Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization 9780804796859

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transcolonial maghreb

Cultural Memory in the Present Hent de Vries, Editor

TRANSCOLONIAL MAGHREB Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization

Olivia C. Harrison

stanford university press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Parts of Chapter One originally appeared as “Cross-Colonial Poetics: Souffles-Anfas and the Figure of Palestine” in PMLA 128.2 (March 2013): 353–69, published by the Modern Language Association of America. Reprinted by permission. Parts of Chapter Two were originally published as “Staging Palestine in FranceAlgeria: Popular Theater and the Politics of Transcolonial Comparison,” in Social Text, Vol. 30, issue. 112, pp. 27–47. Copyright 2012, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harrison, Olivia C., 1980- author. Transcolonial Maghreb : imagining Palestine in the era of decolonization / Olivia C. Harrison. pages cm--(Cultural memory in the present) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-9421-3 (cloth : alk. paper)-isbn 978-0-8047-9682-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)-isbn 978-0-8047-9685-9 (eBook) 1. North African literature--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Arab-Israeli conflict--Literature and the conflict. 3. Palestine--In literature. 4. Colonies in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Cultural memory in the present. pn849.a355h37 2015 809'.933585694--dc23 2015026356 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

in memory of James Pinckney Harrison (1932–2010) to Arne, Ada, and Louise, for life

Contents

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: Palestine as Metaphor

1

part i. decolonizing the maghreb 1. Souffles-Anfas: Palestine and the Decolonization of Culture

17

2. Transcolonial Hospitality: Kateb Yacine’s Experiments in Popular Theater

41

3. The Transcolonial Exotic: Allegories of Palestine in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Algerian Trilogy

61

part ii. jews, arabs, and the principle of separation 4. Portrait of an Arab Jew: Albert Memmi and the Politics of Indigeneity

81

5. Abrahamic Tongues: Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Hassoun, Jacques Derrida

101

6. Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other

129

Epilogue: Palestine and the Syrian Intifada

143

Notes

153

Index

187

Illustrations

Figure 1.  Front cover of Souffles 15 (1969), special issue “For the Palestinian Revolution,” by Mohamed Chebaa

22

Figure 2.  Poster by Mohamed Melehi, “Palestine,” Souffles 15

24

Figure 3.  Poster by Tahar Ben Jelloun, “Fath,” Souffles 15

25

Figure 4.  Palestine cartoons by George Wolinski, Souffles 15

26

Figure 5.  Photograph of a literacy lesson in a Palestinian training camp, Souffles 20–21 (1971)

33

Figure 6.  Undated photograph of Kateb Yacine and Mahmoud Darwish

43

Figure 7.  Performance of Mohamed prends ta valise ca. 1972

45

Figure 8.  Poster of Mohamed prends ta valise

46

Figure 9.  Ziyad in combat gear, opening credits of Dhakirat al-jasad

75

Figure 10.  Ahlam in traditional garb, opening credits of Dhakirat al-jasad

75

Acknowledgments

Columbia University’s Department of French and Romance Philology and the Center (now Institute) for Comparative Literature and Society were an ideal intellectual haven for the genesis of this project. My first thanks go to Madeleine Dobie, whose infallible support, generous engagement, and copious comments on innumerable chapter drafts were instrumental in making this book a reality. Gil Anidjar had a decisive impact on the final shape the project has taken, and I am endlessly grateful for his incisive readings and intellectual example. Noha Radwan provided much needed guidance with the Arabic corpus, and rightly insisted that I include Ahlam ­Mosteghanemi in the final draft of the book. The much regretted Philip Watts was a belated but essential interlocutor for this project and the next, as was Kristen Ross. It is thanks to them both that Transcolonial Maghreb will, I hope, have a French sequel. My years at Columbia would not have been nearly as rewarding without the example, support, and camaraderie of many individuals I would like to acknowledge here, though I cannot possibly name them all: Bashir Abu-Manneh, Seth Anziska, Étienne Balibar, Taoufik Ben Amor, Maria Boletsi, Peter Connor, Hamid Dabashi, Patricia Dailey, Vincent Debaene, Souleymane Bashir Diagne, Brent Edwards, Avishek Ganguly, Alysia Garrison, Stathis Gourgouris, Zeina Hakim, Alvan Ikoku, Simon Jackson, Mehammed Mack, Marc Nichanian, Neni Panourgia, Bruce Robbins, Emmanuelle Saada, Gayatri Spivak, Mathew Udkovitch, and Ali Wick. Though I did not arrive in time to meet Edward Said, this book is deeply indebted to his work. UCLA’s departments of French and Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature offered me visiting scholar status during my first year in Los Angeles, and I thank Dominic Thomas and Ali Behdad for their academic hospitality. Meeting Gil ­Hochberg, Lia ­Brozgal, Aamir Mufti, Nouri Gana, Susan Slyomovics, and Françoise Lionnet d ­ uring

xiv   Acknowledgments that formative year was crucial. I am especially grateful to Françoise for her continued mentorship. At the University of Southern California I have found an incredibly stimulating and collegial intellectual community. Natania Meeker and ­Panivong Norindr have been exemplary mentors from the start, and I feel very fortunate to count them as my close colleagues and friends. Ramzi Rouighi, Laurie Brand, Sarah Gualtieri, and Kevin van Bladel gave me a very warm welcome to the Middle East Studies Program as soon as I arrived on campus. I am especially grateful to Ramzi for entertaining my nostalgia for Columbia, and to Laurie for inviting me to present my work at the MESP faculty seminar. My research assistant, Nada Ayad, provided invaluable help with my Arabic corpus. I have been very fortunate to work with Nada as well as Sophia Azeb and Umayyah Cable, whose dissertation projects have helped me think through my own research. Last but not least, the interdepartmental postcolonial reading group my colleague Neetu Khanna launched in 2012 has been an ideal venue to discuss new work, and I am grateful to all its participants for their helpful feedback. I am especially indebted to Neetu for reading numerous drafts as well as the final version of this book, which very much bears the imprint of her careful scrutiny. More rewarding still has been her unflagging camaraderie and sense of humor. USC’s Zumberge Award and the Office of the Dean of USC Dornsife, as well as numerous course releases and a luxurious junior leave, were instrumental in creating the conditions for the completion of this work. Parts of this book have been presented at many venues over the years and I am indebted to the many people who engaged with it on those occasions, some of whom I am able to thank by name: Nadia Abu El-Haj, Lila Abu-Lughod, Safoi Babana-Hampton, Maya Boutaghou, Thierry Durand, Jason Earle, Yasser Elhariry, Robeson Taj Frazier, Nitin Govil, Erin GraffZivin, Kifah Hanna, Nicholas Harrison, Alma Heckman, Cheryl Higadisha, Anikó Imre, David Lloyd, Megan MacDonald, Jessica Marglin, Richard McLaughlin, Anne-Marie McManus, Sofian Merabet, Timothy Mitchell, Valérie Orlando, David Palumbo-Liu, Theri Pickens, Guilan Siassi, Robert Stam, Edwige Tamalet-Talbayev, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Research and writing would truly mean very little without such a hospitable intellectual community. I am grateful to Ella Shohat and the anonymous readers of Social Text for their initial feedback on the second chapter of this book,

Acknowledgments  xv and for permission to reprint portions thereof, as well as to the anonymous readers and editorial staff of PMLA, where the first version of Chapter One appeared. Emily-Jane Cohen of Stanford University Press energetically supported the publication of this book from beginning to end, and I thank her and her tireless editorial assistant Friederike Sundaram for their patience with my endless queries. I couldn’t imagine a better home than Hent de Vries’ Cultural Memory in the Present series, and feel truly honored to be in such distinguished company. Most decisively, I thank Gil Hochberg, my then anonymous reader, for lending such a careful eye to the manuscript, and for sustaining the conversation well beyond the initial report. This book is dramatically improved as a result of her incisive comments and generous feedback, though of course any errors remain my own. It was an immense pleasure to research and write this book, in no small part due to its conditions of production: Morning Side Heights in New York City, Columbia’s Butler Library, la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, site Henri Mitterrand in Paris, l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine in Normandy, the 11e and 12e arrondissements of Paris, USC’s Doheny Library, UCLA’s Young Research Library, and Echo Park and Highland Park in Los Angeles. I am grateful to the staff of the BnF and IMEC, particularly Albert Dichy, IMEC’s director, for their expert guidance in navigating the archive, and for maintaining such beautiful collections. My travels allowed me to cross paths with several of the writers I discuss in these pages, as well as France- and Morocco-based scholars. Thanks to Samuel Weber and Lucy Stone McNeece, I had several decisive conversations with Abdelkebir Khatibi, first in Morocco in 2004 and then in Paris in 2008. I was also fortunate to correspond with the writer and artist Etel Adnan, an early Souffles collaborator, when I was still a graduate student. Since then she has more than once shared her memories of Souffles and her thoughts on Palestine with me. In 2013 I had the pleasure of meeting Abdellatif and Jocelyne Laâbi, after several years of very helpful email exchanges. I am indebted to them both for their hospitality and enthusiasm about the project. Thanks to Luc-Willy Deheuvels at l’Institut National des Langues et Cultures Orientales, I was able to meet Kenza Sefrioui at an early stage in this project. She has been incredibly forthcoming with her work on Souffles ever since. Benjamin Stora, then also at l’INALCO, was most generous with his time from the beginning.

xvi   Acknowledgments Thanks to Madeleine Dobie and Ali Guenoun, in 2013 I was able to study Kabyle with Nacima Abbane and meet the Kabyle poet Ben Mohamed, a close companion and translator of Kateb Yacine. I am especially indebted to Nacima and Ben for responding to my queries about Palestine, Berber politics, and Kateb’s popular theater over the years. I am also grateful to Amazigh Kateb and his mother, Zebeida Chergui, who graciously gave me permission at the eleventh hour to reprint a photograph of Kateb in this book. I am immensely grateful to all of my interlocutors for giving so unsparingly of their time, and for making the experience of writing this book such a richly collaborative one. Since 2004 Arne De Boever has been my traveling companion, first interlocutor, staunchest supporter, and so many things more. I dedicate this book to him and to our daughters, Ada and Louise, as well as to my father, James Pinckney Harrison, who was, in more ways than I could have ever imagined, my first example and source of inspiration. I am forever ­indebted to my mother, Chantal Dubertret Harrison, and to my sister, ­Alicia ­Harrison. This book is for them, too.

transcolonial maghreb

Introduction Palestine as Metaphor

Among the chorus of chants and slogans echoing from Tunisia to Egypt, Syria, and beyond starting in late 2010, popular expressions of support for Palestine have been a remarkably persistent leitmotiv. From Sidi Bouzid, the site of the first Tunisian protests, to Tahrir Square in the heart of Cairo, Palestine has been invoked as a galvanizing issue by protestors hailing from all class, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. At first flush this is hardly surprising. After all, Palestine has been the most recognizable symbol of Arab and Muslim unity in Arab state rhetoric for the past halfcentury. Yet recent invocations of Palestine as rallying cry in the Maghreb and Mashriq invite us to look more closely at the kind of work “Palestine” does in the decolonizing world.1 Beyond the well-worn cliché of ArabMuslim solidarity with colonized Palestine, what does the word mean for postcolonial subjects protesting their continued disenfranchisement and oppression decades after the end of European colonization? Variously termed revolt or revolution (thawra) and uprising (intifada) in Arabic, the mass protests of the 2010s are, by their very name, inscribed within a decadeslong transnational history marked by two iconic anticolonial struggles, those of Algeria and Palestine.2 As the most visible and enduring symbol of colonial rule and military occupation in the twenty-first century, Palestine has played an important role in popular protests against authoritarian postcolonial regimes, revealing a much longer history of transnational mobilization for Palestine across the region, one that implicates corrupt postcolonial and military regimes in the oppression of nominally sovereign subjects. This book is concerned with the range of meanings

2  Introduction and mobilizations of “Palestine as metaphor” for non-­Palestinians, specifically, Palestine as a metaphor of the colonial, writ large to include Western/ European, Zionist/Israeli, and postcolonial state discourses and practices in the colonial past and in the purportedly postcolonial present.3 It may seem counterintuitive or even objectionable to speak of Palestine as a metaphor of the colonial as opposed to an actually colonized place. And yet I argue that it is precisely because it remains colonized that Palestine enables a sustained reflection on the afterlives of colonialism in the present, including the legacies of European colonial rule, the on­going effects of Zionist ideology and Israeli occupation, and “internal” or neocolonization by nominally independent states. Palestine has operated as a catalyzing issue across the decolonizing world, and particularly the Maghreb and Mashriq, for decades. As the sole part of the region formerly controlled by France and Britain that was never decolonized, Palestine has been, at least since the coalescence of the Palestinian national movement in the mid-1960s and Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in June 1967, a point of acute concern for the “Arab street,” often in direct conflict with state interests, if not rhetoric (most states in the region pay lip service to Palestine, few follow through with actual support, and many actively hinder Palestinian rights).4 As activists and scholars have noted, civil society groups that had been mobilizing around Palestine for years were instrumental in organizing protests in the early days of the revolts, demonstrating the political use-value of the Palestinian question in facilitating democratic movements across the region.5 But Palestine must also be understood as a powerful metaphor of political disenfranchisement in the purportedly postcolonial present, as forcefully demonstrated by Samar Yazbek’s memoir of the Syrian uprising, which compares Syrians fleeing state violence to Palestinian refugees.6 Collapsing postcolonial Syrian subjects and Palestinians under occupation, Yazbek’s memoir, to which I return in the Epilogue, exemplifies what I call “transcolonial identification” with Palestine: processes of identification that are rooted in a common colonial genealogy and a shared perception of (neo)colonial subjection.7 The central argument of this book is that Palestine has been, and continues to be, deployed as a figure of the colonial, expanded to include not only the “classic” forms of colonization exemplified in French and British rule over the Maghreb and Mashriq but also various instances of neocolonialism, including continued foreign control as well as the repressive tactics

Palestine as Metaphor  3 of the postcolonial state. I argue that the three countries of the Maghreb— Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—form a privileged site of transcolonial identification with Palestine, illuminating with particular salience the ways in which Palestine has become a figure of the colonial in the past half-­century. France colonized Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in the long nineteenth century, which saw the rise of political Zionism and the imperial settlement of the Jewish question. Though French colonialism and Z ­ ionism/­Israeli expansionism differ on a number of points, they intersect historically and discursively in ways that have yet to be fully explored. As I will detail in individual chapters, the legal and cultural distinctions France instated between Jews and Muslims in the Maghreb (particularly in its prized settler colony, Algeria) bear strong resemblance to the construction of Jews and Arabs as opposite categories in Zionist discourse. Although Israel’s “principle of separation” between Jews and Arabs appears to be at the antipodes of the colonial myth of assimilation whereby natives must become French, my readings reveal that the borders between these two types of colonial discourse (separation and assimilation) are more porous than they first appear.8 The archive of texts I uncover brings a distinctly trans­colonial sensibility to bear on the question of Palestine, revealing overlapping modalities and discourses of colonization across the decolonizing world. The metaphoric import of Palestine is hardly confined to the Maghreb, however. Keith P. Feldman and Alex Lubin have unearthed a rich archive of African American writings on Palestine, most prominently those of the Black Panthers, who “recognized the shared conditions of racial capitalism and possibilities for anti-imperialism among local communities across the world,” including “the Palestinian nationalist movement, and the struggle among black Arab Jews within Israel who formed the Israeli Black Panther Party.”9 Other, more recent examples include the Zapatista and other indigenous movements in the Americas as well as disenfranchised ethnic minorities in Europe and, of course, protestors and activists from Tunisia to Syria and beyond.10 Transcolonial Maghreb is in conversation, explicitly and implicitly, with studies of Palestine as metaphor in the decolonizing Global South, and among minority and other disenfranchised communities in the Global North. The late Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said was the first to speculate on the global significance of Palestine in his seminal essay The Question of Palestine, presenting Palestine as exemplary of political subjec-

4  Introduction tion in the modern era, particularly the kind practiced by postcolonial regimes. For Said, There is an awareness in the non-white world that the tendency of modern politics to rule over masses of people as transferable, silent, and politically neutral populations has a specific illustration in what has happened to Palestinians—and what in different ways is happening to citizens of newly independent, formerly colonial territories ruled over by antidemocratic army regimes.11

It is difficult not to think of the protests of the 2010s when reading this passage, which equates, in characteristically dense fashion, modern politics with colonial rule, exemplified in the fate of Palestine, and both of these with the postcolonial state. Glossing the racial question (“the non-white world”) as well as the difference between old and new forms of colonial governance, Said suggests that Palestine is paradoxically illustrative of the (post) colonial condition. The only remaining colonized nation of the twenty-first century, Palestine is both exceptional and exemplary of modern political violence. Put differently, it is the exception that proves the rule, a colonial remainder that belies the persistence of colonialism writ large in the purportedly postcolonial present. Yet it is important to note that, for Said, Palestine is not simply a marker of political disenfranchisement in the era of postcolonial disenchantment. It also and by the same token represents the possibility of radical political change—or, to preview the arguments I make in this book, the possibility of decolonial thought. Starting from the status of Palestine as a “nonplace,” Said explores the metaphoric potential of Palestine as utopia, etymologically derived from the Greek a-topos, nonplace. Without underplaying the acute importance of reclaiming an actual place to inhabit, Said emphasizes the political significance of Palestine as “a place to be returned to and . . . an entirely new place, a vision partially of a restored past and of a novel future, perhaps even a historical disaster transformed into a hope for a different future.”12 The loss of Palestine becomes, in this reading, a pretext for political reinvention. Though Said is speaking here of Palestine as a utopia for Palestinians, he immediately opens this metaphor up to others: Egyptian students and Iranian protestors rising up against their repressive regimes in the name of Palestine, seen as “a symbol for the struggle against social injustice.”13 In this sense, Palestine is also a topos, a figure or metaphor, of the colonial writ large.

Palestine as Metaphor  5 Said’s reflections on the metaphoric dimensions of Palestine open up a rich terrain of investigation for the diverse political imaginaries that concern me here. Taking my lead from Said, I analyze Palestine as utopia and topos in Maghrebi literature and intellectual history, from the immediate aftermath of independence to the present day. My subtitle should not in any way imply that we are living in a postcolonial age in a strictly chronological or even political sense, however. Palestine’s ever-worsening situation as well as the ubiquity of Palestine as a metaphor of the colonial, broadly conceived, in the decolonizing world constitute a bitter testament to the incomplete nature of the decolonization project in the purportedly postcolonial age. Yet the continued actuality of the colonial also confirms that decolonization is not behind us. We are decidedly still living in the era of decolonization, with all the pain and promise that realization brings. It should be clear from the above that Palestine is not only topical in the usual sense of the term, that is, a topic of current interest among others, as the ubiquitous expressions “question of Palestine,” “Palestinian issue” or even “Palestinian problem” imply. Certainly, Palestine has been in the news regularly since the mid-1960s, and it is topical in the sense of a dramatically unfolding and always current event. Political imaginaries of Palestine in the Maghreb center round the two most traumatic events of modern Palestinian history. The first is known in Arabic as al-Nakba (“the catastrophe”) and designates the expulsion of some eight hundred thousand Palestinians to make way for the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, an expulsion the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe characterizes in no uncertain terms as ethnic cleansing.14 The second is known as al-Naksa (“the reversal”), the IsraeliArab war of June 1967, which resulted in Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai. The 1967 war provoked a veritable intellectual crisis in the world of Arabic letters, generating an effervescence of writings the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm dubbed “the literature of defeat” (adab al-hazima).15 Writers and intellectuals turned to the past in an attempt to understand what had led to such a spectacular downfall, mobilizing Orientalist tropes of cultural decadence and intellectual stagnation. This new genre, though best represented by Israel’s immediate neighbors, had a few illustrious practitioners in the Maghreb as well.16 For the most part, however, the writers and intellectuals whose work I discuss here mark their distance from what they consider to be an occasional or even opportunistic corpus, preferring to look forward

6  Introduction to the possibility of political change rather than backward on purported Arab shortcomings. Deriding adab al-hazima as a state-sponsored, retrograde form of nostalgia, they choose instead to deploy Palestine as a model for decolonization in the present. Similarly, the forms of transcolonial identification I analyze in the following chapters distinguish themselves sharply from state representations of Palestine. Though policies have varied widely over the past fifty years according to shifting regional and international alliances, the rhetoric surrounding Palestine is largely one of unmitigated support, usually qualified along the lines of “support for our Arab and/or Muslim brethren in Palestine”—an obviously problematic formulation that neglects Christian Palestinians as well as the diaspora and refugees, who have fared notoriously badly in Arab host countries. Though Algeria is the only Maghrebi nation-state that unambiguously asserts its anti-Zionism (Morocco and Tunisia have historically been more circumspect), affirmations of fraternal solidarity with Palestine remain the official stance across the region. Rather than formulate a cohesive Arab identity, the texts I study blur the borders between self and other and call into question the state’s instrumentalization of the figure of Palestine. In this sense, Palestine represents the possibility of what Khatibi calls “double critique”—a critical distance-taking from both colonial culture and a purportedly originary Arab-Islamic culture, often articulated with reference to the Mashriq.17 Yet because Maghrebi and Palestinian experiences of colonial rule remain distinct, the metaphor by which Maghrebi writers have portrayed Palestine as Algeria or Morocco begs the question of the politics of representation. What are the pitfalls of speaking for the colonized other? To what extent can subjects of postcolonial regimes claim to identify with subjects of colonial rule? These questions are compounded when the languages and forms used to represent Palestine are those of the former colonizer, France. In different ways, the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas (Chapter One), Kateb Yacine’s popular Algerian theater troupe (Chapter Two), and the Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi (Chapter Three) all problematize the question of language in the postcolony in relation to Palestine. The question of representing Palestine is arguably even more fraught when those doing the representing are virtual—albeit often unwilling—Israeli nationals. As I will show in Part Two, Jewish-Maghrebi writers such as Jacques Derrida and Edmond Amran El Maleh identify

Palestine as Metaphor  7 with Palestine against Israel, the state that claims to speak in their name (Chapters Five and Six). The continuing deterioration of the conditions of Palestinian life and political existence in the twenty-first century makes the problem of representation particularly acute today, and in these chapters I also underscore the limits and dangers of transcolonial identification. Never­theless, this book is driven by the idea that the politics of solidarity and coalition, indeed the politics of comparison, carry tremendous decolonial potential, perhaps nowhere more forcefully than in Palestine-Israel. Remaining attentive to the risks inherent in speaking for the colonized other, I insist on the urgency of representing Palestine, both politically and aesthetically, in this increasingly precarious context. Transcolonial Maghreb focuses on an area that has long been considered marginal within the Arabic-speaking world. Each of the three countries of the Maghreb has a distinct history, yet their shared experience of French colonialism—which is nevertheless marked by important differences I discuss in individual chapters—justifies considering them as a coherent region, particularly in the domains of political history and cultural expression. At the same time, these three nation-states have, by virtue of their colonial past, been artificially segregated from their wider regional context. Critics have tended to privilege the Maghreb’s relation to France, particularly when it comes to issues of language, culture, and literature. Conversely, France’s aggressive assimilation policies and the continued prevalence of French in the region, particularly in Algeria, have led scholars of Arabic literature and Middle East studies to neglect the Maghreb, obfuscating crucial cross-regional and cross-linguistic links. The recent ­upheavals are only the latest example of the limits of the critical division between Maghreb and Mashriq. As the slogan chanted throughout the streets of Cairo—“kuluna tunisiyun / we are all Tunisians”—demonstrates, the links between the two regions run much deeper than is commonly thought. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. The history of Maghrebi support for Palestine reveals that such transnational connections and affiliations long predate the twenty-first century. As my readings will show, Palestine was regularly the locus of struggles over language, literary form, and cultural politics in the Maghreb. By proposing that we reread the Maghrebi literary canon in relation to transversal political and aesthetic engagements with Palestine, I call for a repositioning of the field of Maghrebi studies along an East-West, rather than North-South, axis.

8  Introduction My emphasis on the transcolonial also shifts the terms of the debate surrounding the question of Palestine in important ways. In recent years, the field of Palestine studies has become increasingly inter- and trans­ national to encompass the Palestinian diaspora (refugees and exiles) as well as international mobilizations for Palestine. Given the ubiquity of the Palestinian question and the wide support it enjoys worldwide, what I am calling transcolonial identification with Palestine—transnational forms of solidarity that are based on an understanding of Palestine as the product of a long and unfinished colonial history—is clearly a global phenomenon, one that is not limited to the so-called Arab or Muslim world. Palestinian civil society campaigns such as the call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) have given increased visibility to nonviolent resistance movements on the ground, eliciting unprecedented international support for the Palestinian cause. At the same time, historians have situated political Zionism and the foundation of Israel within the broader context of the European colonization of the region, and comparisons between ­Israel’s treatment of its Palestinians citizens (“Arab Israelis”) to South African apartheid or even Europe’s racialized treatment of postcolonial minorities have gained currency in the emerging fields of comparative settler colonial and indigeneity studies.18 The recent publication of books assessing the global significance of Palestine for still and formerly colonized nations and for our globalized, neoliberal modernity further attests to the universal importance of the question of Palestine.19 Transcolonial Maghreb contributes to this growing corpus on the broader resonance and significance of Palestine in the contemporary moment. My starting point, object of study, and evidentiary terrain is postcolonial Maghrebi literature and intellectual history from the 1950s to the present day: popular plays, literary magazines, television series, feminist texts, novels, theoretical essays, letters, pamphlets, and public debates composed in the three languages of the Maghreb (Arabic, including the spoken languages known as Darija; Tamazight or “Berber”; and French).20 The six chapters of Transcolonial Maghreb reveal that writers and intellectuals as diverse as Abdellatif Laâbi, Kateb Yacine, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, ­Albert Memmi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Derrida, and Edmond Amran El Maleh have been concerned with the Palestinian question and the ­Palestinian-Israeli conflict for decades, with lasting effects on how they write and imagine the Maghreb, as well as Palestine, Israel, and France. The

Palestine as Metaphor  9 texts I have chosen are the work of some of the Maghreb’s most established and celebrated writers, revealing how deeply ingrained and dynamic the question of Palestine has been in the development of Maghrebi literature and intellectual history. With the exception of Derrida, who left Algeria for France as a teenager, and Mosteghanemi, who lives in Beirut, these writers are part of a heterogeneous and long-stifled tradition of leftist opposition in the Maghreb. The Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas was banned after two of its lead editors, Laâbi (editor-in-chief ) and Abraham Serfaty, founded a radical leftist party, for which they were imprisoned in the infamous jails of Hassan II. The Algerian writer and lifelong leftist activist Kateb devoted an entire play to the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, made several trips to the Soviet Union and Vietnam, and was a vocal supporter of women’s and Imazighen rights in Algeria. Memmi helped found the journal Afrique Action (later renamed Jeune Afrique) in Tunis at the height of the Algerian anticolonial struggle. Profoundly influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and the European Left, Memmi espoused socialist ideals and later professed to be a “left-wing Zionist.”21 Though not affiliated with any party, Khatibi consistently advocated for pluralism and democratization in his writings and public appearances. Finally, like Serfaty, El Maleh was a prominent member of the Moroccan communist party before retiring from politics. He is best known in Morocco for his first novel, a satire of the party, and well respected as a militant in the struggle for independence.22 Because Palestine has been a point of transcolonial identification in the Maghreb for more than half a century, the corpus I have selected will inevitably appear incomplete. This is partly by design. It is important to stress that Transcolonial Maghreb is not about the so-called Palestinian- (or Arab-) Israeli conflict. Nor is it about Palestine and the Palestinians’ rightful aspirations, though my study is in dialogue with both in ways that will become clear in my readings. I am concerned with transversal engagements and representations based on the understanding that the Maghreb and Palestine are part of an overlapping, transnational (post)colonial history, rather than with texts that depict the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a matter of foreign policy. The much-discussed novel The Attack, by the ­Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra, as well as its critically acclaimed film adaptation, for example, do not fall within the purview of this book.23 Khadra’s novel presents Palestinian suicide bombing in the Israeli-­Palestinian context alone, without connecting it to a larger history of colonialism and violent

10  Introduction anticolonial resistance—a surprising omission given the use of guerrilla warfare tactics, including attacks targeting civilians, during Algeria’s war of independence. Franco-Tunisian writer Hubert Haddad’s 2007 novella Palestine, which relates the fate of an Israeli soldier who is taken hostage by Palestinian militants in the West Bank, is similarly devoid of any historical background, and adopts instead the reportage genre increasingly common in fiction writing.24 And even though Rachid Boudjedra, Noureddine Aba, and Tahar Ben Jelloun decidedly place Palestine within a colonial genealogy, they do so without conducting a crossed critique of postcolonial Maghrebi states and Israel.25 I have organized the six chapters of Transcolonial Maghreb into two parts, each of which is roughly chronological, to account for what I identify as the two main orientations of transcolonial identification with Palestine: Palestine as an exemplar of cultural decolonization and anti(neo) colonial struggle in the purportedly postcolonial present, and Palestine as a way to reassess the legacies of colonialism, particularly the separation between Jews and Arabs epitomized in Palestine-Israel. As will become clear, several problematics run through all the chapters of the book, none more centrally than the question of language: the imposition of French in the Maghreb, at the expense of Arabic, Hebrew, and Tamazight (among other languages) and the nefarious consequences of France’s preferential assimilation of indigenous Jews over Muslims. The related question of what public to address (the Francophone or Arabophone elites? the illiterate masses? France? the Mashriq? the Palestinians?) is similarly central to many of the texts under scrutiny here. As any scholar of Maghrebi (and more broadly postcolonial) literature will recognize, these are cardinal preoccupations for those writing in the wake of colonization. What I show in this book is that questions of language, assimilation, and public in the postcolony do not involve only the specter of colonialism. They are also debated and elaborated in relation to present, transcolonial relations. Palestine, I argue, is the interlocutor of choice in Maghrebi debates about the legacies of French colonial rule. The three chapters of Part One, “Decolonizing the Maghreb,” focus on texts that deploy Palestine as a model for the political and aesthetic transformation of the postcolonial Maghreb. Chapter One analyzes the representation of Palestine in the bilingual Moroccan Marxist-­Leninist journal Souffles-Anfas (1966–1971), the first text explicitly to connect cul-

Palestine as Metaphor  11 tural change in the Maghreb to an engagement for Palestine. I begin with this seminal text because it explicitly compares Palestine to Morocco on the basis of a similar history of colonization and acculturation, going so far as to draw a parallel between cultural imperialism in the Maghreb (e.g., continued French control over the publication and distribution of Maghrebi literature) and the “cultural annihilation” experienced by Palestinians under Israeli rule. Souffles-Anfas exemplifies what I call transcolonial identification with Palestine: forms of solidarity that are based on the understanding that the Maghreb and Palestine are part of an unfinished colonial history. I show that Palestine was a central interlocutor not only in the journal’s increasingly militant positions against the Moroccan regime but also in its efforts at “cultural decolonization,” including the recovery of the Arabic language and the development of experimental literary forms independent from both French and Arabic canons. Laâbi’s translations of Palestinian poetry in particular became the site of a reflection on the politics of culture, displacing the journal’s founding mission—the elaboration of an autonomous Moroccan literature—onto the Palestinian context. If the poets who launched Souffles-Anfas could write only in the colonial tongue, Palestinian poetry in Arabic—albeit translated into French—provided the model for cultural decolonization in an imperfectly decolonized Morocco. Souffles-Anfas’ five-year run coincided with the pan-Arab fervor following the June 1967 Israeli-Arab war, and the journal naturally inscribed Palestine within a pan-Arab, pro-Arabization agenda. In contrast, the popular theater troupe led by Kateb Yacine in the 1970s and 1980s mobilized Palestine in Darija and Tamazight against a state defined as Arab and ­Islamic. Chapter Two analyzes the figure of Palestine in Kateb’s first popular play, “Mohamed arfad valiztek” (Mohamed pack your bags), as the vehicle of a two-pronged critique of the postcolonial Algerian state and French and Israeli colonial discourses.26 I argue that the play’s comparison between France-Algeria and Israel-Palestine serves to condemn what Mireille Rosello calls the discourse of “postcolonial hospitality,” applied here to the context of anti-immigrant racism in France as well as to Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian subjects.27 Aimed at a popular Algerian public, “Mohamed arfad valiztek” further satirizes the Algerian state’s instrumentalization of the Algerian and Palestinian revolutions to rally popular ­support. Kateb’s popular theater begins to make evident the convergences

12  Introduction and overlaps between two apparently antithetical discourses, which will be the focus of Part Two: the discourse of assimilation, characteristic of French colonial discourse (Algeria is France), and the principle of separation that undergirds Zionism and the Israeli state (Jews vs. Arabs). Part One ends with a more critical take on Palestine as rallying cry in Mosteghanemi’s Algerian trilogy. Locating Mosteghanemi squarely in the Mashriqi cultural center—based in Beirut and the most widely read contemporary Arabic-language author today, she is far better known in the Mashriq than in her native Algeria—I show that her novels deploy the figure of the Palestinian guerrilla fighter and poet as a transnational allegory of revolution in the era of postcolonial disillusionment, reversing the classic nationalist trope of nation as woman. But if Mosteghanemi is rightly critical of feminine national allegories, I argue that she fails to interrogate her own metaphoric use of Palestine. Her contrapuntal allegories of ­Algeria and Palestine are symptomatic of what, adapting Graham Huggan’s terminology, I call “the transcolonial exotic”: a marketing of the margins (Algeria and Palestine) for consumption at the center (Beirut and Cairo).28 This is even more evident in the Syrian television series based on her first novel, which aired during the 2010 Ramadan in Tunis, months before the onset of the Tunisian revolution. Partly due to the constraints of the teledrama genre, the series goes even further than the original in exoticizing Palestine and Algeria for mass consumption, removing all traces of Mosteghanemi’s criticism of national allegory and postcolonial Algeria in the interest of pan-Arab patriotism. Part Two, titled “Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation,” elaborates on Kateb’s crossed critique of Zionist and French colonial discourse to investigate how debates about Palestine-Israel have served to reassess the legacies of colonialism in the Maghreb, particularly French minority politics aimed at separating Muslims and Jews. I begin this section, somewhat paradoxically, with the Tunisian writer Albert Memmi, known simultaneously as one of the most important theorists of colonialism (The Colonizer and the Colonized ) and as a staunch advocate for the state of Israel ( Jews and Arabs). Against the critical tendency to read Memmi’s texts on colonialism and Zionism separately, Chapter Four examines his later essays through the lens of his early work, particularly his theoretical analyses and fictional representations of the colonial separation between Jews and Arabs. Memmi’s critique of colonial minority politics seems to disap-

Palestine as Metaphor  13 pear from his later work, which endorses the colonial (and Zionist) separation between Jews and Arabs in order to claim Jewish indigeneity in Palestine. Yet even his most pro-Israeli essays make surprising comparisons between Palestinians and Maghrebis, including those he hesitantly calls “Arab Jews.” Despite Memmi’s apparent about-face from anticolonialism to Zionism, I argue that his later writings betray a transcolonial understanding of—if not identification with—Palestine. Ironically, Memmi’s early analyses of colonial minority politics and the role of assimilation in producing a “pyramid of petty tyrants” in the colony were used by several of his intellectual adversaries to disprove his claims about the history of Jewish-Muslim relations in the Maghreb.29 Chapter Five begins by examining Abdelkebir Khatibi’s 1974 pamphlet, Vomito blanco, written against Memmi as well as French intellectuals like Sartre who failed to recognize the colonial predicament of the Palestinians, despite their public support for Maghrebi independence.30 A violent polemic against Zionism, this treatise is markedly different in tone and genre from Khatibi’s later writings, and in particular, his exchanges with the Jewish Egyptian psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun and the French-­Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida. Whereas in his early pamphlet Khatibi engaged in a polemical tone similar to that deployed in Souffles-Anfas (he was an early contributor to the journal), his exchanges with Hassoun and Derrida are the occasion for a more meditative reflection on “the Abrahamic,” the tie that binds Jews and Muslims in spite of colonial and Zionist efforts to separate them. I revisit Khatibi’s notion of bi-langue—the in-­ between language he is compelled to practice as a result of the imposition of French—in light of these Abrahamic conversations and argue that he deploys bi-langue to resist not only assimilation but also the separation between Jews and Arabs. Conversely, I read Derrida’s writings on Algeria and Israel-Palestine through the lens of his exchanges with Khatibi, and show that his little known pro-Palestinian writings are rooted in his experience of French colonialism in Algeria. Like Chapter Five, Chapter Six begins with an explicit refutation of Memmi’s position on Jews and Arabs by the Moroccan writer Edmond Amran El Maleh. Though most critics have focused on the fictional recreation of Moroccan Jewish communities in his work, I argue that El Maleh’s representation of Jews in Morocco is inseparable from his “disidentification” with Israel and his rejection of the European and Zionist

14  Introduction construction of Jews and Arabs as opposite terms.31 Focusing on El Maleh’s novel Mille ans, un jour (A thousand years, one day), I show that his Judeo-­ Arabization of the French language works simultaneously against colonial assimilation and the divide-and-rule policies aimed at separating Jews and Arabs.32 But if El Maleh writes in support of the Palestinian cause, he also refuses to identify with or speak for the Palestinians, eschewing the dangers of representing the other as self. In pointing to the distance that remains between Maghreb and Palestine, El Maleh articulates transcolonial identification against identity, revealing the intimate connection, both historical and structural, between Palestine and the Maghreb without collapsing these heterogeneous figures. In the Epilogue I return to the use of Palestine as a metaphor of the colonial, broadly conceived, in the uprisings of the 2010s. Without effacing the important contextual and historical differences between and among current and past forms of transcolonial identification with Palestine, I argue that Samar Yazbek’s comparison between Palestinian refugees and Syrian subjects of Bashar al-Assad’s regime participates in a decadeslong political imaginary of Palestine as the figure par excellence of the kind of subjection epitomized in colonial rule, including in its post- and neocolonial guises. It will not escape the reader’s attention that Yazbek’s Palestine is more a sign of the deterioration of life in the purportedly postcolonial present than it is a beacon of revolution, as it was in the late 1960s and 1970s. There is a distinct sense, palpable through the chronological sequencing of the chapters in both parts of Transcolonial Maghreb and culminating in my Epilogue, that Palestine has become a figure for the failures of decolonization, by virtue of both a global postcolonial disillusionment and a Palestinian predicament that seems only to get worse with the passage of time. One can only hope that Palestine will again become a utopian figure, in the sense Said gives that term, in Syria, Egypt, Algeria, or indeed Palestine. This book was written with that hope and promise in mind.

1 Souffles-Anfas Palestine and the Decolonization of Culture

The first text explicitly to link Maghrebi culture and politics to the Palestinian question, the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas captures and exemplifies what I am calling transcolonial identification with Palestine: transnational forms of solidarity that are based on the understanding that Palestine and the Maghreb are part of an overlapping and unfinished colonial history. More explicitly than any other text in my corpus, Souffles-­ Anfas compares the plight of the Palestinians to the Maghrebi (post) colonial condition, including not only the experience of French colonization and acculturation but also continued French cultural and economic hegemony and the repressive tactics of the autocratic state. I argue that Palestine was a central interlocutor in the journal’s founding mission, “cultural decolonization”: the elaboration of cultural forms (literature, theater, orature, the visual arts), political models, and intellectual traditions that would break with both colonial (French) and pre-colonial (“traditional”) canons and norms.1 After June 1967, Palestine became the principal source of inspiration for Souffles-Anfas’ sustained reflection on language and culture, culminating in the launching of an Arabic-language journal, Anfas, and the dissemination of Palestinian poetry in French translation. I begin, in medias res, with a poem that dramatically stages the kinds of political imaginaries I will be calling transcolonial in this book, an impassioned plea for solidarity with Palestine written in the wake of the ArabIsraeli war of June 1967: my memory is long . . . Scars and grafts . . . weigh down my step but no longer stop my expansion

18   Decolonizing the Maghreb for a long time I dreamed  They were nightmares  Slow motion races of repetitive executions  Whirling eyes  Opium-burned demonstrations . . . Branded faces  Cataclysmic winds  The Atlas erupting in a deluge of collective memory memory . . .   You dictated to me the itinerary of violence .............................................................. I am the Arab man in History set in motion built anew by the vanguard of Palestinian guerrilla fighters Arab Arabs Arab a name to be remembered great voices    of my seismic deserts a people marches on through 8,000 kilometers raises tents command bases how many are we yes how many gentlemen statisticians of pain advance a number and the prophetic masses retort with infallible equations today WE     ARE      ALL         PALESTINIAN              REFUGEES tomorrow we will create     TWO . . .   THREE . . .   FIFTEEN  PALESTINES2

Abdellatif Laâbi’s “Nous sommes tous des réfugiés palestiniens” (We are all Palestinian refugees) intertextually inscribes Morocco and Palestine in a transnational history of popular protest and anticolonial struggle, culminating in a call to pan-Arab revolution. In this sense it constitutes a textbook example of the anticolonial fervor that swept across the Arab world after June 1967. It also perfectly captures the transnational character of what has come to be known as May ’68, and the centrality of anticolonial and Third Worldist thought to this event. The poem’s titular metaphor, reprised in the cascading layout and capital letters of the poem’s conclusion,

Souffles-Anfas  19 appropriates “we are all German Jews,” the famous French slogan of May ’68, for Palestine, while the final tribute to Ernesto Che Guevara’s call to “create two, three . . . many Vietnams” places Palestine at the vanguard of world struggles for social and political justice.3 But what fascinates me in this otherwise typical if not cliché pro-Palestinian poem is the “itinerary of violence” it sketches from French colonialism and Israeli expansionism to what Laâbi elsewhere calls “internal colonialism”: the postcolonial state’s subjection of its citizens.4 Although the medical and bodily metaphors that punctuate the first stanzas of the poem (“grafts,” “scars,” “burns,” “branded faces”) are clear references to the physical and psychological violence of colonization, any Moroccan of Laâbi’s generation would have recognized that they also evoke an event that marked the beginning of the “years of lead,” as the repressive regime of Hassan II (1962–1999) came to be known: the violent repression of a student demonstration in Casablanca on March 23, 1965.5 The “cataclysmic winds” that usher in postcolonial violence project the poet into the arms of “the prophetic masses” marching to Palestine, metaphorically collapsing Palestine and the rest of the Arab world in a common front against colonialism, writ large to include past and present, foreign and domestic forms of oppressive rule. Laâbi’s ode to Palestine was published in the fifteenth issue of Souffles (the plural of souffle, meaning breath or inspiration in French), a journal he founded with several poets and artists in 1966, ten years after Moroccan independence and exactly one year after the protests of March 1965.6 Initially a venue for experimental French-language poetry, from the second issue onward Souffles began publishing articles on popular theater, film, and art, and quickly became a platform for debates ranging from national culture and language to the continued effects of what its founders called “colonial science” on artistic and scholarly endeavors in postcolonial ­Morocco.7 In an editorial published after al-Naksa, Laâbi coined an expression that captures the journal’s broader cultural and political aim: “cultural decolonization,” the elaboration of literary and artistic forms that would break with French canons without seeking a return to tradition, which Laâbi, like Frantz Fanon before him, identified as a colonial construct.8 Souffles undertook this task on many fronts—scholarly production, the visual and performative arts, and cinema—but none more forcefully than poetry, its main focus from the outset. The texts published in the journal remain some of the most exciting examples of “linguistic guerrilla” from

20   Decolonizing the Maghreb the era, to use Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s felicitous turn of phrase: the irreverent, iconoclastic use of the colonial tongue, French, to decolonize Moroccan culture.9 Souffles-Anfas played a seminal role in the fields of Moroccan and Maghrebi literature, shaping debates about genre, form, language, and popular culture that continue to be central to the field today. From the first issue onward, it published iconoclastic and formally inventive texts, for the most part experimental poetry written in French, and later in Arabic as well, by the likes of Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelkebir Khatibi, M ­ ostafa Nissa­bouri, Malek Haddad, and Mohamed Zafzaf, now among the most canonic postcolonial Maghrebi writers. The journal clearly positioned itself on the Maghrebi cultural scene, breaking with what it characterized as “official pseudo-­literature” (salon literature) in Morocco,10 and challenging predecessors such as Albert Memmi and Haddad, who famously prophesied the death of Francophone Maghrebi literature.11 ­Souffles-Anfas’ assessments of writers such as Kateb Yacine, Driss Chraïbi, and Rachid Boudjedra as well as its editorials on the role of the French language in Morocco made clear the journal’s commitment to decolonizing Maghrebi culture. Kateb in particular was singled out as the writer who had done most in this regard, through the invention of a Maghrebi “mythology” aimed at suturing the layers of Algerian history torn asunder by colonialism.12 As we will see, the journal also played a pioneering role in promoting dialogue between Arabic- and French-language writers in the Maghreb. An essential compendium of early postcolonial Maghrebi literature, Souffles-Anfas also constitutes an important if neglected archive of 1960s political thought and experimental writing. The journal published key postcolonial texts such as “Toward a third cinema,” the manifesto penned by Argentine directors Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas,13 and the Black Panthers’ ten-point program.14 It was instrumental in introducing a Moroccan and Maghrebi readership to foundational anti- and post­ colonial texts by the likes of Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, René Depestre, and Mahmoud Darwish. The journal’s internationalization went hand in hand with its political radicalization. After the communist militant Abraham Serfaty joined the Souffles team in 1968, the journal adopted an explicitly leftist orientation and became a tribune for politically divisive domestic issues ranging from education reforms and miners’ strikes to the status of the Western Sahara.15 In 1970, Laâbi and Serfaty founded a

Souffles-Anfas  21 Marxist-Leninist party, ­Ilal-Amam (Forward), and the journal became a de facto mouthpiece for the party. Given the journal’s overtly leftist and oppositional stance, it is surprising it survived as long as it did, at the height of state censorship and repression. In 1972, Laâbi and Serfaty were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, Laâbi for eight years and Serfaty for seventeen. After twenty-two issues of Souffles and eight issues of Anfas, the companion Arabic-language journal founded in 1971, the journal ceased publication.16 In part because of this singular and high-profile political trajectory, critics have tended to situate Souffles-Anfas in a national (Moroccan) or at best regional (Maghrebi) framework, neglecting its transnational dimensions. They have also tended to focus on the early, more literary issues of Souffles—the avant-garde poetry review rather than the Marxist-Leninist journal.17 Without downplaying Souffles-Anfas’ important role as a venue for postcolonial Moroccan and Maghrebi literature, as a forum for debates on Maghrebi culture, and as a key player in post-independence Moroccan politics, I argue that, after al-Naksa, Souffles-Anfas consistently placed Palestine at the vanguard of the cultural and political battles it was waging on the home front. In other words, the journal’s response to the renewed urgency of anticolonial struggle was to advocate for the decolonization of Palestine, seen as the vanguard of cultural and political resistance and renewal across the Arabic-speaking world. It is not a coincidence that Palestine played such a pivotal role in the journal. Souffles was founded just before the event that would put the Palestinian question on the map, in the Maghreb and globally: the Arab-­ Israeli war that began on June 5, 1967, and culminated in Israel’s annexation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The journal bears the imprint of this event and of the heady days of pan-Arab and Arab nationalist sentiment that followed. If the protests of March 23, 1965, were a foundational trauma for Souffles-Anfas at the national level, June 5, 1967, was its equivalent at the level of the “Arab nation,” which became a rubric in the journal after the special issue on Palestine. The ubiquitous image of the Palestinian guerrilla fighter, the feda’i (literally, martyr) donning his characteristic checkered headscarf, the kufiya, and carrying a Kalashnikov, is typical of the Pan-Arab iconography of the 1960s and reappears throughout Souffles-Anfas from the special Palestine issue onward (see cover image and Fig. 1). Yet despite its recourse to pan-Arab discourse and iconography,

figure 1.  Front cover of Souffles 15 (1969), special issue “For the Palestinian Revolution,” by Mohamed Chebaa. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc (BNRM). Reprinted with permission.

Souffles-Anfas  23 Souffles-Anfas distanced itself explicitly from adab al-hazima (“the literature of defeat”), the heterogeneous corpus occasioned by the crushing defeat of June 1967, seen not as a singular military reversal but as marking the decline of Arab civilization broadly speaking.18 In contrast to this corpus, the editorial of Souffles 6, published immediately after the war, marked the journal’s distance from invocations of patriotism, condemning instead what it described as a colonial war and warning against Arab states’ recuperation of nationalist sentiments.19 Unlike adab al-hazima, Souffles-Anfas did not lend Palestine a merely illustrative function. As I will argue, Palestine became a model of cultural decolonization for the journal, particularly in the domains of language use and poetic form. Published two years after the June 1967 war, Souffles’ special issue on Palestine, titled “Pour la révolution palestinienne” (For the Palestinian revolution) crystallizes in condensed form the ways in which Palestine came to signify the colonial in the journal, broadly defined to include past and present, domestic and foreign forms of rule. An early example of transcolonial solidarity with Palestine, Souffles 15 features poems by Maghrebi, Palestinian, and Lebanese writers (including “Nous sommes tous des réfugiés palestiniens”), posters by Moroccan artists (see cover image and Figs. 2 and 3), cartoons about the Arab-Israeli conflict (see Fig. 4), essays on the Palestinian question, an important article by Serfaty on Moroccan Jews, anti-Zionist tracts by Israeli and Jewish intellectuals and activists, and a collective “Appel aux écrivains marocains” (Appeal to Maghrebi writers). This latter text illustrates with particular clarity the emergence of Palestine as the figure of the colonial, and the ways in which Palestine was brought to bear on the legacies of French colonialism in the Maghreb. The appeal explicitly compares the Maghreb to Palestine not only in the past (when France held sovereignty over the region) but also in the purportedly postcolonial present. Drawing an explicit parallel between I­ srael’s ongoing “cultural annihilation”20 of Palestine on the one hand and the “deculturation”21 of the Maghreb on the other, it connects processes of colonial acculturation (the suppression of indigenous languages and cultural forms by French and Israeli colonial regimes) to more insidious forms of ­cultural imperialism, such as metropolitan control over Maghrebi cultural production through the institutions of Francophonie and French publishing and distribution circuits. The best form of resistance to both processes, according to the appeal’s signatories, was not cultural retrenchment

figure 2.  Poster by Mohamed Melehi, “Palestine,” Souffles 15 (1969). Source: BNRM. Reprinted with permission.

figure 3.  Poster by Tahar Ben Jelloun, “Fath,” Souffles 15 (1969). Source: BNRM. Reprinted with permission.

