, 108, 121–122 ‘Double Imaginary’ of Globalization 30–31, 108, 119–122, 124, 138–139 Matvejevic, Predrag 15, 26 Mediterranean Sea 3–9, 15, 23–24, 26–29, 34–35, 49–50, 52, 54, 56–57, 71–77, 91–92, 95, 99– 103, 105–106, 108, 110–111, 113–114, 116–118, 120, 124– 125, 135–136, 138– 139, 142, 145, 153– 158, 167, 181–182, 198–199, 201, 203– 204 Mediterraneanism 14–15, 17, 21, 37 Melilla 150–151, 158, 163, 171, 184–185, 189

INDEX memory, collective 40, 49– 51, 58, 195, 199 metaphor 77–78, 81–82, 125, 172, 174–175, 177–181, 183, 186– 189, 191–193, 201, 204 Morocco 3, 17, 28–30, 32, 38, 41, 45–46, 48–50, 58–61, 64–70 Moroccan 19–20, 51–52, 54, 57–61, 66, 68–69 Mrabet, Mohamed 96 Muslim (see ‘Islam’) N nativism 34–35, 71–72, 149, 160–161, 172, 191, 200 NDiaye, Marie Trois Femmes Puissantes 32–33, 169–177, 181–183, 187–194 Nietzsche, Freidrich 187 Nini, Rachid Yawmiyyāt Muhājir Sirrī 28–29, 51–53, 199 non-place 23, 47, 123, 138 nostalgia 17, 29–30, 33, 46–47, 49–61, 63–66, 69–70, 108, 136, 138, 180 Nubian 132–134 O Orientalism 56, 58–61, 64– 67, 89–90, 92–93, 95, 98–101

229 P paradise 28–29, 34, 47, 52, 71–76, 78–79, 83–84, 94, 118–119, 146 plague 163–164, 183–184, 189, 191 postcolonialism 28, 72, 119, 145 R racism 105, 163, 175, 184, 189, 200 Rancière, Jacques 144, 149, 159–160, 165 realism 30, 71–73, 87, 90, 102, 110–111, 193 refugee 38, 42, 75, 139, 178, 201 Rushdie, Salman 178–180 S Sahara Desert 7, 32–34, 141–147, 152–157, 160–163, 170–171, 181–182, 189, 190 sans-papiers 38–39, 143, 148, 159 sea (see ‘Mediterranean Sea’) sea cemetery (see ‘cemetery, sea’) Senegal 33, 41, 169, 173– 175 Senegalese 174 sexual assault 82, 84, 87 fantasy 60–61, 63, 98, 107

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sexualization 97–99 sexuality 26 tourism 26, 92–93, 95, 101–102, 111 Shire, Warsan 200–203 smuggling 45, 89, 102, 113–114, 119–120, 130–131, 141, 143, 154, 169 Somalian 200–201 Spain 1, 3, 8, 19–20, 28, 45, 50–52, 55, 57–59, 61, 63, 75, 95, 97, 99–101, 105, 107, 147, 150– 151, 158–159, 163, 171, 176, 184–185, 189 Spanish 37, 95, 98–99, 101, 107 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 41–42, 65, 139 subjectivity 28, 32, 38, 68, 82, 103, 119, 144–145, 148–149, 165–166, 171, 176–178 T Tangier 10, 48, 64, 68, 89– 90, 92–95, 97, 100 terrorism 19, 54, 107–108, 154, 184–185 Todorov, Tzvetan 86

transit 48, 202–204 transit migration (transmigration) 32, 41, 100, 141–144, 147, 155– 158, 160, 167, 171 trafficking 33, 71, 76, 89, 131, 169, 173, 175, 190 U uncanny (unheimlich) 17, 30, 33–35, 80–81, 86– 87, 89–91, 103, 105– 11 utopia 4, 9–10, 14–15, 17, 22–25, 27–29, 31–35, 37, 44, 46, 50, 55, 62, 65–66, 87, 93–95, 101, 108, 111, 114–119, 122–124, 129, 132– 136, 138–139, 156–57, 171, 198–199, 204 W waste 40–42, 139, 187, 191, 195 Z Zuḥrī, Ayman Baḥr Al-Rūm 35, 113– 120, 130, 132, 135