26   Decolonizing the Maghreb

figure 4.  Two cartoons by George Wolinski, Souffles 15 (1969). (“You’re a German. You must support Nazism. / You’re a Frenchman. You must support Pétainism. / You’re a Jew. You must support Zionism.” “I’m a Palestinian / Impossible! You don’t exist / Could you hold this for me for a minute? / Whoa! A grenade! / I don’t understand how you can be afraid of something that doesn’t exist / My problem is my existence, not yours”) Source: BNRM. Reprinted with permission.

but aesthetic innovation. Instead of calling for a purely militant literature, they advocated in distinctly Fanonian terms for a radical rethinking of the forms adopted for cultural combat, posing anew the question that framed Souffles-Anfas’ project from the outset: What forms and languages are best suited to the task of cultural decolonization? The anticolonial struggle in Palestine underscored the centrality of the relation between formal innovation and revolutionary content, pointing to the dangers of a return to a fetishized past that would inadvertently reproduce colonial folklore: “This revolution . . . confirms the need that we have long proclaimed to call into question the ossified contents and forms of our traditional culture and the mystifying reasoning of bourgeois Western culture.”22

Souffles-Anfas  27 In order to be up to the task of representing Palestine, Maghrebi writers had to break free from the double constraints of cultural imperialism and “traditional culture,” positioning the anticolonial struggle of the Palestinians as the driving force for the development of a new literature in the Maghreb. With its appeal in support of Palestine, Souffles articulated its sharpest and most explicit critique to date of continued French control over Maghrebi cultural production. Henceforth, Palestine became a rallying cry for the struggle against French cultural imperialism in the Maghreb. The journal’s renewed anticolonial vigilance is evidenced in the striking contrast between two important literary reviews published in the journal, one before the June 1967 war, the other after the special issue on Palestine: Laâbi’s reviews of Driss Chraïbi’s Le passé simple (The Simple Past), a novel published two years before Moroccan independence, and of the young Algerian writer Rachid Boudjedra’s iconoclastic first novel, La ­répudiation.23 In the first, Laâbi conceded that Chraïbi’s critique of tradition and Moroccan patriarchy had been delivered too early, at a time when anticolonial struggle had to take precedence over auto-critique. But he never­ theless insisted on the need to expose various forms of “auto-­colonization” at work in Maghrebi societies, revalidating a work that had been cast aside during the anticolonial struggle as an example of cultural decolonization avant la lettre.24 In contrast, in his review of The Repudiation, a novel published seven years after Algerian independence, Laâbi warned in stark terms against the normalization of colonial discourse. Noting that Boudjedra’s novel had been well received in France, he accused the French publisher of letting colonialism off the hook and called on the author to refuse the prestigious French Goncourt prize, or any such “attempt to recoup and integrate his work,”25 if he should receive it: The publisher does not refrain from saying (and we can feel a sense of self-­ satisfaction and vengeful spirit) about La répudiation: “Refusing to make colonialism responsible for all the problems his country suffers, he takes a passionate stand against stifling ancestral traditions.” Obviously I am not about to hold a congress to defend these stifling ancestral traditions, but it’s a long way between doing that and granting any kind of reprieve, any semblance of rehabilitation, to the colonial system.26

Laâbi’s warning is all the more striking in that Boudjedra’s iconoclastic novel corresponds exactly to the kind of anticonformist, experimental, and incendiary literature Souffles was founded to promote. If Laâbi praised

28   Decolonizing the Maghreb Boudjedra’s anti-ethnographic, subversive style and categorized his novel as a kind of “terrorist-realism,” he nevertheless felt the need to caution strongly against what he perceived to be the metropolitan recuperation of Maghrebi literature.27 The journal’s renewed vigilance with regard to continued French control over the production, dissemination, and reception of Maghrebi literature was explicitly articulated in reaction to, and in solidarity with, the “cultural annihilation” of the Palestinians. At the same time, Souffles also expressed increasing skepticism vis-à-vis the French language, seen as a vehicle of neocolonialism. It is important to remember that Souffles was founded as a venue for French-language poetry, by poets and artists whose primary language of expression was French, not Arabic. If Laâbi and other contributors had debated the question of language use in early issues,28 Souffles’ militancy for Palestine from its 1969 special issue onward provoked a full-fledged language crisis in the journal, leading to the founding of an Arabic-language venue, Anfas, which was to become the main focus of the journal. As I will show in the final part of this chapter, Palestine was to provide a way out of this language crisis through Laâbi’s translations of Palestinian poetry. The journal’s shift to Arabic was a gradual process, beginning with a sustained practice of translation between Arabic and French. Fittingly, the journal’s first translation efforts were aimed at making the Palestinian question legible to a Maghrebi audience. In 1968, Souffles reprinted excerpts of a French translation of the Syrian poet Adonis’ “Le manifeste du 5 juin 1967” (The manifesto of the 5th of June, 1967), obtained courtesy of the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan. Cofounder of the poetry review Shi‘r (­Poetry) and creator of Mawaqif (Positions), an experimental poetry journal praised in Souffles for its renewal of the Arabic language and poetic forms,29 Adonis was an obvious interlocutor for the journal. Using al-Naksa as a pretext to decolonize “contemporary Arab thought,” Adonis’ manifesto is a fierce critique of Arab “mimic-men” and a call to invent a new “Arab man” capable of original, nonderivative thought.30 The editors strategically placed his manifesto at the outset of Souffles 9 to mark the importance of the Arabic language and Palestine, metonymically captured in the date of the Arab defeat. In their introductory note, they presented Adonis’ manifesto as an avant-garde, anti(neo)colonial text, and explained that the publication of this text was to be the first in a series of analyses of the Arab world designed to bridge the gap between Mashriq and Maghreb.31

Souffles-Anfas  29 After the June 1967 war, translation became a means to decolonize the borders separating Maghreb and Mashriq, and within the Maghreb, French and Arabic. The three issues that followed the publication of Adonis’ manifesto (Souffles 10–11, 12, and 13–14) were bilingual ones, showcasing French- and Arabic-language poems and texts. The journal’s ideal, bilingual reader could peruse these issues in both directions: from left to right, the French poems, and from right to left, the Arabic ones. This cross-­linguistic enterprise lasted until the special issue on Palestine, which, though entirely written or translated into French, explicitly tied the dialogue between French- and Arabic-language writers to the Palestinian question. In the aforementioned appeal to Maghrebi writers, the journal called for the integration of Maghrebi literature into “la littérature arabe” (Arab or Arabic literature), whatever its languages might be. For the signatories of the appeal, Palestine required particularly from Maghrebi writers of French expression (if it has not already been achieved), a radical geo-cultural reorientation: the development of dialogue and a confrontation with the creators of the Arab Mashriq in order to establish that in reality our literature, regardless of its language of expression and in this precise phase of decolonization, is an integral part of Arabic literature, to which its fate is in every way tied.32

In the wake of al-Naksa, the borders drawn between Maghreb and Mashriq had become irrelevant. Maghrebi literature was now fully a part of what the signatories of the appeal called “Arab(ic) literature,” playing on the polysemy of the French and Arabic adjectives arabe and ‘arabi(ya), which, unlike in English, can be used to modify the language as well as the people. In this reading, Palestine was not only at the forefront of popular revolt in the Arab world; it also led the way in renewing Arab(ic) literature in all languages. Souffles 15 marked a shift in the journal’s content and format, reflecting the politicization of the journal from 1968 onward. In the prologue of the Palestine issue, the editors announced a “new orientation” away from exclusively literary concerns, which they now deemed a “luxury.”33 After this issue, the journal adopted a different layout, new rubrics (including “The Arab nation”) and a more politics-heavy content.34 The transition to Arabic was presented as an outcome or corollary of the shift toward political issues, and as an explicitly political gesture. For Souffles-Anfas, the Palestinian question required the full decolonization of Maghrebi culture,

30   Decolonizing the Maghreb beginning with the turn to Arabic, which would put an end to what Laâbi described, in Marxist terms, as “linguistic alienation.”35 As late as 1970, Laâbi continued to defend the use of French as a temporary and transitional tool for cultural decolonization, yet he did so in increasingly anticolonial terms. It is worth citing Laâbi’s description of the quasi-military operation of pacification and infiltration of the French language: The operation consists on the one hand of neutralizing—on the level of terminology and cultural models—the negative elements promoted by the foreign tongue and on the other hand of forcing this language to absorb other terms and models specific to our culture. This is how one achieves an operation of transculturation without transforming the desired goal (expressing our totality) into a kind of cultural synthesis. This is why it is often said that Maghrebi or Negro-African literature of French expression is nothing short of a terrorist literature, i.e. a literature that on all levels (syntactic, phonetic, morphological, graphical, symbolic, etc.) shatters the original logic of the French language.36

It is striking that Laâbi uses the metaphor of terrorism to describe the subversion of the colonial tongue, echoing both the Algerian writer Kateb ­Yacine’s account of his embattled relationship to French and, as we will see, statements by Palestinian poets such as Mahmoud Darwish, whom he had begun translating. Terrorism, the ultimate weapon of the colonized against the colonizer, had been used as a measure of last recourse in the Algerian revolution, and though Laâbi could not know it at the time of writing, it would soon begin to make headlines in the context of Palestine-Israel. Invoking yesterday’s (Algerian) mujahidin and today’s (Palestinian) feda’in, Laâbi’s felicitous expression remains Souffles-Anfas’ most evocative formulation of literary decolonization. Yet even as Laâbi defended a subversive practice of French, he acknowledged the urgent need for Arabization, effectively signing the death warrant of Francophone literature that he had staunchly refused to advocate for in earlier issues.37 In his foreword to Souffles 22, which would be the last issue of the French-language journal, Laâbi announced the creation of Anfas (the plural of nafs, meaning “breath” or “soul” in Arabic) a few months earlier, and explained that henceforth it would be the journal’s privileged venue. Written in an accessible style, language, and format and dedicated to issues affecting the Arab world, Anfas would achieve the libera-

Souffles-Anfas  31 tion of the masses “from Palestine to the Western Sahara.”38 Laâbi presented Anfas as a way out of what he termed a “flagrant contradiction,” the fact that the journal was advocating anti-imperial struggle in a colonial tongue: Today more than ever before—and particularly in a country like ours whose historical destiny, whose destiny of struggle and liberation, is permanently linked to the destiny of the entire Arab nation—the struggle against imperialist franco­ phonie and the use of the Arabic language in all domains of thought and expression are one of the fundamental conditions of our disalienation and of our true commitment to the liberation struggle.39

Though Souffles would continue to be issued for a Francophone and Western public, the French language could no longer play an active part in cultural decolonization. On the contrary, the recovery of Arabic became a precondition for the decolonization of Maghrebi culture, considered within a broader regional framework. In May 1971, Anfas was born, confirming the turn toward Arabic at the expense of French. Anfas did not solve the problem of accessibility, however. The gradual shift to Arabic through translation, bilingual publication, and the creation of Anfas aimed to broaden the journal’s readership nationally and regionally. Like the bilingual issues featuring French-language poetry in the first half and Arabic-language poetry in the second, and in accordance with the appeal published in the special Palestine issue, the foundation of a parallel Arabic-language venue was aimed at suturing the gap between French and Arabic, Maghreb and Mashriq. But this cross-linguistic move failed fully to take into account the “linguistic drama” of the Maghreb, where French acculturation policies had rendered the Arabic language inaccessible to many intellectuals (including the founders of Souffles), and where a large part of the population was illiterate in both French and Arabic.40 If the majority of Moroccans spoke the local Arabic dialect (Darija) and/or Tamazight (Berber), only a very small fraction could read classical or literary Arabic. Though Souffles-Anfas was careful to insist on the plural cultures of Morocco, including its Berber, Jewish, and sub-Saharan African traditions, describing Darija and Tamazight as important components of a rich cultural heritage,41 these languages remain what Jacqueline Kaye and Abdelhamid Zoubir call “allegories of orality” in the journal, rather than experiments in popular culture. Laâbi and the Souffles poets could not recover “the tribal language,” but only evoke “the search for that ­recovery.”42 Given the inordinately high rate of illiteracy and the prevalence of Tamazight in ­Morocco,

32   Decolonizing the Maghreb it is surprising that Souffles-Anfas adopted literary Arabic as a tool of democratization, a fact that would be leveled against it during the rise of the Berber movements in the 1980s.43 The journal’s radical language choice was firmly in line with the push for Arabization across the Maghreb in the postcolonial period, a movement that was premised on developing literacy, but in Arabic rather than French.44 Souffles-Anfas’ interest in popular culture did not disappear entirely. Rather, it was gradually displaced onto the analogous context of occupied Palestine. The penultimate issue of Souffles, titled “Pour un enseignement populaire” (For a popular pedagogy), provides a visual clue of this transcolonial displacement through the insertion of a single image within a series of articles on the insufficiencies of education in Morocco and literacy campaigns from China to Vietnam, Cuba, and Albania. Without transition or introduction, the article on Albania segues to a black-and-white photograph of kufiya-wearing feda’in attentively following a literacy lesson on a makeshift blackboard propped up against a tent. A brief caption explains: “In the Palestinian feda’i camps, revolution and pedagogy are inseparable” (see Fig. 5).45 Given the importance of the March 1965 student protests for the founding members of Souffles-Anfas, many of them ­teachers, and given the journal’s increasing militancy for Palestine at this time, the laconic inclusion of a photograph depicting Palestinian literacy campaigns in a special issue on pedagogy was clearly meant to present Palestine as a model for the derelict Moroccan educational system. Here as in its special Palestine issue, Souffles-Anfas regarded Palestine as the vanguard of cultural revolution in the Third World. From this point onward, it also embraced Palestine as a local struggle exemplified in its vernacular culture, including, as we will see, the Palestinian Arabic dialect. In the remainder of this chapter, I show that Laâbi’s translations, presentation, and exegesis of Palestinian poetry in and alongside Souffles-Anfas became the staging ground for a sustained reflection on cultural decolonization in Arabic. Souffles’ special issue on education signaled a new and ambitious effort in the journal, taken on single-handedly by Laâbi: the dissemination of Palestinian poetry in French translation. Laâbi’s first published translation, of Samih al-Qassim’s post-Naska poem “On the fifth of June,” had already appeared in the special Palestinian issue.46 In 1970, Laâbi published the firstever French-language anthology of Palestinian poetry, entirely translated by him, La poésie palestinienne de combat (Palestinian combat poetry).47 The

Souffles-Anfas  33

figure 5.  “In the Palestinian feda’i camps, revolution and pedagogy are inseparable,” Souffles 20–21 (1971). Source: BNRM. Reprinted with permission.

“popular pedagogy” issue features an announcement about Laâbi’s anthology as well as the transcript of his contribution to a summit of Arab poets in Beirut, which places Maghrebi and Palestinian poets at the forefront of a cultural renaissance in the Arab world. Here Laâbi makes clear what ties the Maghreb to Palestine. Before proclaiming the unity of revolutionary Arab poets from Casablanca to Cairo, Beirut, and Palestine, Laâbi begins by listing “some of the specifically Maghrebi contributions to the vast movement of cultural, ideological, and revolutionary renewal [renaissance] our great nation is experiencing thanks to the tireless struggles of our people, and at their vanguard, the revolutionary Palestinian people.” If all Arab intellectuals bear the mark of colonialism and cultural imperialism, in the Maghreb, the colonial rape was more ambitious, more extremist, and often more brutal. This is why we are more severely traumatized, our cultures are more underdeveloped, our intellectuals and cadres are more deeply alienated, but also, with hindsight, why we have a more clinical understanding of colonial and neo­ colonial phenomena, of their racist and ethnocentric foundations.48

34   Decolonizing the Maghreb For Laâbi, the degree and nature of the colonial rule imposed on the Maghreb, and in particular the processes of deculturation and acculturation that were the hallmark of French colonialism, made postcolonial Maghrebi intellectuals particularly apt to elaborate a practice of cultural resistance in the face of new forms of cultural imperialism and outright colonial rule, most vividly illustrated in Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Laâbi concluded his address with an homage to the Palestinian poets ­Darwish, al-Qassim, Tawfiq Zayyad, and Fadwa Touqan, who were unable to attend the summit because of the very “political and cultural aggression” that made revolutionary poetry so urgent.49 Bookending Laâbi’s address, then, are the Maghreb and Palestine, cast as the two standard bearers of anti(neo)colonial struggle in the Arab world. The poems Laâbi chose to translate in his anthology are drawn from the corpus that the Palestinian writer and literary critic Ghassan ­Kanafani famously dubbed adab al-muqawama (“resistance literature”): popular literature and orature written to protest colonial rule and resist cultural imperialism.50 Laâbi’s use of the distinctly Fanonian phrase combat poetry reinscribes these anticolonial poems within a transcolonial canon exemplified in the militant poetry propounded in Souffles.51 Even more clearly than his address to the Arab poets’ summit, Laâbi’s long introduction to the anthology compares the Maghreb and Palestine on the basis of an analogous experience of colonization. Inscribing Palestinian poetry within “a Second Nahda” or “Renaissance”—the effervescence of literary production accompanying anticolonial movements in the Maghreb and Mashriq after 194552—the introduction implicitly situates Darwish and al-Qassim alongside Laâbi and the Souffles poets. It is impossible not to think of ­Laâbi’s remarks on the violence of colonization in the Maghreb when reading his introduction to Palestinian poetry, which stresses the “cultural and national annihilation” of the Palestinian people: the expulsion of the educated urban classes in 1948, the cultural embargo imposed on internally displaced Palestinians, the distortion and suppression of Palestinian history and culture, and the censorship and repression exerted on Palestinian writers residing in Israel. Laâbi did not neglect other aspects of Israeli colonialism (the expulsion of the Palestinians, the annexation of their land, and their destitution to the rank of “third-class citizens”53), but his descriptions of the diverse forms of deculturation aimed at destroying Palestinian culture—for example, the “sound colonial logic” according to which Zion-

Souffles-Anfas  35 ism had to “[attack] the history and memory of the Palestinian ­people”54— directly hearken to Souffles-Anfas’ analyses of cultural imperialism in the Maghreb. Later passages extend this comparison to the post­colonial present, suggesting similarities between direct strategies of colonial acculturation deployed in Palestine and more diffuse forms of French cultural hegemony in the Maghreb—a transcolonial comparison first made, as we have seen, in the appeal to Maghrebi writers published in the special issue on Palestine. Presenting Palestinian poetry as a form of “denunciation of the attempt to ‘Israelize’ the Arab Palestinian people” and a “defense and illustration of this people,”55 Laâbi emphasized above all else the cultural dimension of anticolonial struggle: the undoing of “Israelization,” a phrase reminiscent of francisation, the twin processes of deculturation and assimilation that were the hallmark of French colonialism. Laâbi’s translations also reveal that he was as concerned with the form as with the content of resistance, strengthening the links between the early formal explorations of Souffles and those of the Palestinian poets. Echoing a Fanonian understanding of culture as the engine of revolution and storehouse of the people, Laâbi honed in on the role of popular culture in Palestinian resistance to Israeli acculturation and deculturation policies. In his biographical note on Zayyad, for example, he foregrounds his use of “the rhythms and refrains of popular poetry” and of “the Palestinian Arabic ­dialect.”56 His choice of poems accordingly represents a varied repertoire of popular forms: dialogue and song in Darwish’s “Song for the men,”57 story­ telling in Zayyad’s “Sirhan and the pipeline”58—and a narrative corpus composed of Arabic legends, Greek myths, and Biblical and Qur’anic motifs. If the differences in register and dialect are to a large extent lost on the Francophone reader, the heterogeneity of sources, oral quality, and mythic tone of these poems foreground the dynamic, multilayered dimension of the poetic revival in Occupied Palestine—a revival that Laâbi explicitly connected to the poetic experimentation in which he and his Souffles-­Anfas collaborators had participated. In his translator’s note to the anthology, Laâbi accordingly emphasized his position as an anticolonial poet of the French language, opposing his engagement with Palestinian poetry to an Orientalist tradition that would seek to render Palestinian folklore into “the ‘distinctive nature [génie distinctif ]’” of the French language for “a public hungry for local color and folklore. . . . That is why, as an Arab poet, I have tried to understand the work of my ­Palestinian brothers from

36   Decolonizing the Maghreb the inside, and to restore its voice, its inspiration [souffle], its profound exigency.”59 As we will see, it is as a “terrorist” poet that Laâbi translated Palestinian poetry, producing a French-language anticolonial corpus reminiscent, in many ways, of the poetry published in Souffles-Anfas. Laâbi’s anthology opens with what remains the most iconic example of Palestinian resistance literature: Darwish’s “Identity card.”60 “Record! / I am Arab,” the refrain of this incendiary poem and a rallying cry for the Palestinian cause, constitutes a manifesto for cultural resistance—what, in Laâbi’s address to the Arab poets’ summit, he termed a “legitimate defense” against colonial racism.61 It is of note that Laâbi uses an expression borrowed from the Martinican journal credited with paving the way for Negritude, the literary movement that seized the derogatory term Negro and turned it into the agent of a black cultural renaissance, to explain the Maghreb’s experience of acculturation, more analogous to that of the French Caribbean than the still predominantly Arabophone Mashriq.62 The translation of Darwish’s refrain into French (“Inscris / je suis arabe”) in an anthology of resistance poetry cannot but echo anticolonial Francophone literature, transforming the racialized epithet Arab into a positive marker of identity. Though Darwish did not write in dialect or free verse and chose instead to experiment with classical Arabic forms, the language of this poem bears a strong resemblance to the “terrorist” use of French practiced by the Souffles-Anfas poets. Written during Darwish’s first incarceration, “Identity card” gives voice to a peasant who wields the identity imposed by the colonizer—the appellation Arab—in order to reclaim his stolen “name,” “orchards,” and “land.”63 The imperative refrain and reiterated self-affirmation (“­Record! / I am Arab”), the series of questions posed to the colonizer, locking him or her in direct confrontation (“are you going to get angry?”; “are you satisfied with my condition?”64) and the violent images (“if I go hungry / I will eat the flesh of my oppressor / beware .  .  . beware / my hunger / and my anger!!”65) formulate a kind of textual warfare against the colonizer, while the familiar register and informal tone of address echo the irreverent and incendiary tone of the French-language poetry published in Souffles. At a time when Souffles-Anfas had abandoned the task of founding a “terrorist literature” in French, Laâbi redirected the journal’s cultural decolonization efforts toward Palestine, simultaneously supporting Palestinian resistance to Israeli cultural imperialism and waging “linguistic guerrilla” in French translation.

Souffles-Anfas  37 I have argued that Palestine represented a way out of the language crisis in the journal—a means to continue the journal’s founding mission, cultural decolonization, without staying in the orbit of France and the French language. But it was also much more than this. The first text to tie the cultural decolonization of the Maghreb explicitly to the Palestinian question, Souffles-Anfas attests to the emergence of Palestine as a figure of the colonial, writ large to include past and present, external and internal forms of (post/neo)colonial state violence. Souffles-Anfas begins to gesture toward the ways in which Palestine and the Maghreb can reciprocally illuminate new facets of the colonial condition in this modified understanding. By way of conclusion, I turn to a telling “error” of translation in Laâbi’s anthology, one that effects a perhaps unintentional but politically productive transcolonial comparison between Palestine and Morocco. What I am calling a mistranslation is in fact a very minor but significant lexical change Laâbi made in the translation of an interview with Darwish, included in annex form at the end of the anthology. Laâbi liberally underscores key passages of the interview to reveal parallels between French and Israeli practices of cultural imperialism, for example when Darwish speaks of “the brainwashing operation” he was subjected to in school, and his realization of “the encroachment of cultural colonization.”66 Similarly, in the passage below, Darwish is describing physical restrictions imposed by Israeli authorities on Palestinian writers, and by extension on all Palestinians—restrictions on work, movement, and civil liberties, censorship and censure, house arrest, imprisonment, and arbitrary trials: “Write what you want and pay the price that we want.” That is the unwritten rule. But what is this price? You will not be able to work, you will not be able to move around freely, you will no longer be free and you will constantly be subject to ­arrest. The states of exception from the protectorate era, which remain in place, allow the military authorities to use any measure against any citizen without having to give him an explanation or try him in court.67

It is striking that Laâbi uses the French euphemism for its Moroccan and Tunisian colonies, protectorate, as an equivalent for the administratively different category mandate (technically, mandates were destined to achieve national sovereignty under League of Nations supervision, unlike protectorates and colonies), (mis)translating one colonial context (Mashriqi) as

38   Decolonizing the Maghreb identical to another (Maghrebi). If this was an intentional mistake, Laâbi was most likely aiming for legibility. Unlike colonies governed by direct rule (Algeria), the semi-indirect rule exerted in the protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia resembled that of British and French mandates in the Levant. More significantly, Laâbi’s translation choice deliberately places Zionism in a palimpsestic narrative of colonialism spanning the Frenchruled Maghreb and the French- and British-ruled Mashriq. It is true that Laâbi’s use of the term protectorate is historically inaccurate. But I argue that it productively translates Darwish’s anticolonial critique in terms legible to a Maghrebi readership. For although the Palestinian poet begins by (ironically) underscoring the nominally democratic nature of the Israeli regime—which, unlike France in Morocco, theoretically allows freedom of opinion and expression—he immediately exposes its recourse to British colonial law as punishment for any unwelcome license. Laâbi’s translation simultaneously reveals that the Palestinian question is part of a larger European colonial history that exceeds the frame of Zionism/­Israel, and that it remains a colonial question despite superficial changes in nomenclature (occupation vs. colonization, parliamentary democracy vs. colonial regime). It is particularly chilling to read Darwish’s account of the house arrest and censorship experienced by Palestinian poets in Israel-Palestine in light of the violent crackdown on Souffles-Anfas just one year after ­Laâbi’s anthology was published. Laâbi could not have known that his first audience, as a translator, would be his fellow inmates in Kenitra Central prison.68 In his 2010 memoir, Laâbi revisits his “love affair” with Palestine, claiming that the Palestinian question was the trigger for his political coming-to-­consciousness in 1960s Morocco.69 Noting the exquisite irony by which Palestinian poetry written in jail-like conditions came to be read in Moroccan prisons, Laâbi describes the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a gigantic prison—a strong statement for someone who spent eight years of his life behind bars—and remarks that his own poetry is better known in Israeli jails than in Moroccan schools.70 The ironic parallel Laâbi surreptitiously draws between Israeli and Moroccan prisons powerfully underscores the potency of what I am calling transcolonial identification. Palestine represents, in Souffles-Anfas and in Laâbi’s translation enterprise, the colonial, reconfigured to include French and Israeli colonial discourses and practices as well as the repressive tactics of the postcolonial state. It

Souffles-Anfas  39 also enables a crossed critique of French, Israeli, and, indirectly, “internal” Moroccan colonization, a critique that ultimately failed to eschew state censorship and repression. In the two remaining chapters of Part One, I explore how two very different writers, Kateb Yacine and Ahlam ­Mosteghanemi, deployed Palestine as a privileged figure of the colonial in order to critique the Algerian state.

2 Transcolonial Hospitality Kateb Yacine’s Experiments in Popular Theater

When Laâbi described the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine as one of the most important precursors in literary innovation in the Maghreb,1 he was thinking of his French-language novels, plays, and poetry, most centrally his iconic allegorical novel Nedjma and a series of anticolonial plays written at the height of the Algerian war of independence.2 By the time Anfas was founded, Kateb had embarked on a new adventure: popular theater in the spoken languages of Algeria, the Algerian Arabic dialect (Darija), and Taqbaylit or Kabyle, a Tamazight language. Where the Souffles-Anfas team sought to resolve the paradox of decolonizing Moroccan culture by turning to literary Arabic, envisioned as a bridge to Palestine, Kateb explicitly positioned himself against the official language of the Algerian state. From 1971 to his premature death in 1989, Kateb and his theater troupe, The Worker’s Cultural Action (Al-nishat al-thaqafi li al-‘umal / L’Action Culturelle des Travailleurs, hereafter ACT) produced a series of satirical plays on topics ranging from emigration, Imazighen (Berber) history, and women’s rights to the struggle for self-determination in the Western Sahara and Palestine. In this chapter, I focus on the first play Kateb staged with the ACT, “­Mohamed arfad valiztek” / Mohamed prends ta valise (Mohamed pack your bags), which compares postcolonial Algerian migrants and Palestinian refugees in a crossed critique of colonial and postcolonial France, Zionism and Israel, and the Algerian state. I argue that the play’s trans­ colonial comparison between Algeria and Palestine shores up the structural parallels and historical convergences between French colonial and Zionist/

42   Decolonizing the Maghreb Israeli discourse, in particular the apparently opposed ideologies of assimilation (Algeria is France) and separation (Jews versus Arabs). More surprisingly, it also undermines what I call the discourse of fraternity: state articulations of national identity as Arab and Muslim, often through the demagogic use of the figure of Palestine. “Mohamed arfad valiztek” is in this sense exemplary of how Palestine has been subverted from state discourse in the service of anti(neo)colonial critique for the past fifty years. It also powerfully demonstrates how the metaphor of Palestine has been deployed to critique both classic forms of colonialism (French, Israeli) and the persistence of colonial discourse and practices in the purportedly postcolonial present, whether in the form of French racism or the repressive tactics of the Algerian state. As I will show, what links these diverse forms of the colonial in Kateb’s experiments in popular theater is the metaphor of hospitality: the (post)colonized subject seen as a guest of the host nation, whether in the colony, the metropole, or the postcolony. The Palestinian refugee and the Algerian immigrant are the twin figures of the “guest worker” in Kateb’s parodic plays, linked by language use (popular Arabic versus French or Hebrew) as well as by parallel (post)colonial itineraries. Yet it is important to stress that Kateb and his troupe were also “hosting” Palestine on the French-Algerian stage, in plays aimed at a popular Algerian audience rather than a Palestinian one. For this reason “Mohamed arfad valiztek” dramatically shores up the political possibilities, as well as some of the risks, inherent in what I am calling transcolonial identification. Before turning to the popular languages of Algeria, Kateb was known as an iconoclastic anticolonial writer who excelled in the art of subverting the languages and literary forms imposed through colonization. He famously wrote about his use of the French language as a weapon, deployed “to show in French that Algeria was not French,” a quasi-military hijacking of language similar to the act of “snatching a shotgun from the hands of a paratrooper.”3 After independence, however, Kateb was faced with what the Souffles-Anfas team described as the contradiction of decolonizing Maghrebi culture in the colonial tongue.4 If Algerian writers no longer needed to address a French public, what recourse was left to writers whose only language was French? For whom would they write? And if they chose to write for the French-educated elites, who would speak to the illiterate, Darija- and Tamazight-speaking masses?5 Popular theater was, for Kateb, the only viable solution. In the late 1960s, he started drafting

Transcolonial Hospitality  43 “Boucherie de l’espérance” (Butchery of hope), a monumental fresco of world revolutions depicting the struggles of the Algerian, Palestinian, and Vietnamese people (to cite only the most iconic), with the aim of staging it for tens if not hundreds of thousands spectators over the course of several days. The project was never realized, but discrete parts of the original manuscript, now lost, would find their way into the plays Kateb produced with the ACT.6 In 1970, he was invited to read the Palestinian fragment of this play in Beirut, where he met the Lebanese communist militant Hassan ­Hamdan, the young Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (see Fig. 6), and his future wife, Zebeida Chergui, who was staging an Arabic adaptation of his tragedy Les ancêtres redoublent de férocité (The ancestors redouble in ferocity), the second play in the Cercle des représailles trilogy, in the Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut.7

figure 6.  Undated photograph of Kateb Yacine (right) and Mahmoud Darwish (center). Source: Personal collection of Amazigh Kateb. Reprinted with permission.

44   Decolonizing the Maghreb In 1971, Ali Zaamoun, a civil servant in the Ministry of Labor,8 invited Kateb to return to Algiers to direct an amateur theater troupe, ­Masrah al-Bahr (The Theater of the Sea).9 Founded in Oran in 1968, this troupe produced plays at the antipodes of the bourgeois theater showcased by the Algerian National Theater, which had just staged Kateb’s play about the history of Vietnam in classical Arabic,10 betraying, to his mind, the revolutionary message and form of the play.11 Kateb enthusiastically accepted Zaamoun’s invitation and moved with the troupe into modest lodgings in Bab el-Oued, a working class neighborhood of Algiers, where he set to work on a play about immigration. First staged in Algiers in 1971, “Mohamed arfad valiztek” toured throughout immigrant communities in France from February to June 1972. Renamed ACT, the reconstituted troupe returned to its headquarters and began producing the plays that would constitute its repertoire: “Al Kahina” and “Saout Ennissa” (Voice of the women) in 1972, “Harb alfayn sana: Filastin maghdura” (The two thousand-year war: Palestine betrayed, hereafter “Filastin maghdura”) in 1974, and “Harb alfayn sana: Malik al-gharb” (The two-thousand-year war: The king of the west) in 1977.12 In 1978, the newly instated government of Chadli Benjedid stopped funding the ACT and relocated the troupe to the remote region of Sidi Bel-Abbès in a thinly veiled attempt to marginalize its activities. Despite material constraints, it continued to tour the Western provinces until 1988, when Kateb left for what he imagined to be a brief stay in France. Diagnosed with advanced-stage leukemia, he died in Grenoble in 1989, leaving behind an incomplete collection of manuscripts and scattered records of his work with the ACT. To an even greater extent than published plays, which require the critic to reconstitute the performative dimensions of theater, Kateb’s ACT plays are, by their very nature, fragmentary and unfixable. My readings are based on the above-mentioned published variants of the plays, as well as on the extant textual and audiovisual archive held at the Institut ­Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC): manuscripts and typescripts, photographs, partial and undated tape recordings, fragments of Kateb’s source text, posters, explanatory materials, interviews with and statements by Kateb and the troupe, and reviews and accounts by critics and audience members. Though the troupe drew heavily on Kateb’s pre-ACT manuscript “Boucherie de l’espérance,” translating and adapting several scenes from this matrix text, each play was the result of a collaborative process of

Transcolonial Hospitality  45 composition across three languages, French, Darija, and Taqbaylit, often with no written support.13 These plays were popular in more ways than one. Borrowing the storytelling form known as al-halqa—literally, the circle that designates the audience of the storyteller, and, metonymically, the act of storytelling itself—the troupe most often performed in outdoor, public spaces such as marketplaces or school yards. As in traditional storytelling performances, the audience would frequently interject and participate through laughter, song, and dance. In addition, performances usually ended with a rendition of the Communist International hymn in Darija or Taqbaylit, followed by a public debate (see Fig. 7).14 Performed in popular languages and using popular comic and storytelling genres, the ACT plays were explicitly aimed at shaping a public and public sphere. The first play performed by the ACT, “Mohamed arfad valiztek” remained one of the troupe’s most popular plays throughout the 1970s and 1980s, reaching 45,000 spectators during its French tour and a total of 350,000 spectators in the next four years alone.15 First performed during the fourth iteration of National Emigration Day, instituted by president

figure 7.  Performance of Mohamed prends ta valise in Algeria circa 1972. Source: Fonds Kateb Yacine/L’Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC). ­Reprinted with permission.

figure 8.  Poster of Mohamed prends ta valise. Source: Fonds Kateb Yacine/ IMEC. Reprinted with permission.

Transcolonial Hospitality  47 Houari Boumedienne to advocate for the “reinsertion” of emigrant workers in Algeria,16 the play was explicitly aimed at convincing Algerian emigrants to leave France—a message so unambiguous that emigrant workers in France mistook a poster advertising the play for a racist campaign ad (see Fig. 8).17 With an estimated 750,000 Algerian living in dire circumstances in France by the time of the first oil shock in 1973, and given the rising tide of racist crimes and the ascent of the xenophobic National Front party in France, there were good reasons to encourage Algerians to return home.18 Yet the ACT did not spare the postcolonial regime in its critique of the incipient immigration crisis. In a series of biting portraits, “­Mohamed arfad valiztek” condemns the lack of work and resources leading Algerians to seek work elsewhere and accuses Algerian elites of exporting cheap labor to France in exchange for lucrative oil contracts. A far cry from the bombastic tone and langue de bois of Algerian state celebrations, “Mohamed arfad valiztek” deployed Darija, Taqbaylit, and popular theatrical forms to subvert the official story of postcolonial immigration. The anticolonial tone and content of the play—structured, as we will see, through a comparison with Palestine—served to condemn rather than extol the state. “Mohamed arfad valiztek” does not begin with the question of Algerian emigration to France, or even French colonialism in Algeria. It opens instead with a scene comparing colonial Algeria and mandate Palestine through a multilayered play on language, hospitality, and assimilation, shedding new light on both French colonial and Zionist discourses. Initially contrasting the ideology of assimilation in the French context (Algeria is France, and France’s colonial subjects are to become French) with the Zionist ideology of separation (Israel as a state for the Jews, and Jews and Arabs as discrete and opposite identities), this scene proceeds to collapse these two models to expose their convergences in a searing critique of colonialism that will become the basis for the play’s critique of the discourse of (post)colonial hospitality in France and Israel. The play begins with an encounter between two sets of characters: Mohamed I and Ernest are on one side of the “stage” (surrounded, it bears repeating, by the audience), Mohamed II and Moshe on the other. The stage directions included in the manuscript versions of the play emphasize the parallel nature of these encounters: “Mohamed I and Mohamed II are working the land, one in Algeria, the other in Palestine.”19 While the two Mohameds are allied by name and occupation, the status of Ernest and Moshe is revealed through

48   Decolonizing the Maghreb the use of language. Almost entirely performed in Darija, “Mohamed arfad valiztek” also includes French (in brackets in the excerpt below) and ­Hebrew passages at key junctures:20 ERNEST: Hello, Mohamed! [Bonjour, Mohamed!] MOSHE: Shalom! MOHAMED I: Hello, sir! [Bonjour, m’sieur!] MOHAMED II: Salam! MOSHE: Salam?

  Another Arab Who has lost his caravan! MOHAMED II: Shalom?   Where is this wandering Jew going?21

At this stage the two pairs are differentiated through contrasting language use. Ernest interpellates Mohamed I in French, eliciting a diminutive “bonjour, m’sieur” that evokes the “yassuh, boss” described by Fanon as an example of “pidgin-nigger”—the debilitating speech used by the colonial master and parroted by the colonial subject.22 Here language serves as symbol and medium of assimilation: Mohamed I’s use of the colonial tongue signifies his integration into the Republic and simultaneously provides him access to it. Yet his response is not exactly identical to the settler’s address, encoding the power relation implied in the fact that Ernest speaks first. Moshe and Mohamed II, on the other hand, speak Hebrew and Arabic, leading to their mutual recognition as nomadic Arab and wandering Jew. Like the Frenchman and the Algerian, the Arab and the Jew understand each other’s salutations—salam and shalom, or “peace” in Arabic and Hebrew. But the linguistic difference is immediately translated into religious-ethnic alterity via the stereotypical image of the nomadic Arab and the wandering Jew. Here these twin figures are not brothers, however. The parallel staging of colonial Algeria and mandate Palestine makes clear that the wandering Jew is in fact a settler, and the nomad Arab, his colonized subject. This scene stages in condensed fashion two apparently differing colonial situations, inviting the spectator to contrast and compare them: French Algeria on the one hand, Israel-Palestine on the other. The ACT’s public would have immediately recognized the first encounter as a pastiche of French colonial rule in Algeria, premised on an ideology of assimilation: the native speaks French, the language of the colonizer. The encounter be-

Transcolonial Hospitality  49 tween Mohamed II and Moshe, on the other hand, is less immediately legible. By portraying the encounter between Moshe and Mohamed II in terms of linguistic and ethnic-religious difference, the ACT underscored the difference between French assimilationist discourses and a second type of colonial discourse: the discourse of separation exemplified in the Zionist nationalist movement aimed at creating a nation-state for the Jews to the exclusion of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, construed not as Semitic brothers but as age-old enemies. Though the two colonial situations and their corollary ideologies are initially presented as distinct, the rest of the scene proceeds to diminish the difference between the two pairs. The fragmented dialogue that follows the greeting scene—delivered so quickly that Moshe ends up addressing the Algerian Mohamed (Mohamed I) while Ernest questions the Palestinian Mohamed (Mohamed II)—collapses the imaginary border between the two halves of the stage: ERNEST: Where are you going? MOHAMED I: Home. MOSHE: Home? MOHAMED II: Yes, what about you? ERNEST: Me too.23

The characters lie down to sleep at the end of their journey and wake up the next morning to the call of a rooster. Unaware that their traveling ­companions—the two Mohameds—also consider the bird to be theirs, Ernest and Moshe pursue the rooster in order to offer it to their purported guest for breakfast. The cacophonic scene of mistaken hospitality that follows finally externalizes the conflict: ERNEST, to Mohamed I: I’d like to invite you . . . MOSHE, to Mohamed II: Do you like chicken? MOHAMED I: I was about to invite you. ERNEST: You’ll invite me

  When you’re in your own home. MOHAMED I: This is my home! MOHAMED II: This is my village. MOSHE: No, this is my home! MOHAMED I: Come on, you’re joking? MOSHE: I’m telling you, this is my home! ERNEST: What is the name of your village?

50   Decolonizing the Maghreb MOHAMED II: Come on, you’re mad!

  What is the name of your village? MOHAMED I: Algeria, and yours? ERNEST: France! MOSHE: Israel, and yours? MOHAMED II: Palestine! MOHAMED I: If only this rooster could speak . . . ERNEST: He’d say France! MOSHE: Israel! MOHAMED I: He’d say Algeria! MOHAMED II: He’d say Palestine! ERNEST: France! MOSHE: Israel! MOHAMED I: Algeria! MOHAMED II: Palestine!24

This scene is a pastiche of the “differend” between colonizer and colonized, who cannot agree on a common name for the land they both claim as theirs.25 Parodying the famous colonial phrase “L’Algérie, c’est la France” (“Algeria is France”), the naming contest at the end of the scene exposes the discourse of assimilation as a legitimation of colonial appropriation. What is at issue is not the truth of the statement “Algeria is France” (in 1848 the French government annexed the territory now known as Algeria, making it, by French law at least, an integral part of France) but rather the colonial claim itself, the legal system or language that enables the discursive and physical violence of colonization. Though the ACT might easily have made this point through a pastiche of colonial Algeria, this parody of colonial discourse operates through a comparison with Palestine that indexes both the differences between the two situations (linguistic assimilation vs. linguistic heterogeneity, translated in ethnic-religious terms) and the similarities that lead them to collapse into one. The parallels between these two settler-colonial situations—the symbolic and physical struggle over the land claimed by both colonizer and colonized—would have been immediately evident to an Algerian public. But the subtle differences between the two discourses, indexed by varying language use, become clear only through the final chiasmus and implicit metaphor: France (is) Israel, Algeria (is) Palestine. France’s claim to incorporate Algeria through synecdoche (Algeria is a part of France) stands as an equivalent to Israel’s claim to replace Palestine through metaphor—a sub-

Transcolonial Hospitality  51 stitution operated, as scholars have noted, through the practice of renaming the land, above and below ground.26 This parallel staging of colonial Algeria and mandate Palestine, I argue, ties the rhetoric of assimilation to that of incommensurable difference and portrays them as mirror images of colonial discourse. This opening scene serves as a prologue to the trials and tribulations of Mohamed, an Algerian emigrant in France. What is the function of this detour into colonial history—and what is more, a transnational history involving the colonization of Palestine—in the drama of postcolonial emigration? I argue that the cacophonic naming contest in the first scene of “Mohamed arfad valiztek” serves to historicize what, adapting Mireille Rosello’s productive notion, I call the discourse of (post)colonial hospitality. Starting from the premise that “the vision of the immigrant as guest is a metaphor that has forgotten that it is a metaphor,” Rosello historicizes the ubiquitous discursive equation of immigrant and guest in French debates on immigration since the 1970s, and the production of postcolonial migrants as foreign to the nation-state in contemporary French discourse.27 “Mohamed arfad valiztek” lends itself particularly well to the analytical framework Rosello proposes. If the settler claims to be at home in the colony, going so far as to name Algeria France and impose the use of the French language, after decolonization the colonial “host” of Algerian emigrants claims the same status, but in postcolonial France. The rhetorical trick that turns the settler into the host of the native in an uncanny colonial home returns to haunt the postcolonial metropole, casting doubt on the status of home, host, and guest.28 The contrast between linguistic assimilation on the one hand and linguistic difference on the other serves to reveal the exclusionary nature of a colonial system that nevertheless advocates assimilation: despite its rhetoric of inclusion, French colonialism also results in ethnic (and religious) segregation, in colonial Algeria and postcolonial France. But it also points to how the discourse of hospitality operates in Palestine-Israel. As Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin shows, official Israeli discourse has suppressed the reasons for the presence of Palestinians (“Israeli Arabs”) in Israel, foregrounding an alarmist, ahistorical view structurally and historically analogous to that presented by the European extreme right, as exemplified by the National Front in France.29 Expanding Raz-Krakotzkin’s frame of analysis to include the entirety of historic Palestine, I contend that what we might call the Israeli

52   Decolonizing the Maghreb discourse of colonial hospitality erases the history of the expulsion and oppression of Palestinians in a move that is comparable to the discursive erasure of colonial history in France. The initial difference between the Palestinian and Algerian situations is shown to be one of theory rather than practice, wielding a powerful critique of France and Israel as (post)colonial states. I have argued that “Mohamed arfad valiztek” exposes the links between French colonial and Zionist-Israeli discourses of separation by comically collapsing France-Algeria and Israel-Palestine. Yet in other ways, the play is also a product and symptom of such discourses of separation, particularly concerning Jews and Arabs. “Mohamed arfad valiztek” excises a figure that was present in Kateb’s matrix text, “Boucherie de l’espérance,” and that returns in the 1974 ACT play “Filastin maghdura” (Palestine betrayed): the figure of the native Jew, whether Algerian or Palestinian. As I will show, “Boucherie de l’espérance” and “Filastin maghdura” both dramatize how, to quote Ella Shohat, Palestinian Jews were “prodded to choose between anti-Zionist ‘Arabness’ and pro-Zionist ‘Jewishness’.”30 “Mohamed arfad valiztek,” on the other hand, takes this transformation as a fait accompli. A brief detour via textual genealogy will allow me to chart the erasure of the native Jew in the latter play. The opening scene of “Mohamed arfad valiztek” is largely adapted from “Boucherie de l’espérance,” but with several important departures. Set in Palestine in the early part of the twentieth century, Kateb’s pre-ACT play stages an imperial contest over the land in which Arab and Jewish Palestinians are pawns in the hands of British, French, and Zionist interests. The two protagonists and neighbors, Mohamed or Moh Zitoun (a pun on Mao Zedung) and Moïse, are oppressed by the mufti and rabbi respectively, and pitted against each other by European and Zionist colonists. As in “Mohamed arfad valiztek,” the conflict between the two characters culminates in a scene of mistaken hospitality and a contest to name their common village (Palestine/Israel). Here too, language is key to recognizing the other: Moïse’s “shalom” identifies him as a “wandering Jew,” ­Mohamed’s “salam” as “an Arab who has lost his caravan.”31 In a comically contracted chronology, the British, French, American, Zionist, and Soviet powers organize a boxing match between Moïse and Mohamed to determine who will be their puppet in the cold war race. The play ends with the two contenders fighting outside the ring. Asked to return to the imperial arena, both oppose a resounding “no” to their erstwhile masters.32 Yet if the

Transcolonial Hospitality  53 once-friendly neighbors have escaped the ringmasters’ grip, they have successfully been transformed into enemies: Jew versus Arab. In “Mohamed arfad valiztek,” the native Palestinian Jew Moïse has become the colonial settler Moshe, and his counterpart is Ernest, not ­Mohamed. By giving Moses the Hebrew name Moshe (evoking the infamous Israeli general Moshe Dayan, satirized as the general d’Aïe-Ane, or “Ouch-Donkey,” in “Boucherie de l’espérance”) rather than the French Moïse or the Arabic Musa (as in “Filastin maghdura”) “Mohamed arfad valiztek” “Israelizes” Mohamed’s antagonist. It also omits to provide a genealogy of the conflict, papering over the transformation of indigenous Jews into Jewish settlers by imperial and Zionist hands. In contrast, Kateb’s pre-ACT plays place Jews and Muslims within a shared history of colonial subjection. In the comic sketch titled “Le luth et la valise,” for example, Ali tells his mother Nedjma that the French collaborationist regime of Maréchal Pétain has expelled the Jews from school, speculating that “the natives” will be next.33 This scene finds its way into several versions of “Filastin maghdura,” where Ali and Nedjma, Palestinian refugees in Algeria, are described as “wandering Jews.” In this example, Vichy-ruled French Algeria and the postcolonial state are telescoped to effect a crossed critique of colonialism, fascism, and Zionism, metaphorically tying Jewish and Muslim, Algerian and Palestinian subjects.34 The excision of the role of colonial and Zionist discourse in producing Arabs and Jews as enemies in “Mohamed arfad valiztek” is all the more puzzling because, as I have shown, the play was aimed at exposing the colonial genealogy of discourses of hospitality, whether in French Algeria, Israel-Palestine, or postcolonial France. What are we to make of the disappearance of indigenous Algerian and Palestinian Jews in what remained the ACT’s most successful play? This question takes on particular salience given that Kateb’s popular plays took aim at the Algerian state, defined as Arab, Muslim, and Arabic-speaking, and therefore as decidedly nonJewish and non-Berber. As critics have noted, Kateb lent a central role to the Jewish component of Algerian society in his early writings—most famously through the figure of Nedjma’s (French) Jewish mother.35 In contrast, “Mohamed arfad valiztek” portrays Jews not as indigenous subjects of colonial rule in Algeria and Palestine, but as settlers in Palestine. The only references to Jews in “Mohamed arfad valiztek” are to Israel and Hebrew, maintaining Jewishness outside an Algerian frame of reference and

54   Decolonizing the Maghreb problematically reproducing the conflation between Zionism/Israel and Jewishness entertained by the state of Israel.36 The foreign status lent to Jewishness in this play is all the more striking because the ACT gave pride of place to the other Algerian minority, Imazighen, portraying them as the indigenous population of Algeria—the symbolic equivalent of Palestinians in Israel. As a result, the comparison between Palestine and Algeria implicitly places Jews and Imazighen on opposite ends of the colonizercolonized, native-settler spectrum. In Mahmood Mamdani’s terminology, the representation of Imazighen as indigenous helps to produce the Jews as nonnative, even if it is by omission.37 Kateb’s positions in favor of Imazighen rights were intrinsically linked to his positions on language. Unlike his contemporaries Albert Memmi and Malek Haddad, Kateb did not advocate for the use of Arabic in lieu of French. Though on occasion he allowed that other writers might take on the task of fashioning a distinctly Algerian Arabic, he became increasingly vehement in his denunciation of the state’s Arabization policies, which he characterized in no uncertain terms as a new form of cultural imperialism. For Kateb, classical Arabic was as foreign to Algeria as was French, and the only authentic Algerian languages were Tamazight and Darija (­itself traversed with Tamazight and French idioms). Kateb’s defiance toward classical Arabic is clearly linked to his anticlerical positions toward Islam, a double inheritance of Marxist and French laïcité discourses.38 To illustrate the link between the Arabic language and Islam, he readily compared classical Arabic to Church Latin, and Darija and Tamazight to the French vernacular—thereby discounting the fraught history of the imposition of Île-de-France (Parisian) French in the metropole.39 In a context in which (classical) Arabic had been relegated to the status of a foreign language, this was obviously a highly charged statement, as Kateb, himself a staunch critic of Francophonie, was no doubt aware.40 Kateb’s strategic comparison between classical Arabic and Church Latin and his rejection of the Arab-Islamic character of Algerian society cannot be entirely separated from a French republican ideal of secularism, based on individual choice and the separation of church and state, nor from the anticlericalism of leftist movements. It also aligns with the historically secularist positions of the Berber movements emerging in the 1940s and 1950s, and even more vocally at the time of Kateb’s involvement with the ACT. If his affiliation to Palestine in nonreligious, in fact secular, terms

Transcolonial Hospitality  55 is not surprising—this is also true of Souffles-Anfas, and generally speaking of most pro-Palestinian movements as well as of the Palestinian resistance at this time—his rejection of any pan-Arab identification is highly marked. As we have seen in the case of Souffles-Anfas, a ubiquitous if ill-defined pan-Arabism of the left was common rhetorical fare in the early days of transcolonial identification with Palestine. Unlike Souffles-Anfas, however, the ACT’s anti-Arabist identification with Palestine must be understood specifically in relation to its Berberist politics. The Berber movement crystallized in Algeria in 1980, when the local government of Tizi Ouzou, the cultural and symbolic capital of Kabylie (a Tamazight-speaking region near Algiers), cancelled a highly anticipated talk on Taqbaylit poetry by the anticolonial writer and documentarian of Kabyle orature Mouloud Mammeri. As Kateb notes in his introduction to a collection of poems by the Kabyle poet Lounis Aït Menguellet, he was subjected to similar types of anti-Berber censorship when “Filastin m ­ aghdura” was cancelled in Tizi Ouzou and the troupe banned from performing the play in Kabylie.41 The fact that the ACT’s Palestine play was banned exclusively in Kabylie and toured the rest of country without impediments demonstrates the extent of government suspicion toward a class of citizens considered inauthentically Arab and even Muslim, in no small part as a result of colonial policies aimed at rallying the purportedly less Islamized and therefore more assimilable Imazighen to the civilizing mission.42 Though he did not speak Taqbaylit or any other Tamazight language, Kateb was intransigent in his criticism of what he called the myth of “AraboIslamic Algeria,” which he considered to be graver than the comparatively less-pervasive (and much shorter-lived) myth of French A ­ lgeria.43 His positions are particularly clear in the fragment of “La guerre de deux mille ans” (The two-thousand-year war) titled “La Kahina/Dihya,” posthumously published in the Berber journal Awal in 1992.44 The manuscript version held at IMEC differs from the published fragment in one interesting respect: in the unpublished Taqbaylit manuscript, the Arab horsemen who confront the Berber queen address her not in Arabic, as would be expected, but in French, translating the colonial dimension of this power relation in terms that would have been clear even to an Arabo­phone ­audience.45 Alternatively performed in Darija and Taqbaylit, the play portrayed the ArabIslamic conquest as a form of colonization even more pernicious than that of the French.

56   Decolonizing the Maghreb Given the large proportion of Kabyles among Algerian emigrants, it is not surprising that the troupe chose to translate “Mohamed arfad ­valiztek” into Taqbaylit. Translated by the Kabyle poet Ben Mohamed, the play was successfully staged in Tunis as well as in Kabylie, most likely in the early 1970s.46 The only trace that remains of this performance is a copy of a Taqbaylit translation (in fact a loose adaptation) of the Communist International hymn, which was most likely sung at the end of the play.47 Though I can only speculate on how the satire of (post)colonial hospitality staged in the opening scene of “Mohamed arfad valiztek” was received in the language of the dominated minority of postcolonial Algeria, it is thrilling to imagine the ACT’s public chanting the international in Taqbaylit in a move that subverted both state-sanctioned socialism and the image of Algeria as Arab and Muslim.48 Partly as a result of Kateb’s militancy for the Berber cause, his name is most commonly associated among young Arabic-speaking Algerians today with his controversial views on language and his affiliation with the Berberist movements.49 It is an acute irony that the legacy of this iconic anticolonial writer should be part of the larger story of the fragmentation, by French colonial politics, of Algerian society into “évolués” (literally “evolved,” that is civilized, natives) and traditionalists, francisants and arabisants, Berbers and Arabs. Even after Kateb’s posthumous canonization by the Algerian authorities, his work remains caught within categories created through colonial divide-and-rule policies. In a typical move, Noureddine Aba, the author of several rather conventional French-language plays and poems on Palestine,50 attacked Kateb for neglecting Palestine in favor of a non-Arab, non-Islamic cause, Vietnam—according to Kateb, a thinly veiled attack of his communist and anticlerical positions.51 And although the state could not begrudge the ACT its representation of Palestine per se, it had plenty of reasons to worry about how it deployed this figure, and its goals in doing so. The ACT’s dissident attitude toward the state seems puzzling at first if we consider Algeria’s relationship to Palestine. During the anticolonial struggle and in the decades following independence, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which became the state party, was one of the most vocal supporters of Palestine in the international arena. Unlike its more circumspect Maghrebi neighbors, the Algerian state actively sought to assuage the plight of Palestine. It extended the right of refuge

Transcolonial Hospitality  57 to ­Palestinians—many of whom helped in the Arabization of school and university curricula—sent weapons and military assistance to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and hosted diplomatic missions devoted to the question of Palestine.52 At the same time, however, the state’s invocation of Palestine as a symbol of Arab unity helped shift attention away from its authoritarian rule. The state-controlled press and state-sanctioned writers made frequent reference to the Palestinian struggle, tying it to the Algerian revolution as embodied by the FLN and the current military regime, which legitimated its power through the memory of the war of independence. It is thus highly significant that the ACT formulated its critique of the state via the figure of Palestine, coopting a purportedly pan-Arab and pan-Islamic icon to critique the state. After setting up a parallel between colonized Algerians and Palestinians in the period before independence and partition, “Mohamed arfad valiztek” stages a comparison between two other figures: the Palestinian refugee and the postcolonial Algerian subject. Without losing sight of the colonial history that produced the problem of emigration, the play re­orients its focus from a critique of (post)colonial hospitality in France to a critique of the discourse of fraternity in Algeria: state appeals to Arab-­Islamic fraternity, often based on strategic assertions of solidarity with Palestine. Contrary to the comparison established in the opening scene of “Mohamed arfad valiztek,” however, the parallel between (post)colonial Palestinian and Algerian subjects is not explicit in the rest of the play. Rather, it requires the critic to reconstitute a multilayered palimpsest of scenes alternately cast as Algerian and Palestinian in this play and its source text, “Boucherie de l’espérance.” I focus in the concluding section of this chapter on the last scene of “Mohamed arfad valiztek,” which rewrites a comic sketch from “Boucherie de l’espérance” in order to undermine A ­ lgerian state appeals to Arab-Muslim fraternity. Set during the mandate period, this scene is a classic tale of colonial dispossession. The central character, Mohamed, a destitute peasant, is forced to sell his house for a trifling price to a rich merchant who is in the business of selling Palestinian lands to Zionist settlers. In the accelerated time frame of this satirical play, Mohamed has been dispossessed—by a fellow Palestinian, it bears emphasizing—but he manages to keep a rusted nail in the wall of the house, where he sets up his makeshift “butchery of hope,” selling the meat of his last remaining possession, a donkey.53 If this sketch

58   Decolonizing the Maghreb set in mandate Palestine leaves Mohamed’s future hanging in the balance, the tale that inspired it leaves no doubt as to the outcome of the story. In popular Maghrebi culture, the story known as “Juha’s nail” ends with the triumph of the protagonist, who is able to renegotiate an unfair contract thanks to a hidden clause—the proverbial nail in the story.54 The spectator is left to surmise that Mohamed will make a triumphant return to Palestine, outwitting both the colonizers and the elites who betrayed him. In “Mohamed arfad valiztek,” this scene is set in Algeria and straddles the colonial and postcolonial eras, showing the continuity of French and Algerian state violence. Forced to sell his house to his greedy brother Boudinar (Father of the Dollar) during the colonial era, and then to emigrate to France, the triumphant Mohamed returns at the end of the play, singing: In my country, I’ve left a nail. We’ve returned to the village And one nail leads to another, I’ll hang forty donkeys on it ’Til the end of colonialism!55

Like the Palestinian Mohamed, his Algerian namesake is able to regain possession of his property thanks to his trusted nail. Here, the “hospitality” accorded to the guest worker is exposed for what it is: an agreement between corrupt authorities and the colonizing power who usurped the status of host in the colony and continues to play this role in the post­ colonial metropole.56 Like Juha’s nail, Palestine is the ruse that allowed Kateb and the ACT to undermine (post)colonial discourses of hospitality in France and ­Israel, and Arab-Islamic invocations of fraternity in Algeria and beyond. But here the question of the political and ethical implications of transcolonial identification must be raised. If the ACT’s use of the figure of Palestine is markedly different from state rhetoric, does it not similarly deploy another people’s cause for its own political agenda? By hosting Palestine on a popular Algerian stage, did the ACT not risk reproducing the substitutive aspect of French colonial discourse, taking the place of Palestine through metaphor (“Palestine is Algeria”)? Does transcolonial identification, however sincere, suffice to efface the dangers inherent in such a practice of representation, whereby Algerians would speak for Palestinians—and, what is more, in order to critique postcolonial France and Algeria, rather than

Transcolonial Hospitality  59 Israel? Though “Mohamed arfad valiztek” clearly portrays Zionism as a colonial discourse and Israel as a colonial power, it remains a play about France-Algeria, not Israel-Palestine. Performed in Darija and Taqbaylit interspersed with French and a few token words of Hebrew, this play ­addresses—and constitutes—an Algerian and Franco-Algerian public, not a Palestinian one. In Kateb’s popular plays, Palestine remains a metaphor of the colonial, revised to encompass both external (French and Israeli) and internal (Algerian) forms of repression, in the service of Algerian decolonization. Yet as I will show in my readings of Khatibi, Hassoun, Derrida, and El Maleh in Part Two, the transcolonial comparisons Kateb draws between France and Israel, and between discourses of assimilation and separation, begin to reveal the critical importance of Maghrebi perspectives on Palestine, that is, of transcolonial identification.

3 The Transcolonial Exotic Allegories of Palestine in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Algerian Trilogy

I turn in the final chapter of Part One to a series of best-selling Algerian novels, which, though stylistically and politically at the antipodes of the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas and Kateb Yacine’s popular Algerian theater, similarly deploy Palestine to critique the postcolonial state and advocate for the cultural decolonization of the Maghreb via language use. The first Algerian woman to write a novel in Arabic, Ahlam Mosteghanemi is best known for a trilogy of novels set in Algeria and France at the dawn of the brutal “black decade” of the 1990s1: Dhakirat al-jasad (Memory of the flesh), Fawda’ al-hawas (Chaos of the senses), and ‘Abir sarir (Passerby a bed).2 I argue that Palestine plays a central role in Mosteghanemi’s ­Algerian saga, shoring up the failures of the Algerian revolution through an intertextual critique of the allegory of Algeria as woman immortalized in Kateb’s novel Nedjma. Against the broken promises of the national past, Mosteghanemi opposes a transnational allegorical figure, that of the Palestinian poet and resistance fighter. But if Mosteghanemi’s forward-looking allegory of Palestine productively undermines the utilitarian glorification of the Algerian revolution in state discourse, she falls short of interrogating her own allegorical use of Palestine. Adapting Graham Huggan’s productive notion of “the postcolonial exotic,”3 I read Mosteghanemi’s representation of Palestine as an example of the transcolonial exotic: her novels make Algeria legible for a Mashriqi public through the more recognizable figure of Palestine, packaging both as contrapuntal figures of revolution for consumption at the center. For unlike Souffles-Anfas and Kateb’s popular plays,

62   Decolonizing the Maghreb Mosteghanemi’s novels are part of a cultural industry whose center radiates from Cairo and Beirut, not Rabat and Algiers. Mosteghanemi occupies a complex authorial position spanning ­Algerian, Mashriqi, French, and global literary markets. A native of Constantine and longtime resident of Beirut who began her literary career writing love poetry in Arabic and obtained her Ph.D. in France, ­Mosteghanemi gained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, Dhakirat al-jasad, published in Beirut in 1993 at the height of a series of assassinations of intellectuals, journalists, and artists in ­Algeria. Awarded the American University in Cairo Press Naguib Mahfouz award in 1998, Dhakirat al-jasad has had thirty-four printed editions and sold more than a million copies, an impressive feat in what remains a small literary market. Though the publication of Mosteghanemi’s debut novel was marred by rumors of plagiarism, she has since emerged as one of the foremost writers of Arabic. Her popularity extends far beyond the relatively limited circle of book readers. A Syrian-Algerian television series based on her first novel was released, with her cooperation, in 2010, turning ­Mosteghanemi into a literary celebrity and something of a cult phenomenon in the Mashriq, as the glamorous image she cultivates through her website and her highly visible Facebook presence attest.4 The unparalleled popularity of ­Mosteghanemi’s Algerian trilogy, and even more so her ability to capitalize on the much larger audience of the wildly popular musalsalat (television series) genre, urges us to pose the question of the salability of Algeria—and Palestine—in the Arabic-speaking world. As I will argue at the end of this chapter, the televised version of Dhakirat al-jasad makes even more salient the commodification of these twin figures of revolution for consumption in the Mashriqi center, alerting us to the continued relevance and risks of the transcolonial exotic. Given Mosteghanemi’s transnational focus and reach, the critical reception of her work has been surprisingly local, focusing on her place in the Algerian literary scene. Yet even her most “Algerian” work, the trilogy of novels that won her international fame, is obviously geared toward a non-Algerian audience. Dhakirat al-jasad, Fawda’ al-hawas and ‘Abir sarir offer the uninitiated reader a crash course in Algerian history: the war of independence, the power struggle that followed, the establishment of a corrupt military regime, and the rise of Islamist parties capitalizing on popular unrest. Palestine plays a central if neglected role in this dystopian

The Transcolonial Exotic  63 national tale. Reading the trilogy as the story of a love affair between Algeria and Palestine in which Palestine functions as a mirror of, and counterpoint to, Algeria, I argue that Palestine serves as a transnational allegory of revolution in the era of postcolonial disillusionment. My reading centers round the elusive figure of Ziyad, a Palestinian poet and feda’i whose appearance dramatizes two competing visions of Algeria, one turned toward the past, the other toward the future. The allegorical function of Palestine is embedded in the narrative structure of Dhakirat al-jasad, which tells the story of an unconsummated love affair between Ahlam, the daughter of an Algerian war hero, and the narrator, Khaled ben Toubal, a middle-aged painter who lost his arm fighting against the French during the war of independence.5 Dhakirat al-jasad is the book Khaled writes after Ahlam’s marriage to a corrupt military officer and the brutally repressed October 1988 demonstrations, which retrospectively mark the onset of the black decade. Khaled’s life story weaves French colonialism, post-independence authoritarian rule, and Israeli expansionism into an inventory of his “personal and national disappointments”6: his imprisonment in a French prison in May–June 1945, the amputation of his arm during the revolution, the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, his torture at the hands of the Algerian police in June 1971, the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon and his best friend Ziyad’s death in June 1982, Ahlam’s marriage shortly thereafter, and Hassan’s accidental killing during the 1988 protests in Algiers. Ziyad’s death is a turning point in the narrative: after his departure Khaled loses sight of Ahlam, only to see her again during the celebration of her marriage to a corrupt military leader. In narrative terms, the death of the Palestinian poet and fighter signifies that the dreams of the Algerian revolution are shattered for good, auctioned off to an autocratic moneyed elite. Dhakirat al-jasad is, in this sense, a straightforward allegory of Algerian postcolonial disillusionment, or to use Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s terminology, an “allegory of impotence” whereby “literal or figurative impotence serves to allegorize the social, political, and economic predicaments of Third World nations.”7 Though none of ­Mosteghanemi’s characters are sexually impotent, Khaled is severely handicapped—his memory is marked in his flesh, as the Arabic title suggests—and his relationship with Ahlam fails to progress beyond a one-armed embrace. Ahlam embodies the elusive dreams of the revolution, and Khaled’s ­longing for a

64   Decolonizing the Maghreb past that is irrevocably lost. Not only does she remain unattainable, foiling Khaled’s physical and allegorical desires, she marries a corrupt military officer instead, betraying the promises of the Algerian revolution. The national allegory that is staged and unraveled in Dhakirat al-jasad is, I argue, intentional and highly self-conscious, that is, “meta-allegorical” in the sense Aamir Mufti gives the term in his study of national allegories in modern Urdu literature.8 Adapting Mufti’s interpretation to the post­ colonial Algerian context, I contend that Mosteghanemi ironically stages the construction of a classic feminine national allegory “as a means of exploring the complexities of [allegory] as signifier.”9 Her ironic undermining of feminine national allegory is, I argue, the first step in the construction of an allegorical figure better suited to the era of postcolonial disillusionment: Palestine. In order to understand the dynamic and stakes of these contrapuntal allegories (Algeria as woman, Palestine as man), let me examine in more detail the unraveling of feminine national allegories in Dhakirat al-jasad. Eight years before her first novel came out, Mosteghanemi published a book based on her dissertation, Algérie: Femme et écritures (Algeria: The writing of woman), which inventories and analyzes the representation of women in Algerian literary texts written in French and Arabic by women and men: the mothers, foreign lovers, female militants, object-women, and symbol-women that populate Algerian novels.10 Nearly all of these figures turn up in Dhakirat al-jasad: Khaled’s (absent) mother; his French lover, Catherine, whose sole function is to satisfy his carnal desires; and Ahlam, who symbolizes Constantine, and metonymically, Algeria. Khaled’s entire narrative can be read as a pastiche of feminine national allegories, a trope that is explicitly invoked in the novel through a series of intertextual references to Nedjma and the inclusion of Kateb Yacine himself in the roster of characters. Recounting his decisive encounter with the writer in prison following the May 1945 anticolonial riots in the eastern region of Constantine, Khaled describes Nedjma as “the novel I’d never write, but which I felt in some way was also my story.”11 Dhakirat al-jasad is, intradiegetically, Khaled’s attempt to recreate Nedjma in the figure of Ahlam, an allegory for Constantine and Algeria, and his “najma hariba” (“shooting star”).12 His descriptions of Ahlam predictably focus on the attributes that remind him of Algeria: the miqiass bracelet she is wearing at the opening, a traditional piece of jewelry that his mother used to wear, and the Constan-

The Transcolonial Exotic  65 tine expression with which she greets him: “‘indak ka’s ma’ . . . ‘ayshak?” (literally, “do you have a glass of water . . . may you live long”).13 As I will detail further below, the mother tongue links Ahlam physically and symbolically to Khaled’s birthplace, turning her into an allegory for the homeland. The trope of nation as mother and lover, metonymically conveyed through feminine ornaments and the mother tongue, becomes explicit to the point of bathos in Khaled’s sentimental narrative: “You, the girl who could have been my daughter, and who was becoming, without realizing it . . . my mother!”14 he exclaims, confessing that he is “making love . . . to the nation!” as he paints.15 Mosteghanemi’s novels and critical writings are explicit contributions to the by now well-established body of work interrogating the limits and dangers of national allegory, particularly the feminine national allegories that have been the hallmark of modern and anticolonial nationalism, from Eugène Delacroix’s Marianne as a symbol of the French revolution to the shot of ululating women that famously closes Gillo Pontecorvo’s epic film of the Algerian revolution, The Battle of Algiers.16 Without discounting the feminist politics of Mosteghanemi’s critique of allegory—indeed her critical work makes clear her impatience with the equation of nation and woman—I show that Dhakirat al-jasad and its sequels allegorize the failures of the Algerian revolution through an equally problematic transnational allegory: Palestine as man. I begin with a scene that captures the tension between the promises of yesterday’s revolution and the seductiveness of tomorrow’s revolt. Separated from Ahlam for the first time since they met—she is holidaying in Constantine—Khaled spends the summer painting eleven canvases of the bridges of his native city in a desperate attempt to reconstruct the past and grasp, if only in imagination, the object of his affections. Ziyad arrives for an unexpected visit at the end of the summer, and after Ahlam’s return Khaled arranges for them to meet in a café near his house. Deliriously happy to be reunited with Ahlam and excited to introduce her to his best friend, Khaled is crestfallen when, barely acknowledging him, Ahlam dismisses the news that he has produced eleven allegorical portraits of Constantine. “When will you ever be cured of that city?” she asks, betraying her impatience with his nostalgic relation to the past.17 In contrast, she beams with excitement when she sees the famed Palestinian poet whose work she devoured over the summer, and introduces herself by reciting a poem from his last collection. ­Bemused, Ziyad

66   Decolonizing the Maghreb completes her impassioned rendition with a verse that seems to fit the archetypal model of national allegory, characteristically making his beloved synonymous with the nation: “I have no homeland [watan] but you.”18 While Ahlam’s rejection of Algeria in favor of Palestine appears to be a simple transnational displacement of allegory, I contend that it transforms the nature of allegorical desire, from a nostalgic (­backward-looking) to a utopian (forward-looking) impulse. Edward Said’s notion of utopia sheds light on the contrast between Khaled’s nostalgic allegory of Algeria and Ziyad’s dynamic allegory of Palestine. Remember that for Said, Palestine is “both a place to be returned to and . . . an entirely new place . . . perhaps even a historical disaster transformed into a hope for a better future.”19 Whereas the Algerian nation has achieved national sovereignty and betrayed the dreams of the anticolonial struggle, Palestine remains a nation in the making, an object of political desire and imagination. The negative phrasing of Ziyad’s verse (“no homeland but you”) and the future-oriented title of his collection, Projects for a love to come, remind us that this nation does not yet exist. Ahlam’s choice of transnational over national allegory marks her desire to leave behind the myths of Algerian nationalism, betrayed by the post-independence regime, but also by those who continue to live in the past, allowing her to identify instead with current struggles for nationhood embodied in the Palestinian revolution. The allegorical instrumentalization of Palestine is even more explicit in the novel’s sequels. More limited in narrative and historical scope than Dhakirat al-jasad, Fawda’ al-hawas reads like a cross between a roman de gare—a torrid and illicit love affair set against the political conflict of the 1990s—and a roman à clef driven by the desire to discover how its characters match up with those of Dhakirat al-jasad, which is, we learn, Ahlam’s first novel, not Khaled’s. Now married, Ahlam pursues an affair with a young photographer, also named Khaled ben Toubal, who lost his arm while photographing the October 1988 protests. Ahlam’s narrative is interrupted by a series of dramatic political events: the 1991 Islamist demonstrations; the assassination of Mohamed Boudiaf, an iconic leader of the independence struggle; and the first murders of journalists by Islamist ­militants. Though she bemoans the fact that “love had never been so tied up with politics before,” she elliptically confesses to being the author of these allegories: “Is it desire, or the need to write, or fate that makes every

The Transcolonial Exotic  67 individual story progress in tandem with a public story, so that we can’t tell which is writing the other?”20 Admitting that she invented Ziyad as a figure for revolution and made him die “the Palestinian way,”21 fighting the Israeli occupier, to keep the resistance alive, she proclaims that “there’s no such thing as Palestine,”22 implying that Palestine is more useful as a still realizable dream than as an accomplished fact. Algeria was “once a nation that exported revolution and dreams to the world.”23 Today, Palestine fulfills that role. ‘Abir sarir confirms the contrapuntal allegorization of Algeria and Palestine as failed revolution versus revolution to come. Narrated by the young Khaled ben Toubal, the last novel in the trilogy begins two years after the end of his affair with Ahlam, and ten years after her encounter with the artist. Having traveled to Paris to collect an award he received for the photograph that cost him his arm, Khaled discovers the work of an ­Algerian painter, Zian, who, like Khaled in Dhakirat al-jasad, is obsessed with bridges. ‘Abir sarir ends somewhat anticlimactically with Zian’s unglamorous death. After the murders of Ziyad in Lebanon and Khaled’s journalist friend Abd al-Haq in Algiers—they are described as “martyrs” [shuhada’ ] of the Palestinian resistance and the black decade, respectively—the veteran of the Algerian revolution succumbs to cancer in a P ­ arisian hospital, symbolically sealing the fate of postcolonial ­Algeria.24 In ‘Abir sarir, Ziyad is the object of the young Khaled’s jealousy and a­ dmiration—the Palestinian counterpoint to the Algerian journalist Abd al-Haq and, in death even more than in life, an icon of resistance in the wake of colonial and post­ colonial violence. Given Mosteghanemi’s impatience with national allegory in ­Algérie: Femme et écritures, one might surmise that the contrapuntal allegories of Algeria and Palestine she deploys in the trilogy are meant to shore up the pitfalls of (trans)national allegory. Yet here we must consider her intended and actual public, the Mashriqi readership. Modifying the terms of ­Graham Huggan’s analysis to examine horizontal rather than vertical politics of representation and cultural hegemony, I examine Mosteghanemi’s mediation of Algeria and Palestine for a Mashriqi readership as an example of the transcolonial exotic: the commodification of peripheral allegories of revolution (Algeria and Palestine) for literary consumption at the Mashriqi center. My reading of Mosteghanemi’s contrapuntal use of allegory shows that, like national allegory, transnational allegory risks appropriating dif-

68   Decolonizing the Maghreb ference (here, transcolonial rather than gender difference) within culturally dominant (Mashriqi rather than male) imaginaries. As evidenced in popular and high cultural imaginaries of the Algerian and Palestinian revolution (e.g., Youssef Chahine’s biopic about Jamila Bouhrayd, a heroine of the ­Algerian revolution, or Mahmoud Darwish’s widely celebrated ­poetry) Algeria and Palestine remain poles of pan-Arab identification as well as objects of cultural desire and consumption across the Arabic-­speaking world.25 Yet they are exotic for other reasons as well. Here I focus on one central difference, that of language, which becomes one of the main conduits of transcolonial desire in Mosteghanemi’s novels. Critics have rightly focused on how Mosteghanemi positions her work against French, the colonial tongue imposed on generations of ­Algerian writers.26 Dedicated to Malek Haddad, “martyr of the Arabic language” because he refused to write in French after independence, and to her father, a hero of the Algerian revolution who was likewise illiterate in Arabic, Dhakirat al-jasad narrates and performs the turn to standard Arabic in post-independence Algeria.27 As I will show, the figure of the Palestinian poet and resistance fighter embodies the Arabic language, making Palestine the vehicle of linguistic decolonization. At the same time, Algeria remains a crucial counterpoint in the novel’s narrative of linguistic recovery, and not only in a negative sense. I argue that Mosteghanemi’s representation of languages other than standard Arabic—French, Darija, and Tamazight—produce linguistic difference as reified markers of cultural authenticity for consumption in the Mashriqi center. Language plays an important if contradictory role in Mosteghanemi’s trilogy, and particularly in Dhakirat al-jasad, which is narrated as a ­coming-to-Arabic. Khaled describes his acquisition of the national language in Memmian terms as a victory over “[his] old complex as an Algerian fluent only in French.”28 Schooled in the colonial educational system, he was promised “a glowing literary future . . . in French,” but opted for painting over writing after his arm was amputated so as not to collude, even in language use, with the enemy he could no longer fight physically.29 His encounter with Ahlam, a successful Arabic-language novelist who insists on conversing with him in “the language of [her] heart”30 (whether this is standard Arabic or Darija is unclear at this point), leads Khaled to adopt Arabic as the language that will finally allow him to reach “the Algerian reader.”31 Dhakirat-al-jasad is, intradiegetically, the fruit of this reconquest.

The Transcolonial Exotic  69 As we have seen, the Arabic dialect of Constantine plays a central role in Khaled’s infatuation with Ahlam. Tenderly noting her “Algerian accent [lahja]”32 and turns of phrase (e.g., the Constantine greeting “do you have a glass of water . . . may you live long?”), Khaled settles into his memories and “revert[s] to [his] old accent,” “pronounc[ing] ‘t’ as ‘ts’ in the Constantine fashion”33 and “washik” (“how are you”) “in the Constantine accent that [he] so missed.”34 Like the miqiass bracelet Ahlam is wearing when Khaled meets her for the first time, the mother tongue is one of the attributes that make Ahlam synonymous with his native city, and metonymically, Algeria. Khaled’s allegorical relation to the mother tongue is apparently untroubled by his triumphant account of Arabization, even though Arabic is not, in fact, his mother tongue. What is the function of the dialectal words that interrupt the standard Arabic prose of the novel? Mosteghanemi’s trilogy alludes only once to a potential conflict between standard Arabic and another non-European language: Tamazight. One of the extended conversations between the young photographer Khaled and the ailing painter Zian in ‘Abir sarir revolves around the death of Kateb Yacine in France in October 1989—one year exactly after the deadly protests in Algiers. Praising the writer who defied the powers that be even in his death, Zian describes the procession of women and men singing in “al-lugha al-barbariya” (“the Berber language”) at his funeral while the imam and other officials stood helplessly by. For Zian and his younger interlocutor, both invalids of Algeria’s most recent wars, Kateb embodies the continued promise of the “Algerian revolution” in the era of postcolonial disillusionment.35 Paradoxically, it is Tamazight, not Arabic, that symbolizes this promise. It is of course ironic that Mosteghanemi uses the derogative term Berber to evoke Kateb’s funeral in a novel written in standard Arabic, a language he explicitly characterized as colonial. Mosteghanemi’s bracketing of Tamazight—a language whose struggle for recognition in the 1980s and 1990s coincides with the setting and context of production of her ­Algerian trilogy—is symptomatic of her treatment of the spoken languages of ­Algeria. Like Constantinois (incidentally, a dialect very close to the one Kateb spoke—he was from this region), this brief mention of “Berber” functions as an exoticized marker of Algerian authenticity in a novel geared toward a Mashriqi audience more familiar with the Levantine dialects. So whereas Khaled peppers his evocations of Constantinois with examples, he

70   Decolonizing the Maghreb feels no such need when recalling Ziyad’s use of “the full gamut of crude Oriental [al-sharqiya] epithets” to “[curse] the regimes that acquired glory with Palestinian blood.”36 The Palestinian dialect, although also exotic to Cairene ears, is nevertheless familiar and brooks no explanation. I noted above that Khaled expresses his love for the spoken tongue of Constantine in the written language without ever noting the paradoxical nature of such a substitution. Yet this difference is impossible to ignore for a reader of Arabic: words and expression such as washik (“how are you”) or ‘ishak (“may you live long”) jump out as examples of Algerian Arabic, even without translation or comment. In this respect they are nearly as salient as the French words and citations spelled out in Roman letters as evidence of Algeria’s continued bilingualism—usually as a negative counterpoint to Constantinois, for example when Khaled recoils at Ahlam’s French salutations, but also as a nod to “martyrs” of the French language such as Haddad, through quotes reproduced in the original French. If Khaled’s narrative papers over the difference between standard and dialectal Arabic, a parallel linguistic drama is played out in the novel: Khaled’s and Ahlam’s contrasting use of the Arabic language. Whereas Khaled presents his coming-to-Arabic as a recovery of the nation he has left behind—a nation paradoxically synonymous with his mother tongue—Ahlam writes in Arabic to bury the past. For her, Arabic is not the language of Algeria, but of an Arab world centered round transcolonial rather than (post)colonial relations. Palestine, I argue, is at the heart of this new literary cartography. In order to substantiate this claim, I return to the scene of encounter with which I began. Recounting the fateful meeting between his (unattainable) lover and best friend, Khaled acknowledges his admiration for, and jealousy of, Ziyad in terms of language: “I loved Ziyad . . . I admired him. I felt that he was stealing from me the words for sadness [huzn], the words for nation [watan], and the words for love too.”37 In other words, Khaled envies Ziyad’s ability to write allegorically (“I have no homeland but you”) in the Arabic language. In a striking admission, Khaled later contrasts his relationship to Arabic, a language he associates with Ahlam and Algeria and opposes to French, with Ziyad’s revolutionary Arabic, oriented not toward the past but toward the future. After a desperate and futile attempt to woo his beloved in Arabic, Khaled admits that “[I] should have written [those letters] to you before Ziyad crept under your skin and became your language.”38 As we have seen, Ahlam has already chosen Arabic (and Pal-

The Transcolonial Exotic  71 estinian) literature over Algerian art, a nation in the making over one that has broken its promises, and pan-Arab over Algerian nationalism. I have argued that Mosteghanemi’s trilogy exoticizes Algeria for a Mashriqi public, contrasting the languages of Algeria (Darija, Tamazight, and French) with the more recognizable Palestinian dialect and the literary Arabic exemplified in Palestinian poetry. I further contend that her use of the Arabic language is aimed at the production of a transnational reading public, beyond the French public of her elders, beyond also “the ­Algerian reader” willed by Khaled. What are the political consequences of ­Mosteghanemi’s transcolonial exoticism, and to what extent might the category of the transcolonial exotic help clarify political imaginaries of Algeria and Palestine in the Mashriq at the dawn of the 2010–11 revolutions? In her analysis of the controversies surrounding the American University in Cairo Press (AUCP) Naguib Mahfouz Award, Samia Mehrez identifies Mosteghanemi as one of two authors who were singled out among a roster of thirteen awardees for unusually vicious critique. In addition to the “nationalist” rancor directed at the AUCP—fueled in part by the fact that awarded works are guaranteed translation into English, and therefore a global reception—Mehrez argues that it is particularly as novice women writers (beautiful ones at that) that Mosteghanemi and Somaya Ramadan, the other author she discusses, were targeted.39 Critics went so far as to claim that they had slept with the right people or, in ­Mosteghanemi’s case, plagiarized the work of either Nizar Qabbani or Sa‘di Yusuf, to achieve literary stardom.40 But Mehrez insists most on Mosteghanemi’s status as an outsider to explain the fury that followed the announcement of the award. Not only did she hail from the Maghrebi margins; she also held a Ph.D. from a French university and spent most of her adult life in exile in Paris and Beirut rather than in her native Algeria. Critics implied that she was neither Maghrebi enough, by association with Paris and Beirut (“the Paris of the East”), nor, as an Algerian presumably still somehow under the stranglehold of the French language, Arab enough. Without in any way endorsing these sexist and nationalist attacks against Mosteghanemi, one can certainly interrogate the relationship between Mosteghanemi’s commercial and professional success and her subject matter: Algeria and Palestine. Perhaps in response to the N ­ aguib Mahfouz Award controversy, Mosteghanemi stages the charge of self-­Orientalism— the marketing of the Orient for the West—in the last novel of her trilogy,

72   Decolonizing the Maghreb ‘Abir sarir, published five years after the award. The novel is set in Paris, where Khaled has come to accept a prize for the photograph that cost him his arm, which depicts a boy crying for his dead dog. Speculating on the reasons this photograph would appeal to a Western audience, he wonders if it is because the Western world has been so desensitized to human suffering—partly as a result of the profusion of war photographs produced by people like him—that it has become more receptive to the death of animals than to human death. When he shows Zian the award-winning photograph, the dying painter has a different interpretation. A ­ ccording to him, an image of postcolonial Algerian violence is proof that the Algerian revolution is finally over. The picture of present-day violence covers over a past that no longer needs to be exhumed, putting France’s guilty conscience to rest.41 It is difficult, when reading this passage, not to think of Mostegha­ nemi’s position as an author whose success in the West has proved controversial. Excerpts of Mémoires de la chair, a translation that faithfully reproduces the style, if not the exact content, of Dhakirat al-jasad, were assigned on the 2003 French baccalaureate, the centralized high school exit exam, in a remarkable testament to Mosteghanemi’s palatability in France, given the risk-aversive climate of national curricula.42 The fact that ­Mosteghanemi’s first novel exhumes memories of the Algerian war of independence against the fictional and real backdrop of postcolonial violence no doubt explains her success in a France that was beginning, at this time, to revisit its Algerian history. Another metafictional passage in the opening pages of Dhakirat al-jasad does even more to raise questions about ­Mosteghanemi’s currency in Arabic letters, and, indirectly, about the salability of Algeria and Palestine in the Arabic-language literary market. As Khaled sets out to begin writing his life story, he picks up Ahlam’s last novel, The Corner of Oblivion. Looking at the photograph on the cover of Ahlam’s book, Khaled wonders why she chose a modern haircut and dress, so different from his memory—or fantasy—of her as a traditional woman of Constantine. Was it to frustrate his desire to allegorize her? Or was it “to promote a product in the shape of a book”?43 The fact that ­Mosteghanemi titled her 2009 self-help book for women suffering in love Nisyan.com (Oblivion.com), echoing the title of Ahlam’s fictional work, is yet another clue that she self-consciously stages her authorial position, though perhaps less ironically than one would hope.44

The Transcolonial Exotic  73 The mise en abyme of the marketability of cultural production in ­Dhakirat al-jasad and ‘Abir sarir directs us to the “transcolonial exotic,” applied here not to the marketability of Algerian novels within Western circuits of production (though this remains a relevant question for ­Mosteghanemi) but to the exchange value of both Algeria and Palestine in a Mashriq-­centered cultural and literary field. It is interesting to note the place of language with respect to the charge that Mosteghanemi was neither really of the center—not Mashriqi enough—nor authentically Maghrebi, that is, peripheral, enough. I contend that the ambiguous position she occupies—as an Arabic-language author who resides in Beirut and is better known in Cairo than in her native Algeria—is central to her success. The fragments of Algerian dialect and French that punctuate her novels are proof of ­Algerian authenticity in a novel whose reading public remains principally Mashriqi, while Palestine functions as a symbolic equivalent—and more recognizable avatar—of the Algerian revolution. The question of “marketing the margins” is even more relevant when we consider the television series based on Dhakirat al-jasad. A SyrianAlgerian co-production that first aired on the Tunisian, Islamist-leaning Nessma TV network during Ramadan in September 2010—just months before the onset of the Tunisian uprising—it translates the twin allegories of Mosteghanemi’s novel into the popular genre of Arabic-language teledrama. Mosteghanemi was deeply involved in the production of the series: she chose the production company and the two lead actors, and appears in the finale to accept Khaled’s completed manuscript—­Dhakirat al-jasad— on one of the hanging bridges of Constantine.45 Yet, as is to be expected, there are significant differences between the novel and its adaptation for the small screen. Some can be explained by the constraints of the medium and the nature of the genre: frequent flashbacks stand in for narration, dialogue is added for explanatory purposes or removed in the interest of action, minor characters are fleshed out to add intrigue, especially of the romantic kind, and elements are borrowed from the novel’s sequels to add dramatic foreshadowing, of the black decade in particular. Other variations, however, are more problematic. Taking into account the specificities of the medium—television series are targeted to a mass audience and shaped by market considerations, to a much greater extent than literary texts, even best-selling novels—I show that the series elides ­Mosteghanemi’s critique of national allegory, retaining only its exoticization of Palestine and Algeria

74   Decolonizing the Maghreb for a transnational public. Even more obviously than the novel, the series invites us to read the transnational allegorization of Algeria and Palestine as a commodification of revolution at the dawn of the 2010–11 uprisings. Samia Mehrez has written about the transnational turn in Arabic-­ language television, and in television series more specifically, building on Lila Abu-Lughod’s analysis of tele-imagined national communities to account for a media pan-Arabism more successful than pan-Arab politics could ever hope to be.46 Mehrez nuances the long-held view of Cairo as the film and television capital of the Arab world by discussing the proliferation of satellite television in the 1990s, and the recent emergence of highly popular Syrian musalsalat, which, unlike Egyptian teledrama, “have adopted a level of pan-Arab language that is more representative of a wider Arab collectivity.”47 Though Mehrez focuses on a popular Egyptian serial, her remarks about ­Ramadan serials and satellite television in general are of great relevance to my analysis of the Dhakirat al-jasad series, which, though not specifically designed for Ramadan, was released during that highly lucrative season. Aired when families across the Muslim world are gathered for post-iftar (fast-breaking) television viewing, Ramadan serials are, Mehrez argues, geared toward the imagination of national (e.g., Egyptian) and transnational (Arab, Muslim) communities. I would add that they are also an ideal medium for the consumption of transcolonial allegories, as the popularity of the televised version of Dhakirat al-jasad attests. The music video that serves as the introductory segment for each episode succinctly captures Mosteghanemi’s double exoticization of revolution by pairing the militarized, masculinized Algerian and Palestinian revolutions against a backdrop of love, lust, and betrayal.48 The double portrait of A ­ lgeria and Palestine that obtains borrows liberally from a Ba‘athist lexicon of revolutionary pan-Arabism that takes the Palestinian armed resistance as its vanguard. Here, the Algerian revolution is interjected as an illustrious predecessor in the struggle to reclaim the Arab world from imperialist encroachment. In this, the series mirrors the novel on which it is based, marketing the transcolonial exotic for a Mashriqi viewing p ­ ublic. The handsome, kufiya-­ wearing Palestinian fighter and beautiful Algerian woman donning traditional Constantine clothes embody military and cultural resistance to Israel and France, respectively (see Figs. 9 and 10). In this sense, the series’ musical introduction distills the twin allegories of ­Mosteghanemi’s novel into the saccharin form of the teledrama genre.

figure 9.  Ziyad in combat gear, opening credits of Dhakirat al-jasad. Source: YouTube.

figure 10.  Ahlam in traditional garb, opening credits of Dhakirat al-jasad. Source: YouTube.

76   Decolonizing the Maghreb Yet this apparently faithful rendition of the Algerian and Palestinian revolutions omits two elements that are central to Mosteghanemi’s representation of Palestine: Ziyad’s status as a poet—his mastery of literary ­Arabic, envisioned as the language not of the independent Algerian nation, but of the Arab world writ large—and Ahlam’s resistance to feminine allegories of Algeria, which turns Ziyad, the Palestinian poet-cum-fighter, into an alternative and expendable allegory of transcolonial revolution. Where Palestine and Algeria remain glorified images of resistance in the series, Mosteghanemi’s novels deploy Palestine to underscore the failures of the Algerian revolution. Absent, too, are Khaled’s and Ziyad’s scathing critiques of Arab regimes. Here, the only guilty parties are a handful of corrupt Algerian dignitaries and the Israeli ambassador to Paris, the object of an attack orchestrated by Ziyad—a conspicuous departure from ­Mosteghanemi’s novel, which never specifies the nature of Ziyad’s mission. In a world that is rather more Manichean than that painted by Mosteghanemi, the Algeria of yesterday and the Palestine of tomorrow team up to defeat their imperial enemies. Obviously, the medium of television does not lend itself easily to the subtleties of multiple focalization, conflicting narratives, intertextuality, and irony through which Mosteghanemi deconstructs national allegory. Because the series adapts only the first novel of the trilogy (with the exception of a few details borrowed from the sequels for context or dramatic effect), the story is entirely focalized through Khaled, with the result that the viewer shares his idealized portrait of Ahlam as allegory of Algeria. The critique of national allegory articulated by Ahlam and divined in the gaps and contradictions in Khaled’s narrative has completely disappeared from this straightforward glorification—and equation—of the Algerian and Palestinian revolutions. Instead, the series gives visual form to national allegory itself, producing a grotesque parody of allegory as woman with comical, if unintentional, effects. Thus, when Khaled fixates on Ahlam’s miqiass, the camera zooms in to give a close-up of the gold ornament before panning out to an image of Khaled’s mother bathing him as a boy in Algeria.49 The scene unfolds to dramatic music, while Khaled’s voice-over explains the significance of the miqiass. The image of Ahlam fully decked out in traditional Constantine costume—at the antipodes of Ahlam’s seductive “­European” attire, fetishized, differently, by the younger Khaled ben Toubal in Fawda’ al-hawas and ‘Abir sarir—dances across the scene, un-

The Transcolonial Exotic  77 checked, in Khaled’s imagination. And whereas Mosteghanemi evokes the Algerian and Palestinian revolutions tangentially—whether in the memories, conversations, or accounts of her characters—only to debunk the first and embrace the second, the series provides unambiguous action shots of both. By depicting the Algerian and Palestinian struggles directly—rather than through narrative and filmic devices—the televised version of these revolutions removes all sense of mediation, and any attendant doubt about the veracity or value of these accounts. Dhakirat al-jasad first aired in Tunisia a few short months before Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked a wave of uprisings across the Maghreb and Mashriq. Algeria was remarkably silent during this period, save a few underreported protests and an unprecedented wave of self-­ immolations.50 Commentators attribute this relative calm to the collective trauma of the black decade, which has become the lens through which many Algerians interpret anti-regime, and particularly Islamist, activism. At the same time, the October 1988 demonstrations have been invoked as a relatively recent example of popular unrest in the region, as has, in a different way, the first Palestinian Intifada, making both Algeria and Palestine symbolic and rhetorical precursors to the most recent wave of protests. Indeed, as I noted in the Introduction, the terms most commonly used to describe these events, thawra (“revolution”) and intifada (“uprising”) are highly evocative of the Algerian and Palestinian anticolonial struggles. It is tempting to imagine that Mosteghanemi’s representations of Palestine and Algeria have gained new relevance in the wake of the uprisings of the 2010s. Yet Mosteghanemi’s exoticization of Algeria and Palestine for a Mashriqi center has become outdated in another sense. What I am calling the transcolonial exotic—the salability of the margins in the cultural capitals of the Arabic-speaking world—loses some of its market value with the proliferation of new centers of media and cultural attention. Since the beginning of the uprisings, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria have occupied the airwaves alongside Egypt, shifting the balance of symbolic capital from Cairo and Beirut to Tunis and Damascus. The chants resounding from Tunis to Cairo and beyond—“Dégage,” “Irhal” (“Get out” in French and Arabic), and “Al-sha‘b yurid iskat al-nizam” (“The people demand the fall of the regime”)—clearly demonstrate new forms of rhetorical and political solidarity across borders previously thought to be less porous. Though extended analyses of the cultural exchanges that enabled and in turn mediated popular

78   Decolonizing the Maghreb protests across national and regional borders are still forthcoming, critics, activists, and bloggers have begun documenting the importance of music, poetry, and even prose fiction in producing a transnational vox populi and translating imaginaries of revolution.51 If the transcolonial exotic is the process of marketing the margins for consumption in the center, it is no longer as clear where the center and margins reside. And though Cairo and Beirut remain the capitals of literary production, the Syrian-Algerian TV series Dhakirat al-jasad demonstrates that they no longer have an exclusive monopoly over popular culture. What, then, will be the effects of this multiplication of representational foci on the twin figures of Algeria and Palestine? Though both have remained marginal on the map of the recent wave of uprisings, I suspect that the multicentered nature of the Maghreb and Mashriq—both terms that need to be revisited in light of recent events— have increased, rather than effaced, the import and impact of these iconic predecessors.

4 Portrait of an Arab Jew Albert Memmi and the Politics of Indigeneity

In Part One I focused on literary texts from the past fifty years that deploy transcolonial identification with Palestine to make the case for the cultural and political decolonization of the Maghreb. I have shown that, in different ways, Souffles-Anfas, Kateb Yacine’s popular theater troupe, and Ahlam Mosteghanemi mobilize Palestine as a figure of the colonial, writ large to include not only classic forms of European colonialism and their persistence in the postcolonial present (e.g., continued metropolitan control over the means of production, distribution, and reception of Maghrebi literature or racism in postcolonial France) but also the legacies of French colonial measures aimed at separating Jews and Muslims in the Maghreb, measures that have historically overlapped with what Amnon Raz-­Krakotzkin calls the “principle of separation” in Israel-Palestine.1 Part Two focuses on historical debates and literary representations of French colonial minority politics and their convergence with Zionist/Israeli discourses and practices. I begin my study of French and Zionist/Israeli discourses of separation with a figure whose writings on colonialism and Zionism have been central to Maghrebi debates about Palestine-Israel: the Tunisian writer Albert Memmi. This may seem a counterintuitive move. Unlike writers and intellectuals like Abraham Serfaty, the leftist militant and a prominent member of the Souffles-Anfas team (Chapter One), and the Moroccan writers Abdelkebir Khatibi (Chapter Five) and Edmond Amran El Maleh (Chapter Six), Memmi emphatically refused to link the emergence

82   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation of political Zionism and the establishment of the state of Israel to European colonial practices in the Maghreb. At the same time, however, his early analyses of French colonial minority politics enable the very kinds of transcolonial critique of French and Zionist/Israeli discourses of separation that he failed to deliver in his writings on Jewishness, Zionism, and Israel. Drawing on Mahmood Mamdani’s account of the legacies of colonial divide and rule policies in Africa, I show that Memmi’s writings simultaneously reveal and obfuscate the colonial genealogy of the Arab-Jew divide, while staking a claim for Jewish indigeneity in both the Maghreb and Palestine.2 As my readings of Memmi’s later work reveal, even his most vehemently pro-Israeli writings sketch a paradoxical parabola between the Maghreb and Israel, one that unwittingly sets up a transcolonial comparison between Palestinians and Arab Jews. Memmi is best known in the fields of Francophone and postcolonial studies for his trenchant critique of colonialism in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) and for his portrayal of the colonized subject in his first novel, The Pillar of Salt (1953).3 Postcolonial critics in the United States have tended to focus on these two seminal works, ignoring his later writings on Jewishness, Zionism, and Israel-Palestine: Portrait of a Jew (1962), The Liberation of the Jew (1966), and the essays collected in Jews and Arabs (1974).4 In contrast, most French-language criticism focuses on M ­ emmi’s status as an assimilated, colonized Jew. Following Guy Dugas’ monographs on Memmi and his breakthrough scholarship on Judeo-Maghrebi Franco­ ­ phone literature, French-language scholars of Jewish Studies and Franco­phone literature usually situate him within a Jewish-Maghrebi (rather than Maghrebi or postcolonial) canon.5 As a result, Memmi’s anticolonial and Jewish writings are seldom the object of comparative study.6 It is as if there were two Memmis: the theorist of colonialism and assimilation, read alongside Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon; and the theorist of Jewishness, canonic in the field of Jewish(-Maghrebi) studies, and ignored or reviled by everyone else. Against this tendency to treat these two corpuses separately, I read Memmi’s texts on Jewishness and Israel through the lens of his foundational analyses of colonial society. It is paradoxical, or at least surprising, that a champion of decolonization in the Maghreb would have had so little to say about Palestine. Memmi famously celebrated the inevitable demise of the colonial system in The Colonizer and the Colonized, which ranks, alongside C ­ ésaire’s D ­ iscourse

Portrait of an Arab Jew  83 on Colonialism (1950/1955) and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), as one of the first and most important anticolonial texts of the twentieth century.7 A relentless critic of European colonialism—­including, as we will see, of French colonial minority politics aimed at separating Jews and Muslims—Memmi was nevertheless unwilling to situate the emergence of political Zionism and the foundation of the state of Israel within the context of European imperialism, or to analyze the overlap between Zionist and French colonial discourses of separation. Casting Israel-­Palestine as the culmination of a millennial antagonism between Jews and their Muslim oppressors, Memmi portrays Zionism and Israel as the Jewish counterpart of the anticolonial liberation movements he advocated for in the Maghreb.8 Before I turn to the apparent contradiction between Memmi’s anti­ colonial and pro-Israeli positions, I analyze his representations of Jews and Muslims in The Colonizer and the Colonized and The Pillar of Salt. As I will show, Memmi’s early work simultaneously sets up and problematizes the Jew-Arab opposition that undergirds his writings on Jewishness, Zion­ ism, and Israel, revealing a dynamic tension between the dramatization and naturalization of the terms Jew and Arab throughout his work. Rather than chart a straight line from Memmi’s anticolonial engagements in the Maghreb to his later pro-Zionist stance, I analyze the configuration of these questions in his writings and the complex and sometimes surprising ways in which they are mapped out onto the Maghreb and Israel-Palestine. The Colonizer and the Colonized is not as schematic as it first appears. Several elements complicate the binary opposition announced in the title, not least Memmi’s own position in this diptych. The French title underscores the book’s double portraiture, clearly privileging the colonized: Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait du colonisateur (Portrait of the colonized, preceded by Portrait of the colonizer). Composed as a series of sociological sketches of the various “types” on either side of the colonial divide, from the racist colon or settler to the reformist colonizer, and from the colonized mimic-man to the anticolonial revolutionary, Memmi’s seminal anticolonial essay significantly places Tunisian Jews not in the section titled “Portrait of the Colonized” but in the opening section describing the groups who benefit to some degree from French colonization, alongside Italian and Maltese nationals—poor but nevertheless protected by their sovereign states and culturally closer to the French than the natives could

84   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation ever hope to be—and the token Muslims who were elevated to the rank of cadre, police officer, etc., often to enforce colonial rule. “Eternally hesitant and rejected candidates for assimilation,” native Jews “live in a painful and constant ambiguity,” for they desperately want to join the ranks of the colonizers yet can never be accepted into the upper echelons of colonial ­society.9 They remain stuck at the next-to-last level of “the pyramid of petty tyrants,” Memmi’s vivid phrase for the racial hierarchy of colonial society.10 Echoing Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous preface to the first edition of The Colonizer and the Colonized—Sartre described Memmi as neither colonizer or colonized, or perhaps both, given the Jews’ relative privilege and high degree of assimilation compared with Muslims11—he admits in a subsequent preface that if he was able to write a portrait of the colonizer, it is because he was not entirely colonized himself. Unlike the Muslim, the “­native” Jew “found himself one small notch above the Muslim on the pyramid which is the basis of all colonial societies,” and sought to preserve this modicum of privilege in relation to the colonized majority. Memmi parted ways with the majority of his co-religionists to advocate for Tunisian independence, but confesses that he was unable to shake off his profound admiration for the West, and he continued to feel most at ease in the company of “the colonizer of good will,” the Frenchmen advocating for democratic reform in the colonies. Unlike the pieds-noirs (European settlers) or the Muslim masses, Memmi “was a sort of half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because [he] belonged completely to no one.”12 I begin with Memmi’s important, if seldom commented, remarks on the place of Jewish minorities in the colonial pyramid to set the stage for my reading of the representation of Jews and Arabs in his novels and essays, which simultaneously narrate and exemplify the colonial production of these two categories as separate and opposite. In Chapter Two, I discussed the colonial policies and discourses aimed at distinguishing between Arabs and Berbers (for example, the “Kabyle myth” devised by French Orientalists, according to which the originally European, sedentary Kabyles were more superficially Islamized, and therefore more assimilable, than the nomadic Arabs). I turn now to the analogous divide-and-rule measures aimed at separating indigenous Muslims (recast as Arabs) and Jews in the Maghreb, whether through legal means (e.g., the mass naturalization of Algerian Jews via the 1870 Crémieux Decree) or selective access to French schools and other assimilationist tactics. Though Jews were

Portrait of an Arab Jew  85 never naturalized en masse in Tunisia and Morocco, the administration of both Protectorates used similar legal measures to divide the local population into ethnic-religious groups. In the Protectorates, French colonial law enshrined customary law—Rabbinic and Islamic codes—to legally differentiate between Muslims and Jews, who were thought to be more receptive to French civilization. In colonial discourse, the ethnic identity Arab was opposed to both Jew and Berber, and thus came to mean both Muslim and non-Jewish or non-Berber. Although historically only a fraction of Tunisians speak Tamazight compared with Algeria and especially Morocco, the production of these identities as discrete in adjoining colonies has bearing on Tunisia as well. As I will show, Memmi’s use of these terms cannot be divorced from this discursive context. France’s colonial minority politics were most effective in assimilating indigenous Jews, partly thanks to French Jewish individuals (Adolphe Crémieux) and organizations that took on the civilizing mission on behalf of African and Oriental Jews. In Algeria, the Crémieux Decree consecrated in law the processes of assimilation initiated through the French school system. In contrast, most Moroccan and Tunisian Jews remained colonial subjects (rather than citizens) of France and fell under the jurisdiction of rabbinic law. Yet they too underwent drastic processes of assimilation through French-Jewish schools. The Alliance israélite universelle (Universal Israelite Alliance or AIU), a nongovernmental, secular Jewish association founded in Paris in 1860 for the protection and advancement of non-European Jews, developed an extensive network of French schools across the Mediterranean, pairing the French curriculum with a secular humanist Jewish culture. As Aron Rodrigue has documented, this assimilationist, Jacobin institution was initially at odds with the separatist project of Jewish nationalism. With the onset of anti-Jewish laws in Germany in the 1930s, however, and most decisively after the discovery of the death camps, the AIU took a clear position for the creation of a national homeland for the Jews.13 Although the colonial project to assimilate indigenous Jews stands in apparent contradiction with the Zionist project, French colonial and Zion­ ist discourses share a central trait, which will serve as my guiding thread throughout Part Two: the separation between Jews and Arabs. The legal distinction between Jews and Muslims, recast as Arabs, in the French colonies of the Maghreb was mutually reinforced by the distinction ­between

86   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation Jews and non-Jews (Muslim and Christian Palestinians) in Palestine-Israel. In this chapter I read the work of Memmi as a symptom of this remapping of colonial Maghrebi identities onto the terrain of Israel-Palestine and, conversely, of the translation of the Jew–non-Jew divide in Palestine into the terms that crystallized in the colonial Maghreb—Jew and Arab. I begin with Memmi’s first novel, arguing that it shores up the opposition between Jews and Arabs in colonial discourse, yet simultaneously relies on this opposition to fulfill its narrative goal: the definitive exile of the assimilated Jewish protagonist. A narrative illustration, avant la lettre, of Memmi’s analysis of the impossibility of assimilation in The Colonizer and the Colonized, The Pillar of Salt hones in on a figure that plays only a minor role in Memmi’s essay: the Tunisian Jew. The novel begins when the narrator, Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, is about to take the prestigious entrance examination to become a teacher of philosophy in the French colonial school system. Instead of completing his training as a purveyor of French culture, he sets aside his philosophy exam and embarks on a retrospective account of his frustrated attempts to climb the social ladder of colonial society. Alexandre begins his tale in the impasse Tarfoune, the squalid cul-de-sac where he was born, describing his family’s subsequent move to the “Passage,” a modern apartment building, and his integration into the French educational system via the primary school of the AIU and the French lycée. His desire to succeed is presented as a way out of the metaphoric and literal impasse of his childhood. But this physical trajectory from the old city to the new also stages the unlinking of the narrator’s fate from that of his negligibly less indigent Muslim neighbors. Alexandre was not born in what he calls the “ghetto” or hara, but “at the frontier of the Jewish quarter,” that is, between the Jewish and Muslim neighborhoods.14 Alexandre learns to distinguish between the components of colonial society—indeed the components of his own, contradictory ­identity—in the French school system. Unnamed in the first part of the novel, the protagonist’s identity is revealed in Part Two, eponymously titled “­Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche,” which begins with the narrator’s declension of his name in a slightly different order: “My name is Mordekhai, ­Alexandre ­Benillouche.”15 Though the assimilated Alexandre tries to downplay his Jewish name, school officials retain “the exact order of [his] legal status” (état civil) in the colony, identifying him, first, as a native Jew.16 ­Onomastically

Portrait of an Arab Jew  87 relegated to the “ghetto” from which he desperately wants out, Alexandre summarizes his contradictory identity as a series of exclusions, simultaneously revealing the fragmentation of colonial society into discrete and opposite categories. This is perhaps the most famous passage of Memmi’s novel: Even if I descended from a Berber tribe the Berbers would not recognize me, for I am Jewish and not Muslim, a townsman not a mountain dweller; even if I carried the name of the [Italian] painter, the Italians would not welcome me, for I am African and not European. Always I will remain Alexandre Mordekhai, Alexandre Benillouche, native in a country of colonization, Jewish in an anti-Semitic universe, African in a world dominated by Europe.17

Most often read as a succinct formulation of Memmi’s hybrid identity as an assimilated, Tunisian Jew, this passage also illustrates in condensed form the crystallization of the colonial identities inventoried in The Colonizer and the Colonized: indigenous (here, African) Muslims, Jews, and Berbers on the one hand, Europeans on the other. Defining himself as (possibly) Berber, Jewish, and African, Alexandre simultaneously sets up an implicit opposition between Jews and Arabs and points to the limits of these categories. Though the first set of names is immediately legible—­Alexandre was his parents’ tribute to the West they admired, Mordekhai his link to the Jewish tradition—his surname, Benillouche, is indeterminate with respect to both religion and ethnicity, leading the narrator to speculate on his origins: “Benillouche or, in Berber-Arabic dialect, the son of the lamb. From what mountain tribe did my ancestors descend? Who am I, after all?” The fact that his name means “son of the lamb” in Berber (ben is the dialectal variant of the Arabic ibn or “son,” illouche is Tamazight for “lamb”) leads Alexandre to infer that he descends from a tribe converted to Judaism by Kahina, the Berber queen who, in his account, “founded a Jewish kingdom in the middle of the Atlas Mountains.”18 Onomastic research leads him to discover that the name Benillouche also has Roman antecedents, and that an illustrious Italian painter had a similar-sounding name: “philology could explain the changes the name had undergone,” he concludes.19 Alexandre’s invocation of the science of language to reconstruct his origins is particularly significant in the context of colonial discourse, which draws heavily on philology and ethnography to distinguish between “Jews,” “Berbers,” and “Arabs.” Edward Said and others have discussed the

88   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation cardinal role philology played in the elaboration of Orientalist discourse and modern racial theory. The study of languages was harnessed scientifically to ground European mappings of race and ethnicity, coupling language, culture, religion, and race to distinguish between human groups, with Indo-European as the exemplar of civilizational superiority. Ernest Renan, the philologist who coined the categories Semite/Semitic to describe the language family including Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic (in opposition to the purportedly more advanced Indo-European languages) and is credited with theorizing the infamous opposition between Semites and Aryans, perfectly illustrates the instrumentalization of the human sciences that was the hallmark of colonial discourse.20 Alexandre’s brief mention of philology at this juncture in the narrative invites the reader to denaturalize the category “Jew” and its silent double “Arab,” subsumed in the rather vague linguistic nomenclature “Berber-Arabic dialect.” Though he intuits the constructed nature of philological categories, remarking that “philology is an uncertain science, and [that] the past is much too far away,” this scientific discourse has made its way into the enumeration of his native, Jewish, and African identities.21 More profoundly, it also subtends the split that is implied, though not analyzed, in his concluding statement: “Always I will remain Alexandre Mordekhai, Alexandre Benillouche.” Alexandre is alternatively Mordekhai or Benillouche, Jewish or Berber-Arab, rather than both simultaneously. If the narrator does not explicitly name the three groupings sedimented in colonial law, his bifurcated name clearly betrays the splitting of the native Jew from his fellow Berber and Arab colonial subjects. Alexandre’s ambiguous surname takes on acute importance toward the end of the novel, clarifying the racist underpinnings of these colonial categories. Part Three, titled “The World,” abruptly ushers in World War II, with the application of the Jewish statutes under Vichy, the German occupation of Tunisia, and the forced assignment of able-bodied Jewish men to labor camps.22 Ironically, it is after the liberation of Tunisia from German and Vichy rule that Alexandre experiences racial exclusion most violently. After escaping from a Nazi work camp, he attempts to enlist in the French resistance and proudly writes his name, Alexandre Benillouche, on the register. When the officer asks him why he was not eligible for conscription, he explains that it is because he is “a foreigner . . . well, not exactly; a native Jew [ juif indigène].”23 Visibly embarrassed, the officer

Portrait of an Arab Jew  89 attempts to convince him to replace the name Alexandre with Mohamed: the army will take Muslims—the officer mistakenly assumed he was Muslim because of the name Benillouche—but not Jews.24 This scene is important for several reasons. Coming close to the end of Alexandre’s retrospective narrative, it represents his final attempt to become French at a time when the racial laws of the fascist colony should have been revoked. But Alexandre is bitterly reminded that these racist laws preceded the Nazi occupation, putting an end, once and for all, to the myth of assimilation. Even more importantly for my purposes here, Alexandre’s foiled attempt to enlist is one of the few scenes that clearly implicates French colonialism in the juridical and political separation of Maghrebi Jews and Muslims. The ambiguity of the name Benillouche, dispelled by the narrator’s confused explanation—he is neither completely foreign nor entirely native; he is an “indigenous Jew”—points to the overlap between the Jewish and Arab components of his identity, despite the administration’s attempts to separate these strands. He is condemned to remain Alexandre Mordechai, Alexandre Benillouche, Jew or Arab. If, as I have argued, The Pillar of Salt exposes the colonial opposition of the categories Jew and Arab in scenes such as these, it also naturalizes this opposition for the purposes of Alexandre’s narrative, which culminates in his exile from Tunisia. Alexandre cannot become French, but he is also unable to become fully Tunisian—that is, colonized, to use the terms of The Colonizer and the Colonized (remember that Memmi situates indigenous Jews in the first part of his essay, not the second). The split between Jews and Arabs and concomitant exclusion of the former from the ranks of the colonized is dramatized in the third and final part of The Pillar of Salt, which recounts the narrator’s exposure to “the others.” This is the title of the second chapter of this section, which begins in medias res after a “pogrom” in the Jewish quarter of Tunis.25 This chapter marks the first in a series of crises that will make Alexandre turn away from the Occident he strove to emulate: the numerus clausus (“closed number” in Latin, as the Jewish quotas were euphemistically labeled) under Vichy, the German work camps, and his rejection by the liberation army. Yet the indeterminacy of the “others” portrayed in this chapter also leaves the door open to the opposition between Jews and Arabs. The ghetto is rife with rumors about the authors of the massacre. Some claim that, before being sent to serve as cannon fodder in Europe,

90   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation the native tirailleurs or infantrymen let themselves loose on the Jewish quarters. Others believe that the massacres were orchestrated by the colonial government in order to distract the population from “its political difficulties” (presumably, anticolonial sentiment), ordering Jewish soldiers to stay in their barracks. Still others claim that they were provoked by a minor scuffle between “a Jewish shopkeeper and an Arab customer.”26 After the massacre, Ben Smaan, a Muslim Tunisian nationalist and classmate of Alexandre’s at the lycée, asks him to persuade his co-religionists that the massacre amounted to a colonial provocation and that the two communities should work together against their common enemy. Unconvinced that anyone will listen to his arguments, the narrator wonders how he can choose between European anti-Semitism and a violence that is presented as endemic to Tunisia: “how was I to choose between repulsive hypocritical anti-Semitism, which had perhaps instigated the massacre, and these murderous explosions which, like letting blood, periodically relieved the pressure of so much accumulated hatred?” Alexandre counters Ben Smaan’s proposition that Jews and Muslims work together against the French by invoking a millennial hatred between Jews and Muslims and “the arguments of Jewish nationalists.”27 Yet he also betrays the role of French colonial discourses and institutions, and particularly the French school system, in making his “encounter” with Ben Smaan impossible. Though both are subjected to racism in school, Alexandre acknowledges that “the impetus that bore [him] toward the West was so strong that these encounters could be but accidents.”28 The narrator’s use of the term encounter here is significant, surreptitiously naturalizing the colonial categories that set Jews apart from Muslims and announcing the total rupture that follows. The narrator’s claim that he could not really “meet” the Muslims (except by the “accident” of a common experience of racism), indeed the fact that he imagines them as “the others,” marks his assimilation of colonial categories. Alexandre’s account of his colonial education stages the construction of the terms Arab and Jew as discrete categories, at the same time as it forecloses any encounter between them. The final chapters of The Pillar of Salt confirm that it is a dystopian account of the failures of assimilation in the colony, a reverse Bildungs­roman of French enlightenment discourse and its colonial civilizing ­mission. Having lost all faith in the French Republic and in the possibility of JewishMuslim solidarity, Alexandre accepts his friend Henry’s invitation to travel

Portrait of an Arab Jew  91 with him to a remote and exoticized Argentina, imagined as an El Dorado where they will be able to start their lives anew. The rushed ­conclusion—a few pages in a novel of more than three hundred pages—denies the reader a satisfactory sense of resolution after the succession of crises endured by the narrator. The war is over and Alexandre is finally reinstated in the French educational system, but he can neither fight for Tunisian independence alongside his Muslim compatriots nor accept a disenchanted status quo. His inability to integrate the multiple and overlapping facets of his identity remains a bitter testament to the enduring success of the colonial classification of native society. Memmi has repeatedly drawn parallels between his life and fiction, inviting autobiographical readings of his works. In a welcome departure from the critical tendency to read Memmi’s oeuvre (and she argues, Maghrebi literature in general) as autobiographical, Lia Brozgal shows that his novels and early essays complicate his own claims to autobiographical referentiality.29 But The Pillar of Salt goes even further, calling into question the colonial identities enumerated by Alexandre (Berber-Arab, Jewish, Italian, African . . . ) and putting into crisis the very possibility of (post)colonial autobiography. In the latter half of this chapter, I argue that the essays that explicitly take Memmi’s life as a case study of the Jewish condition similarly invite the reader to question the very categories of self that they articulate, albeit less obviously than his novels. Without neglecting the important generic, formal, and stylistic differences between ­Memmi’s fictional and nonfictional work, I read his later essays on Jewishness through the lens of The Colonizer and the Colonized and The Pillar of Salt for traces of the colonial foreclosure of the Arab Jew. In conclusion, I show how Memmi’s rare statements on Palestine both betray and challenge the colonial categories unraveled in his early work. Memmi cast his essays on the Jewish question as elaborations on the theme of oppression he began analyzing in The Colonizer and the Colonized. Like his portrait of the colonized, Portrait of a Jew and its sequel, Liberation of the Jew, inventory the various survival strategies adopted by the oppressed, only to expose each as insufficient or inauthentic and doomed to failure. Portrait of a Jew is divided into four parts, moving from the objective conditions of the Jews to their attempts to make do with these conditions through religious and cultural traditions: “The Misfortune of Being a Jew,” “The Mythical Jew,” “The Shadowy Figure,” and “The

92   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation Heritage.” Liberation of the Jew follows an even more didactic outline, describing “Self-Rejection” and the equally problematic “Self-Acceptance” before concluding with “The Way Out,” which proposes national liberation as the only solution to the Jewish problem. Following the teleological structure of Memmi’s first essay, Liberation of the Jew presents Zionism as the sole means for the Jew to finally come to terms with himself. If, in The Colonizer and the Colonized, national sovereignty is the first step “in the complete disappearance of colonialism,”30 contingent on the demise of the dialectic of mimicry and rejection that characterizes the relation of colonized to colonizer, the foundation of a national homeland for the Jews similarly releases them from the interminable dynamic of assimilation and traditionalism, whether they choose to live in Israel or not. The existence of a separate nation-state, on an equal footing with the nations that oppressed the Jews in the past, makes possible the birth of a Jew defined not through a negative relation to his antagonists but on his own terms. Memmi was less quick to arrive at the necessity for national liberation in his two-volume study of the Jewish condition than in The Colonizer and the Colonized, however, and more ambivalent about the implications and consequences of nationalism. In The Liberation of the Jew, Memmi nuances his espousal of nationalism in the conclusion by venturing that “the Jewish state in Palestine was perhaps a catastrophic error” for it “had belonged politically to others for so long that they had even lost the memory of their arrival.”31 Those who had insisted on returning the Jews to the Promised Land had, according to Memmi, “[forced] us to claim a heritage long ago acquired by others, one which had to be torn from them by the force of arms, so that blood flowed and will perhaps flow again.”32 Without naming the Palestinians, Memmi points to the overlap between the Zionist solution to the Jewish problem and the very system he condemned in his first essay, colonialism. The question implied in this formulation is, How can the liberation of one oppressed people be achieved at the detriment of another? Notwithstanding this rare moment of doubt, Memmi’s sympathies have clearly shifted away from the colonized (here, as in The Pillar of Salt, laconically designated as “the others”) to the Jews, even if their liberation must come at the expense of the Palestinians. Memmi’s shift from an unambiguously anticolonial to an increasingly intransigent pro-Zionist position is, I argue, the product of the colonial opposition between Jews and

Portrait of an Arab Jew  93 Arabs that Memmi staged in his first novel. In order to elucidate this claim, let me briefly return to the oft-quoted articulation of Alexandre’s bifurcated identity as a colonized Jew, which serves, in modified form, as the epigraph of Portrait of a Jew. Memmi makes a slight but significant change in his self-quotation. Citing Alexandre’s foiled philological investigation into his origins, he restores onomastic unity to his name, rearranged “in the exact order of [Alexandre’s] status” as a native Jew.33 Rewriting “Always I will remain Alexandre Mordekhai, Alexandre Benillouche” as “Always I will remain Mordekhai Alexandre Benillouche,”34 Memmi reinstates the name attributed by the French school system Alexandre ultimately rejects, legitimating the colonial appellation and naturalizing the opposition between Jews, Arabs, and Berbers. I argue that this erasure of the colonial genealogy of the Arab/Jew opposition in Memmi’s misquotation of The Pillar of Salt is symptomatic of his presentation of Jews and Arabs as discrete and opposite identities in his writings on Jewishness and Zionism. I begin with Memmi’s doubts about the choice of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Memmi, we learn, is not only concerned about the presence of natives in Palestine. He also warns his readers about the paucity of natural resources in this semi-arid land, inadvertently echoing the type of discourse he scathingly critiqued in his first essay. It is striking that Memmi draws on a lexicon of adventure and heroism to speak about Israel in these essays, recreating the romantic portrait of the colonizer as a tall, bronzed tiller of the land debunked in the opening pages of The Colonizer and the Colonized. Dedicated to Memmi’s pioneer friends in Israel and written in praise of “the Israeli epic,”35 Memmi’s portrait of the Zionist pioneer in Portrait of a Jew espouses, without naming it, the image of the Sabra Jew, who sets out to make the desert bloom and bring civilization to the desert, a figure that presents troubling similarities to that of the colonial settler. But what is most surprising on the part of an anticolonial theorist and activist are Memmi’s references to the alternatives to Palestine in early Zionist deliberations about the future Jewish state in his sequel to Portrait of a Jew. In the closing chapter of The Liberation of the Jew, Memmi wonders if rather than choosing an inhospitable land peopled by natives, the Zionists should not have followed Theodor Hertzl’s advice and settled in Uganda, “an immense African territory, really rich and really uninhabited.”36 That the author of a seminal study of colonialism failed to note the similarity between Zionist debates about the location of

94   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation their future homeland and the European partition of Africa at the Berlin conference some thirteen years earlier is remarkable, as is his willingness to give credence to the argument that Uganda was a land without people. Memmi’s trajectory from anticolonial to Zionist nationalism unwittingly reveals an intimate historical and structural connection between European colonialism and Zionism: the invention of indigeneity, paradoxically deployed, in the case of Israel, to claim legitimacy in colonized lands. It is worth recalling that The Pillar of Salt presents the narrator’s flight to Argentina—another contender, along with Uganda, for Jewish settlement—as a tragically flawed attempt to put down roots in an exotic destination after having failed to come to terms with his own ambiguous origins. If Alexandre fails in his attempts to reconcile the contradictory elements of his identity—elements whose very integrity is questioned in the novel—Memmi the sociologist succeeds in finding a way out of this impasse via political Zionism. If Alexandre’s escape is framed as a way out of the more difficult process of self-recovery advocated in The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi concludes his studies of the Jewish condition with the necessity for a coherent identity embodied in the state of Israel. Reproducing the dynamic described by Mahmood Mamdani, whereby native elites (“subject races”) attempt to claim indigeneity after having been denied it by the colonizers, Memmi projects Jewish roots on the supposedly blank canvas of Palestine, thereby effacing the “others” (the Palestinians) about whom he had previously emitted reservations. As Gil Anidjar notes in his pathbreaking study of the construction of Jews and Arabs as figures of the enemy and enemy figures in modern European thought, Mamdani’s insights into the colonial construction of the native-nonnative binary in Africa have profound implications for the genealogy of the categories “Arab” and “Jew.”37 Focusing on the case of Rwanda, Mamdani shows how certain groups (the Tutsi) were privileged by the colonizers and given the status of “virtual citizens,” thereby transforming them into nonnative “subject races,” halfway between colonizer and colonized.38 For Mamdani, the Rwandan genocide did not pit one native group against another (according to a horizontal model of ethnicity) but a native group against a group perceived to be nonnative, the Tutsi. The postcolonial ossification of native and nonnative classes of citizens has its roots in the colonial “[politicization] of indigeneity,” which can be credited for the persistent and often violent distinctions between

Portrait of an Arab Jew  95 groups defined and distinguished, in colonial discourse and still today, according to ethnic or religious criteria.39 Likewise, the colonial classification of indigenous populations in French-ruled North Africa—Arab, Berber, and Jewish—and the privileged status of some (Berbers to an extent, but especially Jews) led to their assimilation and symbolic transformation into nonnatives. The mass departure of Maghrebi Jews from their countries of birth cannot be understood in isolation from the colonial ­divide-and-rule measures that produced separate castes of natives, as a result of which the assimilated “subject races” were perceived as foreign. The impossible situation in which the narrator of The Pillar of Salt finds himself translates the drama of assimilation, which has turned the native Jew into an honorary settler. Extending Mamdani’s framework to the North African and Palestinian contexts, I contend that Memmi’s turn to Zionism constitutes a quest for indigeneity, spinning the narrator’s voyage to Argentina in The Pillar of Salt in a positive light.40 Memmi’s Berberophilia, evident already in The Pillar of Salt, and his invocation of a Jewish Kahina are attempts to claim a rightful place for Jews in North Africa. At the same time, he is very clear that this millennial presence is a thing of the past. For Memmi, Jews have been treated as foreigners since the Arab-Islamic conquest of the Maghreb, and decolonization has put an end to any illusions that these originary inhabitants might remain in their native lands.41 If Tunisian Jews could not be natives in Tunisia, they would become natives in Palestine, construed as the homeland of the Jewish people. Seven years and two wars after defending the foundation of a Jewish state in The Liberation of the Jew (albeit bemoaning the choice of an inhabited land), the secular Memmi subscribed unambiguously to the notion that Jews were simply returning to their God-given birthplace. Memmi’s claim to Jewish indigeneity in Palestine intersects with another important facet of colonial discourse: the claim to legitimacy in a situation where nonnatives rule over natives. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, Memmi theorized this claim as the “Nero complex”: the colonial settler claims, impossibly, to have legitimate rights over the land and resources of the c­ olonized.42 This colonial claim to legitimacy does not constitute a claim to indigeneity in any literal sense. On the contrary, legal discourse in the colonies depended on the distinction between indigene and settler. Yet it can be compared to the metropolitan claim of being “at home” in the colony, a discourse of

96   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation hospitality that is, as we saw in Chapter Two, at the heart of the colonial enterprise. In his essays on Jewishness, Memmi reinforces the colonial “[politicization] of indigeneity” on both sides of the native-­nonnative binary described by Mamdani, and participates in the colonial claim to a land inhabited by others. It is important to note that, in line with midcentury anticolonial discourse, Memmi’s support for the colonized, too, is cast in a language of indigeneity. The Colonizer and the Colonized advocates for national liberation as the framework for the self-recovery that will be achieved via a “return” to the mother tongue, Arabic, and a lucid reassessment of indigenous culture. Ironically, this anticolonial, nationalist nativism is also what has produced native Jews as foreign to the body politic of the new, decolonized nation. If Memmi’s debut novel and first essay expose the colonial genealogy of the becoming-foreign of Tunisian Jews (albeit implicitly), his essays on Jewishness naturalize this process. Yet like the ambiguous Arab origins that reemerge in Alexandre’s narrative, Memmi’s repudiated Arabness fissures the narrative presented in his essays on Jewishness, troubling the roots that he claims to have found in Israel. Arabness, in Memmi’s late writings, takes two forms: the figure of the Arab Jew, and the figure of the Palestinian. In her reading of Memmi’s essays on Jewishness and Zionism, Gil Hochberg argues that these texts are symptomatic of a “forgetting” of Europe in the story of Arab-Jewish relations in North Africa and the Middle East.43 Citing the historian Elie Kedourie, she shows that Memmi’s condemnation of anti-Semitism in the Arab world is based on a universalization of European anti-Semitism, which simultaneously effaces the legacy of divide-and-rule tactics in the Maghreb and the incidence of Euro-­ Zionist colonization of Palestine on Jewish-Arab relations in the Arab world.44 Analyzing Memmi’s claim that Jews living in Muslim lands would have liked to be, but were unable to become, Arab Jews as a result of Arab anti-­Semitism, Hochberg argues that Memmi’s writings on Arabs and Jews manifest a “desire to set apart ‘the Arab Jew he was’ from the ‘Arab Jew’ he cannot remain and must not become.”45 Yet I would like to suggest that, much like The Pillar of Salt, Memmi’s writings on Jewishness and Israel betray key moments of hesitation vis-à-vis the purported impossibility of the Arab Jew as well as the status and fate of the Palestinians. My point here is less to reveal the contradictions in Memmi’s work than to show how Memmi’s texts complicate their own propositional content. This is most

Portrait of an Arab Jew  97 evident in his fiction, which both obfuscates and reveals the construction of the colonial categories Jew and Arab. Yet his essays too reveal a lexical and semantic fluidity that betray his ambivalence toward Muslims, recast as Arabs, and Palestine. In his later essays and interviews, Memmi claims to have coined the expression Arab Jew in order to describe his plural identity. His preface to Jews and Arabs, for example, begins with the admission “I realize I am what may be called an Arab Jew.”46 In the first essay published in the collection, we learn that he borrowed this expression, ironically at first, from Colonel Muammar Qadafi, who had extended an invitation to Arab Jews to return to their countries of origin, in order to prove the impossibility of such a paradoxical identity. In both positive and negative articulations of this expression, however, the integrity and difference of the two terms remain intact. The colonial discourse that produced them as opposite categories is effaced in the canonization of an expression that reiterates and reifies their difference, as does the title of the collection, which further separates them through the conjunction and: Jews and Arabs. I would argue that, for Memmi, the expression Arab Jew works precisely in function of the paradox it seeks to express. Even when it is deployed to capture the cultural in-betweenness of Jews in the Arab world, it is with the intention of demarcating Arab Jews from Muslim Arabs. This is particularly notable because, as I will show in Chapters Five and Six, the expression Arab Jew is usually wielded for the opposite reason, in order to undo the colonial foreclosure of Muslim-Jewish relations. Memmi’s evocations of Arab Jewishness, on the other hand, posit the coexistence of separate and usually opposite terms in order to describe a conflicted and contradictory identity. Even in his most optimistic moments, he advocates for the recognition of the shared history of Jews and Arabs, thus naturalizing these categories and effacing the history of their construction.47 Three years after publishing Jews and Arabs, Memmi returned to the vexing question of Muslim-Jewish relations, inadvertently recalling the role of colonialism in producing the opposition between Jews and Arabs: Between the Arabs and us, it was very complicated, more complicated than with the others . . . I mean, after all, we were Arabs, in a way! Culturally, I’m a kind [­espèce] of Arab!. . . . We were Jewish Arabs or rather Arab Jews. . . . In sum, we were as Arab as the others, the Muslim Arabs, though not in will [sauf par le ­vouloir]: for we did not want to be [Arab] . . .48

98   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation Glossing his earlier riposte to Qadafi, Memmi clarifies that Tunisian Jews did not want to be Arab Jews because they had been “colonized” by Muslim Arabs: “we did not want to be [Arab] . . . we refused ourselves.”49 But a different interpretation obtains if we read this passage in light of a similar fragment in The Colonizer and the Colonized, which uses the language of refusal to characterize the self-rejection of the colonized. In his 1966 preface to the essay, Memmi clarifies that, if “the Jew turned his back happily on the East,” it was in a move characteristic of the colonized, adding parenthetically: “this, by the way, is what all colonized try to do before they pass on to the stage of revolt.”50 What sets the Jew apart from the Arab, then, is a similar desire on the part of the colonized to resemble the colonizer. Although, in 1976, Memmi effaced the role of colonialism in producing this desire, and its division of natives through the legal advantages and assimilation of “subject races,” he nevertheless betrayed the shared subjectivity of colonized Jews and Arabs, going so far as to call himself an Arab Jew. It is telling that Memmi most often uses the expression Arab Jew in the context of discussions of Israel-Palestine. In other words, Memmi feels compelled to deny or affirm the category of the Arab Jew in his (sometimes qualified) defense of the Jewish state. In the essays published under the title Jews and Arabs, Memmi finally names the anonymous natives about whom he expresses doubts in The Liberation of the Jews, alternately describing them as “the Palestinians” (often in scare quotes),51 “the Palestinian population,”52 “the Arab populations living in Israel,”53 “Palestinians Arabs [sic],”54 “the Israeli Arabs,”55 or “Palestinian refugees.”56 This proliferation of names cannot simply be attributed to the distinct legal statuses of Palestinians living in Israel, the Occupied Territories or refugee camps outside Israel-Palestine. It also betrays Memmi’s ambivalence or hesitation toward the Palestinians. What, exactly, is their status? Though at this stage he no longer believed that Palestine was their legitimate “heritage,” embracing the Zionist myth according to which Arabs from neighboring countries were lured to Palestine after the pioneers made the desert bloom,57 he nevertheless recognizes “the national dimension of the Palestinians.”58 The equivocal nature of this statement speaks volumes: the author of The Colonizer and the Colonized cannot advocate for the national liberation of Palestine, for such a project would undermine the idea of Palestine as a homeland for the Jews. Memmi accordingly presents the Arab-Israeli conflict as a clash of national liberation projects, both equally justified. As

Portrait of an Arab Jew  99 a Jew preoccupied with the fate of his co-religionists, however, Memmi can only side with Israel—though not without criticizing it. In an essay delivered at the 1972 Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Memmi urged Israelis to take into account the Palestinian “situation” or “problem” as well as the question of the Mizrahim or Oriental Jews. What is particularly interesting about this essay is that for the first time Memmi paired the Palestinian question with the question of the “Arab Jew.” At the time he made this intervention, the Israeli Black Panthers, founded in 1971, had begun contesting their disenfranchisement within Israeli society as well as condemning the oppression of the Palestinians. This movement conceived itself as both Jewish and Arab (or rather “Oriental”—many Mizrahim were from non-Arab countries) and, in Ella Shohat’s words, as “a ‘natural bridge’ for peace” with the Palestinians.59 Initially, Memmi places these two problems in separate spheres, speaking of the Palestinian question as a national and political problem, and of the Mizrahim as a socio­economic issue. Quickly though, he abandons this distinction, saying that although Israelis would do well to recognize the national dimension of Palestinian aspirations, they will probably choose to ignore it and treat it rather as a domestic affair. Foreshadowing Benjamin ­Netanyahu’s recent proposals for “economic peace,” Memmi stipulates that, should ­Israel decide to ignore the national dimension of the Palestinian question, it will need to integrate the Palestinians economically.60 Though he immediately amends this proposition, speaking of “economic and political integration,”61 he makes it clear that, like the question of the Mizrahim, the “Arab problem” requires urgent attention.62 In a talk given the same year, Memmi made a bold proposal for the economic, political, and cultural assimilation of Palestinians in Israel within the framework of a two-state solution. In order to create “Israeli citizens of the Muslim faith” Israel had to develop “an Arab policy [une politique arabe].”63 Memmi’s adoption of the terms of French colonial discourse (assimilation, politique arabe) becomes clear when he admits the “slightly crazy” idea that if he were religious, he would advocate proselytism—for how else were the founding fathers of new nations able to implant themselves in already inhabited regions?64 Comparing the genocidal model of the American pioneers with the Arabs who converted the Berbers to Islam (and privileging the latter), Memmi offers the French model as a counterexample: “where the Arabs had succeeded, the French in North Africa failed

100   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation because they refused to assimilate the people they defeated.”65 For Memmi, Israel has to assimilate its “Israeli Arabs” through religion or ideology in order to solve the Arab problem. Apparently aware of the radical nature of this proposition, Memmi quickly adds a rhetorical flourish: “But I warned you this was a crazy idea, so let’s pretend I didn’t say anything . . .”66 Memmi’s open endorsement of assimilation is startling when we compare it to his early critique of colonial assimilation (in fact a critique of the impossibility of assimilation under colonial rule, as he points out at several junctures) and his espousal of Zionism in Liberation of the Jew, which is partly articulated as a way out of assimilation, presented as one of several “false solutions.”68 In proposing a model of colonial assimilation (a model that the French failed to live up to, in his account) Memmi turns his own assimilation story into a nostalgic, rather than cautionary, tale. Are we to understand that the Memmi of The Colonizer and the Colonized has come to regret the imperfect integration of Maghrebi citizens into the French Republic? Having married a French woman and raised his children in France, Memmi is in a good position to know the merits of assimilation and m ­ étissage in producing consensual citizens. By presenting himself as a success story of (post)colonial assimilation, he inadvertently compares France and Israel, albeit basing this comparison on an imagined future in which Palestinians would be assimilated (economically at least) into the Jewish state. The discursive parabola encompassing the Palestinians, the ­Mizrahim, and Memmi the assimilated, (post)colonized Jew represents a formidable avowal of the co-constitutive nature of the categories Jew and Arab, denied so vehemently by Memmi in “What is an Arab Jew?” It also constitutes a surprising reversal of Memmi’s critique of assimilation. In these essays, ­Israel no longer represents a way out of the double bind of assimilation and rejection. It has potentially become its own assimilating machine, comparable in this to the European empires that Memmi opposed it to. As his student ­Abdelkebir Khatibi would put it in his polemical response to Juifs et Arabes, though with respect to his pro-Zionist positions globally, Memmi was caught in a “theoretical impasse.”69 At the same time however, like ­Alexandre’s birthplace in The Pillar of Salt, this impasse draws together the antagonistic categories it posits, linking not only the Arab and the Jew but also the Arab-Jew and the Palestinian in a paradoxical transcolonial comparison.

5 Abrahamic Tongues Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Hassoun, Jacques Derrida

In the previous chapter, I argued that the Tunisian theorist of colonialism Albert Memmi set aside his seminal analyses of French colonial society and the “pyramid of petty tyrants” it produced to argue that Jews and Arabs were and always had been antagonists in the Muslim world.1 In 1974, the year Memmi’s Jews and Arabs came out, the Moroccan writer ­ Abdelkebir Khatibi published a violent polemic titled Vomito blanco: Le sionisme et la conscience malheureuse (Vomito blanco: Zionism and unhappy consciousness), aimed, in part, at countering Memmi’s claims about the history of Jewish-Muslim relations in the Maghreb.2 Written with the same urgent and incendiary tone that characterizes the pro-Palestinian texts published in the Moroccan journal Souffles—Khatibi was an early contributor—Vomito blanco gestures toward Khatibi’s later philosophical reflections on the Abrahamic, a protean notion that simultaneously designates and works against the cleft between Muslims and Jews. Trained in sociology and a prolific writer of poetry, plays, fiction, and essays, Khatibi is best known for his writings on cultural decolonization and for his reflections on language, both in fiction and in his numerous essays. He was also one of the first theorists to establish historical and theoretical parallels between deconstructive and decolonial thought, supplementing the deconstruction of Western philosophy with what he calls “pensée-autre” (“other-thinking”) and “double critique”: a reciprocal dismantling of Western and Arab systems of thought.3 What has largely escaped critical attention, however, is the centrality of Jewish-Muslim rela-

102   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation tions in his reflections on cultural decolonization. This chapter investigates the Abrahamic in Khatibi’s (and to a lesser extent, Derrida’s) writings as a site of elaboration of decolonial and deconstructive critique. I argue that Jewish-Muslim relations constitute a primary site of pensée-autre, particularly when it comes to that most Khatibian of questions, the question of language. Beginning with Khatibi’s little-known pamphlet on Zionism, I excavate two later sets of texts that have come to critical attention in recent years: his epistolary exchange with the Jewish-Egyptian-French psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun, titled Le même livre (The same book); and a nexus of texts written in conversation with the Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida: Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages and Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin.4 These crossed readings reveal a sustained conversation on Palestine-Israel, one that is central to Khatibi’s and Derrida’s theorizations of decolonization and deconstruction. Reading Derrida through Khatibi, I further argue that the French colonial experience subtends their writings on language as well as their theorization of the Abrahamic and their approach to Israel-Palestine. Vomito blanco is the first text that attests to the centrality of ­Palestine-Israel in Khatibi’s thought, in the form of a visceral response to what he characterizes, in no hesitant terms, as “the destruction of the Palestinian people.”5 In the preface, Khatibi explains that he wrote this pamphlet out of a violent need to vomit, first during the 1970 massacre of Palestinian feda’in by Jordanian troops, and then again before the wave of antiArab racism in the West following the 1972 Palestinian attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich. I will come back to Khatibi’s first, existential wave of nausea, provoked by the betrayal of an Arab regime, and to the double critique it implies. Here I focus on his second expression of disgust. Written at the cusp of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Vomito blanco is primarily an exercise in moral indignation aimed at the Israeli state as well as Western hypocrisy, and in particular the French left’s unwavering espousal of Zionism and its dismissal of Palestinian rights. In a series of explosive chapters, Khatibi debunks the pro-Israeli stance exemplified by Sartre, co-editor of a special issue of Les Temps Modernes on “The Israeli-Arab Conflict,”6 and Memmi, the thinker of oppression par excellence who is nevertheless incapable of seeing “the exclusion of the Palestinians.”7 A stringent critique of Zionism that, like Souffles, espouses the views of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Khatibi’s

Abrahamic Tongues  103 pamphlet also gestures toward the more elusive figure of the Abrahamic that will reappear throughout his oeuvre, a figure that remains highly ambiguous in this first text. Drawing attention to the fact that the 1973 Arab-Israeli war was waged during Ramadan and Yom Kippur, Khatibi wonders at this “strange irony, this bloody encounter between two sacred holidays, habitually reserved to the remission of sins.”8 Equating the Abrahamic with blood lust and revenge, Khatibi urges Arabs and Jews to fight for an “integrated” (that is, plural and democratic rather than colonized) Middle East: By this symbolic gesture [starting the war on Yom Kippur and during Ramadan], have the Arabs left behind Abrahamism? Is this really the beginning of a new renaissance, rather than a regression into a dark period of resentment? Abrahamic irony by which two exacerbated forms of consciousness, one mimicking the other, seal in blood the separation of a world that has become too humiliating for the one, too blinding for the other.9

Deploying a lexicon reminiscent of the self-Orientalizing discourse of decadence, Khatibi takes the name of a prophet of Judaism and Islam as a sign of regression, against a renaissance implicitly cast as secular. He also seems to fall into the trap of analyzing the Israeli-Arab conflict in terms of religious difference, or worse, as a clash of civilizations.10 In the last chapter of his pamphlet, however, Khatibi is careful to historicize what he names the “Abraham complex,” crystallized in Israel-Palestine: “It [the Israeli-Arab question] cannot be reduced to religious speculation. Rather, crystallized in imperial violence, it refracts the entire political history of the three Abrahamic religions, encoding the circumcision of the heart that lies within it.”11 I will come back to the image of circumcision as a cut or division between Jews and Muslims in my reading of Khatibi and Derrida below. What I would like to underscore at this point is Khatibi’s attentiveness to the difference between religion and politics. In the sentence quoted above it becomes clear that for Khatibi, the Israeli-Arab question is a political conflict dressed in religious terms, one that seeks to place a claim on past relations between the monotheistic faiths. Here the Abrahamic clearly takes on a pejorative sense: in its name, wars of conquest are waged. In a long exposition of the different “Abrahamic figure(s)” in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Khatibi attempts to understand the conflicted relationship binding the three monotheisms together, not because reli-

104   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation gious difference explains the contest over Palestine but because religious discourse is the filter through which this contest becomes legible.12 The ­Abraham complex never­theless turns into a promise in Vomito blanco, or what, elsewhere, Khatibi calls a paradoxical “chance”13: the opportunity to turn the ­Abrahamic into a “mythical positivity.”14 Vomito blanco concludes with a didactic and somewhat lachrymose poem, culminating in a plea for the Abrahamic in this positive, mythical sense: “peace upon Abraham! peace upon orphaned Palestine! / peace! peace! peace!”15 If Vomito blanco remains very much a period piece marked by the Marxist-Leninist Arabist discourse of Souffles, it nevertheless attests to the centrality of Palestine-­ Israel in ­Khatibi’s thought, evident in his musings on the Abrahamic and in his signature concepts themselves, pensée-autre and double critique. Khatibi revisited his early critique of Zionism and Israel in a text titled “Beyond Anti-Semitism and Zionism.” Though critical of what he terms “the lack of theoretical development” in Vomito blanco, he stands by his positions on Zionism while emphasizing the importance of a double critique aimed, also, at Arabist discourse: “this beyond of theology also aims, in the same critical gesture, to go beyond Muslim theology and a certain kind of regressive Arabness that is intolerant of minorities.”16 It is important to recall that Khatibi’s first urge to throw up was provoked by an inter-Arab massacre, that of Palestinians by Jordanians. In addition to provoking anticolonial outrage, then, the Palestinian tragedy elicits in Khatibi a double critique of the discourse of origins, be they Jewish or Arab. In an early version of the text that would be published as “Pensée-autre,” Khatibi theorized the nausea provoked by Black September. Written in 1976, “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée” (The Maghreb as horizon of thought) cautions against the threat posed by identitarian discourses within the Arab world. Paradoxically, it is the impulse to define who counts as Arab that forecloses relations in the region. “In the name of the communitarian unity of the Arabs,” writes Khatibi, “Palestine is massacred.”17 Going one step further than the usual denunciation of Arab regimes’ rhetorical instrumentalization of Palestine, Khatibi warns against the homicidal impulses of identitarian ideologies, whether colonial, Zionist, or Arabist. Vomito blanco was unsurprisingly panned by French critics, when it was not altogether ignored.18 What little critical reception there was entirely missed the main thrust of Khatibi’s text: its double critique of exclusionary nationalisms. Khatibi’s elaborations on the Abrahamic, which

Abrahamic Tongues  105 originate in a critique of Zionism, are, I argue, at the heart of, rather than peripheral to, his thinking on plurality. What is at stake in the Abrahamic is the possibility of pensée-autre itself: thinking outside the categories of self and other, across religious, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries, but also toward internal plurality, deploying “Palestine as other-thinking and becoming.”19 In this sense, Palestine functions, in Khatibi’s writings, much like the Maghreb, as a “horizon of thought.”20 Khatibi’s writings on plurality, arguably his greatest and most lasting contribution to postcolonial thought, are rooted in a reflection on Muslim-Jewish relations, a reflection largely mediated through Palestine-Israel. If the first overt discussion of the Abrahamic occurs in Vomito blanco, Khatibi’s writings on Maghrebi plurality, and particularly on Jewish-Muslim relations in the Maghreb, continue this reflection on the Abrahamic. Khatibi is best known for writings that poetically and philosophically lay bare the schize (“schism”) of the colonial subject, torn between West and East. His oeuvre constitutes an attempt to deconstruct this opposition through a double critique of both poles that would enable the “decolonization of the mind,” to cite another important thinker,21 or what Khatibi calls pensée-autre. Here I propose to investigate a hitherto unexplored region of Khatibi’s schismatic thinking: that surrounding the separation between Jews and Arabs. I argue that Khatibi’s sustained reflection on linguistic division both parallels and allegorizes the separation between Jews and Arabs, and that this latter division in turn finds expression, and to an extent resolution, in the colonial tongue. Focusing on Le même livre, I search for traces of this twinned expression of difference throughout his oeuvre and bring these traces to bear on his writings on language and the Abrahamic. Khatibi’s first literary publication, La mémoire tatouée: ­Autobiographie d’un décolonisé (Tattooed memory: Autobiography of a decolonized subject), names this separation a déchirure, a rending apart.22 As the narrator tells it, his first name—Abdelkebir or “servant of the great,” which honors Abraham’s sacrifice—as well as his circumcised body, his dual memory of two cities and two mothers, and his diglossic and bilingual tongue all attest to the division of the colonized subject, between Islam and secular Christianity, the European and native cities, and French and Arabic. But what happens if we read déchirure not only as the split of a colonized subjectivity torn between Moroccan and French cultures and languages but also as the product of a colonial taxonomy that fragments Moroccan society

106   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation into distinct Arab, Jewish, and Berber ethnicities? Khatibi’s later theoretical emphasis on Maghrebi plurality would, in this light, aim to go beyond simplistic tradition-modernity, Arabic-French, religious-secular binaries, as well as Muslim-Jewish and Arab-Berber ones. A careful reading of La mémoire tatouée reveals that this multidirectional critique is already at work in Khatibi’s earliest fictional work. Khatibi’s autobiography weaves together a series of moments of déchirure, beginning, tellingly, with an Abrahamic split. Born on the most holy Muslim day, ‘Id al-kabir or “the feast of the great,” which commemorates Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son—who remains unnamed in the Qur’an, and might thus be Ishmael or Isaac, Khatibi reminds us23—­ Abdelkebir Khatibi pays tribute by his very name to the common God of ahl al-kitab (“the people of the Book”): Born on the day of ‘Id al-kabir, my name suggests a millennial rite, and I sometimes imagine the gesture Abraham made to slit his son’s throat. I can’t help it, even if the throat slitting song does not obsess me, there is, at the root, a nominal splitting.24

Though the sacred rite described here is a decidedly Muslim one, Khatibi’s evocation of this “millennial rite” cannot but evoke, for a Moroccan ear, the “millennial presence” of Jews in the Maghreb, which has become a leitmotiv in Moroccan literature and historiography. Though Khatibi’s choice of the name Abraham, rather than the Arabic Ibrahim, adheres to the usual French transliteration of the prophetic name, it also evokes its Hebrew transcription. The splitting of roots implied by the Abrahamic cut—the slitting of the throat of a ram in lieu of that of an unnamed son—is doubled here by the implicit presence of Judaism. This allegorical beginning announces, via the Muslim name, the colonial split subject that will be the target of Khatibi’s decolonial anamnesis. It also foreshadows subsequent passages that evoke, implicitly and explicitly, Maghrebi Jews. The first of these scenes is Khatibi’s brief and poignant description of his circumcision, which inaugurates a separation of the world in two: “The world splits in half,” observes the narrator.25 This episode is focalized through the child’s corporeal and psychological experience of the bloody cut between penis and foreskin. He describes how “[his] foreskin fell” and how he and his peers “went through the ordeal of the scissors,” evoking the “wound . . . the opening of a flower of blood, tattooed between [his]

Abrahamic Tongues  107 thighs,” which elicits an “indefinite cry that will make [his] last cruelty tumble.” At the same time, Khatibi relays the liturgical and rationalizing adult discourse surrounding the rite: “Those who rise up with an uncircumcised penis will know only torment and displeasure!”; “Separate yourself and go forth!”26 Allegorically, this scene functions like the nominal Abrahamic cut as a foreshadowing of the colonial déchirure described in Khatibi’s decolonial anamnesis, in particular in the passages that describe his French education. Yet this cut also gestures toward the splitting of Moroccan society via a rite common to Islam and Judaism, circumcision. Implicit in the passages on naming and circumcision, the division of colonial society becomes explicit in a chapter titled “Two parallel cities.” In this chapter Khatibi develops the theme of déchirure via an evocation of colonial cartography. After describing the European sectors of the city of Al Jadida, the narrator explains: The colonial imagination is well known to us: it juxtaposes, compartmentalizes, militarizes, cuts the city into ethnic zones, it buries the people’s culture in the sand. Faced with this uprooting, the people will wander, haggard, in the broken space of its history. And there is nothing more terrible than the tearing [déchirure] of memory. But it is a tear common to the colonized and the colonial, since the medina resisted by virtue of its labyrinth.27

The ethnic zones of the colonial city are European and Arab as well as Jewish and Muslim, as Khatibi’s allusion to the mellah or Jewish quarter of ­Essaouira, his other childhood city, a few pages later, makes clear. Describing it as a site of exotic difference, as opposed to the Cartesian difference of the French parks described in the preceding passage, he gaily recounts his escapades in the mellah. This is a condensed version of scenes he will evoke in later texts on Jewish-Muslim relations, particularly in Le même livre: The mellah is not far, other smells, another somewhat sing-songy dialect which made me giggle. I would grab the old men’s skullcaps and sell them. With the money, we would start all over again in the opposite direction. It will be said that the Jews will rewrite history backward, prisoners of a millennial difference. These are but legends of Ancients. Peace! Peace! Peace!28

Initially narrated in the present tense, this narrative places the mellah in close proximity in both time and place, but at a remove sensorially: the Jewish quarters are close, though they smell and sound different. The end

108   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation of the first sentence marks a temporal distance, placing the events in the past and moving from the first person singular to the plural, as if to take refuge behind the group (he was not the only one) and to dismiss his actions as those of foolish children.29 His switch to the future produces narrative distance, as the narrator formulates a negative judgment about the myth according to which Jews will remain captive of their eternal (millennial) difference. Tellingly, the paragraph ends with the refrain used by Khatibi in the poem that closes Vomito blanco: an appeal for peace among the children of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac, Jews and Muslims. Khatibi’s descriptions of colonial cartography, and in particular the above-quoted sentence “The world splits in half,” evoke Frantz Fanon’s well-known descriptions of the colony as a “world divided in two” and the colonial city as cleft between European quarters and Casbah, medina, or native city.30 These Fanonian echoes become even sharper in a text K ­ hatibi wrote in 1988, “Droit à la raison” (Right to reason), partially translated under the evocative title “A Colonial Labyrinth,” which describes the segregated world analyzed by Memmi, one that separates colonizers and colonized, and, among the latter, Jews and Muslims.31 A labyrinthine descent into memory, which begins, like La mémoire tatouée, with an evocation of Khatibi’s Abrahamic first name, “Droit à la raison” evokes and analyzes the relations binding and separating Jews and Muslims in colonized ­Morocco. Sharing a diglossia between Arabic/Berber and French/­Spanish, a common desire to become French, a love of the Book, the same colonized submissive gaze [“sous-regard”], extreme poverty, and a decolonizing approach to space via the art of detour, Jews and Muslims nevertheless inhabit different spaces within the “colonial labyrinth”: the mellah and the medina, respectively.32 If the existence of separate Jewish quarters predates colonialism,33 Khatibi clearly credits the militarism of the Maréchal ­Lyautey—­mastermind of the “pacification” of Morocco—with the division of the city into three spheres, those of the pieds noirs (European settlers), Jews, and Muslims: “Three communities, that is, three gazes differentiated according to the principle of light and darkness, in a country, it is worth recalling, named ‘Sunset’.”34 Here Khatibi does not explicitly develop the idea of the Maghreb, “Occident” or “West” in Arabic, as a horizon of thought, as he does in “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée” and “­Pensée-autre.” But his evocation of colonized Moroccan society represents an effort to prove, as he states unequivocally in the first sen-

Abrahamic Tongues  109 tence of this piece, that “[he has] never dreamed of the real or imaginary destruction of the Jews.”35 Where Memmi limited himself to a description of colonial cartography that seemed to have no bearing on what he later characterized as a universal anti-Semitism, Khatibi diagnoses Jewish-­ Muslim suspicion as a byproduct of colonialism. For Khatibi, the parallel trajectories of colonized Muslim and Jewish Moroccans parted ways as a double result of colonial taxonomies and Zionist propaganda, an argument made before him by the Jewish Moroccan leftist activist Abraham Serfaty in the pages of Souffles.36 But if Serfaty explicitly argued that French colonial divide-and-rule measures threw Moroccan Jews into the hands of Zionist propagandists, Khatibi draws a subtler parallel between colonialism and Zionism by shuttling back and forth, without explanation, between colonial Morocco and Israel. Speaking of the emigration of Moroccan Jews to France, Canada, and Israel, Khatibi writes: I will point to a few traces of this memory [of Moroccan Jews] and its silence. An immense silence on this word, “colonization,” as if the old colonizers and colonized wanted to forget what shamed the first and humiliated the second, as if colonization was a silent mistake of the past (the sin of having lived) without bearing on what we live today; and as if Israel was not also the symptom of an expropriation accelerated by the end of the second war.37

While ostensibly setting up a parallel between France and Israel as colonizers of Moroccans and Palestinians respectively, Khatibi also exposes the painful gap left by the departure of Moroccan Jews. Yet he does not neglect the role of intolerance within the Moroccan Muslim majority in leading the Jews to mass exile, going so far as to compare the “protection” afforded to dhimmis (Jews and Christians) and the French Protectorate of Morocco38: “Dhimmi, protection: two words that should not be forgotten in the lexicon of this memory.”39 Here, as in La mémoire tatouée and later Le même livre, he is quick to use his own past actions and reactions as examples of intercommunal rivalry: “In the mellah, I was intrigued by a very singsongy accent, by a slight phonetic modification that amused us. But between communities, between classes, a phoneme is a mark of honor.”40 In Le même livre, Khatibi returns to this example of “the narcissism of minor differences,” to use a Freudian phrase,41 and to his acts of petty larceny in the mellah of Essaouira, in what we might interpret as a an effort to come clean in the interest of a Muslim-Jewish, that is, Abrahamic, conversation.42

110   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation Le même livre originates in an encounter between Khatibi and Hassoun around “the Judeo-Arab question.”43 Their letters, written between 1980 and 1984, hail from Rabat, Paris, Cairo, and New York, among other sites, and range from postcard-length notes to a dozen pages written in multiple sittings. Interrupted midcourse by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon, their missives often stray from the topics of Palestine-Israel, Judaism, Islam, and the Abrahamic to the question of language, which undergirds both theorists’ oeuvres. The letters begin with a reflection on Khatibi’s notion of bi-langue, which I will discuss below, on the occasion of a conference on bilingualism in Rabat. Language is from the outset at the heart of their elaborations on the Abrahamic both thematically and theoretically, as Hassoun acknowledges in his enthusiastic response to the conference: “Are we far removed from the Judeo-Arab problem? I do not think so. Maybe our exchange proceeds from this cut . . . which I feel we must urgently insert into this question to restore its true significance.”44 The cut of language in relation to the Abrahamic is present from the very first page, with the announcement of the pretext and topic of their epistolary exchange. As Hassoun remarks several years into the venture, the very expression “Judeo-Arab conflict” is of Western ilk, introducing a hyphen between two terms that are naturalized as antagonistic: But what is the Judeo-Arab conflict? Do we not give in to the imported tongue by speaking of it in these terms? For those of us who were brought up in an Arab culture (language, customs, table and bedroom manners), saying Judeo-Arab conflict would attest to an existential tear [déchirure], to a schism [schize] rather than a separation.45

Hassoun readily admits that for him, “Jewishness” and “Arabness” are co-constitutive.46 Khatibi, for his part, considers his “Jewishness” to be a “tattoo of [his] originary [ pure] childhood,” purposefully muddying the waters of identity with alterity.47 Le même livre is, in its very title, an attempt to remedy this occlusion by writing in the same book—a double reference to the religious Urtext shared by ahl al-kitab and their book of letters. And yet as we will see, the language in which these letters are written marks the separation they mourn, locking Hassoun and Khatibi in hyphenated opposition. The preface announces that the book is an exercise in approaching the other, the foreigner/stranger, the “irreducible brother,” taking as its starting point the foreclosure between Jews and

Abrahamic Tongues  111 Arabs, Jews and Muslims.48 Brothers and others, Khatibi and Hassoun will seek to exorcize this irreducible enmity through the language of separation and loss itself. Prior to meeting in 1980, Hassoun had read Khatibi’s La blessure du nom propre (The wound of the proper name), an intersemiotic ­analysis of tattoos, proverbs, calligraphy, and erotic treatises. Khatibi was familiar with Hassoun’s Fragments de langue maternelle: Esquisse d’un lieu (Fragments of the mother tongue: Sketching a place).49 Their encounter was thus already grounded in a postcolonial excavation of traces: of Moroccan signs for Khatibi, and of the Arabic language for the exiled ­Hassoun. In a sense, Le même livre, too, is an excavation of signs. Their letters, though written in French, are interspersed with Hebrew and Arabic, and they trade fragments of Jewish and Muslim sacred and mystical texts. ­Khatibi makes frequent reference in his letters to Amour bilingue (Love in Two Languages), the novel he was writing when they began their epistolary exchange, and to the concept of bi-langue (“bi-language” or “bifurcated tongue”) he develops therein: the palimpsest that obtains when he writes in French, the colonial language that simultaneously obfuscates his mother tongue, the Arabic dialect, and bodies it forth. Despite their common state of linguistic exile, however, Hassoun insists on several crucial differences. Whereas Khatibi is fluent in Darija, the Moroccan dialect, and occasionally writes in ­Arabic, Hassoun received no training in classical Hebrew or Arabic and is “­condemned to write French in Arabic or Hebrew.”50 And while ­Khatibi continues to reside in Morocco, his linguistic and legal home, Hassoun was definitively exiled, as a Jew, from Egypt, a country that defines itself as Arab and Muslim. Yet despite these starkly different circumstances, or perhaps because of them, bi-langue takes on an even more poignant significance in Le même livre. Evoking Hassoun’s forced exile from his mother tongue and homeland, bi-langue is also an apt metaphor for the two-handed book co-­written by Hassoun and Khatibi, a Jew and a Muslim. Hassoun’s first letter, written in response to Khatibi’s essay De la mille et troisième nuit [On the thousand and third night],51 ties bi-langue to the Abrahamic, reading the former in terms of the divine interdict in Judaism and Islam: Jews may read but not  utter the name of God, and Muslims may utter the name of God but not imagine Him.52 Both are thus caught in bi-langue within their own religious systems of signs, within their versions of the same book. Though

112   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation motivated by the Abrahamic pretext of their exchange, Hassoun’s inaugural gesture thus grounds their epistolary exchange in a relation to language that is dual or multiple vis-à-vis the colonial tongue, French, as well as in terms of the diglossia between classical and dialectal Arabic, and between Hebrew and Arabic. This primary diglossia between the written and the oral—a point often underscored by Khatibi in his theoretical writings on bi-langue53—is also a metaphor for the religious interdicts shared by Jews and Muslims, and thus a common attribute of the people of the book. But what is the place of French, their common tongue, in a bi-langue redefined in terms of the Abrahamic? It is not a coincidence that Khatibi uses the term chiasmus to describe the relation between Jews and Muslims in Le même livre and, in Amour bilingue, the operation of bi-langue. The encounter between French and Arabic, allegorized in Khatibi’s third novel as the encounter between the récitant or narrator and his French lover, is simultaneously the chiasmus of “two languages in orgasm [ jouissance],”54 and the “shattered chiasmus” of “the abyss of language.”55 If, in La ­mémoire tatouée, the narrator’s déchirure between Moroccan and French languages and cultures is described as a painful rending, here the interstices of language that constitute bi-langue are riven with the exquisite pain of birthing and the jouissance of sexual climax.56 As in Le même livre, French is the “common language” that both unites and divides, a déchirure that inaugurates bi-langue. Speculating on the operation of bi-langue, the narrator explains: Difference which exalted me. My objective was also to maintain myself in this gap, carrying it into a listening where all opposition between dead language and living language would be forbidden, where everything that unites through separation and everything that separates by continuously translating itself would be affirmed.57

It is important to emphasize that the relationship between French and ­Arabic is neither reciprocal nor equal in this narrative. The récitant invokes this dissymmetry when he writes, “I will have transcribed you in your native tongue while abducting you from my own, which you do not recognize [méconnais].”58 A verb designating both misrecognition and willful ignorance, méconnaître (literally, “to misrecognize”) implies disdain and an imbalance of power that is heightened when the narrator’s lover addresses a Moroccan maid with the informal second person singular (tu) that was the hallmark of colonial relations.59 The récitant, meanwhile, addresses his

Abrahamic Tongues  113 lover in her mother tongue, his adopted language, which covers over his native diglossia. He describes the palimpsest of languages that obtains: When I speak to you in your language, where does mine become forgotten? Where does it continue to speak in silence? For it is never abolished in these moments. When I speak to you, I feel the flow of my mother tongue divided in two streams: one is gutturally silent, the other, running on empty, unmakes itself by implosion into the disorder of bilingualism. I don’t know how to say this, the whole chain of names and sounds of my native speech—I was born in the mouth of an invisible god—this chain, similar to a speech impediment, destroys itself and returns upside down, stammering. It’s then that I lose my words, forgetting which one belongs to which language.60

Yet if it covers over his mother tongue, bi-langue also represents the narrator’s “chance at exorcism,” the possibility of being “between the book of my god and my foreign tongue . . . beyond any mother, one and unique.”61 Bi-langue deconstructs both linguistic and theological origins: “Life had de-totalized me, the bi-langue had split up any nostalgia for the unique I had,” he explains.62 The unique, the one is a reference to the primal origin of the mother, but also to the foundational notion of the One in Islam, as several other passages make clear. It is striking how often the metaphor of the book recurs in Amour bilingue. From the outset, bi-langue is presented as a destruction of the book. The récitant—a qualifier that associates him with the prophet whom the archangel enjoined to “recite” or read (iqra’) the Qur’an63—announces that he will destroy the book through bilingualism: “Yes, I spoke, I grew up around the Only One and the Name, and the Book of my invisible god ought to end within me . . . let every language be bilingual!”64 Caught between “the book and its exterior,” he is multiplied in the image of the ninety-nine names of God: “His own name was unique and it was many and it spread outside, out there where other gods and other texts beckoned him.” Shipwrecked, the Book becomes a book with a small “b”: “open book . . . blank book . . . so much so that the idea of any book at all was erased.”65 The narrator’s irreverent invocations of the divine, ranging from the claim that he was “born in the mouth of an invisible god” to the image of expelling an invisible god through his anus,66 have the same narrative effect as his cross-continental homo- and heterosexual escapades; his evocation of prostitutes and androgynous, stuttering, and handicapped figures; and the running metaphor of continental drift. All serve to displace

114   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation the idea of a single origin or identity—religious, linguistic, sexual—toward plurality. In La langue de l’autre (The language of the other), a text published in 1999, Khatibi explains that “the sacralization of language, [of ] the sung language” was displaced, for him, via French: “[a] sacralization split off, deported into the language of the other.”67 In Le même livre, Khatibi uses the image of the chiasmus to describe his relationship to Hassoun, and metonymically, the relationship between Jews and Muslims, one that is premised on the Book seen as the source of separation but also as a possibility for conversation, indeed the very conversation in which Khatibi and Hassoun are engaged. Here we find an ambivalence similar to that attached to the Abrahamic in Vomito blanco and to the French language in Amour bilingue, for the Book is simultaneously the mark of déchirure and what can suture the cut: I feel that initial foreignness [étrangeté] of the book. That is why I find it pleasing to write to you in bifurcation, the chiasmus of all the sacred books that have poisoned our lives. . . . What does it mean to be Jewish today, if it is not the end of a horizon of the book. . . . To be Jewish, perhaps, in the text beyond the book.68

If Khatibi calls for the end of the book as a figure of déchirure, it is through the dual writing of a book—the same book, he wonders?69—devoted to the chiasmus that binds and divides Jews and Muslims. “Yes, dear friend,” he writes to Hassoun, “we must maintain this need for the chiasmus.”70 Reading Le même livre and Amour bilingue together reveals a parallel reflection, and perhaps a mutual allegorization, of the schize splitting the postcolonial subject and the Jewish and Muslim communities of the Maghreb. In Le même livre, French is the intermediary language that ­allows Hassoun’s and Khatibi’s exchange, even as it covers over Hebrew. In ­Khatibi’s terms, we express ourselves, do we not? in an “intermediary” tongue that is the singularity of this French language, while I do not know [ignore] Hebrew, or rather I misrecognize [méconnais] it without completely ignoring it. I imagine that this “more or less” gives life to this new correspondence. The passage from one hand to another will have been incalculable.71

It is significant that Khatibi uses the verb méconnaître to describe his relationship to Hebrew. Like the récitant’s French lover, he is familiar with this language yet has not sought to learn it. The verb implies an imbalance of power and a reluctance to inhabit the language of the other. But ­Khatibi also plays on a third connotation of misrecognition here: the in-

Abrahamic Tongues  115 ability, or unwillingness, to recognize a familiar face, a process of othering that implies the other was not always so other, but rather has to be forgotten, ignored. Without saying so explicitly, Khatibi intimates that the colonial tongue, and, metonymically, colonial ideology, is what has partly caused this failure of recognition, a forgetting of the Jewishness of the Maghreb. At the same time, as the tongue common to a decolonized Moroccan Muslim and an exiled Egyptian Jew, French is also the language of anamnesis and a recuperation of this “incalculable” loss, the loss of the Abrahamic: “Something has been lost between Jews and Muslims, something terribly ancient (a Semitic archaism!), which has turned into an extraordinary misrecognition.”72 It is striking that Khatibi couples the adjective ­Semitic—coined, as Edward Said, Maurice Olender, and others have shown, in the interest of philological and racial nomenclatures in the nineteenth century—with the archaic, a telling avowal of the persistence of European categories of thought even in the prose of a self-described decolonial thinker.73 In such a reading, Jews and Muslims, the prototypical Semites described by Ernest Renan and his fellow travelers in the philological adventure, have ceased to be natural brothers in the modern era. Khatibi’s exclamation mark, however, should be read as the equivalent of a raised eyebrow in a parenthetical aside that underscores the irony of finding Semitic commonality in the wildest speculations of European Orientalists. But there is another irony at work here. Like the “Semitic hypothesis,”74 the French language functions similarly to establish a common, if borrowed, ground for Muslim-Jewish relations. For Khatibi and ­Hassoun, the French language remains the primary site of both amnesia and anamnesis, loss and recuperation. Like the figure of the chiasmus, the irremediable takes on the double valence of linguistic and Abrahamic loss in Le même livre. First used by Hassoun to evoke the threat of an irrevocable split between Jews and Arabs in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (“what worries me most is the irremediable nature of the irreconcilable that may occur between Jews and Arabs”75), the irremediable also characterizes Khatibi’s relationship to language and writing. Having just returned from Spain, he describes a strange impression of returning to Spain. As a Moroccan, I return to it at the intersection of two traumatic chiasmi. The first, the Arab defeat over there, in the melancholia of speaking and writing poems about it; and the other, the colonial

116   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation trauma, which continues to belabor us. For example, the French language—which was initially imposed upon me—is an irremediable language, a traumatic event, an overturning of roots. The day I understood that we must transform the irremediable, my “style” took on the incisiveness of a sentence that must welcome the decomposition of humiliation to testify beyond trauma. One writes only (from) the irremediable, but one dies from not returning it to the suffering that subtends it. This is how I write, I think.76

It is telling that, though this passage does not evoke the Muslim-Jewish chiasmus, it begins with a double trauma that is parallel, if not identical, to that of Sephardic Jews: the expulsion from and loss of Al-Andalus, and the Spanish colonization of Muslim and Jewish Moroccans. Yet here what is irremediable is linguistic colonization. The writer cuts, with a stylus, into the colonial tongue to carve out a text that is no longer caught in the colonial dialectic, and yet serves as a witness to linguistic trauma. Once again, the poison becomes the cure, or rather, the only prophylactic against the poison is the poison itself, transformed into a homeopathic remedy. If Hassoun and Khatibi can suture the déchirure between Jews and Muslims only through the Book that separates them (but can they? Hassoun wonders if the 1982 war has not brought them past the point of déchirure, which can be repaired, to the abyss77), the decolonized writer is similarly compelled to cross over the colonial chiasmus via the colonial tongue. He can remedy the irremediable only by excavating its traces. Khatibi connects the linguistic and Judeo-Muslim chiasmus, these two forms of the irremediable that take root in the colonial venture, in the letter that follows: Our letters crossed paths, dear Hassoun. And were they not, are they not destined to cross paths endlessly. . . . Ultimately we have to [il faut bien] write on the traces [à la trace] of this whiteness, here (in the Jewish and Arab debate) sealed in some kind of irremediable. I am convinced that one can only write from the irremediable and from a traumatic trace.78

Writing is thus, for Khatibi, rooted in the déchirure of origins, be they religious, cultural, or ethnic. Bi-langue represents a chance to undo these origins, to work against “the theological concept” of monolanguage, as Khatibi puts it in one of the many texts he wrote in response to Jacques Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other: “Monolanguage, the language

Abrahamic Tongues  117 of the other in its unity, is a word, a theological concept, a fairy story, and a fantasy, all at once.”79 Monolanguage, as we will see, is not unrelated to monotheism and the exclusionary practices it entails. Khatibi is best known outside the field of Maghrebi studies for his conversations with Derrida on language, clustering around a text Derrida partly wrote in response to Amour bilingue, The Monolingualism of the Other. Since the publication of this essay in 1996, there has been a critical outpouring of work on Derrida’s late autobiographical work, manifested in a now-robust postcolonial interest in Derrida’s writings on colonialism, particularly on questions of language and acculturation.80 At the same time, the recent scholarly interest in religion (and its twinned concept, the secular) has also garnered interest in Derrida’s writings on Judaism.81 Gil Anidjar has done much to connect the postcolonial and religious turns in Derrida scholarship, looking for traces of Derrida’s thinking on the colonial separation of Jews and Arabs in his writings on the Abrahamic.82 But the centrality of language in Derrida’s reflections on the Abrahamic has largely escaped critical attention. I turn in the second half of this chapter to Derrida’s and Khatibi’s conversations on language in the colony in order to interrogate their shared concept of the Abrahamic, a concept elaborated, as we will see, in relation to both Palestine-­ Israel and the Maghreb. It is not insignificant that Khatibi and Derrida first met in 1974, immediately after the Arab-Israeli war and the publication of Vomito blanco, which Khatibi duly sent to Derrida along with La blessure du nom propre.83 Both thinkers have evoked, in writing, their friendship and profound affinity over questions of language, decolonization, and deconstruction.84 Though one can only speculate on Derrida’s reaction to Khatibi’s antiZionist pamphlet, this Abrahamic beginning seals their encounter in a twinned deconstruction of origins.85 Beginning with an analysis of The Monolingualism of the Other, I read Derrida’s Algerian writings as philosophical commentaries on the colonial division between Jews and Arabs, before interpreting his scattered pronouncements on Palestine-Israel in light of the Abrahamic. My analysis of déchirure in Khatibi and Hassoun— bi-langue and the Abrahamic as simultaneously what encodes and remedies the colonial schism between French and Arabic/Hebrew, Muslims and Jews—sheds light on the transcolonial stakes of Derrida’s pronouncements on identity, and in particular on Jewish and Israeli identity.

118   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation The Monolingualism of the Other takes the form of an extended dialogue between Derrida and an at-times-adversarial imagined interlocutor. It begins with two contradictory statements, near homonymic phrases in French: 1. On ne parle jamais qu’une seule langue. 2. On ne parle jamais une seule langue. [1. We only ever speak one language. 2. We never speak only one language.]86

Addressing his imagined interlocutor in French, “our so-called common tongue,” the philosopher-narrator asserts, “Yes, I only have one language, yet it is not mine.”87 This splitting of the narrative into two voices is an instance of the Socratic method often adopted by Derrida. But it is also a performance of colonial schize, to use Khatibi’s lexicon. For Derrida’s text is not an “autobiographical anamnesis,” but an essay on the impossibility of saying “I recall ” in what Derrida names the language of double interdict, French.88 The narrative split between philosopher and rebel pupil also echoes and parallels Derrida’s dialogue with his friend Khatibi, with whom he shares a “certain [Franco-Maghrebi] destiny.”89 Their shared, hyphenated identity is marked by the violence of colonialism, a violence that continues to echo in the present in myriad ways, though Derrida does not elaborate on the current ramifications of this violence: The silence of that hyphen does not pacify or appease anything, not a single torment, not a single torture. It will never silence their memory. It could even worsen the terror, the lesions, and the wounds. A hyphen is never enough to conceal protests, cries of anger or suffering, the noise of weapons, airplanes, and bombs.90

Notwithstanding the sensorial evocation of war and human suffering in this passage—which brings to mind the Algerian war of independence and the “black decade” Algeria was traversing as Derrida was writing this essay—violence is first and foremost verbal in The Monolingualism of the Other. The name “Franco-Maghrebi” designates the conflicted relation Khatibi and Derrida have to their language of writing, French, a language that was imposed on both writers in a colonial context. The conditions of this imposition differed on two counts, as Derrida reminds us: the degree of acculturation was far greater in the French colony of Algeria, legally considered an extension of France; and Algerian Jews, who had been

Abrahamic Tongues  119 aggressively assimilated and granted French citizenship en masse by the 1870 Crémieux decree, were excluded from this citizenship under Vichy rule, from 1940 to 1943. This double particularity is what allows Derrida to illustrate, in a provocative and parodic Aristotelian gesture, how, of the two writers, he is “the more Franco-Maghrebi, and perhaps even the only Franco-Maghrebi here.”91 In Derrida’s telling, the Algerian Jew is exemplary of linguistic colonization and of the double interdict sketched above: the prohibition against speaking any language but French (Arabic, Berber, Hebrew), and the impossibility of acceding fully to the French language, of making it one’s own. Derrida’s description of his relationship to language is remarkably close to Khatibi’s notion of bi-langue. Speaking of the double prohibition on “any non-French language of Algeria” and on French itself, Derrida evokes the “the surging wave of amnesia that the double interdict has unleashed”: Yes, an “unleashed, surging wave,” for it is suitable here to think of tensions and the play of forces, of the jealous, vindictive, and hidden physis, or the generative fury of this repression—and that is why this amnesia remains, in a way, active, dynamic, powerful, something other than mere forgetfulness.92

Similar to Khatibi’s use of the image of the palimpsest to evoke the guttural silence of the mother tongue buried beneath the French language, Derrida’s description of an active force of amnesia is, nevertheless, different in one crucial respect. The languages that are forgotten here (Arabic, Berber, Hebrew) were never known. They are rather the targets of an unwilling méconnaissance, in the sense sketched above: a cognizant ignorance, an active forgetting. Derrida is acutely aware of these other languages, but he did not, indeed he could not, learn them. They remain inaccessible, victims of colonial interdiction. If they are lost, it is in the sense that they were never possessed. In contradistinction, Khatibi can evoke the loss of a mother tongue that was once his, and that continues to push against his French through bi-langue: Abdelkebir Khatibi, for his part, speaks of his “mother tongue.” Of course it is not French, but he speaks about it. He speaks about it in another language. In French, precisely. He publishes his words in our language. In order to say of his mother tongue that—and this is quite an admission—it has “lost” him.93

Derrida, then, cannot practice bi-langue; he has no other tongue that would allow him to “make something happen to this language.”94 But he

120   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation proposes a compelling, if not practicable, solution at the end of The Monolingualism of the Other: the invention of a “prior-to-the-first language” to undertake the anamnesis of what was never known or owned. It is worth quoting this passage at length: The monolingual of whom I speak speaks a language of which he is deprived. The French language is not his. Because he is therefore deprived of all language, and does not have any other recourse—neither Arabic, nor Berber, nor Hebrew, nor any languages his ancestors would have spoken—because this monolingual is in a way aphasic (perhaps he writes because he is aphasic), he is thrown into absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference, without an originary language, and without a source language. For him, there are only target languages [langues d’arrivées]. . . . From these sole “arrivals,” and from these arrivals alone, desire springs forth; since desire is borne by the arrival itself, it springs forth even before the ipseity of an I-me that would bear it in advance; it springs forth, and even sets itself up as a desire to reconstruct, to restore, but really to invent a first language that would be, rather, a prior-to-the-first language destined to translate that memory. But to translate the memory of what, precisely, did not take place, of what, having been (the) forbidden, ought, nevertheless, to have left a trace, a specter, the phantomatic body, the phantom-member—palpable, painful, but hardly legible—of traces, marks, and scars.95

Derrida characterizes his “debate with monolingualism” as a form of “­deconstructive writing.”96 In this sense deconstruction is a strategy of bilangue, a strategy of decolonization, as Khatibi puts it.97 If his experience of the double interdict provoked his neurotic obsession with a linguistic purity he could not achieve (an obsession he avows is “inadmissible”) it is also at the root of his suspicion toward language.98 Beyond a manifest critique of colonial language policies, The Monolingualism of the Other is also a deconstruction of the pretension to possess language. Language does not belong, but only produces myths of belonging: “Because there is no natural property of language, language gives rise only to appropriative madness, to jealousy without appropriation.”99 It is clear that monolanguage stands in for much more than language itself: identity, originarity, autochthony, community. The links between the appropriating madness of language and the discourse of origins are exemplified, according to Derrida, in colonial Algeria, and more specifically in the double interdict imposed on Algerian Jews. For the double

Abrahamic Tongues  121 interdict is not only aimed at instating a hierarchy between colonized and colonizers, authentic and imitation Frenchmen. It also separates the colonized into those who have a mother tongue and those who do not: Arabs and Berbers on the hand, Jews on the other. Recalling that he lived “on the edge of an Arab neighborhood,” Derrida describes the cartography of the primary-school classrooms where there were still little ­Algerians, Arab and Kabyle, who were about to vanish at the door of the lycée. Very near and infinitely far away, such was the distance that we were forced—if that’s the right word—to experience.100

It is tempting to use the expression double interdict here as well, for Algerian Jews, although not entirely French (despite their citizenship), were held at a remove from those dubbed Arab or Kabyle. Denied entry into the French community, they were also symbolically barred from the Muslim one. Derrida’s Algerian writings—the texts he wrote toward the end of his life on his “Algerian childhood”101—all gesture, to varying degrees, toward this experience of separation or déchirure. Like Khatibi’s bi-langue, Derrida’s experience of monolanguage simultaneously gestures toward the language of the (colonizing) other and the language of another other, ­Algerian, Moroccan, or Palestinian. Might this be one of the senses of Derrida’s call for a “prior-to-the-first language”: “a language of the other, once again, but entirely other than the language of the other as the language of the master or colonist”?102 If this is the case, we might imagine a fictional language shared by Derrida and Khatibi, a common tongue that would be neither a mother tongue nor an other tongue: “As if it were a matter of producing a truth, by avowing it, of what never took place.”103 Derrida is of course careful to explain that such a language does not exist, that there is no originary language, in this case no “before” colonization and the double interdict it entailed—separating colonizers and colonized and also, among the latter, Jews, Arabs, and Berbers. In this sense, what Derrida terms “­degree zero-minus-one of writing” in The Monolinguism of the other corresponds to what Khatibi names the simulacrum in Le même livre104: to write, to attempt to write, not only what is called the unsaid, but to conjure, beyond all notion of origins, an antecedence of simulacra and appearances. . . . ­Nothing returns, or if something returns, it is not in the guise of a circle: metaphysical, theological, whatever it may be!105

122   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation Both Derrida and Khatibi, then, reject the idea of a primordial language that might be salvaged from the ruins of the linguistic double interdict. Yet they nevertheless attempt a form of anamnesis that would recreate, even re-present, the simulacrum of return. Khatibi formulates this critique of linguistic origins in terms of what he names the theological, echoing his writings on the Abrahamic: “Other thinking: other than the idea of the One and the Same, other than this eschatology of the unique and exclusive Book, be it the Bible, the Gospel or the Qur’an.”106 Though Derrida’s understanding of theology, metaphysics, and religion—hardly identical domains—is rather more complex than what Khatibi implies here, he similarly plays on the assonance between monotheism and monolanguage in his essay, taking aim at the mono, the “One,” that subtends both.107 In a typically Khatibian gesture, Derrida goes so far as to speculate whether his triple alienation (from French, ArabBerber, and Jewish cultures) might be “a paradoxical chance” since this “radical lack of culture” is also what makes him suspicious of identitarian appeals to mother tongues, to fraternity also108: That is my culture; it taught me the disasters toward which incantatory invocations of the mother tongue will have pushed humans headlong. . . . “My mother tongue” is what they say, what they speak; as for me, I cite and question them. I ask them in their own language, indeed, to make sure they understand me, for it is a serious matter, if they know what they are saying and what they are talking about. Especially when they celebrate “fraternity” in such a casual fashion, in the end it’s the same problem, brothers, the mother tongue, etc. . . . “Listen, believe me, do not believe so quickly that you are a people, cease listening without protest to those who say ‘listen’ . . .”109

Whom is Derrida addressing here? Potentially any self-declared community, of course, but we might speculate that he is appealing to those who invoke his fraternity, those who claim to be a, or even his, people. For this is a personal admonition that he has, elsewhere, addressed to Jews and Israelis. Derrida’s writings on Palestine-Israel are scattered in a number of circumstantial texts dating from the mid-1980s to the year of his death, most often in the form of conference addresses, but also in elegies and open letters. Here I focus on a connection that is rarely commented on, the connection Derrida makes between colonial Algeria and Palestine-­ Israel in these texts. For if, as we have seen, Derrida grounds his suspicions

Abrahamic Tongues  123 regarding community and belonging in his experience of monolanguage, he also disidentifies with Zionism and Israel on the basis of his experience as a colonized Algerian Jew—an experience he comments on at length in The Monolingualism of the Other and in other autobiographical texts. The recent critical turn toward Derrida’s autobiographical writings has largely focused on Derrida’s evocations of the loss of citizenship under Vichy rule in Algeria. Without neglecting the formative role of this experience in Derrida’s account, I would like to show that he situates this experience of exclusion in the highly specific context of French colonial minority politics. In other words, Derrida is not speaking of a universal anti-Semitism, as does Memmi in his studies of the Jewish condition, or even of a German or French anti-Semitism alone. Rather, his target is colonial racism, which intersects in highly specific ways with intra-­European racist policies targeting Jews. Derrida’s account of his experience of racism in colonial Algeria, I argue, is rooted in the differential assimilation policies that produced him as a monolingual subject.110 Rather than read Derrida’s statements on Palestine-Israel on the basis of his Jewishness alone, I conclude with a discussion of three highly disparate texts that are, I argue, representative of Derrida’s transcolonial approach to Palestine-Israel. I begin with a text that has apparently little to do with Palestine or Israel yet, in invoking both, refuses Israel’s claims to define an ethnic-­ religious community, that of the Jews. In the second of two lectures delivered in 1996 on the theme of hospitality, Derrida explains the difference between language in the strict sense and language as discursive idiom through a telling example: I have more in common with a Palestinian bourgeois intellectual whose language I don’t speak than with some French person who, for this or that reason, social, economic, or something else, will be more foreign to me in some kind of connection. Conversely, if we take language in the strict sense, which doesn’t include nationality, a bourgeois Israeli intellectual will be more foreign to me than a Swiss worker, a Belgian farm laborer, a boxer from Quebec, or a French detective.111

Hinting at his virtual Israeli “nationality” (Israel recognizes all Jews as ­Israeli nationals-in-the-making; in contrast, Palestinian Israelis are not nationals though they are technically citizens), Derrida simultaneously marks his discursive (class) affiliation to bourgeois Palestinians—including those who are denied the Israeli nationality he would automatically receive as a

124   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation Jew—and disidentifies with the bourgeois Israelis who do not speak his (mono)language. Though Derrida does not tease out the political implications of this double movement of identification and disidentification, it is a fascinating admission, in a lecture on hospitality that includes discussion of colonial and postcolonial Algeria (the citizen-subject divide but also the discourse of hospitality surrounding immigration), of Derrida’s disidentification with Israel.112 One cannot help but think, too, of the automatic citizenship accorded en masse to Algerian Jews by the 1870 Crémieux decree, whose revocation from 1940 to 1943 haunts so many of Derrida’s ­autobiographical writings, and which made him suspicious of the claims of community, in colonial Algeria or in Israel. Derrida’s apprehensions vis-àvis automatic Israeli nationality are founded in the experience of arbitrary national—and colonial—exclusion. In his last public lecture, a keynote delivered in English in 2003 and published in 2012, Derrida makes explicit his own positionality in relation to Palestine-Israel. First delivered in Jerusalem at the 1998 meeting of the Colloquium of French-language Jewish intellectuals, Derrida’s talk, titled “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” reflects on the necessity and pitfalls of “living together,” the overarching theme of the conference. It is important to emphasize that “Avowing—The Impossible” is not an anti-Zionist text. Unlike Khatibi in Vomito blanco, Derrida does not overtly critique the Israeli state as a self-declared Jewish state, that is, as a state that defines itself by excluding non-Jews—­something he does in other texts I will cite below. Nor does he condemn any particular actions or discriminatory practices exerted against Palestinians, whether “Arab Israelis,” Palestinian refugees, or those living in the ­diaspora. Rather, he offers a careful analysis of the pitfalls of community, an analysis that is grounded in personal reminiscences and transcolonial comparison. As Sherene Seikaly elegantly puts it in her written response to this address, “Derrida’s entry into reflections on living together in Israel and Palestine is also, and not surprisingly, through that other shore of ­Judaism, Algeria.”113 Rehearsing the by then well-known facts of his early life (his exclusion from French citizenship and from the French school system at the behest of the Vichy government in Algeria, but also his experience of “living together” with “the Algerian communities—the Arab, Berber, French of ­Algeria,”114 an experience he compares to that of living together in Jerusalem115), ­Derrida

Abrahamic Tongues  125 explains that these experiences are, for him, the starting point for any reflection on Zionism and Israel: It pushes the said child [Derrida] not only to oppose, sometimes publicly, the politics of the current Israeli government and of a great number of those that preceded it, but also to continue to interrogate himself in the most insomniac fashion regarding the conditions in which the modern state of Israel established itself.116

Derrida goes on to analyze, through the eyes of the “little black and very Arab Jew” that he was as a child in colonial Algeria, the inherently violent nature of state foundation.117 Several critics, including Seikaly, have taken this to mean Derrida considers Israeli state violence to be commensurate to that inherent in any state-building project.118 Yet attentiveness to Derrida’s parallel invocation of Palestine and Algeria in this and other texts on Israel-Palestine reveals that, for Derrida, colonial violence is, on the contrary, a heightened illustration of foundational state violence. In the case of Israel, the exclusion of Palestinians (the multiple and heterogeneous forms of exclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel, occupied subjects, refugees, and diaspora Palestinians) is exemplary of, rather than equivalent to, the exclusionary violence of the nation-state. Let me illustrate what is at stake in such a claim by briefly returning to Derrida’s reflections on language in the colony. Toward the end of The Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida makes an uncharacteristically clear case for the political stakes of deconstruction, specifically the deconstruction of identitarian discourses.119 Here, he is speaking of the linguistic double interdict imposed on Algerian Jews: In spite of appearances, this exceptional situation [the double interdict that makes Derrida speak only one language, French, that is not his own] is, at the same time, certainly exemplary of a universal structure; it represents or reflects a type of originary “alienation” that institutes every language as a language of the other: the impossible property of a language. But that must not lead to a kind of neutralization of differences, to the misrecognition of determinate expropriations against which a struggle can be waged on quite different fronts. On the contrary, that is what ­allows the stakes to be repoliticized. Where neither natural property nor the law of property in general exists, where this de-propriation is not recognized, it is possible and it becomes more necessary than ever to identify, sometimes in order to combat them, impulses, phantasms, “ideologies,” “fetishizations,” and symbolics of appropriation.120

126   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation Reading “Avowing” through the lens of The Monolingualism of the Other, I draw two conclusions. The first is that, like France in Algeria, Israel is, for Derrida, exemplary of foundational state violence. This is not to say that Zionism (or colonialism) can be reduced to nationalism. Rather, nationalism and other forms of community building are inherently exclusionary— that is, the overlapping projects of European colonialism and Zionism are manifestations of a much larger appropriating and depropriating impulse. The second, corollary conclusion is that one can only condemn and resist such impulses on the basis of a general claim—in this case, of the exclusionary violence inherent in state building. If Derrida presents The Monolingualism of the Other as a deconstruction of identitarian claims on language, might “Avowing—The Impossible” be a deconstruction of identity claims on religion and ethnicity—the twin parameters of Israeliness/ Jewishness, as consecrated by Zionism? Though Derrida does not take a stand for Palestine and Palestinians in “Avowing—The Impossible,” he does so in other texts.121 During the second Intifada, he sent an open letter to the PEN delegation to Palestine, rehearsing several of his past pronouncements on Palestine. Calling for a complete stop to violence on all “sides” (he casts doubt on such an expression by insisting on the asymmetry of the conflict), Derrida cites a text he wrote after an encounter with Palestinians in Ramallah. It is worth quoting this passage in its entirety given its grammatical complexity: I wonder how I manage to allow all these things to cohabit within my body, through a sleepwalking specter: millennia of amnesic love for every stone, every dead person in Jerusalem, and my “difficulties” (that’s an understatement, and they are not only, and so seriously, so radically political) with so many Israelis, on the basis of my innocent culpability—that is to say perhaps, the last link that remains indestructible in me—that with every Jewish community in the world, to the extent that we remain infinitely guilty, and well beyond Israel itself, of the violence inflicted on the Palestinians, and my alliance with the Palestinian cause, and my affection and limitless compassion for many Palestinians—and Algerians.122

Derrida wonders here on the coexistence of two bonds: his indestructible tie to all Jewish communities (a bond that is indelible in spite of his difficult relation to Zionism and the state of Israel), and his profound commitment to Palestinians and Algerians. The second part of this double tie is itself dual: his love for Palestinians is tantamount to his love for Algerians, and the latter rises out of the first. His affection toward Algerians is appended

Abrahamic Tongues  127 to his affection for Palestinians with a simple em dash, which marks a pause or break but also a causal or corollary relation. The parallel that Derrida makes between colonial Algeria and Palestine-Israel brooks no explanation; it is stated as a matter of fact. The first movement of this sentence is even more complex. His “amnesic love” for the Biblical Jerusalem recalls the amnesia and aphasia of double interdict: the anamnesis of something that was never his to own, in this case, Judaism. The “innocent guilt” of his sense of community with Jews the world over might be a sign of his inability to totally resist identity discourses—similar to his admission of linguistic purism with respect to “his” language, French, in The Monolingualism of the Other. But it also announces the culpability of the Jewish community vis-à-vis Palestinians, the violence in which he is, by his attachment to this community, an unwilling partner. If Derrida approaches Palestine-Israel as a colonized Algerian Jew all too aware of the violence of colonial state building, he is also, unwittingly, on the other “side” of the divide: potentially at least, an Israeli national, more an insider in the nation-state hosting him than the citizens who do not hold Israeli nationality (not to mention the Palestinians he met in occupied Ramallah). Reiterating in crystal clear terms that the foundational violence of Zionism and Israel is “colonial,”123 Derrida makes his appeal for peace in Palestine-Israel in the name of “the Abrahamic.”124 In turn, it is at the site of entanglement of Derrida’s Jewishness and Algerianness, in his double affiliation to Israelis/Jews and Palestinians/Algerians, that we must read the Abrahamic in Derrida. Tellingly, Derrida invokes a series of terms that resonate with the “irremediable” invoked in Khatibi’s and Hassoun’s elaborations on the Abrahamic in Le même livre: “We must repair, as much as possible, wherever there remains any ‘reversible’,” he writes,125 before amending this wish with a slightly different appeal: “there may yet be time to transform irreparable evil into what is to come.”126 What would it mean to build a future on the basis of the irreparable, the irreversible, the irremediable? It is not surprising that Derrida’s statements on Palestine have left his critics hungry for more, reflecting a larger frustration with the practical and even philosophical limits of deconstructive thought. What kind of future can be built on the destabilization of origins alone? Yet this line of criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the stakes of Derrida’s enterprise, stakes that become much clearer when we read his statements on Palestine,

128   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation I­ srael, and Jewishness through his writings on Algeria and his dialogue with Khatibi. A joint reading of Khatibi and Derrida also opens up a space for the Abrahamic as a mark of the split (schize) between Jews and Arabs that nevertheless enables a new relation built on the recognition (reconnaissance) of this split. It is important to remember that writing, for Khatibi and for Derrida, is a writing of the impossible, of a traumatic trace, of a priorto-the-first language. Like the Book, like bi-langue and the double interdict, like, finally, the Abrahamic in Vomito blanco, the irreversible caesura between Jews and Arabs, Palestinians and Israelis can, and must, become the site of a “living together well.”127 This is perhaps one of the senses of the Abrahamic as a “theoretical fiction,” to borrow a phrase Khatibi coins elsewhere.128 Taking the form of an epistolary exchange (Le même livre) or philosophical dialogue (The Monolingualism of the Other), it is a fiction written by more than one hand, allowing the invention of a future on the basis of, and beyond, the irreversible. It is also a fiction written in a “common language”: not a monolanguage, not even a bi-langue, but a pluri-langue. As the récitant of Amour bilingue concludes: “To say only that: Teach me to speak in your languages.”129

6 Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other

A fierce critic of Zionism and the Israeli state, the Jewish Moroccan writer Edmond Amran El Maleh devoted his critical and fictional writings to disproving the myth of a timeless and intrinsic Jewish-Muslim/Arab enmity. Like Serfaty, his former comrade in the Moroccan communist party, El Maleh credits French colonial assimilation policies, particularly those related to language, with the construction of Jews and Arabs as opposite and antagonist categories, linking French minority politics in the Maghreb to the Zionist/Israeli principle of separation. Even more explicitly than Memmi, Khatibi, Hassoun, and Derrida, El Maleh stages language as the site that both crystallizes and eschews the separation between Jews and Arabs. As I will show, his fictional writings give form to plurilanguage, interrupting French with fragments of Judeo-Arabic, Haketia, Hebrew, Arabic, Tasselhit, and even, in rare instances, English in order to undermine the colonizing impulse of language and the identitarian myths epitomized in French colonial and Zionist/Israeli discourses.1 The resulting interdit (literally “inter-dict” or “inter-said,” in-between speech) is explicitly aimed at bridging the déchirure (“tear,” in French) or inshiqaq (“separation,” in Arabic) between Jews and Arabs, a split epitomized in Palestine-Israel and in present-day Morocco. Yet if El Maleh deploys interdit to destabilize French and Israeli attempts to separate Jews and Arabs, he also refuses to identify in a simple one-to-one fashion with Palestine. More than any other figure I have discussed thus far, El Maleh exemplifies trans­colonial identification as a form of political engagement based on difference rather

130   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation than identity—specifically, on disidentification with Israel, the state claiming to represent him. Instead of collapsing self and other, Morocco and Palestine, El Maleh’s essays and fiction reveal important historical and discursive convergences between the Maghreb and Palestine without substituting one for the other, posing this critically comparative move as the basis for transcolonial identification. Most studies of El Maleh’s work focus on his nostalgic evocation of Moroccan Jewish communities, and to a lesser extent on his celebration of Muslim-Jewish entente.2 Although these are both central thematics in his fiction, I argue that they cannot be divorced from his engagement with the Palestinian question. For El Maleh, the foreclosure of Jewish-­ Muslim relations in Morocco is an effect of the same historical processes that turned Jews and Arabs into enemies in Israel-Palestine. El Maleh articulates this position most clearly in his essay “Moroccan Jews and Jewish Moroccans,” a title that revises Memmi’s ambivalent formulation “Jewish Arabs or Arab Jews” to foreground the shared history of Jewish and Muslim Moroccans.3 Arguing that Memmi falsely interprets episodes of the Moroccan anti­colonial struggle as evidence of Muslim violence toward Jews, El Maleh claims that French colonial ideology and Zionist propaganda as well as Israeli expansionism after 1948 are to blame for the destruction of Moroccan Jewish communities. Presenting his intervention as an attempt to set the historical record straight, he invites Moroccan Jews in Israel to return to their homeland in an overt reversal of the Israeli “law of return,” whereby Jewish citizens of foreign countries can become Israeli nationals. This ironic echo of Muammar Qadafi’s suggestion that Arab Jews come home—vehemently rejected, as I noted in Chapter Four, by Memmi in his polemic essay “What is an Arab Jew?”—constitutes yet another rebuttal to Memmi’s claim that Jews could not live in Muslim-majority lands. But it is in the realm of fiction that El Maleh offers his most compelling challenge to the arguments expounded by Memmi in Jews and Arabs. After a thirty-year career as a philosophy teacher and journalist in Paris, where he was exiled after being falsely accused of instigating the 1965 Casablanca demonstrations, El Maleh began writing fiction in order to undermine Zionist accounts of Jewish-Muslim relations in the Maghreb and Palestine-Israel. My reading centers on his third novel, Mille ans, un jour (A thousand years, one day), which stages the unraveling of Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco against the backdrop of the 1982 Israeli invasion of

Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other  131 Lebanon and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. Recalling the surprise of prospective editors when they read his manuscript (why didn’t he just write about the memories of a Moroccan Jew? why bring Palestine into the story?) El Maleh has explained that he had no desire to write about his childhood as an assimilated native Jew, caught between tradition and modernity.4 A transparent reference to Memmi’s The Pillar of Salt, this statement makes clear his refusal to write about Moroccan Jews without also writing about the production of the opposition between Jews and Muslims (recast as Arabs) in Morocco, and the afterlives of this opposition in Israel-Palestine. Mille ans, un jour is the antithesis of Memmi’s teleological Bildungsroman at the level of form as well. Divided into five unequal parts, the novel is narrated in the third person and focalized through the Jewish Moroccan protagonist Nessim, although a multitude of voices are interjected through free indirect discourse and dialogue. Shuttling back and forth between the Moroccan cities of Essaouira and Asfi (an anagram of El Maleh’s native Safi), the Atlas villages of Amizmiz and Ijoukak, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Paris, the novel weaves together a series of stories that narrate the nascent anticolonial and Zionist movements in colonial Morocco, the mass exodus of destitute Moroccan Jews, and their relegation to the status of second-class citizens in Israel. Tied together through the visions and memories of Nessim, these narratives play a part within the larger event that frames them, summoned in the exclamation with which the novel begins: “the Lebanon war!”5 Nessim’s evocation of the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon, and later of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, summons the memory of Muslim-Jewish cohabitation in Morocco, narratively tying the destruction of Palestinian and Lebanese life in the present to the foreclosure of Jewish-Muslim ties in the past. My reading of the narrative function of Palestine in Mille ans, un jour builds on the arguments of Ronnie Scharfman and Gil Hochberg, who lend central importance to the question of Palestine in the novel. In an important early study of Mille ans, un jour, Scharfman analyzes the Lebanon war as the trigger for a double act of testimony that collapses the killing of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and the destruction of Moroccan Jewry, making Sabra and Shatila “the locus of both displacement and condensation of one ethnocide onto another.”6 Explaining that the mass departure of Moroccan Jews is “only metaphorically an ethnocide,”7 Scharfman ­nevertheless argues that the tropes of deportation and slave trading El Maleh deploys

132   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation to describe this traumatic event reinforce the comparison between Moroccan Jews and Palestinians, staging a parallel between Israeli violence toward Arabs and those she names “Arab-Jew[s]” without glossing this expression or the terms that compose it.8 Taking issue with Scharfman’s interpretation of Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Moroccan Jewry, Hochberg argues that the connection between Moroccan Jews and Palestinians in Mille ans, un jour is not merely associative or analogic. Instead, she reads the novel as an invitation to read the terms Arab and Jew as inextricably bound up in the history of their genesis in European Orientalism and colonial ideology. For Hochberg, Palestine and Morocco are connected metonymically in “the vicious trajectory of violence accelerating from French colonialism . . . to the role of Israeli occupation over Palestinians.”9 Contrasting El Maleh and Memmi, she analyzes the memories mobilized in Mille ans, un jour as oriented not toward the past (the Arab Jew that El Maleh once was or might have been) but toward the future (the Arab Jew he may still become). For Hochberg, the novel derives its force from the interruptions of the other into the memories of the self, producing a dialogic memory poised toward a shared future rather than nostalgically looking back on a lost self. Hochberg’s anti-identitarian reading of memory comes closer to grasping the political significance of the figuration of Palestine in a novel ostensibly about Moroccan Jews than does Scharfman’s account. But if Palestine-Lebanon is not merely a metaphor for the oppression of Moroccan Jews, I argue that it also does more than interrupt Moroccan Jewish memory to demonstrate the inseparability of Jews and Arabs. Here I propose to draw out the “trajectory of violence” tying French colonial rule in Morocco to Israeli rule over Palestinian and Lebanese lives in the novel. I begin with a series of scenes from the second part of the novel that reveal that these heterogeneous forms of colonial rule are similarly aimed at producing consensual subjects through assimilation, and in particular, through the imposition of a language (French, Modern Hebrew) that never­theless remains inaccessible, following the logic of what Derrida names “the double interdict” of language in the colony. Set in colonial Morocco, mandate Palestine, and contemporary Israel, these scenes connect French and Israeli discourses of separation and lay the ground for transcolonial identification with Palestine as a means to combat both. Set in 1930s Asfi, the second part of Mille ans, un jour stages the appearance of Zionism in colonial Morocco and sets up subsequent compar-

Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other  133 isons between French colonial and Zionist discourse. The longest section of the novel and the one that most closely resembles a linear narrative, Part Two centers round an unlikely trio of friends, representing, in almost parodic fashion, the three religious-ethnic groups in French Morocco: the juif indigène Nessim, the Muslim/Arab Majid, and Louis Renault, a young colonial officer and aspiring Orientalist seduced by the teachings of Islam. Despite his “atavistic” anti-Semitism,10 Louis aspires to mentor Nessim and “protect” Majid, whom he sees as vulnerable to the “contagion” of metropolitan politics.11 Parroting his commanding officer Legaye, who has just extolled the virtues of colonization to an uncooperative native, he recalls his dreams, as a boy, of the “polymorphic and tentacled myth” of the “civilizing mission”12: The war of colonial conquest! Oh how pretty it was! Glimmering colors under the ardent sun and scintillating sabers, the spirit of bravery galloping across the arid countryside [bled ] to meet the cruel yet equally brave Arab . . . sweat and male sperm fertilizing the conquered land, the sweet and angelic fairy . . . touched those suffering from scrofula, syphilis, trachoma, leprosy, famine with her wand and brought them the joys of good health, opened obtuse minds, chased the darkness away from them.13

As we will see, this parody of colonial discourse will reappear in the novel in an altogether different context: Israel. Here it serves to introduce the discourse of civilization as one of the instruments in France’s ideological arsenal, presenting assimilation (the opening of obtuse minds) as the flip side of colonial conquest. Nessim is apparently a perfect example of the success of colonial assimilation. His impeccable accent, European table manners, and elegant dress could make him pass for French, and he is seemingly at ease in the bourgeois milieu of Asfi. Yet he does not quite fit into “this petty colonial society.”14 As Louis’ commanding officer puts it, “he is not like the other Jews we’ve won over.” Unlike the pupils of the Alliance israélite universelle, which, according to Legaye, “is doing solid work” in producing consensual citizens, Nessim is deemed too political.15 Majid, for his part, is an example of assimilation gone awry. Sent to Paris on a government fellowship, he discovers the Republican ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and channels his energies into the anticolonial movement gathering force in Fes. When Part Two begins, he has just been arrested by the French police. Nessim goes to visit Majid’s family home,

134   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation ­ escribing his room as an island of French culture in a traditional Morocd can house: “The desk [bureau], Sublime Porte in two senses, the one opening onto the West and the symbol, the concrete location of power, people did say ‘Arab Bureau’ after all seat of colonial power, indigenous Affairs or Civil Control.”16 Majid’s desk metonymically captures both the administrative dimension of colonial rule—the Arab Bureau responsible for indigenous affairs—and the role of education in purveying French culture and assimilating natives. But it is language above all that carries the full force of the violence of acculturation—and the capacity to resist it, through i­ nterdit. Reacting to his metaphoric rape by the French language (“I see these words advancing violently, trying to force their way in”), Majid mentally destroys the words he writes on the blackboard: “In the opposite direction another letter, another word [parole] worked in the belly, contained like the fire of a volcano, the accumulated energy weighed on the fault lines, the sudden eruptions.”17 Written from right to left, the Arabic script pushes against the French language in a tectonic movement that threatens to provoke a volcanic eruption or fault line. The politics of language played out in the colonial tableau in Part Two of Mille ans, un jour becomes legible in light of the linguistic drama that is staged in the opening section of the novel. Majid’s experience of acculturation directly echoes Nessim’s evocation of the disappearance of Moroccan Jews and the death of Palestinians in the previous section, a double loss that is marked, not coincidentally, by Nessim’s inability to mourn in the language of Jewish liturgy, biblical Hebrew. Seized by atrocious visions of the Lebanon war, Nessim recalls the “tear [déchirure], fault line, inshiqaq” marking the mass departure of Jews from Morocco. It is important to note that Nessim names the exodus of Moroccan Jews “in Arabic,” a language still available to him via Judeo-Arabic. Reading a letter written in this language by his grandfather during a joint Jewish and Muslim pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Nessim wanders into the Jewish cemetery of ­Essaouira where his grandfather is buried. Unable to recite the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, as a result of “his ignorance of Hebrew,”18 he casts a distraught look upon the newspaper he has just bought and catches sight of the front-page photograph of a Palestinian child lying in a hospital bed with bandaged arms. Interpellated by the boy’s gaze (“the child was looking at him”), Nessim plunges back into his memories of Jewish-Muslim cohabitation in Morocco.19

Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other  135 It is striking to note that Nessim, the implicit narrator, uses the word reserved for the departure of Moroccan Jews in Part One to describe the eruption of Arabic into Majid’s French: inshiqaq, albeit in its French version, “lignes de fracture,” as if the Arabic had to remain subterranean in the French classroom. The word fault line in turn elicits the memory of Nessim’s mother tongue, the Judeo-Arabic dialect of Asfi, described here in Derridean terms as a “prior-to-the-first language” that can only be evoked tangentially, never retrieved20: “the first word [ parole], the archaic, silent, absent one.”21 But it also beckons the image of Hamad, the wounded Palestinian child who appears before Nessim in Part One as he searches for the unknown words of the kaddish. The (Judeo-)Arabic word inshiqaq, translated, here, into yet another French equivalent, signifies the violent foreclosure of Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco and Palestine-Israel-Lebanon: Later, years, centuries later . . . Nessim under the spell of these atrocious visions, under Hamad’s gaze, felt his mother’s gaze fall upon him, appearing suddenly from an absence without return, the tender words came to him, caressing, moved to pain without a single cry, without the least violent tearing [déchirement], a serene field of innocence.22

If colonial minority politics, evoked metonymically through the Arab ­Bureau (Majid’s desk), seek to separate “apolitical” Jews from Muslims, Zionism is what finally drives a wedge between Jews and Muslims, in Morocco and Palestine. Here too, language is both a painful reminder of this separation and a means to work against it. Zionism appears in Nessim’s memories of colonial Morocco via the introduction of Yiddish, a foreign language that is implicitly compared to the colonial tongue, as will become clear in subsequent passages. The narrative flashes back to the rise of Nazi Germany and the arrival of two German Jewish refugees who are unlike their Moroccan co-religionists in both language and mores. The only putative link between these refugees and their host community is Nessim’s friend Ruben, the only Asfi Jew who knows any Yiddish, because he has to correct the “uncertain French” of the Ashkenazi editor-in-chief of a local Zionist journal, “transfer [transfuge] from a Central European country.”23 For Nessim, the combination of theological doctrine with an overtly political agenda that is characteristic of political Zionism (“this prose that mixes the Bible up with political calculations”) is antithetical to the spiritual messianism of Judaism.24

136   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation S­ tressing the religious as opposed to material dimension of the Promised Land, he describes the friendly relations between the “people of the Book” in a city that has no separate mellah or Jewish quarter.25 Later passages reveal the growing influence of the Zionist movement in Morocco, and its convergence with French colonial discourse. The following section flashes forward to the Lebanon war, metonymically captured in the exclamation “Shatila, Sabra!”26 Seized by ­visions of destruction and massacre in Beirut, Nessim wanders through the city of Essaouira with a letter from a friend who emigrated to Israel as a teenager. Guy (renamed Ari) begins his letter by ventriloquizing the dream that brought him to Israel in the first place: the promise to end injustice, exclusion, and genocide. But in his words the Zionist mission slips imperceptibly into a warring discourse captured in the oxymoronic name of the Lebanon war, “Peace in Galilee”: We have effaced the infamy of the ghettos, of hell, of the holocaust here we are before the heavens of resurrection, we make the desert bloom, to the world we bring the flower of justice of righteous speech, of purity of heart, Peace in Galilee! . . . and then, the shock, entry into Beirut.27

Guy/Ari’s ironic citation of his former lyrical patriotism bears close resemblance to the colonial discourse parroted by the French officer Louis in the passage cited above: tropes of civilization and progress, and the colonial cliché of making the desert bloom. Like colonial discourse, Zionism oscillates between humanism and conquest, though here in reverse order, from the promise of justice to the shock of war. Parodying his naïve belief that Israel would bring peace and justice to the world, Guy/Ari describes instead the horrors of what he identifies as a colonial war waged against his fellow Arabs. The balconies and terraces of Beirut and the faces of the Moroccan Israeli soldiers (“our mug [gueule]”) underscore the ties that bind him to his purported enemy. But it is via cultural norms, and especially language, that his solidarity with the Palestinians and Lebanese is expressed. Recounting his shock when a young Beiruti woman approached him shouting in his language, he repeats the phrase “she screamed / spoke to us in Arabic” three times in his letter, as if under a spell.28 Unlike the scene in Majid’s classroom, Arabic is not overwritten by another language in this episode. Rather, it “screams,” interrupting the language of the colonial oppressor: Modern Hebrew.

Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other  137 If Zionism appears in colonial Morocco via the introduction of a foreign tongue, Yiddish, in subsequent sections it is Modern Hebrew, the language of the state of Israel, that becomes the functional equivalent of French. Here I should point out that El Maleh’s metonymic evocation of Zionism via Yiddish is somewhat misleading. As scholars have noted, Zion­ism sought to fashion a “new Jew” at the antipodes of the Yiddishspeaking minority subject of Eastern Europe, the Ostjude.29 Yet it never­ theless points to the co-constitutive nature of European colonialism and Zionism, both concerned with the production of consensual subjects through assimilation. As Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, Zionism “can be read as an extreme expression of the desire to assimilate the Jews into the Western narrative of enlightenment and redemption” through the reinvention of Jews as European pioneers in the mythical cradle of JudeoChristian civilization.30 If Zionist attitudes toward the Palestinians living in the putative Jewish state espoused traditional Orientalist attitudes toward “natives,” ranging from romantic admiration to unmitigated disgust, non-European Jews posed a problem: they were both Jewish and Arab. In other words, they revealed the artificiality of the distinction the “new Jew” was based on, which reproduced European Orientalist attitudes toward both Arabs and Jews, rather than resolving them. Mille ans, un jour gives narrative form to the multiple Orientalist determinations of Zionism discussed by Raz-Krakotzkin, connecting Zion­ ist attitudes toward Oriental Jews to European attitudes toward Arabs. If French colonial minority politics prepared the ground for the mass departure of Moroccan Jews, Zionist activism is the trigger that put an end, in what seems like a single day, to more than a thousand years of MuslimJewish cohabitation. The novel describes the mass exodus of Moroccan Jews, who are shepherded to the Promised Land by Zionist proselytes. “Idolaters” in Morocco, they will become “real Jews” in Israel.31 The assimilationist ideology of the French protectorate, applied differentially to Muslims and Jews, prepares the latter for Zionism’s attempts to Europeanize and civilize them. But whereas French colonial discourse is based on the idea that assimilation is possible (a myth exposed, differently, by both Majid and Nessim), the parody of Zionist discourse presented here leaves no room for doubt. The experience of Moroccan Jews in Israel reveals the internal contradictions of the assimilationist project. For the Israeli soldiers in charge of processing immigrants, Moroccan Jews are “Arab[s].”32

138   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation Their only chance at redemption is in Israel, yet they will always remain inferior to European Jews. Language is the site that both crystallizes and exposes the colonial nature of the Zionist experiment in producing new Jews. The difference between Modern Hebrew (the language of Israel), on the one hand, and biblical Hebrew (the language of liturgy) and the Judeo-Arabic vernacular, on the other, takes on central importance in the fifth and final part of the novel. Nessim finds himself in an Israeli jail, where he is accused of being a traitor to the state. As in previous passages, Nessim’s inability to understand the language of his interrogator conditions his encounter with Israel. But here linguistic difference is ushered in with reference to French colonialism in Morocco: the colonial tongue is also the language of torture. Nessim recalls the torture of Moroccans at the hands of the French and the injunction to “speak”—an absurd order given the language barrier.33 This memory serves as a preface to Nessim’s mock trial, in which a wigged Israeli judge addresses him in a language he does not understand: “always this language problem.”34 A man dressed up as a “para” or ­parachutiste,35 the French special forces famously deployed in Algeria, enters the scene and pronounces his verdict: “You don’t speak real Hebrew, nor Yiddish, which is worse, so you’re not Jewish . . . you’re Arab.”36 For this emblem of colonial military power, language—Modern as opposed to biblical Hebrew, and Yiddish, the language of Eastern European Jews— determines ethnic/racial identity and trumps religion. In fact, religion itself is denigrated on the basis of language: ironically, biblical Hebrew is not “real Hebrew.” Like Judeo-Arabic, it is an “Oriental” language; hence those who speak it are Arabs. The paratrooper continues his litany of insults and explains to his prisoner: “We are not of the same blood, of the same race, of the same mother, of the same word [parole], of the same people.”37 Zionist discourse reprises European racial theories rooted in the classification of languages as Semitic or Indo-European, claiming a Hebrew modernized through Yiddish as the language of “real” (that is, European) Jews as opposed to the biblical Hebrew of Oriental or Arab (Semitic) Jews. Language (Modern Hebrew, French) determines civilizational and racial superiority.38 In Nessim’s nightmarish visions, the Israeli state becomes a modern avatar of the “protectorate” regime of colonial Morocco. Claiming to protect all Jews from oppression, it subjugates Oriental Jews in much the

Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other  139 same way French colonialism subjugated the indigenous peoples of Africa. But the comparison between French colonial and Zionist discourse is not limited to the Arab-Jewish experience of assimilation in Israel. Suddenly finding himself in the “Arab quarters” of Jerusalem, Nessim observes Palestinians and Arab Jews who live in this part of the city and recognizes them as “pariahs” both. Seeing a school, which he describes as “the model high school, the entryway [brèche] of modernity,” Nessim ponders the “continuity” between the French colonial educational system and the Zionist ideology inculcated in Israeli schools. Like Jews (and a few token Muslims) in colonial Morocco, Arab Jews (and a few token Palestinians) in Israel receive “the right education . . . scholarly digestion by myth.” In a perverse inversion of the idea of education as the acquisition of knowledge, here it is the myth ingested in school that devours Arab (and) Jewish children. Nessim’s remarks are most explicitly aimed at the assimilation of Arab Jews (“his people,” “les siens”), rather than that of Muslim Moroccans and (Muslim and Christian) Palestinians. But here we would do well to remember that assimilation is also what produces inshiqaq, the rupture between Jews and Muslims/Arabs. Nessim’s invocation of “the occupation!” and “victims whose throats were cut in the Palestinian camps” makes clear why he resists assimilationist discourses and colonial and Zionist ideologies.39 Like Guy/Ari, Nessim cannot fathom Arab Jews killing Palestinians. In this contraction of time and space, colonial and Zionist myths are revealed to be responsible for the occupation and killing of Palestinians, and for making Arab Jews participate in both. Inshiqaq is, it is worth repeating, an Arabic word, one that works against the assimilation and separation effected by both French colonialism (the French language) and Zionism (Hebrew). In an article focusing on El Maleh’s embattled relation to French, Scharfman analyzes the lexical interventions of Judeo-Arabic in the French prose of Mille ans, un jour as “the form and performance of resistance to total acculturation.”40 Yet the novel’s linguistic resistance to assimilation is not exclusively aimed at French cultural ascendancy in Morocco, I argue. It also seeks to counter the assimilationist ideology of Zionism and undermine the language of ­Israel, the state that claims to speak in the name of all Jews. In this sense, language becomes a way to undermine French colonial and Israeli processes of assimilation, as well as the discourse of separation that these ­processes enable. Much like Khatibi’s bi-langue, Nessim’s use of an ­Arabic term to designate

140   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation the separation (inshiqaq) of Jews and Arabs works against colonial/Zionist principles of assimilation and separation. In light of this reading of the politics of language in Mille ans, un jour, it becomes clear that Nessim’s invocation of a Jewish prayer—that is, of biblical rather than Modern Hebrew—to protest against Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is not fortuitous. It is as a Jew, in whose name Israel wages war against the Palestinians and Lebanese, that Nessim mourns for the Palestinian child. In the final section of this chapter, I argue that Mille ans, un jour articulates what the philosopher Jacques Rancière names disidentification: a subject’s refusal to identify with the state that claims to represent him or her. Though the event Rancière draws on to illustrate disidentification— the brutal police crackdown on Algerian civilian protestors in Paris on October 17, 1961—cannot be compared to the Lebanon war (it was conducted on metropolitan soil and in the context of a “traditional” colonial war), I contend that it marks a process of political subjectivation comparable to that undergone by Nessim in Mille ans, un jour. Rancière elaborates his notion of disidentification in relation to France’s treatment of Algerian subjects during the bitter war to retain control of its Algerian territories (officially annexed in 1848).41 On October 17, months before the French government finally acceded to Algerian demands for sovereignty, the Paris police forces cracked down on a peaceful demonstration for Algerian independence, leading to the death of some two hundred unarmed protestors. In the days that followed, the police undertook a formidable cover-up operation to efface all traces of this act of war. For Rancière, October 17, and more significantly the news blackout that followed, compelled French citizens of conscience to disidentify with the state that claimed to speak in their name. Rancière argues that this form of disidentification is exemplary of the constitution of political subjectivity against the official assignation of a particular identity. Before they could adopt the cause of the Algerians, the French had to violently disidentify with the state that distinguished between French citizens and Algerian subjects, and sought to remove the latter from the domain of visibility and rights. It is important to stress that what Rancière calls “the cause of the other” is marked by “a concern for the other that is not ethical but truly political.”42 Rancière’s aim is to demonstrate the place of the Algerian other in French citizens’ political subjectivation—the formation of political subjects in the gap or fault line between French citizens and subjects. Algerians

Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other  141 are not objects of compassion in this account. Rather, they are the quintessential other that enables the formation of political subjects in opposition to the state that oppresses them. It is easy to see how disidentification operates in the case of Jewish writers and intellectuals such as Serfaty, Derrida, and El Maleh who, in diverse ways, disidentify with the state that claims to speak in the name of all Jews in order to adopt the cause of the Palestinians. I argue that Palestine interpellates El Maleh as a Jew, that is, as a political subject produced in opposition to the Arab in colonial and Zionist discourse. In this sense, Palestine is constitutive of Jewish political subjectivity, a political subjectivity that is articulated in relation to both French colonialism, with its preferential assimilation of indigenous Jews, and Zionism, portrayed as a similarly assimilationist project. Though, as we have seen, the language of citizenry and subjecthood maps out differently in the context of Israel— El Maleh is a virtual Israeli national, while Palestinian citizens of Israel are not—the effect is the same, making Jews the only full citizens of the state. Disidentification with the state that claims to represent him is what allows and impels El Maleh to adopt the cause of the political other: Palestine. El Maleh publicly disidentified with the state of Israel in two essays he wrote in response to Israel’s invasion of Southern Lebanon in 1982, published in the Revue d’Études Palestiniennes. In the first, he refutes Israel’s claim to act in the name and interest of all Jews, and the corollary charge that any critique of Israeli actions is tantamount to anti-Semitism.43 He goes even further in the second, condemning the invocation of the Holocaust as a preemptive justification of Israel’s military actions and pointing instead to parallels between the horrors of Vichy France and Nazi Germany and a war deploying similar tactics. Preempting accusations that the comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is anti-Semitic, or at the very least that it relativizes anti-Semitic violence, El Maleh defends the usefulness and indeed the necessity of such a comparison, explaining that “what is comparable [l’identifiable] is not identical [l’identique].”44 Playing on the common root of the words identifiable (in a sense close to what I am theorizing as identification) and identical, El Maleh argues that comparison draws incomplete yet generative and important analogies.45 El Maleh’s defense of historically grounded comparison is the corollary, I argue, of his practice of transcolonial identification, understood not as a collapsing of heterogeneous situations (those of Moroccan Jews and

142   Jews, Arabs, and the Principle of Separation Palestinians) but as a productive comparison that makes possible a political engagement with the cause of the other. In the same essay, El Maleh writes that the “unspeakable suffering” of Palestinians and Lebanese has abolished all sense of distance: “in immediate proximity . . . distance, distinction, difference itself are effaced.” “Interpellated” by the indescribable horrors of the war, El Maleh is projected into the arena of battle. Yet he immediately qualifies this bridging of distance: “Not that it is a question of putting oneself in the Palestinians’ place,” he writes, “or that in a kind of artificial stance one can falsely pretend to identify with them.”46 On the contrary, it is precisely because colonial and Zionist/Israeli discourse has foreclosed any such identification that he feels compelled, as a Jew, to nevertheless take up the cause of the Palestinians. Playing on the double meaning of negativity in his title, “Le visage d’une négation” (The face of a negation), as marking both what is morally odious and an oppositional or differential identity, El Maleh summons the negative community of those who disidentify with the state that acts on their behalf to adopt the cause of the political other. I argued above that disidentification is, for El Maleh, a necessary first step in transcolonial identification with Palestine. But his wariness vis-à-vis substitutive politics, whereby a Moroccan Jew would speak for the Palestinians, has much broader implications for my readings of political imaginaries of Palestine in the Maghreb and beyond. El Maleh’s position as a post­ colonial Jewish subject claimed by overlapping colonial narratives—French and Zionist/Israeli—brings to the fore the politics of representation that are at work in transcolonial identification, regardless of the identity of the observer. For what El Maleh makes evident is the danger of speaking of, and sometimes as, the other. Unlike Souffles-Anfas and Kateb, El Maleh does not collapse the Maghreb and Palestine. Nor does he reify their differences, as Mosteghanemi and Memmi do (whether to exoticize or “misrecognize” Palestine). Rather, he dramatizes the incommensurable gap, or inshiqaq, that remains between the Maghreb and Palestine, even as he reveals the ties that bind them. El Maleh’s narrative staging of transcolonial identification begins to answer the challenge of representing the other without retreating from engagement altogether. Better yet, it poses this reflexive gesture as the condition of possibility for transcolonial identification.

Epilogue Palestine and the Syrian Intifada

The story of transcolonial identification with Palestine, told here through the lens of postcolonial Maghrebi literature and intellectual history, continues to unfold in the context of the dramatic events that began in Tunisia in December 2010. I have argued throughout Transcolonial Maghreb that Palestine has been deployed for the past half-century as a metaphor of the colonial, expanded to encompass not only the type of governance perfected by France and England in the nineteenth century but also the persistence of colonial discourse and the invention of new forms of autocratic rule in the purportedly postcolonial present. In closing, I turn to the ways in which Palestine has been invoked during the uprisings that swept across the Maghreb and Mashriq starting in 2010–11, focusing on Samar Yazbek’s 2012 memoir of the Syrian uprising.1 The mobilization of Palestine as a metaphor for the colonial in her memoir echoes the texts I have analyzed in this book in a number of ways. Like Kateb, Yazbek unravels state discourses of hospitality and fraternity toward Palestine in order to reveal a parallel subjection of Syrian citizens. But instead of collapsing Syrians and Palestinians into a single figure of (neo)colonial oppression, as do Kateb and Laâbi, for example, and instead of deploying Palestine as an exoticized figure of revolution, as does Mosteghanemi, ­Yazbek draws attention to the mediated and poetic nature of the metaphor of Palestine, pointing to the political possibilities that emerge from transcolonial identification as a truly comparative endeavor that does not efface the differences between two terms, but sheds lights on their points of articulation and overlap. In this reading, Yazbek’s memoir simultaneously

144   Epilogue r­eveals the continued relevance of the metaphor of Palestine and the urgency and importance of transcolonial identification at a time when Palestinian lives and political existence are ever more precarious. As I noted in my Introduction, Palestine has been a rallying cry for political change across the region for decades, and it has continued to serve this function during the ongoing uprisings. Pro-Palestinian activists were instrumental in organizing the first protests, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt, the first countries to witness mass protests and the first successfully to oust their autocratic leaders. In his contribution to the recent collection Dispatches from the Arab Spring, Toufiq Haddad reminds us that pro-Palestine chants were part of the very first demonstrations in Sidi Bouzid, where the Tunisian revolution began, while the Palestinian flag and the subject of Egyptian-Israeli ties quickly became lightning-rod issues that revolutionary forces in Egypt could rely upon to encourage mobilization.

Haddad argues that pro-Palestinian activism played an instrumental role in these uprisings because, unlike other forms of political organization (labor unions, opposition parties), pro-Palestinian groups are “moderately tolerated—largely as a pressure valve—under Arab regimes.”2 The function of Palestine as a rallying cry in Tunisia and Egypt can also be attributed to those states’ shifting positions vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine. Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, drew the ire of other Arab League nations when, one year after the Arab defeat of June 1967, he proposed that they accept the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan, thereby endorsing Israel’s existence as a separate, Jewish state. The Egyptian president Anwar Sadat gained an even more sulfurous reputation when, under American patronage, he signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. It is therefore not surprising that pro-Palestinian activism in both countries is intimately linked with anti-regime sentiment, indexing support for Palestine to political opposition at home. Yet anti-regime mobilizations of Palestine are not confined to countries that are perceived as sympathetic to Israel. Edward Said reminds us that in the 1970s Jordanian and Iranian protestors chanted “we are all Palestinians” while marching against their own nominally pro-Palestinian governments. My study of analogous uses of Palestine in the Moroccan journal Souffles-Anfas (e.g., Laâbi’s poem, “Nous sommes tous des réfugiés palestiniens”) and in Kateb Yacine’s popular Algerian theater, which compares Algerian migrants and Palestinian refugees, shows that this type of

Palestine and the Syrian Intifada  145 mobilization was also prevalent in the Maghreb, irrespective of state attitudes toward Palestine. It is worth citing Said again, as his assessment of the global significance of Palestine in decades past applies directly to the current context: There is an awareness in the non-white world that the tendency of modern politics to rule over masses of people as transferable, silent, and politically neutral populations has a specific illustration in what has happened to Palestinians—and what in different ways is happening to citizens of newly independent, formerly colonial territories ruled over by antidemocratic army regimes.3

Souffles-Anfas’ Marxist-Leninist, pan-Arab turn to Palestine, Laâbi’s militant translations of Palestinian poetry, and the multidirectional comparisons between Algerian immigrants, Berbers, and Palestinians in Kateb’s ACT plays, or between Arab Jews and Palestinians in El Maleh’s novels and even, fortuitously, in Memmi’s writings, are all vivid examples of the significance of Palestine for “the non-white world” in the past half-century. Yazbek’s journal of the Syrian uprising reveals that Palestine remains a metaphor for (neo)colonial subjection today. Published just over a year after the beginning of the Syrian uprising and released exclusively in translation, Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution details the first four months of the revolt, from the first protests in Dar‘a in March 2011 to Yazbek’s departure in July of that year.4 An ‘Alawi writer and journalist who crossed sectarian lines to join protestors demanding that Bashar Al-Assad step down, ­Yazbek fled to Paris with her teenage daughter to eschew government reprisals, and has since traveled back covertly to Syria several times to continue documenting the conflict.5 Her memoir weaves her account of the uprising and interviews with activists, doctors, and ordinary Syrians with moving personal reflections on her fears regarding her own safety and that of her family. The first entry is dated March 25, 2011, ten days after the first Syrian demonstrations, amid what she describes as a “carnival of death.”6 A few weeks later, Yazbek narrates her attempt to reach Douma, a poor suburb of Damascus that has been surrounded by the army and ringed in by a series of military and security checkpoints where young men wait in in the street or in their cars to be screened: Legions of security forces inspect trucks and check IDs, as scores of cars turn around and return the way they had come. Young men are standing off to the side

146   Epilogue as groups of security forces question them. . . . Soldiers line up next to each other, forming a roadblock, and in front of them there is another roadblock made up of security men.

Yazbek’s Syrian public, familiar with the iconography of the Israeli occupation—the endless lines at checkpoints and the ubiquity of the security state—would not be surprised by the comparison that follows: “I feel like I am in a movie about an occupied Palestinian town.”7 This haunting image stays with her as she makes her way into Douma, describing a field of olive trees that reminds her of a television report she saw a few days earlier, in which a Palestinian from the Israeli city of Lod (al-Lydd) explains that he was forced to demolish his house and leave his olive trees behind. As she takes leave of Syrian protestors holding olive branches, Yazbek “take[s] one last look at Douma, an occupied city.”8 Several months later, when the military occupation of rebel zones has produced an unprecedented refugee crisis, Yazbek compares Syrians and Palestinians again, this time with reference to Palestinians fleeing the Israeli army of occupation: I recognize the Syrians afresh, like pictures of Palestinian refugees we were shown when we were children: families searching for somewhere to live under the trees, families living out in the open, a family packing its kitchenware in plastic boxes and staring at the camera in grief.9

Two features are of note in Yazbek’s comparison of Syrians and Palestinians. The first and most obvious is that it establishes a parallel between an authoritarian postcolonial regime (one that relies heavily on pro-­Palestinian rhetoric) and the Israeli state. But Yazbek also draws attention to how this comparison is mediated—literally, represented by recourse to media, film in the first example, photography in the second. Unlike Laâbi, Kateb, or Mosteghanemi, Yazbek does not merely identify with Palestinians. She also stages the process of representation itself, revealing the multiple vectors of mediation that allow such an identification to take place. In this sense, her journal forcefully echoes El Maleh’s novel Mille ans, un jour, in which the photograph of a Palestinian boy burned by Israeli phosphorus bombs forces the narrator Nessim to identify, as an Arab Jew who disidentifies with the Israeli state, with the victims of that state. Of course the mediated and indeed mediatized nature of the Palestinian question is nothing new. The iconography of Palestinian resistance and suffering has fueled support for Palestine across the decolonizing world, from the ubiquitous military

Palestine and the Syrian Intifada  147 images of feda’in in the 1960s and 1970s to the iconic images of dead and wounded children that replaced them after the first Intifada. But Yazbek’s evocation of images of refugees does more than elicit pity or rage. Like El Maleh, Yazbek circumvents the dangers of transcolonial identification— the dangers of speaking for, or in the place of, the other. It is important to emphasize that Yazbek’s identification with Palestine operates differently from the texts I have analyzed thus far in a number of ways. Palestinian refugees fled en masse to Syria and other neighboring countries in 1948 and again in 1967. Today, nearly half a million Palestinian refugees remain in Syria (though this number is changing drastically as the refugee crisis escalates) and countless others have become Syrian citizens.10 The Syrian state—whose name at one time designated the entire region comprising historic Palestine and present-day Syria and ­Lebanon—was directly affected by Israeli expansionism when it lost the Golan Heights in June 1967, and until recently it supported Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist party that controls Gaza (Hamas broke with the Assad regime toward the beginning of the Syrian uprising), alongside Iran and Hezbollah. When Hafez al-Assad took control of the newly minted Arab Socialist Ba‘ath Party in 1966, and then of the Syrian presidency in 1970, the traditional Ba‘athist call for the reconquest of Palestine became the official state line. In this sense, the Syrian regime’s pro-Palestinian rhetoric exemplifies what, in Chapter Two, I referred to as “the discourse of fraternity”—the affirmation of pan-Arab and pan-Islamic solidarity with Palestine to placate disenfranchised masses. On the one hand, Yazbek’s allusions to the images of Palestine she is familiar with—photographs of Palestinian refugees, films of occupied villages—confirms the ubiquity and centrality of the Palestinian issue in Ba‘athist discourse. But unlike the romanticized iconography of military and guerrilla resistance offered in the Syrian television adaptation of Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s novel (remember the action shots of the Palestinian feda’i shooting rounds in Beirut and organizing an assassination attempt against Israel’s ambassador to France), Yazbek’s evocations of Palestine zoom in on civilian suffering and state terror: refugees fleeing the army and villagers under military occupation. It also foregrounds the mediated nature of these images, betraying her Ba‘athist education while simultaneously comparing the Syrian regime to the Israeli state rather than to Syria’s purported protégé, Palestine. Ironically, the images and rhetoric used by the state to

148   Epilogue fuel popular resentment toward an external enemy, Israel, become figurative weapons in an arsenal of resistance against what Laâbi dubbed “internal colonialism”: a regime of subjection exercised by the postcolonial state against its own subjects.11 Yazbek’s comparison between Syrians and Palestinians further invites us to interrogate the borders between these two terms, which are not as discrete as Ba‘athist discourse, in its profession of Syrian support for Palestine, makes them out to be. Given the large proportion of Palestinian refugees in Syria, Syrian and Palestinian identities are inextricable and coconstitutive, much as they are in neighboring Lebanon and Jordan.12 Unlike these two countries, Syria has never officially hosted the Palestinian leadership, and there is no Syrian equivalent of “Black September” (the massacre of thousands of Palestinian feda’in by Jordanian troops in September 1970) nor of course of the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s and 1980s (though Syria played an important proxy role in that war). The precariousness of Palestinian life in Syria is partly a by-product of the condition of refugees the world over, who, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, do not benefit from state protection.13 Palestinian refugees in Syria have been particularly affected by the ongoing conflict between the state and rebel forces, as evidenced in the humanitarian catastrophe in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus.14 But in a more pervasive sense that is comparable to the case of Jordan and Lebanon, Palestinians in Syria have historically been treated with suspicion if not overt hostility. Despite the Syrian state’s discourse of fraternity vis-à-vis Palestine, Palestinians have borne the brunt of state repression during the most recent uprisings. Yazbek’s memoir reveals that rather than signify an exception, the state’s treatment of its Palestinian “guests” exemplifies the subjection of the Syrian population by the state, giving new valence to the metaphor of Palestine in a modified iteration of “(post)colonial hospitality.” Despite their nominal status as full citizens, all Syrians are reduced to the precarious lives of Palestinian refugees within their own country. Two months into the uprising, Yazbek interviewed a couple arrested during one of the first protests, the al-Hamadiyyeh demonstrations of March 25 with which her journal begins. This interview captures in distilled fashion the contradiction between pro-Palestinian state discourse and the state’s practice of terror against its citizens. The young man she is interviewing explains that he was administered electric shocks and asked to “say

Palestine and the Syrian Intifada  149 that one of the protestors was chanting in support of Israel, that he had been holding up a portrait of Ariel Sharon during the demonstrations and that there had been sectarian slogans.”15 Notwithstanding the contradiction between the claim that demonstrators were pro-Israeli and anti-‘Alawi (whatever “sectarian” protestors there might have been would emphatically not have been sympathetic to Israel), the presumption is that the protests were instigated by traitors or outside forces, in particular those associated with Israel. At this point in Yazbek’s memoir, readers have already heard the testimony of a woman who used to work for state television: Even if you’re a demonstrator who hasn’t been accused of being involved with the armed gangs then you’re a traitor. For example, when news is reported of people being martyred “by the monstrous hands of treachery,” we in the media know that such expressions are only used when we’re talking about Israel/Palestine.16

In other words, demonstrators are by definition infiltrators and traitors to the Palestinian cause, which is the hallmark of a pro-Ba‘athist Syrian patriot. This, indeed, has been the regime’s position from the start of the uprising, though ironically its focus has shifted to Islamist/Salifist/Sunni “traitors,” such as several militantly pro-Palestinian, Al-Qaeda–affiliated groups. Having just explained that he was tortured to extract information about purported pro-Israeli agitators, the survivor of the March 25 demonstrations explains, without transition, that “Palestinians in particular were subjected to additional beating.”17 Like the purported pro-Israeli demonstrators, Palestinians are made to look like traitors, suspected of fomenting dissent against the state that “protects” them against Israel. Beyond state paranoia and the need for scapegoats, the discursive parallels that this young man perhaps unwittingly makes—between pro-Israeli traitors and Palestinians, and between his tortured body and that of Palestinians—­ reveals the production of Syrian citizens as virtual refugees, subjected to the whims of their own state and stripped of all rights. In a similar example of transcolonial identification, a young man who was severely reprimanded during the course of his military service for protesting the beating of an elderly woman exclaims that “even Guantanamo would have been better” than the torture he was subjected to.18 The methods used by the postcolonial Syrian regime (via its military and security arms) are identical to those of its rhetorical enemies, Israel and the United States: the extra­ judicial torture and murder of presumed terrorists.

150   Epilogue Toward the middle of her memoir, Yazbek makes reference to a moment of Palestinian-Syrian solidarity against both the Israeli and Syrian states, one of the only moments in which Palestinians in Palestine-Israel (as opposed to those living outside historic Palestine) joined in direct action. Rather than portray the Palestinian and Syrian causes as separate, her evocation of the protests of May 15, 2011—the date commemorating the expulsion of roughly eight hundred thousand Palestinians from their homes in the newly founded Israeli state, an event known in Arabic as al-Nakba, “the catastrophe”—further compares state subjection of both Palestinians and Syrians. Al-Nakba day has been marked by protests in Israel and in the Occupied Territories for decades. In 2011, inspired by the incipient revolts across the region, Palestinian exiles called, on Facebook, for a third Intifada to reclaim their right of return, and organized a series of marches into Israel from the Occupied Territories as well as neighboring countries. Palestinians living in Syria marched to the Israeli border, and several dozen protestors crossed into the occupied Golan Heights, despite the threat of land mines buried underground in the no-man’s land between the two sides, which, luckily, did not explode.19 Rather than present this event as a moment of pan-Arab fraternity against Israel, Yazbek ventures that, in this borderland, “young people are fated to welcome death in a very particular way, either from the bullets of their despotic regimes or the bullets of the Israelis,” and remembers “the women who were martyred in the Palestinian Intifada on that special day of solidarity.” Though she does not say if these women are Syrian Druze or Palestinian, her insistence, in the same sentence, on “the presence of women in the Syrian protests” implies that both are victims of their respective governments, Israeli and Syrian.20 ­Intifada, as the Palestinian uprisings of 1988 and 2000 are known, is unsurprisingly the term Yazbek uses throughout her journal, though she retains the more internationally legible term thawra, “revolution,” in her title. And yet Yazbek’s insistence on the mediated nature of her relationship to Palestine eschews total identification with the colonized other, distilling what I find most interesting about transcolonial identification as a process of political and aesthetic representation. Rather than claim that Syrians are Palestinian refugees in an uncomplicated way, Yazbek “recognizes” her fellow Syrians as Palestinians through the lens of the photographs and films of her childhood: “In images I have never seen before, I recognize the Syrians afresh, like the images of Palestinian refugees we

Palestine and the Syrian Intifada  151 were shown when we were children.”21 The antithetical construction of this phrase—never-seen-before images of Syrians that nevertheless enable her to recognize, to see anew, Syrians as Palestinians—points to the impossibility of transcolonial identification: Syrians are and are not Palestinians. In other words, Yazbek draws attention to how this transcolonial identification has been mediated and produced, partly through the discourse of the very state that is now torturing Palestinian bodies and turning all Syrians into virtual refugees. In this sense, Yazbek’s metaphoric use of Palestine recalls the processes of (mis)recognition underscored by Kateb and Khatibi, those that assign each party to its proper place—in the latter two cases, Jews and Arabs/Muslims, in Yazbek’s, ­Syrians and Palestinians. Remember that in Kateb’s epic fresco of revolutions, the Palestinian M ­ ohamed and Moses “recognize” each other as nomadic Arab and wandering Jew, respectively, thanks to their education into colonial categories.22 In a less ironic vein, Khatibi acknowledges his ignorance [méconnaissance] of Hebrew, even as he seeks to reestablish a conversation with Judaism and Jewishness that was foreclosed by colonialism.23 For Khatibi, the realization of (mis)recognition is the paradoxical chance that allows him to come to terms with his miseducation and repair the broken link in a nonromantic, nonnostalgic way. Might recognition work similarly in Yazbek’s journal, simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of the metaphor of Palestine and its increased urgency? If this is the case, the metaphor of Palestine is revolutionary indeed. To borrow Kristen Ross’ reformulation of Rancière’s understanding of political subjectivation, transcolonial identification with Palestine enables “a shattering of social identity that allows politics to take place.”24 Here, claiming to be Palestinian contra the state is a token not of Syrian patriotism or pan-Arab nationalism but of anti(neo)colonial solidarity with Palestine against both the Syrian state and its purported enemy, Israel. Transcolonial identification has never been more politically productive and ethically responsible than this.

Notes

introduction: palestine as metaphor 1.  Maghreb is the French transliteration of maghrib, derived from the Arabic root “gh-r-b,” which denotes, among other things, “the west.” In Arabic ­al-maghrib designates the western region of the Arabic-speaking world, as opposed to the east, al-mashriq. I retain the French spelling because it is widely used by the Maghrebi (maghribi) writers I discuss in this book, but use Mashriq/Mashriqi for the region referred to as Middle/Near East or Levant in European languages. 2.  For an explanation of the multiple connotations of thawra and intifada, see Gilbert Achcar, The People Want, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 2. As Achcar and others have noted, the term intifada strongly echoes the Palestinian uprisings of 1988 and 2000. 3.  I borrow the expression “Palestine as metaphor” from a book of interviews with the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Mahmoud Darwish, La Palestine comme métaphore: Entretiens [Palestine as metaphor: Interviews], trans. Elias Sanbar and Simone Bitton (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997). 4.  I use the expression “Arab street” in the sense Asef Bayat deploys it in his nuanced analysis of “ordinary” forms of protest in the Arab world. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 211. 5.  Toufic Haddad, “Palestine” in Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East, ed. Paul Amar and Vijay Prashad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 296. In her memoir of the Egyptian revolution, Ahdaf Soueif cites Egyptian protests in support of the second Palestinian Intifada as precursors to the antigovernment protests of 2011, and claims that the government knew that the people would count its treatment of Palestinians “among its sins.” Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 24. In the above-mentioned book, written before the uprisings of the 2010s, Bayat evokes the mass protests that erupted from Rabat to Amman following the Israeli incursion in Jenin in 2002, and explains that they were tolerated only because they were aimed at Israel rather than corrupt postcolonial regimes. Bayat, Life as Politics, 216.

154  Notes to Introduction 6.  Samar Yazbek, A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, trans. Max Weiss (London: Haus, 2012), 15, 139–40. 7.  Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih use the term transcolonialism to designate “the shared, though differentiated, experience of colonialism and neocolonialism (by the same colonizer or by different colonizers),” as well as historical, political, and aesthetic alliances across heterogeneous postcolonial sites. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. In this book, “the transcolonial” highlights cultural and political alliances and exchanges across the (formerly) colonized world in order to illuminate the modalities and contours of the (post)colonial condition from a comparative perspective. 8. I borrow the expression “principle of separation” from Amnon Raz-­ Krakotzkin, “A Peace without Arabs: The Discourse of Peace and the Limits of Israeli Consciousness,” in After Oslo: New Realities, Old Problems, ed. George ­Giacaman and Dag Jorund Lonning (London: Pluto, 1998), 65. 9.  Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 113. Keith P. Feldman, “Black Power’s Palestine: Permanent War and the Global Freedom Struggle,” chap. 2 in A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 10. See Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, “Zapatista Commander: Gaza Will Survive,” The Palestine Chronicle, December 12, 2009, http://www.palestine chronicle.com/zapatista-commander-gaza-will-survive/#.U9vZCoBdU7o. Examples of transcolonial identification with Palestine among postcolonial minorities in Europe abound, particularly in rap and hip-hop culture. For a literary example, see Mohamed Rouabhi, Les Nouveaux Bâtisseurs, suivi de Ma petite vie de rien du tout [The new builders, followed by My insignificant life] (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997). 11.  Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 125. 12. Ibid., 124–25. Original italics. 13. Ibid., 125. 14.  Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld, 2006). 15.  Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm, Al-naqd al-thati ba‘d al-hazima [Auto-critique after the defeat] (Beirut: Dar al-Taliah, 1968). 16.  In his presentation of adab al-hazima as a self-Orientalizing discourse of Arab decline, Joseph Massad cites the Moroccan historian and philosopher Abdallah Laroui’s writings as preeminent examples of the “decadence” hypothesis. Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), 18–19. Abdallah Laroui, L’idéologie arabe contemporaine [Contemporary Arab ideology] (Paris: Maspero, 1967); The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? trans. Diarmid Cammell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 17.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel [Plural Maghreb] (Paris: Denoël, 1983), 12–13.

Notes to Introduction    155 18.  As early as 1966, the Palestinian writer and literary critic Ghassan Kanafani compared Palestinian resistance literature to that of South Africans living under apartheid. Ghassan Kanafani, Al-adab al-muqawama fi filastin al-muhtalla, 1948– 1966 [Resistance literature in occupied Palestine, 1948–1966] (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1966), 50. For a classic account of the foundation of Israel as a settler-­colonial project, see Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? trans. David Thorstad (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973). More recent studies include Ella Shohat, “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine, and Arab-Jews” in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 201–32; Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto Press, 2006); Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008); and Ali Abunimah, The Battle for Justice in Palestine (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014). 19.  See for example John Collins, Global Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 20.  Berber (Arabic barbar, French berbère), a term derived from the Greek barbaros, meaning “non-Greek,” was used by the Romans and then the Muslim Arabs who conquered the Maghreb to designate the indigenous populations. Today the descendants of these indigenous peoples still speak variants of the language they call Tamazight and refer to themselves as Imazighen (“free men,” singular Amazigh). I use Tamazight to refer to the language group, Amazigh/Imazighen for the people. I retain the term Berber only when discussing the “Berber movements” that emerged during the anticolonial period and accelerated in the 1980s. 21.  Albert Memmi, Jews and Arabs, trans. Eleanor Levieux (Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1975), 11. 22.  Edmond Amran El Maleh, Parcours immobile [Immobile trajectory] (Paris: Maspero, 1980). 23.  Yasmina Khadra, The Attack, trans. John Cullen (New York: Doubleday, 2005). The Attack, directed by Ziad Doueiri, 2013, film. 24.  Hubert Haddad, Palestine (Paris: Zulma, 2007). 25.  Rachid Boudjedra published an account of his visit to the Occupied Territories before switching to writing novels in Arabic in the late 1970s. Rachid Boudjedra, Journal palestinien [Palestinian journal] (Paris: Hachette, 1972). Noureddine Aba’s lyrical texts about Palestine mobilize a romantic iconography of the Algerian revolution, while Tahar Ben Jelloun’s poems are perfect examples of engaged anticolonial literature. Noureddine Aba, L’aube à Jerusalem [Dawn in Jerusalem] (Algiers: SNED, 1979); Tell El Zaâtar s’est tu à la tombée du soir: action pour un théâtre [Tel al-Zaatar fell silent at dusk: Action for a theater] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1981); C’était hier Sabra et Chatila: Un chant d’épreuve; Montjoie Palestine! ou L’an

156  Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1 dernier à Jérusalem [Yesterday was Sabra and Shatila: A song of trial; Montjoie Palestine! or Last year in Jerusalem], trans. Cheryl Toman and Evelyne Accad (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). Tahar Ben Jelloun, Les amandiers sont morts de leurs blessures [The almond trees died from their wounds] (Paris: Maspero, 1976); The Rising of the Ashes, trans. Cullen Goldblatt (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010). Though Khnata Bennouna and Slimane Benaïssa do position the Palestinian question in relation to the Moroccan “years of lead” and the Algerian “black decade” respectively, I do not find their work compelling enough to justify a separate study. Khnata Bennouna, Al-ghad wa al-ghadab [Tomorrow and wrath] in Al-a‘mal al-kamila: Al-juz’ al-awal; riwayat [Complete works: part one, Novels] (Rabat: Wizarat al-Thaqafa, 2006), 111–309. Slimane Benaïssa, Prophètes sans dieu [Prophets without god] (Carnières-Morlanwelz, Belgium: Lansman, 1999); L’avenir oublié [The forgotten future] (Carnières-Morlanwelz, Belgium: Lansman, 1999); The Last Night of a Damned Soul, trans. Janice and Daniel Gross (New York: Grove Press, 2004). 26.  Kateb Yacine, “Mohamed prends ta valise” [Mohamed pack your bags] in Boucherie de l’espérance: Œuvre théâtrale [Butchery of hope: Theatrical works] (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 205–370. 27.  Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 28.  Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). 29.  Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (New York: Orion Press, 1965), 17. 30.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, Vomito blanco: Le sionisme et la conscience malheureuse [Vomito blanco: Zionism and unhappy consciousness] (Paris: 10/18, 1974). 31.  I borrow the term disidentification from Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 138–39. 32.  Edmond Amran El Maleh, Mille ans, un jour [A thousand years, one day] (Grenoble: La Pensée Sauvage, 1986). chapter 1: souffles-anfas 1.  Abdellatif Laâbi, “Le gâchis” [Waste], Souffles 7–8 (1967): 8–9. I use SoufflesAnfas to designate the journal as a whole and Souffles or Anfas for individual issues of the journal. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2.  Abdellatif Laâbi, “Nous sommes tous des réfugiés palestiniens” [We are all Palestinian refugees], Souffles 15 (1969): 80–81. The ellipses in the last verse are Laâbi’s. 3.  “Create two, three . . . many Vietnams, that’s the watchword” is the original title of Ernesto Che Guevara’s 1967 message to the Tricontinental. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Vietnam and the World Struggle for Freedom (Message to the Triconti-

Notes to Chapter 1    157 nental)” in Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: Writings and Speeches of ­Ernesto Che Guevara, ed. David Deutschmann (Sydney: Pathfinder, 1987), 347–60. 4.  Abdellatif Laâbi, L’œil et la nuit [The eye and the night] (Rabat: SMER, 1982), 8. 5.  Laâbi made the connection between March 1965 and June 1967 in a booklength poem published the same year (1969), which is signed “Rabat 1967,” and further clarified his intent in a subsequent edition by inserting “1965” and “June” at the end of the text: “Rabat, 1965–juin 1967.” Abdellatif Laâbi, L’œil et la nuit: itinéraire (Casablanca: Atlantes, 1969), 134; L’œil et la nuit: itinéraire (Paris: La Différence, 2003), 159. In his preface to the 1982 edition, he emphasizes the importance of March 1965 in the narrative, tracing an arc between the “battle” of March 1965 and the war of June 1967. L’œil et la nuit (Rabat: SMER, 1982), 7, 11. 6.  Laâbi quickly took on a leadership role and remained editor-in-chief of the journal throughout its print run. Other founding members were Mostafa ­Nissabouri, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Bernard Jakobiak, Hamid El Houadri, and Mohamed Fatha. In 1964, Nissabouri and Khaïr-Eddine had published a manifesto for a new Francophone poetry, “Poésie toute,” followed by a shortlived poetry review, Eaux vives, paving the way for Souffles-Anfas. Abderrahman ­Tenkoul’s dissertation on Souffles-Anfas includes “Poésie toute” as well as the opening editorials of the two sole issues of Eaux vives (Fall 1964 and Spring 1965) in the annex materials. Abderrahman Tenkoul, “Le mouvement poétique et intellectuel de la revue Souffles” [The poetic and intellectual movement of the journal Souffles] (doctoral dissertation, Université de Provence, 1981), 382–85. 7.  Laâbi, “Le gâchis,” 5. 8.  Fanon was a central interlocutor in the journal, as evidenced in Laâbi’s first editorial on national culture, which similarly warned against the myth of a return to precolonial traditions, reified by Orientalists as authentic folklore. Abdellatif Laâbi, “Réalités et dilemmes de la culture nationale,” Souffles 4 (1966): 4–12. Fanon famously opposed what he called “custom” to the living, breathing culture of a people struggling against colonialism. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 160. 9.  Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Moi, l’aigre [Bitter me] (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 28. 10.  Abdellatif Laâbi, “Lisez Le Petit Marocain,” Souffles 2 (1966): 5. Translated as “Read The Little Moroccan,” by Lucy R. McNair, in Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, ed. Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-­Ignacio (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 29–32. 11.  Abdellatif Laâbi, “Prologue,” Souffles 1 (1966): 2. 12.  Laâbi, “Réalités et dilemmes de la culture nationale,” 11. Translated as “Realities and Dilemmas of National Culture,” by Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio, in Souffles-Anfas, ed. Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, 62–73. 13.  Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, “Vers un troisième cinéma” [­Toward a third cinema], Souffles 18 (1970): 66–81.

158  Notes to Chapter 1 14.  “Programme en 10 points des Black Panthers” [The Black Panthers’ tenpoint program], Souffles 16–17 (1969–1970): 35. 15. Though Souffles-Anfas initially endorsed the monarchy’s claim to sovereignty over the Western Sahara, it progressively shifted toward autonomy, culminating in an editorial that compared the Western Sahara and Palestine. “Filastin jadida fi ard al-sahr’a” [A new Palestine in the land of the Sahara], Anfas 7–8 (1971): 66–76. 16. From 1972 to 1973 a new series of Souffles and Anfas was published clandestinely in Paris by militants hoping to mobilize international support for Laâbi, Serfaty, and dozens of other political prisoners jailed in the infamous prisons of Hassan II. 17.  For a refreshing departure from the overly neat distinction between Souffles the poetry review and Souffles-Anfas the leftist tribune, see Safoi Babana-­ Hampton, Réflexions littéraires sur l’espace public marocain dans l’œuvre d’Abdellatif Laâbi [­Literary reflections on the Moroccan public sphere in Abdellatif Laâbi’s work] (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 2008); Suzanne Heiler, “Réflexions théoriques et options esthétiques dans la revue Souffles (1966–1972)” [Theoretical reflections and aesthetic options in the journal Souffles (1966–1972)”], Cahier d’Études Maghrébines 5 (1993): 80–91, and Kenza Sefrioui, La revue Souffles, 1966–1973: Espoirs de revolution culturelle au Maroc [The journal Souffles (1966–1973): Hope for cultural revolution in Morocco] (Casablanca: Sirocco, 2013). 18. Al-‘Azm, Al-naqd al-thati (see my Introduction, n. 15). 19. “Avant-dire,” Souffles 6 (1967): 1–2. 20.  “Appel aux écrivains maghrébins,” Souffles 15 (1969): 99. Translated as “Appeal to Maghrebi Writers,” by Anne-Marie McManus, in Souffles-Anfas, ed. Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, 209–13. 21. Ibid., 210. 22. Ibid., 209–10. 23.  Driss Chraïbi, Le passé simple (Paris: Denoël, 1954). Translated as The Simple Past by Hugh A. Harter (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990). Rachid Boudjedra, La répudiation (Paris: Denoël, 1969). Translated as The Repudiation by Golda Lambrova (Colorado Springs, CO: Three Continents Press, 1995). 24.  Abdellatif Laâbi, “Défense du Passé simple,” Souffles 5 (1967): 20. Translated as “In Defense of The Simple Past” by Edwige Tamalet-Talbayev, in Souffles-Anfas, ed. Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, 81–85. 25.  Abdellatif Laâbi, “La répudiation de Rachid Boudjedra” [The Repudiation by Rachid Boudjedra], Souffles 16–17 (1969–1970): 55. Translated as “Review of The Repudiation by Rachid Boudjedra,” by Anne-Marie McManus, in Souffles-­Anfas, ed. Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, 223–25. 26. Ibid., 224–25. 27. Ibid., 223.

Notes to Chapter 1    159 28.  For example, in the prologue to the first issue, where Laâbi raised the problem of illiteracy, and in articles addressing oral popular culture. Laâbi, “Prologue,” 3. Ahmed Bouanini, “Introduction à la poésie populaire marocaine” [An introduction to popular Moroccan poetry], Souffles 3 (1966): 3–9. Abdallah Stouky, “Où va le théâtre au Maroc?” [Where is the theater going in Morocco?], Souffles 3 (1966): 23–31. 29.  Abdelaziz Mansouri, “Un mot sur Adonis” [A word on Adonis], Souffles 18 (1970): 90–92. 30.  Adonis, “Le manifeste du 5 juin 1967” [The manifesto of the 5th of June, 1967], Souffles 9 (1968): 4. 31. Ibid., 1. 32.  “Appeal to Maghrebi Writers,” 210. 33.  “Au lecteur” [To the reader], Souffles 15 (1969): 1. 34.  For an exhaustive description of these changes, see Tenkoul, “Le mouvement,” 197–200, 210–82. 35.  Abdellatif Laâbi, “Avant-propos,” Souffles 22 (1971): 3. 36.  Abdellatif Laâbi, “Littérature maghrébine actuelle et francophonie,” Souffles 18 (1970): 36. Translated as “Contemporary Maghrebi Literature and Francophonie,” by Lucy R. McNair, in Souffles-Anfas, ed. Harrison and Villa-Ignacio, 226–32. 37.  For example, in Laâbi, “Prologue,” 3–6; “Réalités et dilemmes de la culture nationale”; “Au sujet d’un certain procès de la littérature maghrébine écrite en français” [On the current indictment of Maghrebi literature written in French”], Souffles 18 (1970): 62–65. 38.  The journal employed this expression in an editorial on the Sahraoui question, surreptitiously comparing the two occupied territories—a provocation that would cost the journal dearly, given the state’s intransigent positions on the Western Sahara. “Sahara Occidental” [Western Sahara], Souffles 19 (1970): 48. 39.  Laâbi, “Avant-propos,” 3. 40.  I borrow the expression “linguistic drama” from Albert Memmi’s classic analysis of colonial acculturation. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 108 (see Introduction, n. 29). 41.  Association de Recherche Culturelle, “Programme de recherche et d’action,” Souffles 12 (1968): 7. 42. Jacqueline Kaye and Abdelhamid Zoubir, The Ambiguous Compromise: Language, Literature and National Identity in Algeria and Morocco (London: Routledge, 1990), 55. 43. Abdallah Bounfour, “Langue, identité, et écriture” [Language, identity, and writing], Al-Asas 39 (1982): 53–56. 44.  Though as early as 1966, Laâbi noted the failures of Arabization policies in his first article on national culture. Laâbi, “Réalités et dilemmes de la culture nationale,” 8.

160  Notes to Chapter 1 45.  “Dans les camps de fidayins palestiniens, révolution et enseignement sont inséparables” [In the Palestinian feda’i camps, revolution and pedagogy are inseparable], Souffles 20–21 (1971): 40. 46.  Samih al-Qassim, “Le 5 juin,” trans. Abdellatif Laâbi, Souffles 15 (1969): 3. Originally published as “Fi khams haziran” [On the fifth of June] in Al-A‘mal ­al-kamila lil-sh‘ir Samih Al-Qassim [The complete poetry of Samil Al-Qassim], vol. 1 (Kuwait: Dar Su’ad Al-Sabah, 1993), 474–73. 47.  Abdellatif Laâbi, ed. and trans., La poésie palestinienne de combat: anthologie [Palestinian combat poetry: An anthology] (Casablanca: Atlantes, 1970). 48.  Abdellatif Laâbi, “Intervention à la rencontre des poètes arabes (Beyrouth 8–12 décembre 1970)” [Contribution to the meeting of Arab poets (Beirut, December 8–12, 1970)], Souffles 20–21 (1971): 55. 49. Ibid., 58. 50. Kanafani, Al-adab al-muqawama (see Introduction, n. 18). 51.  Laâbi coined the expression “combat poetry” after Fanon’s influential account of “combat literature,” the oral and written corpus forged in the anti­colonial struggle. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 173. Barring the fact that, for Kanafani, resistance literature ordinarily appears after national independence, his definition of the genre parallels Fanon’s in its emphasis on popular expression and the connection between aesthetic and political revolution. Kanafani, Al-adab ­al-muqawama, 5. I thank Anne-Marie McManus for drawing my attention to Laâbi’s departure from Kanafani’s terminology. 52. Laâbi, La poésie palestinienne de combat, 26. Laâbi’s use of the term Nahda, which designates the cultural revival in Arabic letters and thought from the 1850s through the early twentieth century, usually with reference to Egyptian and Levantine literature, implicitly makes the case for the inclusion of Maghrebi works in the field of Arabic literature. For a nuanced reading of Laâbi’s deployment of the term Nahda, see Anne-Marie McManus, “Towards a Second Nahda in Morocco: Abdellatif Laâbi and the Dialectics of Transnationalism” (working paper sent to the author on Mar. 30, 2015). 53. Laâbi, La poésie palestinienne de combat, 14. 54. Ibid., 19–21. 55. Ibid., 14. Implicitly comparing Hebrew to Latin and the language of Palestinian poetry (Arabic traversed with dialect and popular expressions) to vernacular French, the expression “defense and illustration” directly echoes the manifesto for vernacular French by the Renaissance poet Joachim Du Bellay, The Defence & Illustration of the French Language, trans. Gladys M. Turquet (London: J. M. Dent, 1939). 56. Laâbi, La poésie palestinienne de combat, 83. 57.  Mahmoud Darwish, “Chant pour les hommes (extraits)” [Song for the men (excerpts)], trans. Abdellatif Laâbi, in La poésie palestinienne de combat, 43–47. Orig-

Notes to Chapters 1 and 2    161 inally published as “Nashid lil-rijal” in Diwan Mahmud Darwish [The collected poetry of Mahmoud Darwish] (Beirut: Dar al-‘Awda, 1977), 238–60. 58.  Tawfiq Zayyad, “Sirhan et le Pipe-Line” [Sirhan and the pipeline], trans. Abdellatif Laâbi, in La poésie palestinienne de combat, 97–101. Originally published as “Sirhan wa al-masura” in Diwan Tawfiq Zayyad [The collected poetry of Tawfiq Zayyad] (Beirut: Dar al-‘Awda, 1970), 380–90. 59. Laâbi, La poésie palestinienne de combat, 31. 60. Mahmoud Darwish, “Carte d’identité,” trans. Abdellatif Laâbi, in La poésie palestinienne de combat, 33–35. Originally published as “Bitaqat hawiyya” [Identity card] in Awraq al-zaytun [The leaves of the olive tree] (Haifa: Matba‘at Al-Itihad Al-Ta‘awuniya, 1964), 5–10. 61.  Laâbi, “Intervention à la rencontre des poètes arabes,” 55. 62. René Ménil, Etienne Léro, and Jules Monnerot, ed., Légitime défense [­Legitimate defense] (Paris: Place, 1979). 63.  Darwish, “Bitaqat hawiyya,” 6, 9. 64. Ibid., 5, 8. 65. Ibid., 10. Original punctuation. 66.  Mahmoud Darwish, “Mahmud Darwish: Autoportrait” [Mahmoud Darwish: self-portrait], trans. Abdellatif Laâbi, in La poésie palestinienne de combat, 133. 67. Ibid., 137. 68.  Susan Slyomovics notes that Laâbi’s dissemination of Palestinian poetry in prison was instrumental in raising political consciousness among his fellow political prisoners. Susan Slyomovics, The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 3 and p. 205, n. 6. 69.  Abdellatif Laâbi, Le livre imprévu [The unexpected book] (Paris: La Différence, 2010), 97. 70. Ibid., 130–31. chapter 2: transcolonial hospitality 1. Abdellatif Laâbi, “Réalités et dilemmes de la culture nationale,” 11 (see Chapter One, n. 12). 2.  Kateb Yacine, Nedjma, trans. Richard Howard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991). Originally published as Nedjma (Paris: Seuil, 1956). Kateb Yacine, Le cercle des représailles [The circle of reprisals] (Paris: Seuil, 1959). 3.  Kateb Yacine, Le poète comme un boxeur: Entretiens 1958–1989 [The poet as boxer: Interviews, 1958–1989)] (Paris: Seuil 1994), 96–97, 56. 4.  Souffles, “Avant-propos,” 3. 5. Kateb, Le poète comme un boxeur, 58. In the early 1980s, an estimated 15–20 percent of the population spoke Tamazight. Gilbert Grandguillaume, Arabisation et politique linguistique au Maghreb [Arabization and the politics of language in the Maghreb] (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1983), 14.

162  Notes to Chapter 2 6.  Jacqueline Arnaud, Recherches sur la littérature maghrébine de langue française, tome 2: Le cas de Kateb Yacine [Maghrebi literature of French expression, vol. 2: The case of Kateb Yacine.] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1982), 532. Kateb’s widow, ­Zebeida Chergui, includes a much shorter play titled “Boucherie de l’espérance ou Palestine trahie” in her posthumous edition of Kateb’s ACT plays, noting that it was finished in 1968–69 and formed the source text for later plays. Kateb Yacine, “Boucherie de l’espérance ou Palestine trahie” [Butchery of hope or Palestine betrayed] in Boucherie de l’espérance, 41–203. 7.  Zebeida Chergui, introduction to Boucherie de l’espérance, 33. Kateb recounts the circumstances of his visit to Lebanon in his homage to Hassan Hamdan. Kateb Yacine, Minuit passé de douze heures: Écrits journalistiques, 1947–1989 [Twelve hours past midnight: Journalistic writings, 1947–1989] (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 346–49. 8.  Officially, theater was responsible for the project of “socialist edification,” which sought to enlighten workers and peasants about the benefits of industrialization and agrarian reform. This was for the most part the prerogative of the National Theater, which was successively attached to the Ministries of Education, Orientation, and Culture, but the Ministry of Labor also made use of amateur theater troupes for this purpose. Roselyne Baffet, Tradition théâtrale et modernité en Algérie [Theatrical tradition and modernity in Algeria] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), 69. 9.  Souffles devoted a two-page spread to the program of the troupe’s play on Vietnam, produced before Kateb joined the team. “Théâtre de le mer (Alger): La fourmi et l’éléphant (une pièce sur l’histoire de la lutte du peuple vietnamien)” [Theater of the sea (Algiers): The ant and the elephant (a play on the history of the struggle of the Vietnamese people)], Souffles 20–21 (1971), 50–51. 10.  Kateb Yacine, L’homme aux sandales de caoutchouc [The man in rubber sandals] (Paris: Seuil, 1970). Kateb made several visits to Vietnam in the late 1960s, where he discovered the vernacular musical theater form known as Chèo. For an account of the influence of Chèo on Kateb’s popular plays, see Pamela Pears, Remnants of Empire in Algeria and Vietnam: Women, Words, and War (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2004), 47–49. 11. Arnaud, Recherches, 1006. 12.  This is the chronology established by Chergui in her posthumous edition of Kateb’s dialect plays. Chergui, introduction to Boucherie de l’espérance, 33. Several fragments from the ACT plays were published in journals and in Jacqueline Arnaud’s edition of Kateb’s unpublished work. Kateb Yacine, L’œuvre en fragments: Inédits littéraires et textes retrouvés, rassemblés et présentés par Jacqueline Arnaud [A work in fragments: Unpublished literary texts found, collected, and presented by Jacqueline Arnaud] (Paris: Sindbad, 1986). For a complete list of publications of Kateb’s ACT plays, see Kamal Salhi, The Politics and Aesthetics of Kateb Yacine: From Francophone Literature to Popular Theatre in Algeria and Outside (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1999), 228–29.

Notes to Chapter 2    163 13.  Kateb’s experiments in popular theater were not unprecedented in Algeria, where there was a vital tradition of “collective creation.” Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Bertolt Brecht, and local storytelling forms, this collaborative form of theater emerged as a form of socialist activism in postcolonial Algeria, mainly in amateur theater circles. See Ali Mrah, “Expériences de création collective dans le théâtre algérien” [Experiments in collective creation in Algerian theater], E ­ urope: revue littéraire mensuelle 54 (1976): 176–79. For a history of popular theater in ­Algeria, see Arlette Roth, Le théâtre algérien de langue dialectale, 1926–1954 [Algerian dialect theater, 1926–1954] (Paris: Maspero, 1967); Baffet, Tradition théâtrale et modernité en Algérie; [Theatrical tradition and modernity in Algeria]; Ahmed Cheniki, Vérités du théâtre en Algérie [The truth about theater in Algeria] (Oran: Dar El Gharb, 2006). 14.  For a comprehensive account of the ACT’s theatrical practices, see A ­ rnaud, “Nouer ses racines” [Return to the roots], chap. 13 in Recherches; Salhi, “Theatre Practice: Pragmatics and Aesthetics” and “Practice in the Theatre: Towards an Identity of Popular Theatre,” chaps. 6 and 7 in Politics and Aesthetics. 15. Arnaud, Recherches, p. 1007 and p. 1029, n. 72. 16.  The first National Emigration Day celebrations were held on October 17, 1968, to honor the Algerians killed in Paris on that date seven years earlier. On this occasion Boumedienne repatriated Algerian combatants killed in France and Belgium and paid tribute to the martyrs who fell in enemy territory. Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 275–76. See also Joshua Cole, “Remembering the Battle of Paris: October 17 1961 in French and Algerian memory,” French Politics, Culture, and Society 21.3 (2003): 10. 17. Kateb, Boucherie de l’espérance, 27. The film Kateb Yacine: L’amour et la révolution includes footage of immigrant workers alleging that they returned to Algeria after seeing the play. Kateb Yacine: L’amour et la révolution, directed by Kamel Dehane (Brussels: Centre de l’Audiovisuel à Bruxelles, 1989). These testimonials are all the more significant given that the early 1970s mark the end of what the sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad calls the “myth of return”: most immigrants were in France to stay. Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, trans. David Macey (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004). 18.  It is notoriously difficult to count minority populations in France, given the lack of statistics regarding race, ethnicity, or religion, as well as, in this case, the particular status of Algeria, which was considered French until 1962. For a contemporary estimate of the Algerian population in France in the early 1970s, see “Wave of Killings Spurs Algeria to Curb Migration to France,” New York Times, Sept. 21, 1973. For similar estimates, see Ralph Schor, Histoire de l’immigration en France de la fin du XIXe siècle à nos jours [A history of immigration to France from the end of the nineteenth century to the present] (Paris: Armand Collin, 1996), 205; Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, 131.

164  Notes to Chapter 2 19. Kateb, Boucherie de l’espérance, 209. I quote from Chergui’s collected edition of the plays unless otherwise noted. All translations of the ACT plays are my own. 20.  In an unpublished text, Kateb writes that two-thirds of the play was in “popular Arabic,” while the remaining third was in French. Kateb Yacine, “L’école, la rue, la maison (réflexion sur la langue et la culture en Algérie)” [School, street, home (reflection on language and culture in Algeria)], n.d., KTB 9.25, fonds Kateb Yacine, IMEC. My translation. Given that Algerian Arabic borrows liberally from French and Tamazight, this clear-cut picture is a little misleading. A sympathetic French critic noted that the rare words he was able to decipher were racial slurs designating Arabs (“raton,” “melon,” “bougnoul” [sic]), underlining the ironic contrast between the “jargon de caserne” (“military slang”) of this play and the poetic prose of Nedjma. Jean-Pierre Leonardini, review of “Mohamed prends ta valise” and “La guerre de deux mille ans,” by l’Action Culturelle des Travailleurs, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris, L’Humanité, Sept. 22, 1975. 21. Kateb, Boucherie de l’espérance, 209–10. 22.  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 34, 36. Other (unpublished) versions of “Mohamed arfad valiztek” make this linguistic power dynamic even more explicit, for example when a police officer interpellates Mohamed: “Alors mon zami, y’a bon? / Toi y’en a pas content?” I hesitate to translate what amounts to a racial slur, but riffing on the translation of Black Skin, White Masks, this passage could be rendered in ­English as: “Hey fella, you good? Y’ain’t happy?” The name Mohamed is also clearly significant, as indexed in variants of this play where racist Frenchmen claim that all Arabs are “Mohameds.” Kateb Yacine, “Mohamed prends ta valise. Scène de racisme (Fragment)” [Mohamed pack your bags. Racism scene (Fragment)], n.d., KTB 5.34, fonds Kateb Yacine, IMEC. 23. Kateb, Boucherie de l’espérance, 210–11. 24. Ibid., 212–15. Original ellipses. 25. I am using the term differend in the sense elaborated by Jean-François Lyotard in his eponymous book. To paraphrase, a differend is a conflict about the terms of the conflict itself, where what is at stake is not the argument but what Lyotard calls a “genre of discourse.” Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xi. 26.  See Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007); Basem L. Ra’ad, Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean (London: Pluto, 2010). French attempts to reconstruct a Latin Algeria through the excavation of ruins similarly served to give France antecedents in Algeria. See Seth Graebner, “Louis Bertrand and the Building of l’Afrique latine,” chap. 1 in History’s Place:

Notes to Chapter 2    165 Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007). 27. Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3. Todd Shephard similarly argues that one of the main arenas for the reinvention of France as non-Algerian (what he calls “the invention of decolonization”) was immigration. Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). For a provocative invitation to problematize the idea of France and Algeria as discrete nations, see Etienne Balibar, “Algeria, France: One Nation or Two?” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (New York: Verso, 1999); Mireille Rosello, “­Farança-Algéries ou Djazaïr-frances? Fractales et mésententes fructueuses,” Modern Language Notes 118.4 (2003). 28. See Ranajit Guha’s analysis of the uncanny (unheimlich, literally “unhomely”) nature of Empire: How can the colonizer pretend to be at home in the colony, which depends on the distinction between the metropolitan and the indigene? Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (1997): 482–93. 29.  Raz-Krakotzkin, “A Peace without Arabs,” 67 (see Introduction, n. 8). 30.  Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 11. 31. Kateb, Boucherie de l’espérance, 97. 32. Ibid., 201. 33.  Kateb Yacine, L’œuvre en fragments, 334. Note that the nonnative status of Jews is attributed to colonial discourse here, not to Ali; having expelled the Jews, the French are preparing to expel “those that are called the natives.” My emphasis. 34.  Kateb Yacine, “Palestine trahie/Boucherie de l’espérance. Dialogue: Attika et Ali (Fragment)” [Palestine betrayed/Butchery of hope. Dialogue: Attika and Ali (Fragment)], n.d., KTB 4.6, fonds Kateb Yacine, IMEC. 35.  Jacqueline Arnaud gives a brief account of Kateb’s early positions on the importance of the Jewish component of Algerian society. Arnaud, Recherches, 517–18. 36.  As Roselyne Baffet notes, however, Kateb’s ACT plays break the taboos surrounding Jewishness and Israel in Algeria, where the use of Hebrew (shalom) and the mere mention of Israel might be deemed subversive. The ACT plays also dispense entirely with pejorative references to Jews, reserving their satirical sorties for figures of religious and economic power: muftis and rabbis, (Muslim) merchants, and qadis (judges). Roselyne Baffet, Tradition théâtrale et modernité en Algérie, 145–48. 37.  I will return at length to Mamdani’s account of the colonial politicization of indigeneity in Chapter Four. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become ­Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2001).

166  Notes to Chapter 2 38.  For a non-ACT example, see Kateb’s parodic sketches on the “Frères Monuments” (“Monument Brothers”) a transparent reference to the Muslim brothers. Kateb Yacine, “La Gandourie sans uniforme” [Gandouria without a uniform] in L’œuvre en fragments, 407–17. 39.  Kateb Yacine and Hafid Gafaiti, Kateb Yacine: Un homme, une œuvre, un pays; Entretien avec Kateb Yacine [Kateb Yacine: A man, a work, a country; Interview with Kateb Yacine] (Algiers: Laphomic, 1986), 55. 40.  In the interview in which he compared classical Arabic to Latin, Kateb nevertheless condemned the institutions of Francophonie and the French publishing world as forms of “French cultural imperialism,” a statement that echoes his early indictment of French colonialism in the stillbirth of Arabic literature. Ibid., 13. Kateb Yacine, “La situation de l’écrivain algérien” [The situation of the Algerian writer], interview by Geneviève Serreau, Les Lettres Nouvelles 40 (1956): 108. 41.  In his history of the Berber movement, Ali Guenoun specifies that the play was banned from May 19, 1979, to January 20, 1981. Ali Guenoun, Chronologie du mouvement berbère, 1945–1990: Un combat et des hommes [Chronology of the Berber movement, 1945–1990: A struggle and its men] (Algiers: Casbah, 1999), 42. 42.  For an early study of the colonial opposition between Arabs and Berbers see Ernest Gellner and Charles Micaud, eds., Arabs and Berbers: From Tribe to Nation in North Africa (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1972). In her important study of the “Kabyle myth,” Patricia Lorcin argues that French Algeria was a proving ground for colonial policy in the rest of the Maghreb. Patricia M. E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Race in Colonial Algeria, new ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 227–32. In Morocco, the French tried to assimilate the Berbers through legal means: the “Berber Dahir” of May 16, 1930, exempted Tamazight-speakers from Muslim law and brought them under the jurisdiction of customary law. French efforts to separate “Berbers” from the rest of the population backfired drastically, and this legal measure elicited a wave of protests, consolidating the nationalist movement. 43.  Kateb Yacine, “Les ancêtres redoublent de férocité” [The ancestors redouble in ferocity], preface to Aït Menguellet chante . . . Chansons berbères contemporaines: Textes berbères et français [Aït Menguellet sings . . . Contemporary Berber songs in Berber and French], by Aït Menguellet, ed. Tassadit Yacine-Titouh (Paris: La ­Découverte/Awal, 1989), n.pag. 44.  Kateb Yacine, “Kahina: Extrait de La guerre de deux mille ans (en kabyle)” [Kahina: Excerpt from The two-thousand-year war (in Kabyle)], Awal 9 (1992): 221–230. This fragment was also published in book form but never staged as a solo play. Kateb Yacine, Parce que c’est une femme, suivi de La Kahina ou Dihya, Saout Ennissa, La voix des femmes, Louise Michel et la Nouvelle Calédonie [Because it’s a woman, followed by Kahina or Dihya, Saout ennissa, The voice of women, Louise Michel and New Caledonia] (Paris: Des femmes, 2004). Though Kateb rejected the use of the term Berber for Amazigh/Imazighen and Tamazight, and symboli-

Notes to Chapter 2    167 cally named his second son Amazigh, he retained the pejorative name ­Kahina (“sorceress” or “witch” in Arabic) to designate the Berber queen. In both the French and Taqbaylit manuscripts held at IMEC, however, this name is crossed out and replaced with the Kabyle name Dihya. Kateb Yacine, “La guerre de deux mille ans. Choeur de paysans sur la terre libre d’Amazigh (Fragment)” [The twothousand-year war. Chorus of peasants on the free land of Amazigh (Fragment)], n.d., KTB 4.24, fonds Kateb Yacine, IMEC. Kateb Yacine, “La guerre de deux mille ans (Fragment. Texte bilingue berbère et français)” [The two-thousand-year war (Fragment. Bilingual Berber and French text)], n.d., KTB 4.30, fonds Kateb Yacine, IMEC. 45. Ibid. 46.  In his genealogy of the Berber movement, Said Sadi claims that he cotranslated “Mohamed arfad valiztek” for performances in Kabylie and the region surrounding Algiers during a two-year period in the early 1970s. Said Sadi, A ­ lgérie: L’échec recommencé? [Algeria: Renewed failure?] (Algiers: Éditions Parenthèse, 1991), 185–86. In a personal communication, Ben Mohamed confirmed that Sadi was involved in reworking the text, along with Arezki Si Mohammed and Amer Mezdad. Ben Mohamed, in discussion with the author, July 2013. 47.  According to Ben Mohamed, the Taqbaylit translation of the International was commissioned for “La guerre de deux mille ans ou Palestine trahie” (“The two thousand-year war or Palestine betrayed.”) Ibid. Given that the International was sung after Algerian Arabic performances of “Mohamed arfad valiztek,” Taqbaylit renditions of the play most likely also closed with the International. 48.  In a testament to the highly controversial nature of the ACT’s Berber politics, the Kabyle student and amateur actor Moumouh Loukad was accused of blasphemy during the debate following performance of “Mohamed arfad valiztek” in Kabyle at the Kouba Ecole Normale Supérieure in Algiers, and the troupe had to leave surreptitiously to avoid being attacked by its “Islamo-Ba‘athist” critics. Ibid. Here I should note that Berberist and secularist activists loosely use the label “Islamo-Ba‘athist” or “Arabo-Islamist/Islamic” to characterize official representations of the Algerian nation as Arab and Muslim. The catachrestic use of the term Ba‘athist, which derives from the name of a secular political movement initiated in Iraq and Syria, is meant to denote the perceived foreignness of Arabism and Islamism in Algeria (and indeed Egyptian, Palestinian, and other Mashriqis were massively recruited in the Arabization project following independence). 49. Waciny Laredj, “Le mythe de Kateb Yacine dans l’imaginaire ‘arabophone’” [The myth of Kateb Yacine in the “Arabic-speaking” imaginary], Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle 828 (1998): 198–205. One of the more extreme examples of the attacks against Kateb occurred in 1978, when an Egyptian cleric residing in Algeria denounced Kateb’s plays as heretical, claiming that “Mohamed arfad valiztek” made blasphemous reference to the prophet’s name. Kateb, Le poète comme un boxeur, 31.

168  Notes to Chapters 2 and 3 50.  Noureddine Aba, L’aube à Jerusalem; C’était hier Sabra et Chatila; Tell El Zaâtar (see Introduction, n. 25). 51. Gafaiti, Kateb Yacine, 47. There may have been some rivalry at play too. Aba’s work was performed only once in Algeria, by an amateur theater troupe. Cheniki, Vérités du théâtre en Algérie, 103. 52.  On the Algerian state’s rhetorical and practical support for Palestine, see Michael Laskier, Israel and the Maghreb: From Statehood to Oslo (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 218–46. See also Jean-Paul Chagnollaud, Maghreb et Palestine [Maghreb and Palestine] (Paris: Sindbad, 1977), 145–47. 53. Kateb, Boucherie de l’espérance, 75. 54.  On Juha, a prankster figure familiar, under different guises, across the Mediterranean, and a model for many of Kateb’s antiheroes, see Jean Déjeux, Djoh’a: Héros de la tradition arabo-berbère, hier et aujourd’hui [Djoh’a: A hero of the ArabBerber tradition, yesterday and today] (Sherbrooke, QC: Naaman, 1978). 55. Kateb, Boucherie de l’espérance, 336. 56.  The popular Algerian tale known as “Juha’s nail” bears a strong resemblance to a common trope in Palestinian literature, often in reference to a lost al-Andalus (Muslim Spain): the keys of the house that has been lost to colonial conquest, preserved by the dispossessed owner in provision of a hypothetical return. Kateb was no doubt aware of this trope, as evidenced in manuscripts referring to “the keys of the house” and “the papers of the land.” Kateb Yacine, “Mohamed prends ta valise (Texte français intégral)” [Mohamed pack your bags (Complete French text], n.d., KTB 5.1, fonds Kateb Yacine, IMEC. chapter 3: the transcolonial exotic 1.  The violent conflict opposing the Algerian state to armed Islamist groups in the 1990s, as a result of which tens of thousands of civilians, soldiers, and Islamist militants were killed, is known euphemistically as la décennie noire, “the black decade,” in Algeria. I opt for this expression rather than the more common expression “Algerian civil war,” which evokes Western clichés of sectarian conflict (in this case, Islamist vs. secularist). 2. Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Dhakirat al-jasad (Beirut: Dar Al-Adab, 1993). Translated by Raphael Cohen as The Bridges of Constantine (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Mosteghanemi, Fawda’ al-hawas (Beirut: Dar Al-Adab, 1997). Translated by Baria Ahmar as Chaos of the Senses (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004). Mosteghanemi, ‘Abir sarir [Passer-by a bed] (Beirut: Dar Al-Adab, 2003). I give literal translations of the titles above but use the published translations unless otherwise indicated. 3.  Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). 4.  Dhakirat al-jasad, directed by Nedja Enzour, thirty episodes, aired begin-

Notes to Chapter 3    169 ning Sept. 14, 2010, on Nessma TV (Tunisia), YouTube video posted by dadou3x on Aug. 14, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SlOKhypQEo. For Mosteghanemi’s web presence, see her website, http://www.ahlammosteghanemi .com/ (accessed Dec. 16, 2014); and Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/ AhlamMosteghanemi (accessed Dec. 16, 2014). 5.  Khaled ben Toubal is also the protagonist of Malek Haddad’s Le quai aux fleurs ne répond plus, a tale of colonial betrayal set during the revolution. This detail is significant given that Dhakirat al-jasad is dedicated to Haddad, a point I will return to below. Malek Haddad, Le quai aux fleurs ne répond plus [The flower quay is no longer answering] (Paris: Julliard, 1961). 6. Mosteghanemi, Dhakirat al-jasad, 160. When I cite the original Arabic, translations are my own. 7.  Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 272. 8. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 194 (see Introduction, n. 19). 9. Ibid., 186. 10.  Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Algérie: Femme et écritures [Algeria: The writing of woman] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985). 11. Mosteghanemi, The Bridges of Constantine, 245. 12. Mosteghanemi, Dhakirat al-jasad, 70. The star adorns the Algerian flag and is emblematic of the independent nation of Algeria. 13. Ibid., 85. 14. Ibid., 118. 15. Ibid., 164. 16.  “Long Live Algeria!” The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (1966; New York: Criterion Collection, 2011), DVD. For a critique of the trope of national allegory as woman in the Maghrebi context, see Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Jarrod Hayes, Queer Nation: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 17. Mosteghanemi, Dhakirat al-jasad, 200. 18. Ibid., 202. For an early formulation of the trope of nation as woman in Palestinian literature, see Kanafani, Al-adab al-muqawama fi filastin al-muhtalla (see Introduction, n. 18). 19.  Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, 124–25 (see Introduction, n. 11). Original italics. 20. Mosteghanemi, Chaos of the Senses, 144. 21. Ibid., 59. 22. Ibid., 178. 23. Ibid., 90. 24. Mosteghanemi, ‘Abir sarir, 170. All translations of this novel are my own.

170  Notes to Chapter 3 25.  Gamila al-gaza’iriya [Gamila the Algerian], directed by Youssef Chahine (Cairo: Lotus Films, 1958). 26.  See Elizabeth M. Holt, “‘In a Language That Was Not His Own’: On Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-jasad and Its French Translation Mémoires de la chair,” Journal of Arabic Literature 39 (2008): 123–40. 27. Mosteghanemi, Dhakirat al-jasad, 5. The dedication to Haddad is inexplicably absent from Raphael Cohen’s otherwise rigorous translation, The Bridges of Constantine. For a full English translation of the original dedication, see Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh, trans. Baria Ahmar Sreih, revised trans. Peter Clark (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), n.pag. 28. Mosteghanemi, The Bridges of Constantine, 106. See Albert Memmi’s classic description of “colonial bilingualism.” Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 107 (see Introduction, n. 29). 29. Mosteghanemi, The Bridges of Constantine, 40. 30. Ibid., 62. 31. Ibid., 130. 32. Ibid., 99. 33. Ibid., 102. 34. Ibid., 44. 35. Mosteghanemi, ‘Abir sarir, 164. 36. Mosteghanemi, The Bridges of Constantine, 143. Mosteghanemi, Dhakirat al-jasad, 197. 37. Ibid., 202–3. Ellipsis in the original. 38. Mosteghanemi, The Bridges of Constantine, 160. 39.  Samia Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2011), 50. 40.  See for example Yusuf al-Qa‘id, “Raga‘ al-Naqqash yafdah al-ilaqa bayna Dhakirat al-jasad wa l-Walima” [Raga‘ al-Naqqash reveals the relationship between Memory in the Flesh and A Banquet for Seaweed], Al Ahlam, Mar. 4, 2001, cited in Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, 50, and 284 n. 45. 41. Mosteghanemi, ‘Abir sarir, 139–40. 42.  Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Mémoires de la chair, trans. Mohamed Mokeddem (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002). Bloomsbury’s decision to retranslate Dhakirat al-jasad [Memory of the flesh] under the presumably more alluring title Bridges of Constantine also attests to Mosteghanemi’s desirability in the English speaking world—a desirability unapologetically evoked by the book cover, which reproduces a sepiahued, partially out-of-focus photograph of a young woman whose carefully madeup eyes peer suggestively out of a partial facial veil (really a translucent shroud). Unsurprisingly, the cover image bears striking resemblance to the photograph of the (unveiled) author on the back flap jacket. 43. Mosteghanemi, The Bridges of Constantine, 8. 44.  Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Nisyan.com (Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2009). Translated

Notes to Chapters 3 and 4    171 by Raphael Cohen as The Art of Forgetting (Doha: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation, 2011). A highly self-reflexive work of nonfiction, Nisyan.com celebrates, among other things, the positive influence Mosteghanemi’s novels have had on lovers in the real world, and boasts that its author is “the most read woman in prisons, Israeli and Arab alike.” Ibid., 21. Here Mosteghanemi leaves behind all criticism of allegory, national or transnational. The book is replete with heavy-handed allegories of Arab men and women as, respectively, autocrat and subjects. See for example the chapter titled “Man, that being never apologizes!” in The Art of Forgetting, 122–23. 45. “Ahlam Mosteghanemi wa Jamal Suleiman: Nihayat musalsal Dhakirat ­al-jasad” [Ahlam Mosteghanemi and Jamal Suleiman: The end of the series Dhakirat al-jasad], Dhakirat al-jasad, episode 30, directed by Enzour, YouTube video, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=syvE7bAbh0g, (accessed Dec. 16, 2014). 46.  Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 47. Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, 176. 48.  See for example the opening credits of the first episode, Dhakirat al-jasad, episode 1, directed by Enzour, YouTube video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 8SlOKhypQEo (accessed Dec. 16, 2014). 49. Ibid. 50.  For a timely assessment of Algeria during the uprisings, see Susan Slyomovics, “Algeria,” in Dispatches from the Arab Spring, 122–34 (see Introduction, n. 5). 51.  Nouri Gana, for example, notes that the Tunisian poet Abul-Qasim AlShabbi inspired the ubiquitous slogan “The people demand the fall of the regime” as well as songs and street art, and that the Tunisian El Général’s iconic rap song “Rais Lebled” echoed from Tunis to Tahrir Square. Nouri Gana, “Tunisia” in ibid., 11–12. For an overview of the role of music in the early days of the uprising, see Mark LeVine, “From Protest Songs to Revolutionary Anthems,” Al Jazeera English, July 14, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/07/201171111615224515 .html. For an example of transcolonial literature about the revolution, see Tahar Ben Jelloun’s retelling of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Tahar Ben Jelloun, Par le feu [By fire] (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). Elliott Colla previews his current book project on the literature of the 2011 Egyptian revolution in “Revolution Bookshelf: Revolution is my Name,” Jadaliyya, July 3, 2013, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/ index/12588/revolution-bookshelf_revolution-is-my-name. chapter 4: portrait of an arab jew 1.  Raz-Krakotzkin, “A Peace without Arabs,” 65 (see Introduction, n. 8). 2. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers (see Chapter Two, n. 37). 3. Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, précédé de Portrait du colonisateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). Translated by Howard Greenfeld as The Colonizer and

172  Notes to Chapter 4 The Colonized (see Introduction, n. 29). Albert Memmi, La statue de sel (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Translated by Edouard Roditi as The Pillar of Salt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). 4.  Albert Memmi, Portrait d’un Juif: L’impasse (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). Translated by Elisabeth Abbott as Portrait of a Jew (New York: Orion Press, 1962). ­Albert Memmi, La libération du Juif: Portrait d’un Juif, II (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Translated by Judy Hyun as The Liberation of the Jew (New York: Orion Press, 1966). Albert Memmi, Juifs et Arabes (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Translated by Eleanor Levieux as Jews and Arabs (see Introduction, n. 21). 5.  Guy Dugas, Albert Memmi: Écrivain de la déchirure [Albert Memmi: Writing the schism] (Sherbrooke, QC: Naaman, 1984); Albert Memmi: Du malheur d’être juif au bonheur sépharade [Albert Memmi: From the misfortune of being Jewish to Sephardi well-being] (Paris: Alliance Israélite Universelle, 2001); Bibliographie critique de la littérature judéo-maghrébine d’expression française: 1896–1990 [Critical bibliography of Judeo-Maghrebi literature of French expression] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992). 6.  Notable exceptions include Elie Kedourie, “Mr. Memmi on Jewishness and the Jews” in Arab Political Memoirs and Other Studies (London: Cass, 1974), 101–6; Joan Cocks, “Jewish Nationalism and the Question of Palestine,” Interventions 8.1 (2006): 24–39; Gil Z. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Jarrod Hayes, “Circumcising Zionism, Queering Diaspora,” Wasafiri 22.1 (2007): 6–11. I engage with Hochberg’s reading of Memmi below. 7.  Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (see Chapter One, n. 8). 8.  For example: “Zionism was also the movement for the national liberation of the Jews, on a par with the other national liberation movements, in the Maghreb, in Africa, and elsewhere in the world.” Albert Memmi, Jews and Arabs, 149. 9. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 15. Translation modified. Howard Greenfeld inexplicably translates “éternels candidats hésitants et refusés à l’assimilation” as “eternally hesitant candidates refusing assimilation,” as if Jews were the ones to resist assimilation, rather than the colonial institutions. For the original French, see Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 43. 10. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 17. 11. Ibid., xxi. Albert Camus similarly presents Memmi as “neither French nor Tunisian” in his preface to Memmi’s first novel. Albert Camus, preface to La Statue de sel, by Albert Memmi, 9. My translation. 12. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, xiv–xv. I have replaced “Moslem” and “Moslems” with the more accurate transliteration “Muslim(s),” which corresponds to the French usage “musulman(s).” 13.  Aron Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The

Notes to Chapter 4    173 Teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860–1939 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). The assimilationist project of the AIU is reflected in its name, which adopts the term israélite, paradoxically coined as a secular equivalent of juif in enlightenment discourse. The fact that the term israélite was used to designate Jews in Algeria, as opposed to the expression juif indigène, more common in Morocco and Tunisia, speaks to the success of the assimilation project in Algeria. 14. Memmi, The Pillar of Salt, 20. Arabic for “neighborhood,” al-hara denotes the Jewish quarter of Tunis. 15. Ibid., 93. Translation modified. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 95–96. Translation modified. 18. Ibid., 95. 19.  Ibid. Translation modified. 20.  See Edward Said’s discussion of the articulation of language and race in Renan’s scholarship on Semitic languages. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 123–48. See also Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 21. Memmi, The Pillar of Salt, 95. 22.  For an exhaustive survey of the Vichy years in the Maghreb and of the German occupation of Tunisia, see Michel Abitbol, Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy [North African Jews under Vichy] (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1983). 23. Memmi, The Pillar of Salt, 318. Translation modified. 24.  The historian Paul Sebag has documented how, unlike Muslims, Tunisian Jews were not drafted during World War I (though Jews who had been naturalized French were). The Protectorate declared Tunisian Jews to be non-mobilisables in order to avoid having to cede to their long-standing demands for naturalization. The Jewish Statutes, applied in Tunisia in November 1940 and fully lifted only in August 1943 (three months after liberation) barred Jews from voluntarily enlisting in the army. Paul Sebag, Histoire des Juifs de Tunisie: Des origines à nos jours [A history of the Jews of Tunisia: From the origins to the present day] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991), 170. 25.  The Pillar of Salt, 254. Although The Pillar of Salt largely follows historical fact, this massacre is not based on a real event. In Jews and Arabs, Memmi provides a list of anti-Jewish massacres in Muslim-majority countries, including the murder of more than twenty Algerian Jews in neighboring Constantine in 1934, which likely inspired this scene in the novel. Memmi, Jews and Arabs, 32. For an account of the Constantine massacre, see Charles-Robert Ageron, “Une émeute anti-juive à Constantine (août 1934)” [An anti-Jewish riot in Constantine (August 1934)], Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 13 (1973): 23–40. 26. Memmi, The Pillar of Salt, 254. 27. Ibid., 269. Translation modified. 28. Ibid., 259.

174  Notes to Chapter 4 29.  Lia Brozgal, Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). 30. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 141. 31. Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, 289–90. Memmi would later use a similar argument to defend Israeli actions toward Palestinians, claiming the latter had “forgotten” that they had come from other Arab lands. Memmi, Jews and Arabs, 165. In The Liberation of the Jew, however, his point is to defend the legitimacy of Palestinian claims to the land. 32. Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, 293. 33. Memmi, The Pillar of Salt, 94. 34.  This departure from the novel is evident only in the French original. The English translation of Portrait d’un Juif reprises Roditi’s (mis)translation, “Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche.” For the original variation, see Memmi, La statue de sel, 109; Memmi, Portrait d’un Juif, 7. 35. Memmi, Portrait of a Jew, 323. Translation modified. Elisabeth Abbott uses the rather underwhelming “the events in Israel” to translate “l’épopée israélienne.” For the original French formulation, see Memmi, Portrait d’un Juif, 380. 36. Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, 292. 37.  Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), xiv–xvi. 38. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 27. 39. Ibid., 14. 40.  Mamdani makes a somewhat different comparative move in his conclusion, proposing Israel as a prototype for what he calls “victor’s justice,” that is, the construction of a state “on the ashes of the genocide” with the mantra “never again” as its guiding principle. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 170–71. 41.  See for example Albert Memmi, La terre intérieure: Entretiens avec Victor Malka [The inner land: Interviews with Victor Malka] (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 54. 42. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 52. 43. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, 21. 44.  Among other things, Kedourie takes issue with Memmi’s use of the terms ghetto (as a translation of hara) and pogrom, which originate in the context of European anti-Semitism and cannot, in his opinion, be applied to the experience of Jews in Muslim lands. Kedourie, “Mr. Memmi on Jewishness and the Jews,” 102. 45. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, 25. Original italics. 46. Memmi, Jews and Arabs, 11. 47.  See for example Albert Memmi, Ce que je crois [What I believe] (Paris: Grasset, 1985), 43. 48. Memmi, La terre intérieure, 54. My translation. The first and last ellipses are Memmi’s. 49. Ibid. 50. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, xiv.

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5    175 51. Memmi, Jews and Arabs, 29. Elsewhere Memmi makes the scare quotes surrounding this term explicit, speaking of “those who are called Palestinians even though, like ourselves, they often came from somewhere else.” Ibid., 13. 52. Ibid., 165. 53. Ibid., 127. 54. Ibid., 137. 55. Ibid., 184. 56. Ibid., 163 57.  For example, ibid., 165. 58. Ibid., 139. Original emphasis. 59.  Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel,” 31 (see Chapter Two, n. 30). For an exhaustive study of the Mizrahim, see Sami Shalom Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (London: Routledge, 2010). 60.  On the history of Israel’s recourse to models of economic integration in lieu of political negotiations, including Netanyahu’s 2009 proposal, see Ali ­Abunimah, “Neoliberal Palestine,” chap. 4 in The Battle for Justice in Palestine (see Introduction, n. 18). 61. Memmi, Jews and Arabs, 140. 62. Ibid., 127. 63. Ibid., 167. Original italics. Translation modified. 64. Ibid., 183. 65. Ibid., 183–84. Original italics. 66. Memmi, Juifs et Arabes, 183. My translation. Original ellipsis. This sentence is inexplicably omitted in the English translation. 67.  See for example Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 125, 149. 68. Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, 15. 69.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, Vomito blanco: Le sionisme et la conscience malheureuse [Vomito blanco: Zionism and unhappy consciousness] (Paris: 10/18, 1974), 102. chapter 5: abrahamic tongues 1. Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 17 (see Introduction, n. 29). 2.  All translations of Khatibi are my own unless otherwise noted. 3. Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, 12–13 (see Introduction, n. 17). I will come back to the parallels between decolonization and deconstruction toward the end of this chapter. 4.  Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre [The same book] (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1985). Abdelkebir Khatibi, Love in Two Languages, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Jacques Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 5. Khatibi, Vomito blanco, 1.

176  Notes to Chapter 5 6.  Jean-Paul Sartre, ed., “Le conflit israélo-arabe” [The Israeli-Arab conflict], special issue, Les Temps Modernes 253 bis (1967). 7. Khatibi, Vomito blanco, 106. 8. Ibid., 4–5. 9. Ibid., 5–6. 10.  I am of course referring to Samuel Huntington’s infamous “clash of civilizations” thesis. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 11. Khatibi, Vomito blanco, 127. 12. Ibid., 147. 13. Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, 16. 14. Khatibi, Vomito blanco, 147. 15. Ibid., 153. 16. Khatibi, “Au delà de l’anti-sémitisme et du sionisme” [Beyond anti-­ Semitism and Zionism] in Paradoxes du sionisme [Paradoxes of Zionism] (Rabat: Al Kalam, 1990), 150–51. 17.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, Penser le Maghreb [Thinking the Maghreb] (Rabat: Société Marocaine des Éditeurs Réunis, 1993), 135. 18.  Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre, 121–22. In a text written in 1988, Khatibi confides that to his delight, the Israeli Black Panthers, a Mizrahim militant group advocating for equal treatment of “Oriental” Jews in Israel in the 1970s, began pirating Vomito blanco when the first printing ran out. Khatibi, Paradoxes du sionisme, 21. 19.  Khatibi, “Au-delà de l’antisémitisme et du sionisme,” 147. 20.  “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée” is the title of an early version of “Pensée autre.” Abdelkebir Khatibi, “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée” [The Maghreb as horizon of thought] in Penser le Maghreb, 123–36. 21.  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Curry, 1986). 22. Khatibi, La mémoire tatouée: Autobiographie d’un décolonisé [Tattooed memory: Autobiography of a decolonized subject] in Œuvres de Abdelkébir Khatibi I: Romans et récits [The collected works of Abdelkebir Khatibi I: Novels and narratives] (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2008), 9–113. Originally published as La ­mémoire tatouée: Autobiographie d’un décolonisé (Paris: Denoël, 1971). 23. Khatibi, Vomito blanco, 139. 24. Khatibi, La mémoire tatouée, 13. 25.  Khatibi, ibid., 23. 26. Ibid., 23–24. 27. Ibid., 34. 28. Ibid., 36. 29.  In a 1984 letter to Jacques Hassoun, Khatibi relativizes this and other petty larcenies by claiming that he committed them against Muslims too. This may be

Notes to Chapter 5    177 the meaning of the cryptic phrase “we would start all over again in the opposite [Muslim] direction.” Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre, 107. 30. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 5 (see Chapter One, n. 8). 31.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, “Droit à la raison” in Paradoxes du sionisme, 13–25. Abdelkebir Khatibi, “A Colonial Labyrinth,” trans. Catherine Dana, Yale French Studies 83.2 (1993): 5–11. 32.  Khatibi, “Droit à la raison,” 18. 33.  Though not by much: the mellah was born in the fifteenth century, according to Khatibi. Ibid., 22. 34. Ibid., 18. 35. Ibid., 15. 36.  Abraham Serfaty, “Le judaïsme marocain et le sionisme” [Moroccan Jewry and Zionism], Souffles 15 (1969): 24–37. 37.  Khatibi, “Droit à la raison,” 17. 38.  Al-dhimma refers to the legal protection offered to ahl al-kitab, “the people of the book,” that is, Christians and Jews, in Islamic law; the protected subject is al-dhimmi. 39.  Khatibi, “Droit à la raison,” 22. 40. Ibid., 17. 41. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 72. 42.  Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre, 107. 43. Ibid., 7. 44. Ibid., 48. 45. Ibid., 101. 46. Ibid., 76. 47. Ibid., 107. 48. Ibid., 9. 49.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, La blessure du nom propre [The wound of the proper name] (Paris: Denoël, 1974). Jacques Hassoun, Fragments de langue maternelle: ­Esquisse d’un lieu [Fragments of the mother tongue: Sketching a place] (Paris: Payot, 1979). 50.  Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre, 15. 51.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, De la mille et troisième nuit [On the thousand and third night] (Tangier: Éditions Marocaines et Internationales, 1980). 52.  Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre, 11. 53.  See for example Abdelkebir Khatibi, “Bilinguisme et littérature” [Bilingualism and literature] in Maghreb pluriel, 177–207. 54. Khatibi, Love in Two Languages, 89. 55. Ibid., 94. 56. Ibid., 66. 57. Ibid., 28.

178  Notes to Chapter 5 58. Ibid., 102. Translation modified. 59. Ibid., 63. 60. Ibid., 41. Translation modified. 61. Ibid., 66. 62. Ibid., 84. 63. Khatibi, Amour bilingue, 229. Richard Howard translates “récite” with the expression “tell your story,” losing the Qur’anic echoes of the original French. Khatibi, Love in Two Languages, 36. 64. Ibid., 5. Translation modified. 65. Ibid., 37–39. Translation modified. 66. Ibid., 47. 67.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, “La langue de l’autre: Exercices de témoignage,” in Œuvres de Abdelkébir Khatibi III: Essais [The collected works of Abdelkebir Khatibi III: Essays] (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2008), 117. Abdelkebir Khatibi, “The Language of the Other: Testimonial Exercises,” trans. Catherine Porter, PMLA 125.4 (2010): 1006. Translation modified. 68.  Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre, 79. Original italics. 69. Ibid., 33. 70. Ibid., 84. Original italics. 71. Ibid., 24. 72. Ibid. 73. Edward Said, Orientalism (see Chapter Four, n. 20). Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 74.  I borrow this expression from Gil Anidjar, “The Semitic Hypothesis: Religion’s Last Word,” chap. 1 in Semites (see Chapter Four, n. 20). 75.  Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre, 68. 76. Ibid., 95. Original italics. 77. Ibid., 66. 78. Ibid., 98. 79.  Khatibi, “The Language of the Other,” 1008. 80.  See for example Michael Syrotinski, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007); Christopher Wise, Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Jane Hiddleston, Understanding Postcolonialism (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2009). 81.  See Gideon Ofrat, The Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York: Routledge, 2005). 82.  Gil Anidjar gives a meticulous account of the genealogy of the Abrahamic in Derrida’s work in his introduction to Derrida’s writings on religion. Gil Anidjar, “‘Once More, Once More’: Derrida, the Arab, the Jew,” introduction to Acts of Religion, by Jacques Derrida, ed. Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–39. See also

Notes to Chapter 5    179 Gil Anidjar, “Derrida, the Jew, the Arab,” chap. 2 in The Jew, the Arab (see Chapter Four, n. 37). 83. Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Derrida, en effet [Jacques Derrida, indeed] (Neuilly-sur-Seine: Al Manar, 2007), 7. 84.  Khatibi often addresses Derrida in his writings, in particular around their shared concept of aimance, a substantive derived from the verb aimer, “to love.” Khatibi elaborates the notion of aimance as an active affinity, not only in “interpersonal relations” but also in terms of “the sites of passage and resistance experienced by men when they are confronted with the crossed encounters between cultures, countries, societies, spiritualities. In sum, the question of the inter.” ­Abdelkebir Khatibi, “L’aimance et l’invention d’un idiome” [Aimance and the invention of an idiom] in Œuvres de Abdelkébir Khatibi II: Poésie de l’aimance [The collected works of Abdelkebir Khatibi II: Poetry of aimance] (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2008), 126. Original italics. Derrida, for his part, was delighted to find out that his “friend” Khatibi had coincidentally happened upon the same term as he. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 25. 85.  I can offer one trace of Derrida’s reading of Vomito blanco. Speaking of the multiplication of scenes of avowal since the Nuremburg trials of 1945 and the foundation of international law to safeguard against crimes against humanity, Derrida writes that “this globalization of avowal is therefore not thinkable in its inaugural emergence without what happened to the Jews of Europe in the twentieth century, nor is it any more separable from the international recognition of the state of Israel, a legitimation I would also interpret as one of the first moments of avowal and of this world’s bad conscience.” Jacques Derrida, “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 32. My italics. Unlike Joseph Massad, who reads this and other passages in the essay as a legitimation on the part of Derrida of the state of Israel, I contend that Derrida’s concise formulation of the “globalization of avowal” is a striking assessment of what Khatibi terms, after Hegel, European “unhappy consciousness” in his anti-Zionist pamphlet. See Joseph Massad, “Forget Semitism!” in ibid, 79. 86. Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, 21. Original italics. Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 7. 87. Ibid., 2. Original italics. 88. Ibid., 28–29. Original italics. 89. Ibid., 10. 90. Ibid., 11. 91. Ibid., 12. Original italics. Translation modified. 92. Ibid., 31. Original italics. 93. Ibid., 35. Translation modified. 94. Ibid., 51. Italics restored.

180  Notes to Chapter 5 95. Ibid., 60–61. Original italics. Translation modified. 96. Ibid., 58. Original italics. 97.  In his contribution to the 1992 Cérisy-la-Salle conference on Derrida, Khatibi describes discovering in Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Mallarmé a distancing strategy suited to the invention of a new language of decolonization. Khatibi, Jacques Derrida en effet, 18–19. See also his first response to Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other, where he reiterates that “what bears the name ‘deconstruction’ is a radical form of ‘decolonization’ of so-called Western thought.” Ibid., 34. 98. Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 46. 99. Ibid., 24. 100. Ibid., 37. Translation modified. 101.  Jacques Derrida, “Abraham, the Other” in Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 9. An Algerian Childhood is fortuitously also the title of a collection of texts by writers who grew up in colonial Algeria, including Hélène Cixous, whose Algerian corpus dovetails in fascinating ways with Derrida’s. Leïla Sebbar, ed., An Algerian Childhood, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Saint Paul, MN: Ruminator Books, 2001). 102. Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 62. Original italics. 103. Ibid., 61. 104. Ibid., 65. Original italics. 105.  Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre, 53. Original italics. 106.  Khatibi, “Au delà de l’anti-sémitisme et du sionisme,” 147. 107. Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 51. 108. Ibid., 53. Translation modified. 109. Ibid., 34. Translation modified. The final ellipsis is in the original. 110.  In his autobiographical text “Circumfession,” Derrida evokes the “little black and very Arab Jew” that he was when he was expulsed from school, similarly situating his experience of French anti-Semitism within the context of colonial racism. Jacques Derrida, “Circumfession” in Jacques Derrida, by Geoffrey Bennington and Derrida, trans. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 58. 111.  Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 133. 112.  I will elaborate on the notion of disidentification in Chapter Six. 113.  Sherene Seikaly, “Return to the Present,” in Living Together, 229. 114.  Derrida, “Avowing—The Impossible,” 22. 115. Ibid., 27. 116. Ibid., 29. 117.  Derrida, “Circumfession,” 58. 118. Raef Zreik, for example, argues that “Derrida distances himself from Zion­ism in the same manner that he distances himself from any other form of

Notes to Chapters 5 and 6    181 communitarianism or nationalism,” leading to the foreclosure of any “conceptual space that allows us at once to accept nationalism [for example, for the purpose of achieving national sovereignty] and reject Zionism [as a colonial venture].” Raef Zreik, “Rights, Respect, and the Political: Notes from a Conflict Zone,” in Living Together, 112. 119.  For a recent assessment of the political stakes of deconstruction, see Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, eds., Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 120. Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 63–64. Translation modified. 121.  Here I am paraphrasing the title of Derrida’s response to the “Appeal for Civil Peace in Algeria” launched in France in 1995 in solidarity with the Algerian people. Jacques Derrida, “Taking a Stand for Algeria,” trans. Boris Belay, Parallax 4:2 (1998): 17–23. 122. Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 263. Original italics. The version cited in Derrida’s contribution to the publication of the International Writers’ Parliament’s delegation to Palestine omits the italics. Jacques Derrida, “Message de Jacques Derrida” in Le voyage en Palestine de la délégation du Parlement international des écrivains, by Mahmoud Darwish, Russel Banks, Hélène Cixous, et al. (Castelnau-le-Lez: Climats, 2002), 128–29. 123.  Derrida, “Message de Jacques Derrida,” 134. Here Derrida also clarifies that he questions the legitimacy of the foundation of the state of Israel, even though, on the one hand, all states are inherently violent and, on the other, one can no longer contest the existence of the state of Israel. Ibid., 131. 124. Ibid., 132. 125. Ibid., 135. 126. Ibid., 136. 127.  Derrida, “Avowing—The Impossible,” 25. 128. Abdelkebir Khatibi, “Intersignes” [Intersigns] in Imaginaires de l’autre [Imaginaries of the other], ed. Christine Buci-Glucksmann (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987), 126. 129. Khatibi, Love in Two Languages, 118. Translation modified. chapter 6: edmond amran el maleh and the cause of the other 1.  Haketia, a Judeo-Arabic Spanish dialect transcribed in Hebrew letters, was spoken by Jews of Andalusian ancestry who settled in Northern Morocco after the expulsion of 1492. Judeo-Arabic is a generic term denoting dialects that combine elements of Arabic and Hebrew, and, when written, may be transliterated into Arabic, Hebrew, or Latin characters. Tasselhit is a Tamazight language spoken in the Moroccan Atlas and Souss regions. 2.  The only book-length study of El Maleh to date focuses on the theme of

182  Notes to Chapter 6 memory. Bouazza Benachir, Edmond Amran El Maleh: Cheminements d’une écriture [Edmond Amran El Maleh: Itineraries of writing] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). For a representative example of criticism focusing on Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco, see “Présences d’Edmond Amran El Maleh” [Presences of Edmond Amran El Maleh], special issue, Horizons Maghrébins 27 (1994–1995). 3.  Edmond Amran El Maleh, “Juifs marocains et Marocains juifs” [Moroccan Jews and Jewish Moroccans], Les Temps Modernes 375 bis (1977). Memmi, Jews and Arabs, 29 (see Introduction, n. 21). 4.  Marie Redonnet, Entretiens avec Edmond Amran El Maleh [Interviews with Edmond Amran El Maleh] (Grenoble: Pensée Sauvage, 2005), 75. 5.  El Maleh, Mille ans, un jour, 9. All translations of El Maleh are my own. 6.  Ronnie Scharfman, “The Other’s Other: The Moroccan Jewish Trajectory of Edmond Amran El Maleh,” Yale French Studies 82.1 (1993), 139. 7. Ibid., 140. 8. Ibid., 137. 9. Hochberg, In Spite of Partition, 30 (see Chapter Four, n. 6). 10.  El Maleh, Mille ans, un jour, 85. 11. Ibid., 99. 12. Ibid., 76. 13. Ibid., 74. 14. Ibid., 52. 15. Ibid., 73–74. On the Alliance israélite universelle, see Chapter Four, p. 85 and n. 13. 16.  El Maleh, Mille ans, un jour, 96. 17. Ibid., 100–101. 18. Ibid., 16. 19. Ibid., 21. 20. Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, 61 (see Chapter Five, n. 4). 21.  El Maleh, Mille ans, un jour, 101. 22. Ibid., 102. 23. Ibid., 92. 24. Ibid., 93–94. 25. Ibid., 95. 26. Ibid., 115. 27. Ibid., 119–20. 28. Ibid., 120. 29.  See Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 30.  Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective,” in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 166.

Notes to Chapter 6    183 31.  El Maleh, Mille ans, un jour, 154. 32. Ibid., 119. 33. Ibid., 166. 34. Ibid., 167. 35. Ibid., 170. 36. Ibid., 166–68. 37. Ibid., 170. 38.  Raz-Krakotzkin makes a related point about the status of piety in Zionist discourse. Mizrahim (Oriental Jews) were regarded as a religious, backward people, similar in this to the Orientalist image of the fanatic native, though they were sometimes also valorized as authentic, primordial Jews—regardless of how religious they “really” were. Raz-Krakotzkin, “The Zionist Return to the West,” 171. For a fascinating account of the genesis of Modern Hebrew in opposition to the Arabic language “as well as postbiblical (rabbinic) Hebrew, which was heavily influenced by Aramaic,” see Lital Levy, “From the ‘Hebrew Bedouin’ to ‘­Israeli Arabic’: Arabic, Hebrew, and the Creation of Israeli Culture,” chap. 1 in Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 30. 39.  El Maleh, Mille ans, un jour, 179–81. 40.  Ronnie Scharfman, “Recipes for Resistance: The Textualization of Minority Identity in Edmond El Maleh’s Mille ans un jour,” Paragraph 18.1 (1995), 92. 41.  Jacques Rancière cites October 17 as an example of disidentification at the end of his seminal treatise Disagreement and fully develops his argument in an essay titled “The Cause of the Other.” Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, 138–39 (see Introduction, n. 31). Rancière, “The Cause of the Other,” trans. David Macey, Parallax 4.2 (1998): 25–33. 42. Ibid., 25. 43.  Edmond Amran El Maleh, “Au seuil de l’interdit: Interrogations” [At the threshold of interdict: Questions”], Revue d’Études Palestiniennes 2 (1982): 18–34. The “interdict” of El Maleh’s title refers to the ban on speech exerted by Israel, as well as to the horrors of the war, before which he remains “interdit,” incapable of speech or movement. The term interdit similarly recurs throughout Mille ans, un jour as an expression of speechlessness and shock, for example when Hamad’s gaze locks into Nessim’s: “Speechless [interdit], frozen [figé], without reaction, Nessim held in his hand the newspaper he had just purchased. There, on the entire spread of the first page, the gaze of the burned child.” El Maleh, Mille ans, un jour, 21. 44.  Edmond Amran El Maleh, “Le visage d’une négation” [The face of a negation], Revue d’Études Palestiniennes 5 (1982): 23. 45.  Here El Maleh may have been taking aim at Memmi, whose comparison, in the preface of Jews and Arabs, between Nazi and Arab-Muslim persecution of Jews El Maleh denounced as “totalitarian . . . in that it operates by identification, by reduction to identity [in the sense of sameness] . . . [and] negates what is irreducibly

184  Notes to Chapter 6 and Epilogue other, specific in its difference and truth.” El Maleh, “Juifs marocains et Marocains juifs,” 501. 46.  El Maleh, “Le visage d’une négation,” 17–18. epilogue: palestine and the syrian intifada 1. Yazbek, A Woman in the Crossfire (see Introduction, n. 6). 2.  Toufic Haddad, “Palestine,” 296 (see Introduction, n. 5). 3.  Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, 125 (see Introduction, n. 11). 4.  As this book goes to press (May 2015), Yazbek’s memoir has not yet appeared in the original Arabic. It has been translated into English, French, German, and Dutch, fulfilling its stated aim of mobilizing international public opinion about the conflict. Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy designated Yazbek as the “international writer of courage” with whom she wanted to share the 2012 PEN/Pinter prize. Alison Flood, “Syrian author shares PEN/Pinter prize with Carol Ann Duffy,” The Guardian, Oct. 9, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/09/ syrian-author-pen-pinter-prize. 5.  For an update on Yazbek’s life since she fled Syria, see Samar Yazbek, “The Syrian vs. the Revolutionary: My Own Syrian Debate,” Washington Post, Sept. 13, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-novelist-vs-the-revolutionary-my -own-syrian-debate/2013/09/13/188fad04-1b51-11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html. 6. Yazbek, Woman in the Crossfire, 2. 7. Ibid., 14–15. 8. Ibid., 19. 9. Ibid., 139–40. 10.  The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), which administers all Palestinian refugee camps, estimates there are 540,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria. “Syria Crisis,” UNRWA, http://www.unrwa.org/syria-crisis (accessed Dec. 8, 2014). 11.  Abdellatif Laâbi, L’œil et la nuit, 8 (see Chapter One, n. 4). 12.  For a similar argument about the co-constitutive nature of Jordanian and Palestinian identity, and Jordanian attempts to extricate them, see Joseph A. Massad, “The Nation as an Elastic Entity,” chap. 5 in Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 13.  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 289. 14. See Christopher Gunness, “Inside the Hellhole of Yarmouk, the Refugee Camp That Shames the World,” The Guardian, Feb. 9, 2014, http://www.the guardian.com/world/2014/feb/09/syria-yarmouk-hellhole-palestinians. 15. Yazbek, Woman in the Crossfire, 147. 16. Ibid., 64. 17. Ibid., 147.

Notes to Epilogue    185 18. Ibid., 234. 19.  One of Yazbek’s interviewees—the one who compares Guantanamo favorably to the Syrian army—wonders where these land mines, which he helped to plant, have disappeared to, implying that the regime orchestrated this pro-­ Palestinian march to distract public attention from its own repressive practices. Ibid., 233. 20. Ibid., 105. 21. Ibid., 139–40. 22. Kateb, Boucherie de l’espérance, 97 (see Introduction, n. 26). 23.  Hassoun and Khatibi, Le même livre, 24 (see Chapter Five, n. 4). 24.  Kristen Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3.

Index

Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures; those followed by n refer to notes, with note number. Aba, Noureddine, 10, 56 ‘Abir sarir (Mosteghanemi): gearing of toward non-Algerian audience, 62; on marketability of cultural production, 72, 73; Palestine as transnational allegory of revolution in, 67; on selfOrientalism, 71–72; and Tamazight language as bearer of revolutionary hope, 69 the Abrahamic, Derrida on, 117, 127–28 the Abrahamic, Khatibi on: bi-langue and, 111–12; and language, 110; Maghrebi plurality and, 105; in La mémoire tatouée, 105; as metaphor of political conflict, 103–4; as possibility of penséeautre, 105; and primordial language, impossibility of salvaging, 122; as sign of regression, 103; in Vomito blanco, 101, 102–5 Abrahamic cut: circumcision as, 106–7; colonial origin of, 110; and French language as both cause of schize and potential bridge, 115; Hassoun and Khatibi’s Le même livre on, 110–12, 114, 116; Hassoun on, 106–7, 110–11; Khatibi on, 106–7; in language, Le même livre on, 110–12; as mark and potential remedy for Jewish-Muslim schize, 128. See also déchirure/division of colonial subjects Abu-Lughod, Lila, 74 L’Action Culturelle des Travailleurs. See ACT theater troupe

ACT theater troupe: Berber politics of, as controversial, 55, 167n48; and “Boucherie de l’espérance,” 43, 44– 45; Communist International hymn closing each performance, 45, 56, 167n47; critique of Algerian state, 56–58; fluid nature of Kateb’s plays for, 44–45; government suppression of, 44; and al-halqa storytelling form, 45; and hosting of Palestine on stage, 42; and Jews, lack of pejorative references to, 165n36; as Kateb’s troupe, 41; Palestine as metaphor of colonial in, 81; plays produced by, 41, 44; Souffles-Anfas on, 162n9; use of Algerian popular languages by, 41, 44–45, 47, 48, 56. See also “Mohamed arfad valiztek” (Kateb) adab al- hazima. See literature of defeat Adnan, Etel, 28 Adonis (Syrian poet), 28–29 Afrique Action (Jeune Afrique), founding of, 9 AIU. See Alliance israélite universelle Algeria: adoption of Arab/Muslim identity, Kateb’s critique of, 54–56; anticolonial revolution in, as object of cultural desire and consumption, 68; anticolonial struggle, Arab Spring revolts and, 1; assimilationist project in, 172–73n13; as cause of the other in Rancière, 140–41; commodification of in novels of Mosteghanemi, 62; JewishArab separation under French colonial

188  Index racial hierarchy, 3, 84, 85; socialist popular theater in, 162n8 Algerian civil war. See black decade Algerian government: anti-Zionism of, 6; Kateb’s critique of, 41, 47, 53, 56– 58; and socialist edification through theater, 163n13; support of Palestinians by, 56–57; use of Palestine support as cover for authoritarianism, 57 Algerian immigrants: characterization of as guest workers, Kateb on, 42, 47, 49–52, 58; Kateb’s call for return from France by, 47, 163n17 Algerian National Theater, 44, 162n8 Algérie: Femme et écritures (Mosteghanemi), 64 Alliance israélite universelle (AIU), 85 American University in Cairo Press Naguib Mahfouz award, for Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-jasad, 62, 71 Amour bilingue (Khatibi), 111; on bi-langue, 112–13; Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other as response to, 117; on JewishMuslim schize, and French language, 114–15; metaphor of the book in, 113; on plurality of identity, 113–14 Les ancêtres redoublent de férocité (Kateb), 43 Anfas: founding of, 17, 28, 30; goals of, 30–31; limited audience for, 31–32; and rejection of French language as a vehicle of neocolonialism, 28; transition to, 28–29, 31 Anidjar, Gil, 94, 117 anti-Semitism, El Maleh on criticism of Israel as, 141 Arab, as term: Darwish on reclaiming of, 36; in French colonial discourse, 85 Arab governments, toleration of proPalestinian groups by, 144 Arab Jews: El Maleh on killing of Palestinians by, 139; Memmi on, 82, 91, 96–100, 130 Arab nationalism: Kateb’s rejection of, 55; rise of after al-Naksa, 21 Arab Spring. See uprisings of 2010–2011 Arab street, Palestine as metaphor for, 2

Arnaud, Jacqueline, 162n12 al-Assad, Hafez, 147 assimilation by Israel: and disidentification, El Maleh’s Mille ans, un jour on, 140– 41, 146; Palestinians and, Memmi on, 99–100; and problem of non-European Jews, 137–39; as tactic, El Maleh on, 132, 139 assimilation policies of French colonialism, 3, 7, 34; and impossibility of full assimilation, 84–85, 86, 89; Kateb on parallels to Zionist tactics, 41–42, 47– 52; Laâbi on efforts to undo, 35; and partial assimilation of Jews, Memmi on, 84–89, 172–73n13; and production of Jew/Arab opposition, 84–85, 129; rhetoric of (post)colonial hospitality and, 49–52; success of in Algeria, 172– 73n13; as tactic, El Maleh on, 133–34; and transformation of privileged groups into nonnatives, 95 The Attack (Khadra), 9–10 authoritarian postcolonial regimes, colonialist tactics of: Palestine as metaphor in struggle against, 1–2, 19, 42; Souffles-Anfas on, 17, 19 “Avowing—The Impossible” (Derrida), 124–26 Awal (periodical), 55 al-‘Azm, Sadiq Jalal, 5 Baffet, Roselyne, 165n36 The Battle of Algiers (film), 65 Bayat, Asef, 153n5 Benjedid, Chadli, 44 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 10, 20, 25 Berber movements: history of, 55; secularism of, 54; Souffles-Anfas adoption of Arabic and, 32 Berbers (Imazighen): Algerian government suspicion of, 55; French efforts to assimilate, in Morocco, 166n42; Kateb’s support for, 32, 54–56, 166–67n44; in Mosteghanemi, as exoticized marker of Algerian authenticity, 69–70; as term, 69, 85, 155n20

Index   189 “Beyond Anti-Semitism and Zionism” (Khatibi), 104 bi-langue: and the Abrahamic, 111–12; Derrida’s double interdict and, 119–20; Derrida’s views on identity and, 117; as destruction of the book, 113; and French language, Khatibi on, 112–13; Hassoun and Khatibi’s Le même livre and, 111–12; Khatibi on, 110, 116–17, 119; as remedy to exclusionary practices of monolanguage, Khatibi on, 116–17 black decade, 168n1; and Derrida on echoes of colonial violence in colonial identity, 118; Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-jasad and, 61, 63; uprisings of 2010– 11 and, 77 Black Panthers, and Palestine as metaphor, 3 La blessure du nom propre (Khatibi), 111, 117 Bouazizi, Mohamed, 77 “Boucherie de l’espérance ou Palestine trahie” (Kateb), 42–43, 44–45, 162n6; “Mohamed arfad valiztek” as departure from, 52–54, 57 Boudjedra, Rachid, 10, 20, 27–28, 155n25 Bouhrayd, Jamila, 68 Boumedienne, Houari, 45–47, 163n16 Bourguiba, Habib, 144 boycott, divestment, and sanction (BDS) movement, 8 Brozgal, Lia, 91 Cabral, Amilcar, 20 censorship, of Palestinian writers in Israel: Darwish on, 37; Laâbi on, 34 Cercle des représailles trilogy (Kateb), 43 Césaire, Aimé, 82–83 Chahine, Youssef, 68 Chergui, Zebeida, 43, 162n6, 162n12 Chraïbi, Driss, 20, 27–28 “Circumfession” (Derrida), 180n110 colonialism: persistence of in present, 2, 5; philology in discourse of, 87– 88, 138. See also French colonialism; neocolonialism “A Colonial Labyrinth” (Khatibi), 108

colonial racial hierarchy. See Jewish-Arab separation under French colonialism The Colonizer and the Colonized (Memmi): on colonial dialectic of mimicry and rejection, 92; on colonizers’ claims of legitimacy, 95; critique of colonialism in, 82–83; focus of postcolonial critics on, 82; on Jewish-Arab separation under French colonial racial hierarchy, 83–84; on Jewish liminal position between colonizer and colonized, 83– 84; on postcolonial self-recovery, 96; on romantic portrait of colonizer, 93; on self-rejection of colonized, 98 combat poetry, Laâbi’s focus on, 32–33, 34, 160n51 Crémieux, Adolphe, 85 Crémieux Decree (Algeria), 84, 85, 118–19, 124 cultural decolonization, and tradition as colonial construct, 19 cultural decolonization, Souffles-Anfas and: focus on Palestinian poetry in translation, 28–29, 32–39; as goal, 19, 20; issue of forms and languages appropriate for, 23–27; Palestine as model for, 23–27, 38; rejection of French neocolonialism in, 27–28, 30– 31, 37; use of French language in, 20 Darija: ACT theater troupe use of, 41, 44– 45, 47–51; Kateb on, 54 Darwish, Mahmoud: and cultural imaginaries of revolution, 68; “Identity Card,” 36; Kateb and, 43, 43; Laâbi on, 34, 37; “Song for the men,” 35; SoufflesAnfas and, 20; and subversion of colonial language, 30 Dayan, Moshe, 53 déchirure/division of colonial subjects: Abrahamic as mark and potential remedy for, in Derrida and Khatibi, 128; Derrida’s views on identity and, 117; El Maleh on, 129, 130, 141, 145; in El Maleh’s Mille Ans, un jour, 130–32, 134–35, 136; Hassoun and Khatibi’s

190  Index Le même livre on, 114, 116; multiple forms of, Khatibi’s La mémoire tatouée on, 105–8. See also Abrahamic cut; Jewish-Arab separation under French colonialism decolonization era, as ongoing, 5. See also cultural decolonization; neocolonialism Delacroix, Engène, 65 De la mille et troisième nuit (Khatibi), 111 Depestre, René, 20 Derrida, Jacques: on the Abrahamic, 117, 127–28; on Abrahamic cut, as mark and potential remedy, 128; “Avowing—The Impossible,” 124–26; “Circumfession,” 180n110; on colonial identity, 117, 118–19; on colonial violence, as heightened form of violence of state formation, 125–26; and deconstruction of identitarian discourses, 125–26; departure from Algeria, 9; on French as imposed language, 118–19; on globalization of avowal, 179n85; and identitarianism, critique of, 122, 125–26; and Jewish-Muslim relations, centrality to Derrida’s thought, 102; on Judaism, critical interest in, 117; and Khatibi, 102, 117, 121, 179n84; on Khatibi’s Vomito blanco, 179n85; on language in strict sense vs. language as discursive idiom, 123–24; lectures on hospitality (1996), 123–24; on potential for JewishPalestinian peace, 127–28; on state formation, inherently violent nature of, 125–26, 180–81n118; writings of colonialism, critical interest in, 117. See also double interdict, Derrida on; The Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida) Derrida, and Israeli state: condemnation of colonial violence by, 127; disidentification with, as product of experience as colonized Algerian Jew, 123–28, 141; and violence inherent in state formation, 125–26, 127, 180–81n118 Derrida, late autobiographical work of: critical interest in, 117; focus on separation of Jews and Muslims in, 121

Derrida, on Palestine-Israel, 122–28; and Abrahamic as potential remedy for Jewish-Muslim schize, 128; and commitment to both Palestinians and Jews, 126–27; transcolonial approach to, through Algerian experience, 122–28 Dhakirat al-jasad (Mosteghanemi): Ahlam as allegory of Algerian homeland in, 63–64, 64–65, 66, 68–69, 70– 71; Ahlam’s dialect in, and Algerian exoticization, 68–69, 70; as allegory of Algerian post-revolutionary disillusionment, 63–64; dedication of to Haddad, 68; English translation of, 170n42; as exploration of allegory as signifier, 64–66; French translation of, 72; gearing of toward non-Algerian audience, 62; language difference as conduit of transcolonial desire in, 68–71; on marketability of cultural production, 72, 73; narration of coming-to-Arabic in, 68–69; Palestine/ Palestinians as transnational allegory of revolution in, 61, 63, 65–66, 74– 76; plot of, 63; popularity of, 62; and rejection of past Algerian dreams for dreams of Palestinian future, 65– 66, 70–71, 76–77; Ziyad’s death as allegory of shattered hopes for Algerian revolution, 63, 67 Dhakirat al-jasad (Mosteghanemi), television series based on, 62, 73–78, 75; broadening of media market and, 78; differences from novel, 73–76; equal glorification of Algerian and Palestinian revolutions in, 76–77; and exoticization of Palestine and Algeria, 73–74; Mosteghanemi’s involvement with, 73; popularity of, 74; and revolutionary pan-Arabism, 74; romanticized imagery of, 147 discourse of fraternity: critique of in Kateb’s “Mohamed arfad valiztek,” 42, 57; Syrian policy toward Palestinians and, 147

Index   191 discourse of postcolonial hospitality: and Israeli erasure of Palestinian history, 51–52; in Kateb’s “Boucherie de l’espérance,” 52; in Kateb’s “Mohamed arfad valiztek,” 42, 47, 49–52, 58; Palestinians in Syria and, 148; transformation of privileged groups into nonnatives and, 95 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire), 82–83 disidentification: in Algeria, Rancière on, 140–41; Derrida and, 123–28, 141; in El Maleh’s Mille ans, un jour, 140, 141, 146; Serfaty and, 141 Dispatches from the Arab Spring (Amar and Prashad), 144 double critique, Khatibi on, 6, 101, 104, 105 double interdict, Derrida on: in colonial Algeria, 120–21; as exemplar of originary alienation of every language, 125; and forgetting of never-known language, 119–20; French as language of, 118, 119; and imposition of colonial tongue, 132; and Jewish-Muslim schize, 120–21; Khatibi’s bi-langue and, 119– 20; and liminal position of Algerian Jews, 121; and primordial language, impossibility of salvaging, 121–22 “Droit à la raison” (Khatibi), 108 Du Bellay, Joachim, 160n55 Dugas, Guy, 82 education: in colonial Maghreb, and partial assimilation of Jews, 84–85, 86, 90; in Palestine, Souffles-Anfas on, 32, 33 Egypt: and Israel, relations with, 144, 153n5; and protests of 2010–11, 144, 153n5 El Houadri, Hamid, 157n6 El Maleh, Edmond Amran: career of, 130; as communist, 9; on destruction of Moroccan Jewish communities, causes of, 130; and disidentification with Israel, 141–42; on French colonialism, and destruction of Moroccan Jewish communities, 130; on historically

grounded comparisons, 141–42, 183– 84n45; on interdit, 129, 130, 134– 35, 139–40, 145, 183n43; on Jewish/ Muslim déchirure, 129, 130, 145; on language, and colonial strategies, 129, 132, 134–39; on Memmi, 130, 131, 183– 84n45; “Moroccan Jews and Jewish Moroccans,” 130; on plurilanguage as interdit, 129, 130, 145; and politics of representation, 142; as product of French colonial assimilation policies, 129; on responsibility toward Palestine as a Jew, 141; scholarship on, 130; on similarity of French and Israeli tactics of separation, 129, 130, 145; and transcolonial identification, 129–30, 141–42; “Le visage d’une négation,” 142; wariness of substitutive politics, 142; on Zionism, and destruction of Moroccan Jewish communities, 130. See also Mille ans, un jour (El Maleh) ethnography, in colonial discourse, 87–88 Europe, treatment of postcolonial minorities, 8 Fanon, Frantz: on colony as world divided in two, 108; influence on Laâbi, 34, 160n51; on “pidgin-nigger,” 48; and Souffles-Anfas, 20, 26, 157n8; on tradition as colonial construct, 19; The Wretched of the Earth, 82–83 “Fath” (Ben Jelloun), 25 Fatha, Mohamed, 157n6 Fawda’ al-hawas (Mosteghanemi): gearing of toward non-Algerian audience, 62; Palestine as transnational allegory of revolution in, 66–67 Feldman, Keith P., 3 “Filastin maghdura” (Kateb). See “Harb alfayn sana: Filastin maghdura” (Kateb) FLN. See Front de Libération Nationale Fragments de langue maternelle (Hassoun), 111 France: Algerian population in, 163n18; as (post)colonial state, Kateb on, 51–52

192  Index French colonialism: bond with Palestinians formed through experience of, 33–34; Kateb’s comparison of with Algerian government tactics, 57–58; Laâbi on brutality of, 33–34; Mamdani on legacies of, 82, 94–95. See also Jewish-Arab separation under French colonialism French colonialism, assimilation policies of, 3, 7, 34; and impossibility of full assimilation, 84–85, 86, 89; Kateb on parallels to Zionist tactics, 41–42, 47– 52; Laâbi on efforts to undo, 35; and partial assimilation of Jews, Memmi on, 84–89, 172–73n13; and production of Jew/Arab opposition, 129; rhetoric of (post)colonial hospitality and, 49–52; and separation of Jews and Arabs, 84– 85; success of in Algeria, 172–73n13; and transformation of privileged groups into nonnatives, 95 French colonialism, cultural suppression as tool in: and inaccessibility of Arabic language, 31–32; and Palestinian cultural annihilation, parallels between, 23, 28, 33–35; Souffles-Anfas on, 23. See also French language French colonialism, parallels to Zionism: and assimilation policies, Kateb on, 41–42, 47–52; deculturation and, 23, 28, 33–35; Khatibi on, 109–10; Memmi and, 81–82, 83, 91–94, 96–100. See also Jewish-Arab separation under French colonialism, similarities to Zionist strategies French language: and bi-langue, Khatibi on, 112–13; as both cause of schize and potential bridge, 114–15; El Maleh on imposition of, 132, 134–38; El Maleh on plurilanguage as disruption of, 129, 130, 145; as imposed language, Derrida on, 118–19; Kateb’s embattled relationship to, 30, 166n40; as language of colonial double interdict, in Derrida, 118, 119; Mosteghanemi’s positioning against, 68; Souffles-Anfas’s rejection of, 27–28,

30–31, 37; Souffles-Anfas’s use of, 20; as weapon against France, Kateb on, 42; as traumatic event, Khatibi on, 115–16 French postcolonial cultural and economic hegemony, Souffles-Anfas on, 17, 23, 27–28 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), support of Palestinians by, 56–57 Gana, Nouri, 171n51 Getino, Octavio, 20 “La guerre de deux mille ans” (Kateb), 55 Guevara, Ernesto Che, 19 Haddad, Hubert, 10 Haddad, Malek, 20, 54, 68, 169n5 Haddad, Toufiq, 144 al-halqa storytelling form, ACT theater troupe and, 45 Hamdan, Hassan, 43 “Harb alfayn sana: Filastin maghdura” (Kateb), 44, 52, 53, 55 “Harb alfayn sana: Malik al-gharb” (Kateb), 44 Hassan II, oppressive regime of, 19 Hassoun, Jacques: on the Abrahamic cut, 106–7, 110–11; epistolary exchange with Khatibi, 102; familiarity with Khatibi’s work, 111; Fragments de langue maternelle, 111. See also Le même livre Hertzl, Theodor, 93 Hochberg, Gil, 96, 131, 132 Holocaust, as justification for Israeli action, El Maleh on, 141 Huggan, Graham, 61, 67 identitarianism: Derrida on, 122, 125–26; Khatibi on, 104 “Identity Card” (Darwish), 36 Imazighen. See Berbers IMEC. See Insitut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine inshiqaq. See déchirure/division of colonial subjects Insitut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), 44, 55

Index   193 interdit, El Maleh on, 129, 130, 134–35, 139–40, 145, 183n43. See also double interdict, Derrida on the irremediable: Hassoun and Khatibi’s Le même livre on, 115–16, 127; as potential basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace, Derrida on, 127–28 Israel, assimilation by: and disidentification, El Maleh’s Mille ans, un jour on, 140–41, 146; Palestinians and, Memmi on, 99–100; and problem of non-European Jews, 137–39; as tactic, El Maleh on, 132, 133–34, 139 Israel, Derrida on: condemnation of colonial violence by, 127; disidentification with, on basis of experience as colonized Algerian Jew, 123–28, 141; and violence inherent in state formation, 125–26, 127, 180–81n118 Israel, establishment of: AIU policy on, 85; Mamdani on, 173n40 Israel, establishment of, Memmi on: and erasure of Palestinians, 94; and invention of indigeneity, 94, 95– 96; as Jewish anticolonial liberation movement, 83, 98–99; location of, as issue, 93–94; as means of achieving positive Jewish identity, 92, 94, 100; and Mizrahim issue, 99; and Palestinian status, as issue, 98–100, 174n31; as possible error, 92 Israeli-Arab War of 1967. See al-Naksa Israeli Black Panthers, 3, 99, 176n18 Israeli Olympic team, Palestinian attack on (1972), anti-Arab racism following, 102 Israelization of Palestine, Laâbi on resistance to, 34 Jakobiak, Bernard, 157n6 Jeune Afrique (Afrique Action), 9 Jewish-Arab separation under French colonialism, 84–85; Khatibi on, 105–6, 105–9, 112, 115, 151; Memmi on, 81–84, 86–91, 93, 96–100; Memmi’s Zionist position as product of, 86, 92–93; and transformation of privileged groups

into nonnatives, 95. See also déchirure/ division of colonial subjects Jewish-Arab separation under French colonialism, similarities to Zionist strategies, 3, 81, 85–86; El Maleh on, 129, 132–40; Kateb on, 41–42, 47–52, 151 Jews and Arabs (Memmi): ambivalence toward Palestinian status in, 98; on anti-Jewish massacres, 173n25; on Arab Jews, 96; critics on, 82; El Maleh’s response to, 130; on Muslim persecutions of Jews, 183–84n45 Jews in Maghreb, Memmi on: as foreigners since Arab conquest, 95, 97–98; liminal status of between colonizer and colonized, 83–85, 89–91; partial assimilation of, 84–89, 172–73n13; transformation of into nonnatives, 95 Juha’s nail story, 168n56; Kateb’s use of, 57–58 Kabyle. See Taqbaylit “Al Kahina” (Kateb), 44 Kanafani, Ghassan, 34, 155n18, 160n51 Kateb, Yacine, 43; Aba on, 56; and Algerian Jews, central role of in early work, 53; Les ancêtres redoublent de férocité, 43; on authentic Algerian languages, 54; and Berber rights, support for, 32, 54–56, 166–67n44; “Boucherie de l’espérance ou Palestine trahie,” 42–43, 44–45, 162n6; career of, 41, 42–44; Cercle des représailles trilogy, 43; and classical Arabic, opposition to use of, 54; and colonial fragmentation of Algerian society, 56; condemnation of, 167nn48– 49; critique of Algeria’s adoption of Arab/Muslim identity, 54–56, 167n48; death of, 44, 69; and French language, opposition to use of, 30, 41, 166n40; on French language as weapon against France, 42; “La guerre de deux mille ans,” 55; “Harb alfayn sana: Filastin maghdura,” 44, 52, 53, 55; “Harb alfayn sana: Malik al-gharb,” 44; “Al

194  Index Kahina,” 44; Laâbi on, 41; as Marxist, 9, 54, 56; in Mosteghanemi’s ‘Abir sarir, 69; Nedjma, 41, 61, 64; Palestine as metaphor of colonial in, 81, 144, 145; and paradox of writing in colonial language, 42; posthumous canonization by Algeria, 56; “Saout Ennissa,” 44; secularism of, 54–55; Souffles-Anfas on, 20; turn to Algerian popular languages, 42–43; wife of, 43, 162n6. See also ACT theater troupe; “Mohamed arfad valiztek” (Kateb) Kateb Yacine: L’Amour et la révolution (film), 163n17 Kaye, Jacqueline, 31 Kedourie, Elie, 96, 173n44 Khadra, Yasmina, 9–10 Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed, 19–20, 157n6 Khatibi, Abdelkebir: on Arabist discourse, critique of intolerance of minorities in, 104; “Beyond Anti-Semitism and Zionism,” 104; on bi-langue, 110, 111–12; La blessure du nom propre, 111, 117; contributions of, 101, 105; De la mille et troisième nuit, 111; as democracy advocate, 9; and Derrida, 102, 117, 121, 179n84; on Derrida and language of decolonization, 180n97; on double critique, 6, 101, 104, 105; “Droit à la raison,” 108; Fanon and, 108; on French language as traumatic event, 115–16; Hassoun and, 102, 111; on his own Jewishness, 110; and identitarian discourse, critique of, 104–5; on Jewish-Muslim relations, as chiasmus, 114; on linguistic division, 105–6, 151; on Maghreb, as horizon of thought, 108; “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée,” 104, 108; on Maghrebi plurality, 105; on Memmi’s theoretical impasse, 100; on Muslim intolerance of Jews in Morocco, 109; on parallels between colonialism and Zionism, 109–10; on parallels between deconstructive and decolonial thought, 101, 102; “Pensée-autre,” 104; on pensée-

autre, 101, 102, 105; and persistence of European categories in postcolonial thought, 115; on primordial language, impossibility of salvaging, 121–22; and schize of colonial subject, effort to deconstruct, 105; and SoufflesAnfas, 20, 101; works by, 102; on writing, and déchirure of origins, 116; on Zionism, critique of, 104. See also Amour bilingue (Khatibi); Love in Two Languages (Khatibi); Le même livre (Hassoun and Khatibi); La mémoire tatouée (Khatibi); Vomito blanco (Khatibi) Khatibi, on the Abrahamic: and Abrahamic cut, 128; bi-langue and, 111–12; and language, 110; Maghrebi plurality and, 105; in La mémoire tatouée, 105; as metaphor of political conflict, 103–4; as possibility of penséeautre, 105; and primordial language, impossibility of salvaging, 122; as sign of regression, 103; in Vomito blanco, 101, 102–5 Khatibi, on Jewish-Arab schize, 105–8; as byproduct of colonialism, 108–9, 115; as byproduct of Zionist propaganda, 109; as chiasmus, 112; linguistic division and, 105–6, 151 Khatibi, on Palestine-Israel: centrality to Khatibi’s thought, 101, 102, 104, 105; as horizon of thought, 105; as political rather than religious issue, 103–4; as site of pensée-autre, 102 Laâbi, Abdellatif: on Anfas, goals of, 31; anthology of Palestinian poetry by, 32–38; as anticolonial poet, 35–36; and Beirut summit of Arab poets, 33–34, 36; on brutality of French colonialism, 33–34; call for pan-Arab revolution, 18; on colonial acculturation in Maghreb, 36; on colonialist tactics of postcolonial regimes, 19; and cultural decolonization, 19, 32–39; on Darwish, 34, 37; focus on vernacular culture,

Index   195 35; on French language and cultural decolonization, 30–31; on internal colonialism, 148; on Israeli cultural annihilation of Palestinians, 34–35; jailing of, 9, 21, 38, 158n16; on Kateb, 41; as leftist, 9; Marxist-Leninist party founded by, 9, 20–21; memoir of, 38; on Occupied Palestine as prison, 38; on Palestine as vanguard of world struggle for justice, 33, 145; on PalestinianMaghrebi ties through struggle, 33–35, 37–38; poetry by, 17–19; on al-Qassim, 34; reference to Du Bellay, 160n55; review of Boudjedra’s La répudiation, 27–28; review of Chraïbi’s Le passé simple, 27; and Souffles-Anfas, founding of, 19, 157n6; on terrorist literature, 28, 30; as terrorist poet, 36; transnational identification with Palestine, 32–39; on Zayyad, 34, 35 Laroui, Abdallah, 154n16 Lebanon, Israeli invasion of (1982): Hassoun on irremediable damage caused by, 115, 116; and Jewish/Muslim déchirure in Morocco and Palestine, El Maleh on, 130–31, 134–35, 136, 141 Liberation of the Jew (Memmi): critics on, 82; on establishment of Israel, 92, 100; on Jewish homeland, location of as issue, 93–94; link between Zionism and European colonialism as implicit in, 92; structure of, 92; on survival strategies of colonized, 91 linguistic guerrilla, in Souffles-Anfas, 19–20, 36 Lionnet, Françoise, 154n7 literature of defeat (adab al- hazima): Maghrebi authors and, 5–6; as selfOrientalizing discourse, 154n16; Souffles-Anfas and, 21–23 Lorcin, Patricia, 166n42 Loukad, Moumouh, 167n48 Love in Two Languages (Khatibi), 102 Lubin, Alex, 3 “Le luth et la valise” (Kateb), 53 Lyautey, Maréchal, 108

Lyotard, Jean-François, 164n25 Maghreb: languages of, 8; links with Mashriq, as understudies, 7; shared experience of French colonialism in, 7; as term, 78, 153n1 “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée” (Khatibi), 104, 108 Maghrebi identification with Palestine. See transcolonial identification Maghreb–Mashriq division: critical limitations of, 7; Souffles-Anfas as effort to bridge, 28–29, 31 Mamdani, Mahmood: on colonialist claims of indigeneity, 94; on Israel, establishment of, 173n40; on legacies of colonial policies, 82, 94–95 Mammeri, Mouloud, 55 “Le manifeste du 5 juin 1967” (Adonis), 28–29 Mashriq: as audience for Mosteghanemi’s novels, 61–62, 67–77, 73; necessity of revisiting term, 78; Palestine as metaphor in, 2 Masrah al-Bahr theater troupe, 44 Massad, Joseph, 154n16 Mawaqif (periodical), 28 May ‘68, centrality of anti-colonial thought to, 18–19 media: broadening of market after uprisings of 2010–2011, 77–78; panArabism in, 74. See also Dhakirat aljasad (Mosteghanemi), television series based on Mehrez, Samia, 71, 74 Melehi, Mohamed, 24 Le même livre (Hassoun and Khatibi): on Abrahamic cut, 110–12, 114, 116; bilangue and, 111–12; on the Book, as both mark of and suture for déchirure, 114, 116; as effort to remedy Abrahamic cut, 110–11; as excavation of signs, 111; on the irremediable, 115–16, 127; on JewishArab schize, 114–15; on Jewish-Muslim relations, 107, 109, 110; linguistic division and Jewish-Arab schize in, 105,

196  Index 110–12, 114–15; on primordial language, impossibility of salvaging, 121–22; writing of, 102, 109 Memmi, Albert: on Arab anti-Semitism, 96; on assimilation of colonized, impossibility of, 86, 89; assimilation of into French culture, 100; on assimilation of Palestinians, 99–100; as central to Maghrebi debates about Palestine-Israel, 81; criticism on, as bifurcated, 82; critique of colonialism, 82; El Maleh on, 130, 131, 183–84n45; on Jewish-Arab separation under French colonialism, 81–84, 86–91, 93, 96–100; on Jews in Maghreb, as foreigners since Arab conquest, 95, 97–98; Khatibi on, 101, 102; as leftist, 9; and Palestine as metaphor, 145; on parallels between his life and fiction, 91; postcolonial critics on, 82; pro-Zionist position, as product of Jewish-Arab separation in French colonial racial hierarchy, 92–93; repudiation of Arabness by, 96; Souffles-Anfas challenge to, 20; support for Arabic language, 54; “What is an Arab Jew?,” 100, 130; works by, 82; works on Jewishness and Zionism, 82; and Zionism, support for, 9; Zionist Congress address (1972), 99. See also The Colonizer and the Colonized (Memmi); Jews and Arabs (Memmi); Liberation of the Jew (Memmi); The Pillar of Salt (Memmi); Portrait of a Jew (Memmi) Memmi, and colonial genealogy of ArabJewish divide: erasure of, 82, 93, 96, 97, 98; exposure of, 82, 86–89, 96, 97–98; naturalization of, 89–91, 93, 96 Memmi, and link between Zionism and European colonialism: Arab Jews and, 82, 91, 96–100; as implicit in his analysis, 82, 92, 93–94, 100; refusal to recognize, 81–82, 83 Memmi, on Jewish homeland: and erasure of Palestinians, 94; impossibility of finding in Maghreb, 95; and invention

of indigeneity, 94, 95–96; as Jewish anticolonial liberation movement, 83, 98–99; location of, as issue, 93–94; as means of healing Jewish self, 92, 94, 100; and Mizrahim issue, 99; and Palestinian status, 98–100, 174n31; as possible error, 92 Memmi, on Jews in Maghreb: as foreigners since Arab conquest, 95, 97–98; liminal status of between colonizer and colonized, 83–85, 89–91; partial assimilation of, 84–89, 172–73n13; transformation of into nonnatives, 95 Mémoires de la chair (Mosteghanemi), 72 La mémoire tatouée (Khatibi): on Abrahamic cut, 106–7; on bi-langue, 112; on Jewish-Muslim relations, 107–8, 109; on Khatibi’s circumcision, 106–7; on mellah as site of exotic difference, 107–8; on multiple forms of déchirure/ division of colonial subjects, 105–8 Menguellet, Lounis Aït, 55 Mille ans, un jour (El Maleh): as antithesis of Memmi’s Pillar of Salt, 131; on colonial discourse, rhetoric of civilizing mission in, 133, 136; Hochberg on, 132; Hochberg’s reading of, 131, 132; on Jewish/Muslim déchirure in Morocco and Palestine, parallels between, 130– 32, 134–35; and Majid, as case of failed assimilation, 133–34; on Moroccan Jews, exodus to Israel, 131, 134, 137; on Moroccan Jews, second class status of in Israel, 131; Nessim on political Zionism, 135–36; Nessim’s assimilation in, 133, 134; Nessim’s disidentification with Israel in, 140–41, 146; Nessim’s loss of mother tongue in, 134–35, 135–36, 138; Nessim’s resistance to assimilationist discourses, 139–40; politics of language in, 134–40; Scharfman on, 131–32; Scharfman’s reading of, 131–32; structure of, 131; and transcolonial identification, as means to combat French/Israeli discourses of separation, 132

Index   197 Mille ans, un jour (El Maleh), on French and Israeli tactics of separation: imposition of language in, 132, 134–38; and interdit, 134–35, 139–40; and killing of Palestinians by Arab Jews, 139; racial classification of language and, 138–39; similarity of, 132–37; use of assimilation and, 132, 133–34, 139 Mille ans, un jour (El Maleh), on Zionism: as European colonialism, 137; and imposition of language, 138; Orientalist determinations of, 137; oscillation of between humanism and conquest, 136; and problem of non-European Jews, 137–39; and racial classification of languages, 138; as source of Jewish/ Muslim déchirure in Morocco and Palestine, 135 misrecognition (méconnaître): of Abrahamic, Khatibi on, 114–15; of colonized’s language, Khatibi on, 112, 114–15, 151; and transcolonial identification, Yazbek and, 151 Mizrahim, Memmi on issue of, 99 “Mohamed arfad valiztek” (Kateb): Algerian native languages used in, 44–45, 47, 48, 56, 164n20; “Boucherie de l’espérance” as source text for, 52–54, 57; as call for Algerians’ return from France, 47, 163n17; comparison of Algerian government and Zionist/ Israeli tactics in, 57–58; comparison of French colonial and Zionist/Israeli tactics in, 41–42, 47–52, 151; critique of Algerian state in, 41, 47, 53, 56–58; critique of discourse of fraternity in, 42, 57; critique of France in, 41; critique of Zionism in, 41; and danger of transcolonial identification, 42, 58–59; on differend between colonizer and colonized, 50; metaphor of (post) colonial hospitality in, 42, 47, 49–52, 58; performances of, 45, 45–47, 56, 167n46; popularity of, 45; poster for, 46; removal of native Jew figure from, 52–54; writing of, 44

Mohamed prends ta valise (Kateb). See “Mohamed arfad valiztek” (Kateb) monolanguage, exclusionary practices of, Khatibi on, 116–17 The Monolingualism of the Other (Derrida): on the Abrahamic, and identitarianism, 122; on colonial division of Jews and Arabs, 117, 118; on deconstruction of identitarian discourses, 125–26; on Derrida’s experience as colonized Algerian Jew, 123; on language, creation of myth of belonging by, 120; on monolingualism, and discourse of origins, 120–21; on monolingualism, deconstruction of, 120; on primordial language, impossibility of salvaging, 121–22; on “prior-to-the-first language,” 120, 121, 128, 135; as response to Khatibi, 102, 116, 117 “Moroccan Jews and Jewish Moroccans” (El Maleh), 130 Morocco: under Hassan II, repressiveness of, 19; Jewish-Arab separation under French colonial racial hierarchy, 85; position on Zionism, 6 Mosteghanemi, Ahlam: Algérie: Femme et écritures, 64; career of, 62; and commodification of Algeria and Palestine, 62, 71–77; contrapuntal use of allegory in, as example of transcolonial exotic, 67–77; as first Algerian female novelist writing in Arabic, 61; and Naguib Mahfouz Award, 62, 71; Nisyan.com, 72, 170–71n44; popularity of, 61, 62; positioning against French language, 68; as prominent Arabic writer, 62; residence in Beirut, 9; status of as insufficiently Maghrebi or Arab, 71; Western success of, 72, 170n42; on women as allegorical figures in Algerian texts, 64–66 Mosteghanemi’s Algerian trilogy: as exploration of allegory as signifier, 61, 64–66, 76; on failures of Algerian revolution, 61; language difference

198  Index as conduit of transcolonial desire in, 68–71; Mashriq as audience for, 61–62, 67–77, 73; Palestine/Palestinians as transnational allegory of revolution in, 61, 62–63, 64, 65–66, 65–67, 74–76, 81; popularity of, 61, 62; and rejection of past Algerian dreams for dreams of Palestinian future, 65–66, 67, 70–71, 76–77; and transcolonial exotic, 61, 62, 67–77; Ziyad’s death as allegory of shattered hopes for Algerian revolution, 63, 67. See also ‘Abir sarir (Mosteghanemi); Dhakirat al-jasad (Mosteghanemi); Fawda’ al-hawas (Mosteghanemi) Mufti, Aamir, 64 al-Nakba, as central to Maghrebi political imaginaries of Palestine, 5 al-Naksa: Arab intellectual crisis generated by, 5; as central to Maghrebi political imaginaries of Palestine, 5; as impetus to decolonize Arab thought, 28–30; Souffles-Anfas and, 21 National Emigration Day (Algeria), 45–47, 163n16 National Front party (France), 47, 51 Nedjma (Kateb), 41, 61, 64 neocolonialism: French language as vehicle of, 28; Laâbi on, 33–34, 148; Palestine as metaphor of, 2–4, 17, 23–26, 42; persistence of European categories and, 115 neocolonialism, internal, 2; Palestine as metaphor of, 2–3 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 99 Al-nishat al-thaqafi li al-‘umal. See ACT theater troupe Nissabouri, Mostafa, 20, 157n6 Nisyan.com (Mosteghanemi), 72, 170– 71n44 “Nous sommes tous des réfugiés palestiniens” (Laâbi), 17–19 Olender, Maurice, on Semitic, as term, 115 “On the fifth of June” (al-Qassim), 32

Palestine: Ba‘athist call for reconquest of, 147; commodification of in novels of Mosteghanemi, 62; as constitutive of Jewish political subjectivity, 141; as metaphor of neocolonialism, 2–4, 17, 23–26, 42; as object of cultural desire and consumption, 68; as utopia, 4, 66 Palestine (Haddad), 10 Palestine, Israeli cultural annihilation of: Laâbi on, 34–35; parallels to French deculturation of Maghreb, 23, 28, 33– 35; Souffles-Anfas on, 23, 28, 34 “Palestine” (Melehi), 24 Palestine as metaphor: of Arab/Muslim unity, 1; Arab street and, 2; in critique of colonialism, 42; in critique of neocolonialism, 2–3, 19, 42, 144; cultural decolonization efforts of Souffles-Anfas and, 32–38; in facilitating regional democratic movements, 2; global potency of, 3; in Mashriq, 2; mediatizing of, 146–47, 150–51; of possibility of decolonial thought, 4; Said and, 3–5; of struggle against social injustice, 4; in uprisings of 2010– 11, 4, 143–51. See also transcolonial identification Palestine as metaphor, of colonial rule and resistance, 1–5, 143, 145; in Mosteghanemi’s Algerian trilogy, 61– 67, 62–63, 64, 65–66, 65–67, 74–76, 81; in Souffles-Anfas, 23, 38–39, 81, 144, 145; in Kateb, 81, 144, 145. See also transcolonial identification Palestine as vanguard of world struggle for justice: Laâbi on, 33, 145; pan-Arabism and, 74; Souffles-Anfas on, 19, 21, 32; televised version of Mosteghanemi’s Dhakirat al-jasad on, 33 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Algerian support for, 57 Palestinian anticolonial struggle, Arab Spring revolts and, 1 Palestinian guerrilla fighter (feda’i): as iconic image in Souffles-Anfas, 21, 32, 33; as transnational allegory of revolution,

Index   199 in Mosteghanemi’s Algerian trilogy, 61, 63, 65–66, 74–76 Palestinian Jews, Kateb on Zionist coopting of, 52 Palestinian poetry: Laâbi and SoufflesAnfas decolonization efforts and, 32–39; Laâbi anthology of, 32–38; and poetic experimentation of SoufflesAnfas, 35; as second Nahda, Laâbi on, 34, 160n52; similarities to Souffles-Anfas poetry, 36; Souffles-Anfas focus on, in decolonization efforts, 28–29 Palestinian question, influence on literature of Maghreb, 8–9 Palestinian refugees: characterization of as guest workers, Kateb on, 42, 47, 49–52, 143; suffering of, 6 Palestinian rights: Arab state’s lip service to, 2; wide support for, 8 Palestinians: ever-worsening situation of, 6, 7; expulsion of from Palestine, Israeli erasure of, 51–52; massacre by Jordanian troops (1970), Khatibi on, 102, 104; Memmi’s ambivalence toward status of, 98–100, 174n31 pan-Arabism: of left, 55; in media, 74; revolutionary, Palestinians as vanguard of, 74; uprisings of 2010–11 and, 77–78 pan-Arab revolution, Laâbi’s call for, 18 Le passé simple (Chraïbi), 27 pensée-autre, Khatibi on, 101, 102, 105 “Pensée-autre” (Khatibi), 104 Pétain, Maréchal, 53 philology, in colonial discourse, 87–88, 138 The Pillar of Salt (Memmi): on assimilation of colonized, impossibility of, 86, 89; El Maleh’s Mille ans, un jour and, 131; on exclusion of Jews from Tunisian society, 88–89; factuality of, 173n25; focus of postcolonial critics on, 82; on JewishArab colonial separation, exposure of, 86–89; on Jewish-Arab colonial separation, naturalization of, 89–91, 93; on Jewish liminal position between colonizer and colonized, 89–91, 95; narrator’s flight to Argentina in, 90–91,

94, 95; on narrator’s turn from West, 89–91; on pogrom in Jewish quarter of Tunis, 89, 173n25 PLO. See Palestine Liberation Organization La poésie palestinienne de combat (Laâbi, ed.), 34–38; announcement of, 32–33; as first French translation of Palestinian poetry, 32; heterogeneity of sources in, 35; Laâbi as anticolonial poet and, 35– 36; on Maghreb–Palestine link through colonization experience, 34–35, 37–38; poets and poems included in, 34, 35, 36; and popular culture as engine of revolution, 35 political imaginaries of Palestine in Maghreb: al-Nakba as central to, 5; alNaksa as central to, 5 politics of representation, transcolonial identification and, 6–7, 142, 147, 150–51 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 65 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, influence on Khatibi, 102–3 Portrait of a Jew (Memmi): critics on, 82; on Jewish homeland, location of as issue, 93; romantic portrait of settler in, 93; structure of, 91–92; on survival strategies of oppressed, 91 postcolonial regimes, authoritarian, Palestine as metaphor in struggle against, 1–2, 19, 42 postcolonial subjugation, Palestine as metaphor of, 2–4, 17, 23–26, 42 postcolonial thought, persistence of European categories in, 115 Qadafi, Muammar, 96, 98, 130 al-Qassim, Samih, 32, 34 Le quai aux fleurs ne répond plus (Haddad), 169n5 The Question of Palestine (Said), 3–4 Ramadan, Somaya, 71 Ramadan television series, 74 Rancière, Jacques, 140, 151, 183n40 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, 51, 81, 137, 183n38

200  Index Renan, Ernest, 88, 115 La répudiation (Boudjedra), 27–28 resistance literature (adab al-muqawama), Laâbi’s focus on, 34 Revue d’Études Palestiniennes, 141 Rodrigue, Aron, 85 Rosello, Mireille, 51 Ross, Kristen, 151 Rwanda, Mamdani on legacies of colonialism in, 94–95 Sadat, Anwar, 144 Sadi, Said, 167n46 Said, Edward: on Jordanian and Iranian protests of 1970s, 144; on Palestine as utopia, 3–5, 66, 145; on philology in colonial discourse, 87–88; on Semitic, as term, 115 “Saout Ennissa” (Kateb), 44 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 84, 102 Scharfman, Ronnie, 131–32, 139 Sebag, Paul, 173n24 Seikaly, Sherene, 124, 125 Serfaty, Abraham: as communist, 9, 20; and disidentification with Israel, 141; jailing of, 9, 21, 158n16; on JewishArab split, 109; Marxist-Leninist party founded by, 9, 20–21; and SoufflesAnfas, 20, 23 Al-Shabbi, Abul-Qasim, 171n51 Shephard, Todd, 165n27 Shih, Shu-mei, 154n7 Shi‘r (periodical), 28 Shohat, Ella, 52, 63, 99 “Sirhan and the Pipeline” (Zayyad), 35 Slyomovics, Susan, 161n68 Solanas, Fernando, 20 “Song for the men” (Darwish), 35 Soueif, Ahdaf, 153n5 Souffles-Anfas: on ACT theater troupe, 162n9; and adab al- hazima, 21–23; authors and types of work published in, 20; closing of, 9, 21; as first text to link Maghreb and Palestine, 37; founding of, 21; on French postcolonial cultural and economic hegemony, 17, 23, 27–28;

gradual shift to Arabic, 28; influence of al-Naksa on, 21; on Jewish-Arab split, 109; Khatibi and, 101; as leftist journal, 9, 104; and linguistic guerrilla, 19–20, 36; and Maghreb–Mashriq division, effort to bridge, 28–29, 31; on Palestine as vanguard of world struggle for justice, 19, 21, 32; Palestinians as metaphor of colonial in, 23, 38–39, 81, 144, 145; and postcolonial texts, publication of, 20; revival of in 1972– 73, 158n16; secularism of, 55; seminal role in Maghrebi literature, 20; special Palestinian issue (Souffles 15), 15–26, 22, 24, 25, 26; transition from literary to leftist political journal, 19, 20–21, 28, 29; and tribal languages, inability to recover, 31. See also Anfas Souffles-Anfas, and cultural decolonization: focus on Palestinian poetry in translation, 28–29, 32–39; as goal, 19, 20; issue of forms and languages appropriate for, 23–27; Palestine as model for, 23–27, 38; rejection of French neocolonialism, 27–28, 30–31, 37; use of French language in, 20 Souffles-Anfas, and transcolonial identification, 17–19; and embrace of Arabic language and culture, 28–31; and focus on Palestinian poetry, 32–39; and focus on vernacular culture, 32; and Palestinian education as model, 32, 33; scholars’ neglect of, 21; sources of, 33–34 Souffles-Anfas, translations from Arabic: as cultural decolonization effort, 28–30; focus on Palestinian question in, 28–30; and transition to Anfas, 28–29, 31 Stam, Robert, 63 Syria: and internal colonialism, 148; policy on Israel, 147; precariousness of Palestinian life in, 148; and rhetoric of support for Palestinians vs. reality, 148–49; and TV industry, 74. See also A Woman in the Crossfire (Yazbek) Syrian uprising, Yazbek’s memoir of, 2

Index   201 Tamazight: in Mosteghanemi’s ‘Abir sarir, as bearer of hope for revolution, 69; Kateb on, 54 Taqbaylit (Kabyle), ACT theater troupe use of, 41, 44–45, 47, 56 Les Temps Modernes (periodical), 102 terrorism, in Algerian revolution, 30 terrorist literature: and Laâbi as terrorist poet, 36; Laâbi on, 28, 30; Souffles-Anfas poetry and, 36 Touqan, Fadwa, 34 “Toward a third cinema” (Getino and Solanas), 20 transcolonial exotic, in Mosteghanemi’s Algerian trilogy, 61, 62, 67–77 transcolonial identification, 2; dangers of, Kateb’s “Mohamed arfad valiztek” and, 42, 58–59; El Maleh and, 129–30, 141–42; as focus of this study, 9–10; historical parallels and, 2, 3; impact on Palestinian studies, 8; long history of, 7; and politics of representation, 6–7, 142, 147; vs. state representations of Palestine, 6; Syrian repression and, 149. See also Palestine as metaphor, of colonial rule and resistance transcolonial identification, Souffles-Anfas and, 17–19; and embrace of Arabic language and culture, 28–31; and focus on Palestinian poetry, 32–39; and focus on vernacular culture, 32; and Palestinian education as model, 32, 33; scholars’ neglect of, 21; sources of, 33–34 transcolonial identities, Ramadan television series and, 74 transcolonialism, as term, 154n7 Tunisia: and Dhakirat al-jasad TV series, 73, 77; discrimination against Jews, under Protectorate, 88–89, 173n24; German occupation of, 88; and Israel, relations with, 144; Jewish-Arab separation under French colonial racial hierarchy, 85; Jewish Statues in, 173n24; position on Zionism, 6; and protests of 2010–11, 144 Universal Israelite Alliance (AIU), 85

uprisings of 2010–2011: Algerian and Palestinian anticolonial struggles as precursors of, 77, 78; Arab names for, 1; black decade and, 77; and broadening of media market, 77–78; commodification of revolution and, 74; Dhakirat al-jasad TV series and, 77; music and, 171n51; and Palestine as metaphor, 4, 143–51; pan-Arabism and, 77–78; and popular support for Palestine, expressions of, 1; slogans in, 77, 171n51; and transnational history of anticolonial struggles, 1 Vichy government, and revocation of Jewish rights, 88, 119, 123, 124 “Le visage d’une négation” (El Maleh), 142 Vomito blanco (Khatibi): on the Abrahamic, 101, 102–5; critical reception of, 104; as critique of Zionism, 102–3; Derrida and, 117, 179n85; on Khatibi’s visceral reaction to destruction of Palestinian people, 102; Marxist-Leninist viewpoint of, 102–3, 104; pirating of by Israeli Black Panthers, 176n18; as response to Memmi, 101, 102; targets of, 102 “What is an Arab Jew?” (Memmi), 100, 130 Wolinski, George, 26 A Woman in the Crossfire (Yazbek): events described in, 145–46; on al-Nakba commemorations, 150; Palestine as metaphor in, 143–44, 151; publication history of, 184n4; on Syrian rhetoric of support for Palestinians vs. reality, 148– 49; writing of, 145 A Woman in the Crossfire (Yazbek), comparison of Syrian and Palestinian suffering in, 146–51; and mode of representation, 146–47, 150–51; and Syrian oppression of both Palestinian refugees and Syrian citizens, 143, 147–51 A Woman in the Crossfire (Yazbek), transcolonial identification in: and politics of representation, 147, 150–51; as truly comparative endeavor, 143–44

202  Index Worker’s Cultural Action. See ACT theater troupe The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 82–83 Yarmouk refugee camp, humanitarian catastrophe at, 148 Yazbek, Samar, 2, 143. See also A Woman in the Crossfire (Yazbek) Zaamoun, Ali, 43 Zafzaf, Mohamed, 20 Zayyad, Tawfiq, 34, 35 Zionism: effects of, Palestine as metaphor of, 2; impact of Jewish-Arab relations, Memmi’s effacing of, 96; positioning of within colonialism, 8; Raz-Krakotzkin on piety in discourse of, 183n38;

on separation of Jews and Arabs, similarities to French colonial racial hierarchy, 85–86 Zionism, parallels to French colonialism: and assimilation policies, Kateb on, 41–42, 47–52; deculturation and, 23, 28, 33–35; Khatibi on, 109–10; Memmi and, 81–82, 83, 91–94, 96–100 Zionist separation of Jews and Arabs: El Maleh on, 129, 132–40; Kateb on, 41– 42, 47–52, 151; rhetoric of (post)colonial hospitality and, 49–52; similarity to French tactics, 3, 41–42, 47–52, 81, 85– 86, 129, 132–40, 151; similarity to South African apartheid, 8 Zoubir, Abdelhamid, 31 Zreik, Raef, 180–81n118

Cultural Memory in the Present

Barbara Vinken, Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality: Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the Problem of Democracy Simona Forti, New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital Hans Joas, Faith as an Option Michael Gubser, The Far Reaches: Ethics, Phenomenology, and the Call for Social Renewal in Twentieth-Century Central Europe Françoise Davoine, Mother Folly: A Tale Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze Elizabeth A. Pritchard, Locke’s Political Theology: Public Religion and Sacred Rights Ankhi Mukherjee, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mark of the Sacred Henri Atlan, Fraud: The World of Ona’ah Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Volume 2 Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language Alexandre Lefebvre, Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied Denis Guénoun, About Europe: Philosophical Hypotheses Maria Boletsi, Barbarism and Its Discontents

Sigrid Weigel, Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy Roberto Esposito, Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy Henri Atlan, The Sparks of Randomness, Volume 2: The Atheism of Scripture Rüdiger Campe, The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist Niklas Luhmann, A Systems Theory of Religion Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self ’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine Rodolphe Gasché, Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Volume 1 Alessia Ricciardi, After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi’s Italy Daniel Innerarity, The Future and Its Enemies: In Defense of Political Hope Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture François-David Sebbah, Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition Erik Peterson, Theological Tractates, edited by Michael J. Hollerich Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, Second Edition: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson Yasco Horsman, Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo Jacques Derrida, Parages, edited by John P. Leavey Henri Atlan, The Sparks of Randomness, Volume 1: Spermatic Knowledge Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution Djelal Kadir, Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory Jeffrey Mehlman, Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life Jacob Rogozinski, The Ego and the Flesh: An Introduction to Egoanalysis Marcel Hénaff, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy Paul Patton, Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonialization, Politics Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay

Jacob Taubes, From Cult to Culture, edited by Charlotte Fonrobert and Amir Engel Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form Lambert Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology Freddie Rokem, Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community Vilashini Cooppan, Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing Josef Früchtl, The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner, eds., Re-Figuring Hayden White Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith, eds., The Rhetoric of Sincerity Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson Alexandre Lefebvre, The Image of the Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas Marcel Detienne, Comparing the Incomparable François Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1959–2005 Richard Baxstrom, Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia Jennifer L. Culbert, Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present

Esther Peeren, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond Eyal Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature Sara Guyer, Romanticism After Auschwitz Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life Bella Brodzki, Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory Rodolphe Gasché, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory Michael G. Levine, The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding German Change in Berlin and Beyond Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories James Siegel, Naming the Witch J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul: On Justice

Richard Rorty and Eduardo Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity Beate Rössler, ed., Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy

Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity Dorothea von Mücke, The Rise of the Fantastic Tale Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction Herlinde Pauer-Studer, ed., Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given That: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Thought Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–1998, edited by Elizabeth Rottenberg Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: The Latin American “Boom” in the Neoliberal Marketplace Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Cultural Instruments, Mutualities, and the Fictive Imagination Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Re-Describing the Descriptions of Modernity, edited and introduced by William Rasch Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity

Gil Anidjar, “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in ArabJewish Letters Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark: (One of Hegel’s bon mots) Jean-François Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics Jan Patocka, Plato and Europe Hubert Damisch, Skyline: The Narcissistic City Isabel Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers Richard Rand, ed., Futures: Of Jacques Derrida William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine Kaja Silverman, World Spectators Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation: Expanded Edition Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans in the Epoch of Emancipation Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan Samuel C. Wheeler III, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity Rodolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin J. Hillis Miller / Manuel Asensi, Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading

Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion