Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics : Mapping Culture, Literature, and Politics [1 ed.] 9781527505063, 9781443873338

Citation preview

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics: Mapping Culture, Literature, and Politics Edited by

Samira Mechri and Asma Hichri

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics: Mapping Culture, Literature, and Politics Edited by Samira Mechri and Asma Hichri This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Samira Mechri, Asma Hichri and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7333-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7333-8

“I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos... I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.” —Frantz Fanon

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Re-visioning Space and Place: Praxis and Poetics Asma Hichri and Samira Mechri

Part I: Imaginative Topography and Imagined Communities Chapter One ............................................................................................... 22 Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly Post-Colonial Space Marilisa Lorusso Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 38 Politics of the Dispersed: The Jewish Diaspora prior to 1948 Yosra Amraoui

Part II: Post-modern Mappings Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 54 Alienation in Old Places, Creation of New Spaces: The Role of Digital Media in Socializing, Learning, and Protest in Tunisia Karim Hamdi Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 66 Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization: Remapping the Masjid in the Wake of the Tunisian Revolution Fatima Radhouani Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 82 Islamism, Islamophobia and Shrinking Spaces in the Age of Inhumanity Haideh Moghissi

viii

Table of Contents

Part III: Literary Routes: Geographies of Existence and Resistance Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 94 “Travelling Cultures:” Towards an Anthropological Reading of Space and Culture in Paul Bowles’s Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue Samira Mechri Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 115 Transnational Spaces, Metanarratives, and Identities on the Move in Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life Sihem Arfaoui Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 130 The Art of Juxtaposition: Arab American Writing and Cultural Code Switching Laura Rice Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 150 On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: Spatialising Gender and Haremising Home in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup Asma Hichri Bibliography ............................................................................................ 174 Contributors ............................................................................................. 190 Index ........................................................................................................ 193

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sincere thanks must go to the contributors: without their genuine work and creative genius this project would not have been possible. Infinite gratitude must be expressed to the Cambridge Scholars team whose patience, assistance, agility and professionalism have brought this endeavour to light. On a personal plane, the editors would like to thank their dear family members for their sustained belief in their creativity and their constant support and encouragement. Samira dedicates her work on this volume to her mother. Asma expresses love and gratitude to her mother and dedicates this work to the spirit of her father.

INTRODUCTION

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle… The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space… of simultaneity… of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”

Approaching space and place epistemologically is no easy task, and the proliferation of definitions, texts and cognitive mappings of these concepts only attests to their elusiveness. The discussion of space and place indisputably relates to the field of geography. However, geography is by definition not only cultural, social and anthropological; it is also dependent on human perception, cognition and apprehension of the universe. Indeed, it would be limiting to situate the geographical imagination within culture and society, ignoring its cognitive, psychological, emotional, philosophical, political, and literary manifestations. Rather than defining space and place, however, this study aims at deciphering our constantly evolving construal of these concepts as well as the way space has come to shape our cognitive mapping not only of the actual world around us, but also of our social, ideological, historical, philosophical, psychic, spiritual and textual realities. Throughout the past decades, geographers, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and anthropologists established the duality of space and place by conceiving of them as two polar opposites. Moreover, they tended to vest place with all the meanings that space “failed” to encompass. In a modern era still characterized by the relative preponderance of metanarratives, place was still the locus of meaning, and to many, it was synonymous with home/land, nation, and territory, as well as the values and promises these could entail. As Steven Flusty argues, “geography has been,” since its inception, deeply ingrained “in Enlightenment-cum-modernist notions of truth as objective and transparently representable.”1 Moreover, place seemed to derive much of its essence from its connectedness to time. Since history and geography are two interdependent fields, and “all geography is

2

Introduction

historical geography, and all history is geographical history,”2 it was taken on trust that the qualities of place, and its primacy over indefinite space inhere in its ability to bear the marks of time and history. In literary criticism, the “intrinsic connectedness” of space/place and time has previously been asserted by Mikhail Bakhtin in his articulation of the concept of the chronotope: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. The intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.3

Deconstructing the diachronic and chronotopic envisioning of place thus amounts to challenging “traditional dualisms—such as mind–body, global–local, culture–nature, self–Other—that structure conventional knowledge,”4 a tendency that has characterized postmodern thinking. In the new postmodern aesthetic, “history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle” gives way to “space,” to synchrony, to the here and now, to “simultaneity” and “juxtaposition.”5 In order to approach the concepts of space and place from a geocritical perspective, it seems vital to explore their literal definitions as well as the different qualities historians, sociologists and geographers ascribed to them. Literally, space denotes “a continuous area which is unoccupied as well as the dimensions of height, depth and width within which all things exist and move.”6 Space might also refer to an interval of time, a significance that highlights its connectedness to time, which Bakhtin seems to allude to in his definition of the chronotope. Place, however, refers to a particular position or point in space, a location.7 In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre rightly argues that “the word ‘space’ had a strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area.”8 Geocritic Robert Tally confirms this idea pointing out that “space was understood either as a plenum that was full of matter, as in the theory of a classical atomist like Lucretius … or a vacuum that could be completely empty, which was a view Sir Isaac Newton would embrace.”9 In the past, philosophers, physicists and theorists of place and space often assigned meaning and essence to place, relegating space to a secondary, yet indefinite position. Place is emotional, spiritual, affective, and human: space is dull emptiness, a void, a vacuum, or a shape that can be geometrically measured. For the most part, as Tally expounds, space

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

3

was still viewed “as static, empty, and mere background to historical and temporal events.”10 In his discussion of the symbolism of land and territory from a historico-religious perspective, theologian Walter Brueggemann provides an enlightening definition of place, which ascribes to it stronger valences, thereby reasserting its primacy over space: Place is a space which has historical meanings, where some things have happened which are now remembered and which provide continuity and identity across generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken which have established identity… place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made… Place is indeed a protest against the unpromising pursuit of space. It is a declaration that our humanness cannot be found in escape, detachment, absence of commitment, and undefined freedom.11

In Brueggemann’s duality, space is ahistorical, unpromising. It is synonymous with detachment, escape, and “undefined freedom,” while place recalls roots, origins and thus has ontological and historical meanings. It is worth noting that the values assigned to place are deeply anchored in time and history, since the significance of a particular place is acquired through the existence of individuals who establish their “identity across generations” and who assign relevance to place through their interaction with it. The nature of place is thus rather covenantal: the gifts and promises of place are the vows its people have “exchanged” with it and the collective memory and identity they have established through commitment to it. It is worth noting that Brueggemann’s definition betrays an obsession with time and history. His historical mapping of place through the reference to “historical meanings” and “events” that are “remembered” and that ensure “continuity and identity across generations” strongly echoes Harvey’s definition of territory and of the dialectics of time and space it entails: In fact, the history of “territory” as a concept provides a beautiful illustration of how absolute, relative, and relational conceptions of space and time get dialectically integrated in particular ways through material social practices (border and boundary building), representations (cartographic practices), and lived meanings (affective loyalties to the territorial unit of the nation-state).12

A similar argument is advanced by Mark Augé who rather conceives of space and place as polar opposites. Augé posits the hypothesis that if

4

Introduction

place is inherently “relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.”13 In this context, Augé argues that “supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which … are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”14 And herein lies the paradox. For if non-places have no material or “anthropological” existence and if they can never exist “in pure form;” for “places reconstitute themselves in [them]; relations are restored and resumed in [them],”15 then it would be reductive and even simplistic to conceive of space as a non-place. Moreover, if one accepts that non-place is non-relational and thoroughly ahistorical, then how can one claim that relations are restored in it or that it can be promoted to the status of realms of memory? The crucial problem with Augé’s argument is that he resorts to solving the duality of space and place through establishing a sharper duality. In fact, place and non-place further reinforce the schism traditional geography and ethnography have established between place as “the calm centre of established values” and space as “a haunting presence,”16 an abstraction or a mere site of transience. Moreover, by being compared to Pierre Nora’s “realms” or “sites of memory,” Augé’s non-place curiously assumes the qualities of what Michel De Certeau calls a “practiced place,” a space “actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it,” as it “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it.”17 In this context, it is important to recall Pierre Nora’s definition of realms of memory. “A lieu de mémoire,” Nora claims, “is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.”18 Nora’s places of memory are “lieux—places, sites, causes—in three senses—material, symbolic and functional.”19 In this definition, it is important to note Nora’s use of the word “site.” If memory spaces represent one way in which the human mind can encapsulate time and memory, then they also invite a reflection on the spatialisation of time and memory. Significantly, Nora’s realms of memory correspond with De Certeau’s definition of places, these “fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories are held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolisations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body.”20 Nonetheless, realms of memory reflect no more on space than on our evolving perception of time, memory and history in a changing world where a tradition of memory is lost and where history self-reflexively

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

5

turns upon itself.21 As Jonathan Boyarin argues, realms of memory are the “mnemonic schemes by which people were taught to ‘fix’ memories in imaginary spaces and thus enable themselves to recall them more easily.”22 Memory spaces represent only one example of how the mind can map the world geocritically. But while this mechanism looks retrospectively at our symbolic representations of the past, it would be more significant to consider our spatial mapping of our emotional, political, and literary present as well the new tendencies in cultural and human geographies that enhanced this spatial turn. Starting from the 1980s, and more particularly with the writings of Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre, critical geographies began to establish themselves as new paradigms of cultural studies, providing new insights into notions of place, space and territory. With the emergence of novel theoretical landscapes, such as postmodernism, postpostmodernism, and postcolonialism, critics have given primacy to the concept of space in an attempt to eschew the “despatializing historicism” of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, which “occluded, devalued, and de-politicized space.”23 In Edward Soja’s terms, “a distinctively postmodern and critical human geography” vigorously began to reassert “the interpretive significance of space in the historically privileged confines of contemporary critical thought.”24 In Henri Lefebvre’s spatialized Marxism, for instance, space is imbricated with modes of production and thus becomes a product of social forces: “Every society—and hence every mode of production … produces a space, its own space.”25 Rather than conceiving of space as an “empty abstraction” or as “the passive locus of social relations,” Lefebvre is “concerned with logico-epistemological space, the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and Utopias.”26 To mention symbols and utopias in this debate on space certainly recalls the affective genius loci Brueggemann ascribes to place. It is worth noting, however, that Lefebvre assigns these meanings to space, inferring that it produces these relationships through reiterative social practice. Moreover, to Lefebvre space is neither affective, emotional nor covenantal. To the question “Is space a social relationship,” he provides the following answer: “Certainly—but one which is inherent to property relationships (especially the ownership of the earth, of land) and also closely bound up with the forces of production.”27 Elsewhere, Lefebvre emphasizes the political nature of space: Space is not a scientific object removed [détourné] from ideology or politics; it has always been political and strategic. If space has an air of

6

Introduction neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents and thus seems to be “purely” formal, the essence of rational abstraction, it is precisely because this space has already been occupied and planned, already the focus of past strategies, of which we cannot always find traces. Space has been fashioned and molded from historical and natural elements, but in a political way. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally populated with ideologies. There is an ideology of space. Why? Because space, which seems homogeneous, which appears given as a whole in its objectivity, in its pure form, such as we determine it, is a social product.28

He also argues that space is a product of the state and its institutions, thus establishing it as another Ideological State Apparatus. Indeed, “the state and each of its constituent institutions call for spaces—but spaces which they can then organize according to their specific requirements,”29 spaces not only fashioned through ideological interpellation, but also functioning through ideological interpellation of their subjects. In the 1990s, prominent researchers in human, cultural, and political geographies built on Lefebvre’s theory of space. Marxist geographer David Harvey, for instance, defines all space as inherently “relative space,” i.e. space already rooted in time and history, “processes and motion,” which “mandates an important shift of language from absolute space and absolute time to the hyphenated concept of relative space-time.”30 Human geographer Tim Cresswell provides a rather different conception of spatial practices. In arguing that “places are never finished” and that they are “the result of processes and practices,” Cresswell insinuates that place is a product of spatial practice and negotiation: “places need to be studied in terms of the ‘dominant institutional projects’, the individual biographies of people negotiating a place and the way in which a sense of place is developed though the interaction of structure and agency.”31 It is worth noting that in defying essentialist constructions of place, Cresswell implicitly apprehends place much in the same way postmodernists conceive of space. For Cresswell, place “needs to be understood as an embodied relationship with the world” since “places are constructed by people doing things and in this sense are never ‘finished’ but are constantly being performed.”32 As such, he conceptualizes “place as open and hybrid - a product of … routes rather than roots,” thereby “call[ing] into question the whole history of place as a center of meaning” and a marker of stability, rootedness and an authentic sense of identity.33 Of crucial importance in this debate, however, is French philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory of the dialectics of time and space and the entanglement of space with ideology and power. In one if his interviews,

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

7

Foucault comments on the traditional dualism of time and space in the following terms: If one started to talk in terms of space that meant one was hostile to time. It meant, as the fools say, that one “denied history,” that one was a “technocrat.” They didn’t understand that to trace the forms of implantation, delimitation and demarcation of objects, the modes of tabulation, the organization of domains meant the throwing into relief of processes—historical ones, needless to say—of power. The spatializing decription [sic] of discursive realities gives on to the analysis of related effects of power.34

Foucault’s unruly venture into the debate on space and place is backed up by his powerful arguments against historicism and the phenomenological spatialisations of human life that characterized traditional geography. Eschewing dominant teleological views of time and space, and supplanting them with the dialectics of space and power, Foucault’s mapping of processes of order(ing), discipline, normative behavior and misbehavior, carceral spaces, and heterogeneous spaces certainly brings space to the fore, revealing that “the anxiety of [the postmodern] era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time.”35 Relying on Foucault’s theory of heterotopias and what he refers to as Lefebvre’s “trialectics of spatiality, spatial thinking and the spatial imagination,” postmodern political geographer Edward Soja creates the concept of thirdspace, which he defines as an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality.36

Thirdspace, however, “is portrayed as multi-sided and contradictory, oppressive and liberating, passionate and routine, knowable and unknowable. It is a space of radical openness, a site of resistance and struggle, a space of multiplicitous representations,” which “can be mapped but never fully captured in conventional cartographies; it can be creatively imagined but obtains meaning only when practiced and fully lived.”37 The interface between Soja’s thirdspace, Foucault’s heterotopia and Lefebvre’s trialectics becomes clear. However, in arguing that “the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space… of simultaneity… of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed” Foucault not only anticipates postmodern cultural geography’s concern with heterotopic spaces, but also draws attention to the interface

8

Introduction

between postmodernism and postcolonialism. Foucault’s envisioning of this era’s heterochronic and heterotopic break with absolute time and space emphasizes the effects of postcolonialism in an era where traditional spatial or territorial limits were constantly redrawn. In this context, Boyarin points out that Foucault’s reference to “the near and far,” “the side-by-side,” and “the dispersed” reminds the reader of “those living with us on the planet; that they are ‘distant’ from us does not make them ‘fixed, dead, immobile,’ as the lingering discourses of primitivism, racism, and Orientalism would have us believe.”38 In substituting imperial geography with a geography of difference, Foucault already implicitly undermines the “us vs. them” weltanschauung that pervaded colonial thought. In fact, in imperial thought, space is mapped onto time, since spatial displacement, or the condition of existing in the “wrong” place for “other peoples” is conceived of as an anachronism. Dispersal as such denotes the anachronistic and diasporic existence of those whose ethnic or racial traits defy European standards of normalcy. In challenging such norms, they not only live in the wrong place, but their primitivism and savagery situates them in anachronistic time that has become “fixed, dead, and immobile.” In this discussion, Foucault’s concern with the heterotopic and the dispersed reveals how space synchronically bears its own social, historical, political and even textual and intertextual practices. Flusty confirms this new orientation by acknowledging the role of postmodernism and its denigration of grand narratives of history and continuity in rethinking the dialectics of time and space. “In repositioning historical truth as fragmentary narratives produced and imposed in the present,” Flusty explains, “postmodernism subverts Hegelian notions of space as a residual product of idealised historical time,” thereby instilling a new dialectics of time and space and a new geography of space as a site of differential histories simultaneously “arrayed in space.”39 This “differential” literary and cultural politics of space thus seeks to destabilise and deterritorialize the plausible facts, truths, and established dualisms that confine spatial thinking within the realm of a particular place. Indeed, postmodern mapping rather values fluid, multiperspectivist and openended ways of approaching the complex net of spatial relations where space is no longer seen as “a stable or inert category but rather as complex, heterogeneous practice”40 and where “human space” is much similar to “a garden of forking paths” or “a rhizome.”41 Signalling the “spatial turn” of the century, the geocritical notion of space, along with such related concepts as mapping, border, spatiality, routes, contact zones, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, have provided new and fresh avenues for literary criticism and cultural studies.

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

9

Spatial practices, spatial semantics, critical geographies, or geocriticism, indeed reveal that writing is yet another imaginative topography. Such practices, however, are not restricted to the literary or critical arenas. Radical developments in transnational politics, the media, and satellite communications, and the internet also significantly revolutionized the way we apprehend space and place. In this context, Saskia Sassen points out how new patterns of “cross-border cooperation and conflict, such as global business networks, the new cosmopolitanism, non-governmental organizations, diasporic networks, and spaces such as global cities and transboundary public spheres” have led to a “rescaling” of space and of the notion of territory in relation to the nation-state.42 Other global events and political crises that plagued the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have also triggered this constant rescaling of space. The September 11 attacks, the War on Iraq, tsunamis and global warming, the “uprisings” dubbed The Arab Spring, the War on Terror and ISIS, and the Refugee Crisis have all become “shared metaphors”43 of global space. In this vein, Benedict Anderson’s trope of “Imagined Communities” is quite significant to elaborate on symbolic transnational spaces. Anderson’s concept of the Ummah, which translates as “the nation,” but which also bears religious connotations, is a curious case in point. For Anderson, the borderless Ummah “stretches from Morocco to the Sulu Archipelago” involving an immense community which is “imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script,”44 rather than through an identifiable and scalable space or territory. He explains this in the following: If Maguindanao met Berbers in Mecca, knowing nothing of each other’s languages, incapable of communicating orally, they nonetheless understood each other’s ideographs, because the sacred texts they shared existed only in classical Arabic. In this sense, written Arabic functioned like Chinese characters to create a community out of signs, not sounds.45

The Muslim Ummah, like other large communities, thinks of itself as “cosmically central” through the medium of Arabic and “a superterrestrial,” super-spatial power.46 However, taking into consideration today’s current political conjuncture, some extremist Islamist groups in different parts of the world have converted the theological and symbolic concept of the Ummah into a material and political one, an “Islamic State” or Khilafah that stretches from Morocco to Bukhara, ISIS being only its starting point. In this volume, scholars from different academic fields express their views on this controversial cognitive mapping of human life and contest

10

Introduction

new spaces for critical, cultural, and philosophical expression. The chapters of this volume venture into a geocritical discussion of postmodern and postcolonial notions of border, territory, identity, embodied geographies, gendered spaces, and spaces of resistance. Comprising theoretical and critical contributions in the fields of culture, history, politics, literature, and philosophy, this engaging work invites postmodern readers to think geocritically about the significance of concepts that inform the spatiality of human life. In the first chapter, entitled “Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly PostColonial Space,” Marilisa Lorusso reflects on the ongoing mechanisms of imperialism and colonialism in post-Soviet Ukraine. Tracing such mechanisms at a time when Russia has lost its territorial hegemony over former Soviet nations, Lorusso argues that Russia has never taken on board the idea that its relation to post-soviet states must be based on equal sovereignty and statehood. Lorusso notes that the case of Ukraine is even more intricate, since its distinct identity has always been shaken by colonial rule, which brought to Ukrainians “negative self-images” that they “internalised over time.” Ukrainians were indeed convinced that “the metropolitan power is superior in language, culture, achievements and in other areas,” a perception that marred their sense of belonging and their national pride.47 Through scrutinising Ukraine’s colonial history and highlighting new nationalist tendencies and conflicts in the region, Lorusso maintains that decolonisation in Ukraine is a complex process, rarely not traumatic. She also points out a crisis of nationalism among Ukrainians due to the difficult transition from a divided loyalty to an articulated and unitary national consciousness, highlighting the need for a Ukrainian collective memory and heritage to homogenize a thoroughly diverse populace at a time when territorial boundaries are redrawn. Lorusso concludes that such obstacles to Ukrainian unity prove the Russian conquest to be a quite unique case of colonialism in terms of territorial continuity in that it is definitely hard to recognize—perhaps for some Russians themselves—the internal borders and the dividing lines between the homeland and the conquered territories. In fact, the case of Ukraine is representative of the extent to which the notion of territory in the colonial and postcolonial contexts can be reified. That Russia still cannot relinquish its hegemonic grasp over some nation-states already demonstrates that the sovereignty of the Soviet territory “commonly works precisely through the tendency to take power and meaning and their relationship to be simply self-evident and rather non-problematic,”48 thereby reifying colonial states “as a set of

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

11

fixed units of [its] sovereign space,” thoroughly dehistoricized and decontextualized.49 In her paper, “Politics of the Dispersed, the Jewish Diaspora prior to 1948,” Yosra Amraoui explores the different mechanisms and stratagems whereby the Jewish community created, legitimated, and sustained a strong national identity and sense of belonging to their present territorial space despite their exilic existence. Amraoui points out how the Jews maintain strong community ties and a sense of identity through recollecting common traumatic experiences such as the holocaust, and connecting them to a specific spatial framework, namely the two world wars. To corroborate their cognitive and mnemonic mapping of territorial space, the Jews, as Amraoui maintains, resort to reviving moments of an allegedly glorious ancient past—such as the occupation of Canaan, the promised land—which non-Zionist historians claim, attest to their barbarity. The paper also examines the way the Jewish identity based its continuity primarily on Judaism, thereby highlighting the fact that the focus on religiosity also favored the creation of a territory for the Jews. Through exploring such ideological, religious, political, geographic and mnemonic practices, the paper further elicits the way the Jews’ appropriation of land in the past is used to legitimize ownership of territorial space in the present. Israeli, or Jewish geopolitics, since the religious legitimacy of Israeli identity always comes to the fore, indeed recalls the above-mentioned definition of place provided by Brueggemann. In fact, the Jews’ pursuit and construction of a strong national identity is not based on a pursuit of space as much as it is a pursuit of place. “Whereas pursuit of space may be a flight from history,” Brueggemann argues, the Jews’ “yearning for a place is a decision to enter history with an identifiable people in an identifiable pilgrimage;”50 hence the multiple narratives of Jewish wandering and return to the Promised Land that characterized Zionist historiography. Such stratagems, whether they be cognitive, political, historiographic, or spatial, allowed the Jews not only to create an identity but also to appropriate, legitimize and write a Jewish territory, a practice inherent in the etymology of the word geography. As Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Gerard Toal maintain in their discussion of geopolitics, or the relationship between geographical forms and political structures, geography signifies “a geo-graphing, a form of ‘[re]writing the earth’ that necessarily involves culture, discourse and power/knowledge,” a spatial politics widely practiced by the Jewish community to resist dispersal and gain legitimacy.51 In “Alienation in Old Places, Creation of New Spaces: the Role of Digital Media in Socializing, Learning and Protest in Tunisia,” Karim

12

Introduction

Hamdy underlines the role of young Tunisian activists not only in toppling the Tunisian totalitarian Ben Ali regime in January 2011, but also in revolutionizing the strategies of protest and the spirit of rebellion. By displacing the revolution from the political arena to the virtual world of the internet, tech-savvy Tunisian youth moved beyond the alienation and fear characterizing “old places,” i.e. familiar meeting spaces to which the government was extending its panoptical gaze, to create their own venues for transgressive political thinking and expression. In this chapter, Hamdy also highlights the role of digital media in triggering and transforming the notion of political activism, countering the mass of online censorship that the agonizing government launched on the digital media in the last months of 2010, and kindling the flame of protest throughout the country. Citing famous Tunisian blogger Slim Amamou’s use of foursquare social network to tell the world where the police had taken him, Hamdy points out the government’s failure to control unseen and uncontainable spaces of transgression fashioned by angry youth. In his reflection on place as a tool of resistance, Tim Cresswell argues that spatial transgression operates through anachorism, i.e. spatial displacement.52 Through online activism, Tunisian youth have in fact displaced resistance from the public to the virtual sphere, a transgression that the government’s old and anachronistic strategies could not grasp or handle. In “Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization: Remapping the Masjid in the Wake of the Tunisian Revolution,” Fatima Radhouani explores the changing role of the religious space of the Masjid amidst the political turmoil and strife that characterized post-revolutionary Tunisia. The article is a reflection on the changing Tunisian geopolitical landscape as well as the ascending religious radicalism and competition for religious-cum-political authority that the Tunisian mosque has witnessed. The paper starts with a detailed survey of the mosque’s orthodox functions and its significance in Muslims’ spiritual and social lives. The role of the masjidian institution is highlighted through a geocritical reading of this holy space which brings to the fore its specific spatial arrangement and the way its architectural features corroborate its sacred character. Radhouani also points out how, in the times of Prophet Muhammad, the mosque has come to symbolize governmental authority and sovereignty, which probably represents the very reason why this religious institution has been exploited for political purposes in postrevolutionary Tunisia. Rather than maintaining its significance as a place of worship and religious instruction, the mosque has been divested of its sacred character and involved in Salafists’ “ideological struggle” to “shape a new Islamic identity after half a century of state-imposed secularism.”53

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

13

Through her analysis of the different stages of this struggle and the mosque’s oscillation between pious and secular purposes, Radhouani highlights the fact that religious space is never neutral. Tracing the displacement of political struggle from the public square to the mosque’s central court and pulpit, this study ultimately reveals that the Tunisian masjid is, to use Lefebvre’s spatial dialectics, “not removed [détourné] from ideology or politics;” as “it has always been political and strategic.”54 In “Islmamism, Islamophobia and Shrinking Spaces in the Age of Inhumanity,” Haideh Moghissi draws on Eric Hobsbawn’s depiction of the Short Twentieth Century as the “age of extremes”55 to demonstrate how the Twenty First Century turns to be an age of “barbarity” and chaos.56 Adopting a socio-political approach, Moghissi maps a current international situation marked by catastrophes, from civil wars to devastation of states in the wake of the Arab “Revolutions,” from atrocities committed by ISIS to massive flight of refugees to different destinations, and from the corruption of authoritarian regimes to the rip off of wretched peoples in the context of a global economy. Referring to the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror launched by George W. Bush, Moghissi examines the situation of “subaltern groups,” Muslims living in the West who have been stigmatised and demonised because of their religious affiliation. Moghissi argues that these “subordinated social groups” living in diaspora need a “subaltern counter public,” a “discursive” space where they can fashion and “circulate counter-discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs”57 against the persecuting and accusing media, political, and public discourses prevailing in the West. Here she gives the examples of how Muslim communities in the USA, Canada, the UK and other European countries have been a target of investigation, detention, deportation and striking violation of human rights, which puts into question the celebrated national narratives of western democracies about human rights, and respect for civil liberties. Elaborating on the issue of ethics and international relations, Moghissi pinpoints that the meddling of Western powers with Middle Eastern and North African affairs in the name of democratisation and the propagation of peace has caused the emergence of terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e Islam, ISIS, Alshabab, and Buko Haram. Moghissi also takes on board the issue of foreign fighters, which has affected both Western and Muslim countries. She discusses the main causes that have led to the radicalization of Muslim youth in the Arab world and the West. Drawing on a sociological research she conducted in Canada, Moghissi argues that the alienation and sense of frustration that has led to the rise of Islamism as the mightiest force in the MENA region cannot be explained only in

14

Introduction

socio-economic terms. Researchers need to look to other political and psychological factors that may assist in better understanding the appeal of the long distance nationalism of Muslims. Space has been shrinking for young people who felt upset by the intervention of western powers in different parts of the Muslim world: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, not to mention the atrocities committed by the Israelis in Gaza. The young people who move away from their parents’ peaceful homes in Canada, France, Sweden and other European countries, and end up in the Middle East, North African and South Asian battlegrounds are in search of a space to raise their voices through religious ideology, an “ideology of resistance.” Moghissi ends her article with an ethical note. The criticism of stereotypical images of Islam and Muslims does not require refraining from denouncing the inhumane and despicable violence committed in the region and beyond in the name of defending cultural authenticity or religious values. The chapter titled “‘Travelling Cultures:’ Towards an Anthropological Reading of Travel, Space and Culture in Paul Bowles’s Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands are Blue” discusses Paul Bowles’s intricate relationship and life-long experience with Moroccan space as well as his peculiar rendering of this Oriental space with its cultural and ethnographic specificities. Adopting a cultural studies approach, the study explores Bowles’s aesthetic, psychological, and ideological rendering of the Moroccan city while also underlining his specific practical and pragmatic apprehension of this space from the perspective of the traveller-cum composer-cum-ethnographer. Dwelling on Bowles’s early ethnographic encounter with Moroccan space, more specifically the city of Tangier, the study reveals how Bowles’s literary “geo-graphing”58 of this setting creates an imagined topography of the land, where the kingdom of the senses can enjoy and appropriate this space, its tales, its flavour, and its fragrances. Later in his life, Bowles’s fascination with Moroccan culture develops into a quest for collecting and marketing Moroccan folklore and popular music, an ethnomusicological tendency that betrays his pragmatic and individualistic longing for the possession and “appropriation” of the “Other” and his heritage. Beyond Bowles’s Orientalist rendering of Moroccan space and his heavy ethnotyping59 of Moroccan folklore and Moroccan people, however, the study ultimately reveals that Bowles’s life-long pilgrimage in Morocco has paradoxically cast him as an “expatriate manqué,”60 an alienated and decentred subject. Abhorring his home country and unable to integrate in a culture that had always charmed him, Bowles always remained an “invisible spectator”61 of Moroccan

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

15

culture, and a permanent exile who transforms intense psychic states into intricate literary landscapes. In her chapter, “Transnational Spaces, Metanarratives, and Identities on the Move in Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life,” Sihem Arfaoui adopts a postmodern and transnational reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s poetry memoir Broad Margin, which traces her journeys across geographical, discursive, cultural and literary spaces while revealing the poet’s persistent concern with metanarratives and moving identities. Arfaoui’s postmodernist reading of Kingston’s memoir also invites a reflection on traditional notions of home and nation that move beyond static formulations and conceptions, revealing, as Bruce P. Janz argues, that “home cannot be rendered as either a nostalgic source or an eschatological or utopian finality” and that the postmodern subject is a homo viator.62 Drawing on Gille Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of deterritorialization, Arfaoui underlines the imagery of fluidity Kingston’s verse emphasizes, as well as the poet’s mapping of different routes and itineraries for her characters. Kingston’s transnational envisioning of a broad margin that accounts for her “transmigrant”63 narrators and characters’ transgeneric crossings as well as their spatial and mental movements invites a rethinking of the role of identity and narrative as the basic premises of autobiographical writing. Rather than binding identity to a specific spatial location or a specific literary genre, her re-visioning of life writing in a transnational context “posits identity as a process of multiplicity informed by multiple nodes and roots of different cultural encounters that the present still interlaces together.”64 This reading of identity, Arfaoui concludes, allows Kingston’s readers and reviewers to construe the “fluid experiences” of her pilgrim characters “in ways that challenge our previous conflation” of both narratological and “geographic space[s]” with “social identity,”65 thereby thoroughly destabilizing conventional migrant narratives and rethinking identity politics in terms of flux and mobility rather than rootedness and stability. In her paper, “The Art of Juxtaposition: Arab American Writing and Cultural Code-Switching,” Laura Rice discusses the challenges of writing in a transnational context for Arab American writers. In a hybrid postmodern literary space, Rice points out how the Arab American writer becomes a translator who merges his native culture with American culture, who thinks in Arabic and writes in English. Rice notes how these challenges exhibit themselves on three distinct but interconnected levels: cultural identity, language, and literary practice. Focusing on the work of Libyan-American poet Khaled Mattawa, Rice notes how, despite their

16

Introduction

struggle for positioning within mainstream American culture, Arab American writers were able to create a space for literary and cultural expression. To achieve this aim, they have developed a highly effective poetics of juxtaposition which, placing one cultural identity next to another, one language next to another, one literary practice next to another, opens an expressive space of unexpected connections and disruptions. Through this cultural and literary poetics, Arab American writers have not only earned their position within mainstream American literature, but have also created a thirdspace, which is, in Soja’s geocritical terms, “multi-sided and contradictory, oppressive and liberating, passionate and routine, knowable and unknowable.” It is multisided, since these writers create a discursive arena that embraces the multicultural, the dialogic, and the multi-ethnic. It is also “oppressive and liberating,” since they negotiate and challenge the space of the West as a centre through bringing in “a new centre.”66 Indeed, these writings operate in a space “where il y a toujours l’Autre,”67 i.e. that other world, those other people, and that other culture. In this space, “the value of human life that authors affirm through their compassionate attention to particular people and events” serves to oppose “those whose actions express a contempt for life equal to their capacity to destroy it.”68 Arab American writers thus write in a liminal space that cannot be “captured in conventional cartographies,” but can only “be creatively imagined… and fully lived.” Arab American writers thus negotiate their identity in “a space of radical openness, a site of resistance and struggle, a space of multiplicitous representations” and juxtapositions. Through a conscious blend of genres, discourses, historical images, literary and non-literary voices, their poetry maps “other” geographies “where ties can be severed and also where new ties can be forged.”69 Torn between the frustration felt at being marginalized by the majority, and the danger of internalizing their own marginalization, they create spaces that reveal how our own humanity depends so much on our ability to identify with and embrace the other. The chapter titled “On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: Spatialising Gender and Haremising Home in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup” is a geocritical reflection on Gordimer’s 2002 novel The Pickup which eschews the (post)colonial framework within which critics have confined it. The analysis dwells on Gordimer’s ambivalence between thorough debunking of Orientalist stereotypes through her envisioning of a romantic relationship between two lovers from disparate cultures, namely illegal Arab immigrant Ibrahim and South African aristocrat Julie, and reinscription of the same stereotypes through her Orientalist rendering of Ibrahim’s native country and family. This chapter highlights Gordimer’s

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

17

heavy stereotyping of the Orient, namely though her portrayal of Oriental women and the Oriental landscape. To a great extent, Gordimer’s representation of the Orient betrays her equation of Arab women with silence, backwardness, and ignorance, thereby dismissing more relevant features of the Oriental identity and producing a disparaging picture of Arab women who act as foils to Western women. Such a negative portrayal is also evidenced at the spatial level, namely in the containment of Arab women’s potential and achievements within the home, an envisioned “harem” that has always pricked the Western imagination. Gordimer’s imagined female community is thus constructed as powerless, silent, and utterly dominated by an excessive Arab patriarchy. Gordimer’s representation of Oriental women as a “haremised”70 community, rather than destabilizing Orientalist myths, paradoxically revalidates them. It is worth noting that the topos of the harem extends well beyond spatial boundaries as it becomes visible in representations of women outside domestic space. Pointing out Gordimer’s recurrent reference to Arab women who are denied visibility under their black veils, the analysis not only draws attention to her “haremisation” of Arab women through her protagonist’s patronising gaze, but also points out how this vision robs the veil of its religious and cultural symbolism, equating it with invisibility, enclosure and exoticism. Here Gordimer’s perspective is informed by the trialectics of harem (home), hijab (veil), and desert, which not only fixes Arab womanhood to a pre-historic state, but also divests the Oriental world of its cultural, religious and socio-historical complexities. Gordimer’s romancing of the Orient is finally embodied in her depiction of the oriental desert as anachronistic, existing outside of time and space and thus subject to her character’s fantasies. As the Orient’s aesthetic, cultural and geographical markers get completely wiped out, Gordimer’s narrative ultimately reveals how the dynamics of “[pseudo]-realist mystification go hand-in-hand with those of Orientalist mystification.”71

Notes 1

Steven Flusty, “Postmodernism,” in Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts, eds. David Atkinson et al. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 169. 2 David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 135. 3 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 84.

18 4

Introduction

David Atkinson et al., “Editors’ Preface: On Cultural and Critical Geographies,” in Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts, eds. David Atkinson et al. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), xv. 5 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22. 6 Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “space,” accessed January 22, 2017, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/space. 7 Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “place,” accessed January 22, 2017, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/place. 8 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 1. 9 Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013), 28. 10 Ibid., 33. 11 Walter Brueggemann. The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 5. 12 David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism, 174. 13 Mark Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 77. 14 Ibid., 78. 15 Ibid. 16 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 54. 17 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 11. 18 Pierre Nora, “Preface to the English Language Edition,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xvii. 19 Ibid., xiv. 20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108. 21 Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (spring 1989): 11. 22 Jonathan Boyarin, “Space, Time, and the Politics of Memory,” in Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, ed. Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 12. 23 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 4. 24 Ibid., 11. 25 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 31. 26 Ibid., 11-12. 27 Ibid., 85. 28 Henri Lefebvre, State, Space World. Eds. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Trans. Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 170-171. 29 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 85. 30 Harvey, Cosmopolitanism, 135. 31 Tim Cresswell, Place, A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 37. 32 Ibid.

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics 33

19

Ibid., 53 Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 77. 35 Foucault, Of Other Spaces,” 23. Foucault explains the notion of heterogeneous space, which he names the heterotopia, in the following terms: “The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs… is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things … [W]e live inside a set of relations that delineates sites, which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.” These opposed sites, which he calls utopias and heterotopias, recall Deleuze’s opposition of homogenous or “striated space,” i.e. “sedentary space… the space instituted by the State apparatus,” to heterogeneous or “smooth space,” “an amorphous, nonformal space” endowed with a “great power of deterritorialization.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474, 477. 36 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Cambridge, Massachussets: Blackwell, 1996), 10. 37 Ibid., 276. 38 Jonathan Boyarin, “Space, Time, and the Politics of Memory,” 11. 39 Steven Flusty, “Postmodernism,” 171. 40 Robert Tally, “Geocriticism: Mapping the Spaces of Literature,” L’Esprit Créateur: The International Quarterly of French and Francophone Studies 49, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 134. 41 Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism, Real and Fictional Spaces (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 139. 42 Saskia Sassen, “Deciphering the Global,” in Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, ed. Saskia Sassen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 6. 43 Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism, 12. 44 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 13. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Taras Kuzio, Ukraine State and Nation Building (London: Routledge, 1998), 151. 48 David Delaney, Territory: a Short Introduction (MA, Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 18. 49 Ibid., 57. 50 Walter Brueggemann. The Land, 5. 51 Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Gerard Toal, “Geopolitics,” in Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts, eds. David Atkinson et al. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 65. 52 Tim Cresswell, Place, A Short Introduction, 103. 34

20 53

Introduction

Haim Malka, “Tunisia: Confronting Extremism,” in Religious Radicalism after the Arab Uprisings, ed. Jon B. Alterman (MD, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 111. 54 Henri Lefebvre, State, Space World, 170. 55 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, (London: Abacus, 1995). 56 Eric Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: a User Guide,” New Left Review, 206 (JulyAugust 1994): 45. 57 Nancy Fraser, “Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Toward a Postmodern Conception,” in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, eds. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 291. 58 Gearóid Ó Tuathail and Gerard Toal, “Geopolitics,” 65. 59 Closely associated with ethnocentrism, ethnotyping is defined as “the stereotypical representation of people categorized according to a series of xenotypes, cast in bronze for all time.” Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism, Real and Fictional Spaces (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 144. 60 Steven E. Olsen, “Alien Terrain: Paul Bowles’s Filial Landscapes” Twentieth Century Literature 32, no. 3/4, (1986): 336. 61 Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Weidenfeld, 1989. 62 Bruce B. Janz, “The Territory Is Not the Map: Place, Deleuze and Guattari, and African Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 45, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 398. 63 Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc use the term “transmigrants” to refer to immigrants “who develop and maintain multiple relationships—familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political— that span borders.” Basch et al. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States, (London: Routledge, 1994), 8. 64 Kathy-Ann Tan, “‘All the difficult Names of Who We Are:’ Transnational Identity Politics in Chang-Rae Lee’s and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Fiction,” in A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity, eds. Silvia Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu (Krotenthallergasse: Lit Verlag, 2010), 113. 65 Basch et al. Nations Unbound, 8. 66 David Williams, “This Hyphen Called My Spinal Cord: Arab-American Literature at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” World Literature Today 81, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb. 2007): 55. 67 Soja, Thirdspace, 276. 68 Williams, “This Hyphen,” 55. 69 Soja, Thirdspace, 276. 70 Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London: Tauris, 2004), 182. 71 Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society (New York: Harper Row, 1989), 37.

PART I: IMAGINATIVE TOPOGRAPHY AND IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

CHAPTER ONE UKRAINE, A TERRITORY IN A NEWLY POST-COLONIAL SPACE MARILISA LORUSSO

Casus Belli, or Casus de Bello A political crisis, an issue of foreign policy which reverberated at domestic level, a spiralled up distrust towards the president, a second revolution: all this would have fit the description of the situation in Ukraine in late 2013, early 2014. All but a war. In two weeks, the theatre was to change dramatically and substantially, and the essence of the crisis shifted from an issue of democracy and reforms to one of hard security and territorial integrity. This shift took shape between the end of February and early March: on the 13th February 2014, President Viktor Yanukovych fled the capital, Kyiv. In November 2013, he triggered a series of protests after having refused, without publicly debating the decision, to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. The protests that followed were then dubbed Euromaidan and collected a motley group of protests. Mismanagement, poor respect of basic civil and political rights, disproportionate use of force, intimidation, violence, abductions, and all the worst possible portfolio of police brutality had contributed to turn a peaceful—and dwindling—protest into quite a mass movement, whose agenda in the end was no longer compatible with a presidency held by Viktor Yanukovych. He proved himself incapable of holding the position by fleeing the capital and crossing the border with the Russian Federation. The following presidential impeachment voted by the Verkhovna Rada1 was not fully consistent with the constitutional provision of article 111 but,2 as some experts sarcastically noted at the time, no Constitution foresees that the president escapes to another country and still assumes to be the legitimate head of state.

Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly Post-Colonial Space

23

On the 26th of February, the so called “little green men” appeared in Crimea. According to Russian media the well-equipped and apparently well trained fighters that materialised on the territory of the peninsula occupying strategic targets were self-defence forces. Their purpose was to resist the Nazi-junta that had allegedly illegally ousted the legitimate president Yanukovych, albeit they did not seem too eager to bring him back to power. On the 27th of February, the Parliament was seized, and a referendum was called for the 31st of March, later to be anticipated to the 16th of March. The referendum, which was meant to change the national border of Ukraine either through annexation of Crimea to Russia or through its secession from Ukraine, was held just locally3 and voters expressed the will to join the Russian Federation (95%). Not all Crimeans cast their ballots: Ukrainians and Tatars, the titular minority, i.e. the only one recognized as an indigenous minority in the peninsula, did not take part in the vote. The result of the referendum was deemed invalid by a United Nation General Assembly Resolution.4 Since annexation, Russia is under a regime of sanction. A large part of the international community consider the Russian government responsible for breaching the territorial integrity of Ukraine, violating the relevant bilateral and multilateral agreements signed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, fomenting the internal turmoil, and interfering into the domestic political life of Ukraine. On 17 April 2014, Putin acknowledged that the unmarked troops in Crimea were Russian but denied that separatists in eastern areas were. Fights and sovereignty crisis spread to Eastern Ukrainian inland, the so called Donbas where two self-proclaimed republics were declared and at the moment of writing are still engaged in fights with the central authorities.

A Post-Colonial Relation In the clear evidence of the presence of the Russian army and of the involvement of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, the key question is what brought the Russians there. Officially, Russia felt compelled to interfere to prevent the genocide of Russian nationals under a Nazi-junta who ousted the legitimate president. In fact, when the little green men appeared in Crimea, not a single citizen had been touched. There were no signs of violence and, albeit present in full strength on the territory of the peninsula and able to evacuate the local population, the Russian army did not help locals to leave the area because of security concerns, as it has happened lately in Donbas, after the proclamation of independence and the outburst of armed confrontations. It should be recalled that the Russian

24

Chapter One

army was permanently based in Crimea, where the Russian government rented the naval base of Sebastopol’ with a contract meant to last until 2047. Therefore, in case of real threat, even a considerable number of Russian nationals would not be too difficult to evacuate via sea. The only threat was a draft law on language, which never entered into force. The reason why Russia moved into Ukraine seems to stem from an issue of foreign policy, misperceived as a matter of Russian domestic security. The Association’s Agreement with the European Union would have prevented Ukraine from joining the Eurasian Union, a newly founded, Moscow-led international organization, which is meant to be the East European parallel to the EU. So far, the Eurasian Union has four members: Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus’ and Armenia. Moscow is particularly keen on having Ukraine as a member, and it cannot accept that the country aims at any reinforced partnership other than the one with Moscow. And here lays the post-colonial aspect of the issue. Moscow has simply never come to terms with the fact that the relation with the other post-Soviet states should be based on the concept of equal sovereignty and statehood. It simply seems to accept their existence as independent states as a necessary pain, and just as long as they preserve a pro-Moscow policy. Any decision which veers them from Russian orbit is perceived not as matter of foreign policy, but as a direct attack on Russian essence, which probably still needs to be defined within the borders of a single nation-state, independently from the previous, enlarged empire. The psychological discontinuity, the line between the idea of Empire and Russian national identity is still blurred, as if Russia was designated to be an empire to be truly Russian, and the country is accepting to be a nationstate as a temporary condition and for a transitional period. In the case of Ukraine the issue is even more complex than for other post-Soviet states. In fact, some post-Soviet states were fully developed nation-states, or had a strong perception of their national identity before being integrated into the Soviet Union. Such is the case of the Baltic States, Armenia and Georgia. Others have now identity markers that definitely single them out from a Russian identity, like Muslim countries from the Caucasus to Central Asia. In contrast, Ukraine shares with Russia the same religion and, particularly eastern regions, a common history. To quote an excellent analysis of the Russian-Ukrainian colonial relations by Taras Kuzio: Colonial rule usually brings with it negative self-images which developed and were internalised over time. This ‘collective shadow’, in Carl G. Jung’s words, leads to a perception that the metropolitan power is superior in language, culture, achievements and in other areas. A nation’s own

Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly Post-Colonial Space

25

negative qualities cannot be turned against the oppressor; instead they are turned against oneself… This, in Ukraine’s case, led to a significant portion of the population rejecting its own traditions while adopting ‘the beliefs, attitudes and values of the oppressor’. Ukrainians became instrumental in the destruction of their own culture and language, which led to passivity and a dependency syndrome … Ukrainians were constantly told that they had never wanted to exist as an independent state—but only in union with the eastern Slavs under Moscow’s benevolent leadership. Ukrainians were therefore an ‘unhistoric nation’ whose language and culture had no future perspective… Western Ukrainians were depicted collectively as ‘zapadentsi’ (‘Westerners’), German-fascist collaborators’ or ‘banderovtsi’.5

In Eastern Ukraine, the long way of colonial assimilation still brings its fruits in terms of mixed identities and confused loyalties. In the last twenty years, Ukrainian poor nation building, state building and state capacity did not enable the newly independent state to put sound bases for an accommodation of cultural diversities that could have made now the eastern area (and some Ukrainian cadres) less permeable to provocations and infiltrations.

Post-Colonial Nationalism in Ukraine: Political Space and Territorial Place In his investigation of the ideology of nationalism, Lyman Tower Sargent wraps up the following indicators: 1. National consciousness or awareness of oneself as part of a group 2. National identity or identification with the group 3. Geographical identification or identification with a place… 4. Patriotism or love of the group 6 5. Demands for action to enhance the group

These indicators can be used to shortly analyse Ukrainian nationalism and contextualize it within the framework of a post-colonial phase.

National Consciousness or Awareness of Oneself as Part of a Group Ukrainian national consciousness is unevenly spread over the territory. Western Ukraine was annexed to become a consistent part of present day Ukraine after World War II, and had been historically part of central

26

Chapter One

European modern states. This enabled local citizens to develop a mature national consciousness, which was expressed in literature and in the intellectual life of big cities and which represents the backbone of Ukrainian national identity. On the other end, the Eastern regions were subject for a longer time to the Empire. They share with Russia two centuries of history during which Ukrainian national identity was indissociable from the Russian one, and was conceived of as a matter of national folklore rather than the component of a potential nation-state. In the end, it should be recalled that the semantic origin of the word nationalism is nation. Not all nations become autonomous political entities (e.g. constituent parts of federations) or fully-fledged independent states. Ukraine on the whole gained its independence upon the collapse of the Soviet Union. A complicated, articulated and unitary national consciousness had to replace an integrated system of multi-loyalties—to the national group, to the Soviet identity—in a transition that was economic, cultural, and political. Ukraine, like many post-Soviet states, underwent a multiple revolution, to a new identity, to the market economy, to a tentative democratic system and to a newly independent state, all in one. Elements of this transition flew into the refreshed Ukrainian identity, like democracy and human rights, which had been a consistent part of the XXI century Ukrainian identity and that—from independence to the Orange Revolution, from the Orange Revolution to Euromaidan—seem to become less and less negotiable.

National Identity or Identification with the Group Many identity markers can shape a nation. One of them is the language. Not by chance, the fomented unrest in Eastern Ukraine stemmed out of a new draft law on languages. Russian was very spread all over the territory of Ukraine, and it is a language still used among post-Soviet states, somehow still an international language. The amount of publications in Russian outnumbers the ones in Ukrainian, definitely. Therefore, the number of Russian sources in terms of books, media outlets, and websites in Russian are extremely reachable in Ukraine. Russian schools overrepresented the quantity of Russian speakers in Ukraine, as the permanent economic crisis which Ukraine faced after independence never enabled the governments to fully implement a consistent program of retraining and cultural conversion of the scholastic system from the Soviet time. This implies that bilinguals found their place in the cultural space of independent Ukraine. Until recent events, the linguistic cleavage did not determine a political one. Speakers of different languages shared the same

Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly Post-Colonial Space

27

loyalties, and although this fact has been challenged in the international arena through a massive media manipulation that describes a country divided along linguistic lines, this is an oversimplification. For two decades, the absolute majority of Russian-speaking Ukrainians had no specific political connotation. Due to the current Russian military intrusion in Ukraine, the situation is clearly changing, thereby urging people to make choices between two cultures that were not perceived incompatible a few months ago. As national culture is an ongoing process of mediation between past and present, it is evident that the national culture of Ukraine is undergoing a process of re-definition of loyalties. It is thus likely that the Ukrainian language will gain more ground as a national marker and that the Ukrainization of national culture will be more promoted than in the past. War as well is becoming a more relevant marker of Ukrainian identity. A national war fought for independence—to gain or to preserve it from the former colonizer—transforms the conflict from an instrumental into an expressive, emotional activity. In fact, the war itself becomes the confirmation of a pledge, a promise of loyalty. The nation is built on shared memories of joy and suffering, and, above all, of collective sacrifices. Battles, defeats no less than victories, mobilize and unify ethnicities and nations. The current conflict, while economically destabilizing the country, is consolidating and invigorating the perception of Ukrainian national identity as well distinguished from the Russian one, and the cohort of youngsters fighting now on the Ukrainian eastern front will definitely have a more concrete and sound awareness of the uniqueness of their postSoviet experience separated from the Russian one.

Geographical Identification Another national indicator vested with symbolic significance is boundaries. Boundaries and their maintenance are central to the concept of nation and hold a sway in the nationalistic imagination. Borders represent the legal extension of sovereignty, and as such, the legitimate definition of where the state lies. In the specific case of post-Soviet states, former constituents’ borders are a thorny issue. The Russian Federation has unsolved border disputes virtually all along its perimeter, and some of them are with constituent republics of the former Union.7 Through border demarcation, the newly independent post-Soviet states managed to preserve their existence as separate political entities in the aftermath of the collapse of the Union. The big challenge was to manage the process of demarcation pacifically and through negotiation, a long process that

28

Chapter One

worked quite successfully until 2008, when Russia first challenged the post-Soviet national borders of Georgia, thus recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two Georgian breakaway regions. With Ukraine, the issue of territorial water is still open. A treaty on the demarcation of the common border between the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia, signed on 17th May 2010 and enforced on 29th July of the same year, eventually defined land borders (length of 2,295.04 kilometres). Yet the process has been significantly halted by the ongoing military confrontation. Russia annexed Crimea and Russian authorities support the rebels of the de facto independent political entities in Donbas—the so called Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic—within the internationally recognized Ukrainian territory. International observers noted an almost constant flow of armed men, weapons and material crossing from Russia into separatist-controlled areas of Ukraine, unregistered and unauthorized. These national security threats, coupled with the permanent state of war, made the protection of the national territory and the awareness of the relevance of border security even more salient and fraught with psychological and cultural meanings. Ukrainians today have a dearer picture of their country as they saw it represented in maps, with the border running from Kharkhiv to Mariupol and from Mariupol down south, to the Crimean peninsula, that is to say, with the north-west coast of the Azov sea, to the Russian border of Rostovna-Donu, being Ukrainian. War is exacerbating the need to preserve this image and borders, which no longer represent administration lines, are becoming the real strongholds of existence.

Patriotism or Love of the Group How does a group become aware of itself, how is it induced to develop full consciousness and affection towards itself? Memories and myths are essential parts of this process and necessary components of nation building. Writing about the historical colonial heritage of Ukraine, Taras Kuzio notes: Historical memory is a central component of national identity. … [It] could be in the form of popular myths, self-images and ethnic stereotypes where they profoundly affect how we perceive the outside world. Collective memories and myths and a shared history are essential to unite a heterogeneous populace into a united polity and nation. Otherwise the sense of being one whole united in a political community is absent. … The erasure of a nation’s historical memory is tantamount to “intellectual colonisation.” Tsarina Catherine provided instructions in 1764

Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly Post-Colonial Space

29

to her Attorney-General that “When the hetmans are gone from Little Russia every effort should be made to eradicate from memory the period and the hetmans.” These instructions were on the whole implemented by both the Tsarist and Soviet leaders who followed her. Consequently, historical memory plays a central role in the state and nation building project. ‘In other words, it is not only a problem of “where we are going?” which is not resolved, but also “from where?”’8

In the final part of the quotation, two words are of particular significance: Little Russia and the Hetmans. Little Russia (Ɇɚɥɨɪɨɫɫɢɹ/Malorossija) was used in Tsarist time at the time of the conquest of what is today a part of Ukraine. The term refers to a territory of former Cossack Hetmanate after its annexation by Moscow and the transformation of the Cossack Hetmanate into the Little Russia Governorate in 1764. With time, it developed into a political and geographical term in the Russian language referring to most of the territory of modern-day Ukraine before the twentieth century. Accordingly, derivatives such as “Little Russian” (ɦɚɥɨɪɨɫɫɤɢɣ/malorusskij) commonly applied to the people, language, and culture of the area. The term has turned to be derogatory nowadays, as it suggests that Ukraine cannot exist but as a minor branch of the Russian culture and state. The idea that Ukrainians are the younger brother of a mighty, Imperial Russia, and thus unable to decide for their own future, is still cultivated in some Russian nationalistic groups, and holds its sway on the national political level. According to this view, Ukrainians would aspire to become a member of NATO or of the European Union just because they are victims of an anti-Russian conspiracy, brainwashed, or outright fascists. The fact that in the self-definition of Ukrainian national identity its linkage to the Western world or values might have a conceptual continuity with the local culture is unconceivable. And here a historical memory is totally neglected, a myth that plays its role in connecting Ukraine with polities such as republican democracies: the Hetmanate. The Hetmanate was a unique political experiment in the Slavic world, a republic of Cossacks. The world Hetman—which means commander-inchief—is a world that the Cossacks borrowed from the Poles, who in turn took it from the Germans by slavicizing the term Hauptmann.9 The Hetman state or Hetmanate existed from 1648 to 1782. It came into existence as a result of the Cossack-Polish War and the alliance of the registered Cossacks with the Cossacks of the ZaporozhianSich and other segments of the Ukrainian populace.10 The Republic in the mid-1750s extended from Starodub to Poltava, including Cherkhihiv, Nizhyn Kyiv Pryluky, Pereyaslav, Lubny, Hadiach, Pryluky, Myrhorod, that is to say nowadays Central Ukraine which stretches from the Desna River to the

30

Chapter One

area of Zaparozhia (another region traditionally inhabited by Cossacks), and the piece of land in between the Capital and Kharkhiv. The Hetman state exhibited elements of both republican and monarchic types of government. The General Military Council was the institution of direct government in the 17th century and represented in theory the supreme will of the dominant social group, the Cossacks. The hetman was the head of state, commander in chief of the Cossack army, and head of the entire administrative, judicial, and military apparatus. The office of hetman was finally abolished by the Russian government in 1764, and his functions were assumed by the Little Russian Collegium. Approximately one hundred years before, the treaty of Pereyaslav (1654) between the Hetmanate and the Russian Empire had led the former to become a protectorate of the Muscovite tsar, thenceforth also the “tsar of Little Russia.” To mark the 300 jubilee of the signature of the treaty in 1954, Crimea was passed from the administration of Moscow to that of Kyiv. In 2014, Moscow declared legitimate to reverse this decision in the name of the protection of the Russian interests and population based in Crimea. To the international public opinion, it sounded quiet weird that a piece of land was given as a present, and this somehow helped to justify the Russian claim. But some aspects should be taken into consideration. In Soviet times, such a transition of lands from one federate republic to another was not so uncommon. Entire republics were scrubbed out of other ones, like Belarus’ or Tajikistan, which are totally made up of pieces of lands of previous Tsarist Governorates that had been turned into Republics, or of other Soviet Republics that had been reshaped. Drawing new national borders, removing or adding territorial units according to the central administrative needs is a typical behaviour of colonizing powers. The same can be said for changing the demographic balance of the population in order to create a form of social cohesion more consistent with the central power’s needs. This is exactly the case of Crimea: the peninsula added to Ukraine in 1954 was no longer the Tatar stronghold of the past: the only recognized local population or indigenous group, the Tatars, suffered a massive deportation and were largely replaced by Russian settlers. In a word, it is quite difficult in an area of intensive colonization, like Crimea, to legitimate present day claims of territorialisation of identities based on historical memories, as whose memories should be taken into consideration significantly depends on the century used as a benchmark.

Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly Post-Colonial Space

31

Demands for Action to Enhance the Group Ukraine is a multinational state of approximately 100 ethnic groups, some of which are quite small in number. The biggest national minority consists of 12 million Russians (about 22% of the total population), just as Ukrainians are the biggest national minority in Russia. Russians are largely concentrated in eastern-southern Ukraine, where they do not constitute a majority in any region except in Crimea. This exception has been recognised by the granting of political autonomy to the Crimean peninsula. This was at least the picture before the war. The ongoing conflict is having severe repercussions on the distribution of the population, and the displacements might have grave consequence in terms of demographic unbalance. Ukrainians, Russians, Russian speaking Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews and other minorities are fleeing the regions of the conflict. Some of them are not allowed to take part in the political events taking place in their area of origin, such as Crimean Tatars who refused and sometimes were prevented from voting at the referendum about the future status of Crimea. It is extremely difficult now to understand how post-war Ukraine will look like, how national cohesion will be built and how inter-ethnic cohabitation will be insured. Before the war, Ukraine, albeit multinational, did not represent any threat of inter-ethnic conflicts. Ethnic-based personal assaults were very rare and not alarming. Now the situation has significantly deteriorated due to the conflict and the consequent emergence of new actors in the political scene. With the soaring nationalism and the role played by radical groups all over the territory, inter-ethnic relations are more strained in the area annexed to Russia, in those under the control of pro-Russian secessionist entities and in the areas under the control of Kyiv. Moscow puts pressure on Ukraine to turn into a federation, allegedly to protect the interests of Russian-speakers. The request has been met coldly. In the XX century in the East bloc, there were three federal communist states: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. None of them survived until the present day. The USSR and Czechoslovakia disintegrated far less dramatically than Yugoslavia. Yet federalism does not sound too palatable among postcommunist states, especially as there are in the international community quite successful stories of nation-states that coped quite well with the issue of national minorities without the need to turn into a federation. In Italy, for instance, specific linguistic communities are recognised as having an autonomous status within the national, unitary State. The Council of Europe Convention for the protection of national minorities dictates specific provisions, and Ukraine is party to the Convention.

32

Chapter One

Federations need to be sound democracies and no federal system seems to work in autocratic or semi-autocratic states. The reason is quite clear: a federal polity is based on the division of power, and no autocratic state can really create a power-share agreement on its territory. The Russian case is a good example: the Russian Federation is a centralized state with elements of devolution and autonomous administrative units, which are the tangible proof of the recognition of the expression of local, sub-national necessary sovereignties. But most reforms, especially in the last decade, make it definitely a federation sui generis. In his analysis of the roots of ethno-political conflicts and the specific features of political autonomy in post-Soviet states, Svante Cornell observes: With the institution of an autonomous status for a given region, the central government of a state acknowledges the devolution of a certain portion of its sovereignty to the representatives of the population of that region. In fact, the central government concedes that it does not have unlimited jurisdiction over the territory in question—herein lies the essence of autonomy. But at the same time, the central government insists on emphasizing the subordination of the autonomous region to itself and that the existence of the latter in no way contradicts its territorial integrity. Hence the relations between the two units can be described as diagonal; in fact an autonomous region can be conceived of as a state within a state, whether or not this circumstance be officially recognized by either party. Autonomous regions typically share some or most of attributes of states, given that they possess executive, legislative and judiciary bodies; they often have state-like symbols like flags, coats of arms, etc., and often have other state-like institutions like parliaments, ministries, and even presidencies. In fact, autonomies may share most attributes of a state but never, by definition, the main one that of being completely sovereign, not having any judicial authority above itself. An autonomous region may claim elements of sovereignty, but it is by definition a part of a sovereign state… There are two ways in which the institution of autonomous regions could be conceived of as conducive to secessionism: first of all by institutionalizing and promoting the separate identity of its titular group, thereby increasing group cohesion and the incentives of the group to act; and secondly by its political institutions that increase the capacity of the group to act.11

Cornell also adds six indicators that can lead to secession, once a form of autonomy is created. Some of them, such as borders and group identity, have already been discussed, while others deserve some additional information. State Institutions, for instance, can play a crucial role in the process of ethnic mobilization, in that they can be used by nationalist

Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly Post-Colonial Space

33

leaders to challenge the central state’s integrity. Locally rooted nationalism can become the ticket to power and the entirety of the bureaucracy could be enticed to follow suit and adopt a more nationalist profile for socioeconomic gains. Leadership, another key factor for secession, is institutionalised in a manner that the leadership of a regular popular national movement has a relatively solid base to stand on. A local, with a clear ethnic connotation, can easily become the focal point of breakaway ambitions, and channel them against the central government. This tendency is reinforced by Mass Media, which is capable of influencing the attitude of the population towards the central government using independent financial resources. Devolution of taxes and incomes can provide local communities with economic viability independently from the political centre. The last indicator that Cornell provides is external support. The very institution of autonomy entails that the state recognises the devolution of its sovereignty and the international political (and perhaps also legal) standing of an autonomous region. And the fact that it is recognizable and singled out from the national context may make it more easily attachable to a close by centripetal force. Local political players are galvanized by the confidence that recognition (by a neighbour country, by a regional power, by a global power) is ensured. Notwithstanding the position of their national central government, they would manage to gain a sort of international political legitimation, and are more prone to act against the central authority, if not to engage in an open—sometimes violent— confrontation. The last point seems to be salient in the case of Crimea and in the present situation in Eastern Ukraine, where local players can rely on the support, de facto recognition and legitimating measures of neighbouring Russia. For this reason, the proposal to solve the present crisis in Ukraine through a federalization of the country sounds as a poisoned fruit, which would possibly open the path to further fragmentation. Such fragmentation would not serve the cause of accommodating inter-ethnic cohabitation but would most probably erect another border and exacerbate inter-ethnic tensions on both sides of it, as Russians are the biggest majority in Ukraine just as Ukrainians are in Russia.

Conclusions Bolsheviks used to distinguish the idea of colonization into two different phenomena: Kolonizatija, which bears a negative connotation and, kolonizatorstvo, which bears a positive one. The first would refer to

34

Chapter One

the encroachment, occupation and exploitation of a territory, its inhabitants and resources by a colonizing capitalist imperialist power. The second would refer to the annexation/unification of a territory to the Soviet Union and the policy of enlightening the backward peripheries and organizing all the territories and economies of the union under the auspices of MarxismLeninism.12 As under Tsarist rule, Russia was allegedly endowed with a civilizing mission in its neighbourhood. Indeed, the expansion of the Russian state in the last four centuries presents some peculiarities: it is something in between the process of state building and enlargement and a quite unique case of colonialism in the context of territorial continuity. In fact, this sense of territorial continuity is so strong that it is still unclear where the borders of Russia are, where its periphery lies, what remains of the Empire, and which areas represent former colonies to which Russians have no claim. While pundits have stressed the analogies between the American conquests of the Wild West with the one of Siberia, it would be odd to hear an American expert question whether what used to be called the Wild West can be considered a consistent part of the United States. This is not so uncommon in Russia, where the idea of the Russian core is kept somehow separate from the Russian Federation as a whole. So it is definitely hard to recognize—perhaps for some Russians themselves—if there are internal borders and where the dividing lines between the homeland and the conquered territories are. While this issue may cause further turmoil and instability, Georgia and Ukraine set two precedents, proving the Russian conquest to be an act of colonization, albeit the toolkit from colonial studies is not systematically applied to post-Soviet states and colonialism as the theoretical framework is not often applied to the area. A more inclusive and ductile new strand of research in post-Soviet studies which would include and take advantage of the analytical indicators of post-colonial studies could prove quiet fruitful. Post-Soviet states, and Ukraine among them, renamed places, removed monuments (e.g. the statues of Lenin), rewrote their histories and promoted their indigenous culture, a pattern they share with most postcolonial states. These politics still cause an outcry in Russia. The removal of the statue of Lenin in Ukraine was taken as a hostile act against the Russian Federation. In fact, the Russian public opinion and ruling elite are not yet ready to face the consequences of de-colonization and enter in a post-colonial period when local languages, tradition and sovereignty enjoy the same dignity as the Russian one, and where relations among former members of the Soviet Union are based on equality. On the contrary, the present trend tries to reverse decolonization and control again those parts of the former USSR that were or are more affected by centrifugal tendencies.

Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly Post-Colonial Space

35

Kuzio compares the condition of Ukraine as a colony to that of Ireland: In Ireland, on the eve of the potato famine, (which suspiciously resembled the 1933 artificial famine in Ukraine that was also designed to break the back of a national identity)13 half the Irish population spoke Gaelic. Within less than a decade after the famine had taken its toll this figure had dropped by half. By the 1890s, the majority in Ireland spoke English. Both the Irish and Ukrainian languages became castigated as ‘inferior’ and ‘peasant’ languages spoken only by the poor. For many decades both prior to, and after independence, the English and Russians could not look upon Irish and Ukrainian separatism as serious entities (for how could ‘peasants’, after all, create modern nation-states?). In Eire and Ukraine local inhabitants with divided loyalties emerged (Anglo-Irish and Little Russians). Living between two worlds they could not be accepted by either, proud of both their Irish/Ukrainian and British/Russian roots. Therefore, in both Eire and Ukraine, independence was seen as an opportune time to reverse the previous policies of denationalisation undertaken by the former imperial metropolis.14

Decolonization is always a complex process, rarely not traumatic. Until 2008, the year of the Russian-Georgia war, the withdrawal of the former Russian Empire (of which the USSR was just the last expression in time order) from its former periphery or colonies was promisingly mediated, relatively peaceful and comparatively less tragic than expected in the very early 1990s. It is therefore both regrettable and alarming that a new surge of imperial ambitions urges now the Russian Federation to move new claims in the post-Soviet space. Ukraine is not indeed the only target of the current political communication, not to label it a blatant Kremlin mastered propaganda. The bitter aftertaste is that precious compromises are getting lost and the side effect is actually an acceleration of decolonization. Whereas Crimea might remain for years to come a constituent part of the Russian Federation, the rest—with possibly the exception of Donbas—of Ukraine is gone. A new cultural clash emerged between two demographically intertwined neighbour states that could have had perfectly compatible existences, prolific and mutually beneficial cultural and social exchanges. The Ukrainian territory has been pushed much farther from the Russian space than perhaps Ukrainian leadership and Ukrainian people would have wished, and expected just a couple of years ago.

36

Chapter One

Notes 1

The Ukrainian Parliament. According to Article 111 of the Constitution, the procedure of impeachment is initiated by the majority of the Verkhovna Rada (Rada). Then, the Rada of Ukraine would establish a special temporary investigatory commission. Its conclusions would go back to the Rada, which by a two-thirds majority would adopt a decision on the accusation of the President of Ukraine. The Consitutional Court would review the case and the removal could enter into force, if voted by a three-quarter majority. On 21st February the procedure for impeachment was amended through a new law that enabled that Viktor Yanukovychto be eventually impeached in absentia on February 22nd. Less than three fourths, i.e. 328 out of 447 deputies, 34 of whom are members of the President’s Party of Regions, backed the impeachment. “Constitution of Ukraine,” Legislationline, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.legislationline.org/documents/section/constitutions/country/52. 3 The referendum is a blatant violation of the Ukrainian Constitution, which foresees only nationwide referendum. 4 The resolution was approved by 100 member states, 11 voted against, 58 abstained. 5 Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: State and Nation Building (London, Routledge, 1998), 151-52. 6 Lyman Tower Sargent, Contemporary Political Ideologies (Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2009), 23-47. 7 In the East, the Kuril Islands are called Japan’s “controversial northern territories;” in the South-West the Caspian sea boundaries are not yet determined among the five coastal states (Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan). In the North-West, two technical agreements have been signed with Estonia, one for land demarcation, one for sea delimitation; in the North, Russia reserves the right to make a territorial claim to Antarctica, and there are very bleak expectations about the future settlement of the issue. 8 Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: State and Nation Building, 201-03. 9 Serhii Plokhy, The Cossack myth, History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 36. 10 Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Hetmanstate,” accessed 28 August 2015, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages\H\E\Hetmanst ate.htm. 11 Svante Cornell, Autonomy and Conflict (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2002), 14-15. 12 Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (New York, Cornell University Press, 2005), 90. 13 The quotation refers to the Holodomor/ Ƚɨɥɨɞɨɦɨғɪ, a term that can be translated as “Hunger-extermination.” The Holodomor, or the “terror-famine,” which took place in Ukraine (1932-1933), was a man-made famine “inflicted on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and the Ukrainian Kuban… by setting for them grain quotas far above the possible, removing every handful of food, and 2

Ukraine, a Territory in a Newly Post-Colonial Space

37

preventing help from outside… from reaching the starving.” Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4. The Holodomor resulted in an estimated 2.5– 7.5 million casualties. It is also dubbed the “Ukrainian Famine” and since 2006, it has been recognised by Ukraine as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet Union with the alleged purpose of quenching Ukrainian resistance to collectivization and nationalism. 14 Taras Kuzio, Ukraine State and Nation Building, 18.

CHAPTER TWO POLITICS OF THE DISPERSED: THE JEWISH DIASPORA PRIOR TO 1948 YOSRA AMRAOUI

Jewish group identity prior to the creation of Israel had for long been principally based on three main criteria: religion, history and memory. These three criteria help trace and understand the formation process of the Jewish Diaspora. In relation to the way the Jews’ religious identity is inscribed in their memory through canonical Hebrew Scriptures generation after another, Edouard Drumont rhetorically wonders: “Why would today’s Jews study the Talmud? It is engraved in their brain by the law of heredity; it is the mental legacy left by countless generations that faded under its precepts and assimilated its doctrines. The Jews are molded by and infused with the Talmud.” (My translation)1 The hereditary transmission of Talmudian thinking portrayed by Drumont is significant as it deals with an unquestioned acceptance of a holy book elaborated by rabbis as commentary on Prophet Moses’ commandments. In Drumont’s words, the process is trans-generational and can be transmitted through various mechanisms. The present paper aims to shed light on the politics of displacement developed by the Jewish diaspora prior to the creation of Israel through a display of the main facets of the relationship between space and identity construction. The paper also points out divergences between Jewish historiography and other historiographical accounts that delineate the way the Jews’ usurpation and appropriation of land in the past is used to legitimize ownership of territorial space in the present. The Greek origin of the term “Diaspora”—diaspeirein—denotes the dispersion and scattering of a closely linked group from its original homeland. As Lourdes López Ropero argues, Greek translators used the verb diaspeirein – to describe the scattering of peoples due to divine punishment, thereby drawing attention to the strong religious connotation of the term.2 Coined in the 1870s, the concept of Diaspora originally described Jewish life outside the “homeland” after the Babylonian

Politics of the Dispersed: The Jewish Diaspora prior to 1948

39

conquest (also called Babylonian captivity) of the land of Palestine that took place in the year 597 B.C.E.3 The term was mostly used to designate the Jews living out of their acclaimed ancient historical and biblical homeland over centuries. Indeed, as Ropero argues, “the Jewish experience has become a paradigmatic case of diaspora. In the classical definition, therefore, diaspora had strong connotations of enforced exile, uprooting, homelessness, perpetual longing for the lost homeland and racial purity.”4 But it then acquired further connotations after the creation of Israel in 1948 and was even applied to designate other dispersed communities living outside their homeland. The Jews used the Hebrew term galut, which means exile, to refer to their diasporic existence. The term slightly differs from diaspora in the sense that it is applicable only when the dispersed people are dispossessed by an alien/foreign power. The definition of the concept galut, as put in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, shows a clear distinction between galut and Diaspora in that “the residence of a great number of members of a nation, even the majority outside their homeland is not definable as galut so long as the homeland remains in that nation’s possession. Only the loss of a political-ethnic centre and the feeling of uprootedness turn Diaspora into galut.”5 This distinction corroborates the use of both Diaspora and galut to refer to the Jewish community before the creation of Israel in the present paper. Arab scholar Rashad Abdullah Al Shami comments on the meaning of galut in the same way but brings it closer to the meaning of forced exile. Al Shami significantly points out that Zionist historiography tends to ignore the fact that only one million Jews resided in Palestine after the destruction of the First Temple. At that time, three million Jews were in the Diaspora out of their free will and were not prevented from living in Palestine, neither then, nor in the subsequent eras.6 Holding common historical accounts/beliefs and common religious bonds as those shared by exiled Jews and their offspring, galut can be labelled as a “psychological group,” or psychological crowd a term that has existed in psychoanalysis since the 19th century and was further elaborated by Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud. This type of group does not require total knowledge of all other members of the group. It rather presupposes the existence of ties that connect the group to the individual, such as belonging to the same race, nation, caste, profession, institution or even “a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose.”7 One can understand from such elaborations that the nature of the bonds linking the members to each other is basically of a libidinal nature, i.e. related to

40

Chapter Two

emotional ties and love for or hatred of something and not to sexual aspirations as is the case in individual psychology. Another feature of the psychological group is that it can either have a leader or be leaderless, and thus have a leading ideology instead. Leaderless groups, such as the Jews, particularly after the fall of King David, had been tied by a “wish in which a number of people can have a share” which then “serve[d] as a substitute for the leader.”8 Freud describes the leader of a religious group as “an invisible head,” an idea. Gathered by common ties such as religion,9 memory and a unified version of history, and using the memories of common trauma, diaspora Jews formed a psychological group that emotionally united the dispersed members through a collective aim: the “return” to the “ancestral” land. In line with this thought, the lyrics of Israel’s national anthem indicate how the Jews have cherished this collective hope through generations. Written in 1878 by the Jewish poet Naphtali Herz Imber, the poem that became Israel’s national anthem deeply expressed national aspirations. The English version of the poem says: As long as deep in the heart, The soul of a Jew yearns And towards the east An eye looks to Zion Our hope is not yet lost The hope of two thousand years To be a free people in our land The land of Zion and Jerusalem10

Despite their dispersal, the Jews managed to make use of their collective memory, oral testimonies, historiography and biblical past. But, as Aristotle once said: One might be puzzled how, when the affection is present but the thing [the object of the affection] is absent, what is not present is ever remembered; for it is clear that one must think of the affection, which is produced, by means of perception in the soul and in the part of the body that contains the soul, as being like a sort of picture, the having of which we say is memory.11

The above quotation can only show how recurrent and persistent some memories can be in the testimonies and documents people pass through generations to revive their past. In this respect, I refer to Paul Ricoeur’s theory on the use of memory in collectivities through testimonies and/or oral history. Ricoeur asserts that

Politics of the Dispersed: The Jewish Diaspora prior to 1948

41

“testimony constitutes the fundamental transitional structure between memory and history,”12 as it pertains to the act of reminiscing, which in itself represents one of the mnemonic13 modes of remembrance. In other words, testimonies represent a tool that enhances the remembrance process through bringing up events from the past and narrating them to an interrogator. One can place testimonies in the reminiscing mode. As opposed to the reminding mode, which necessitates a reminder in the form of notes, books or diaries, reminiscing requires more activity from the self that brings up the memory, because the process needs revival of memories by reliving them with other people who may or may not have witnessed them. Ricoeur defines this mode stating that it “consists in making the past live again by evoking it together with others, each helping the other to remember shared events or knowledge, the memories of one person serving as a reminder for the memories of the other.”14 (Italics added) The third mnemonic mode is about recognizing the “presence of the absent encountered” in the earlier mnemonic modes.15 Therefore, recognition consolidates recollected and reminisced memory. This mode is described by Ricoeur as transitional as well because it “announces … the critical operation by which historical knowledge restores its object to the kingdom of the expired past,”16 thereby bringing it forward, through remembrance, to the realm of the present. The purposes of remembering the past are numerous, which is why an examination of the Jews’ collective memory in addition to their strategy in preserving their past is necessary. But prior to that, there is a need to delineate the relationship between memory and the time and space of the original occurrence of the remembered event. For instance, the Jewish recollection of the Holocaust as an event connected to a specific temporal and spatial framework—which is the period leading up to World War II, and World War II itself—labels this recollected event as traumatic. As opposed to that, Jewish collective memory preserves some glorious memories of past events, such as the Maccabean revolt (167 B.C.) or the early invasion of the Canaanite lands in Palestine. These memories are considered glorious when, in fact, historical accounts show they were disastrous and full of torture. There is consensus on the part of non-Zionist historians about the degree of savagery that accompanied Joshua’s invasion of the land of Canaan. Al Shami quotes Will Durant’s description of the details of the invasion and mentions that Joshua’s army killed about 12,000 Canaanites, crucified the Governor, and completely burnt the city.17 This comes in accordance with the military philosophy of the time as stipulated by Richard Losh. In his account of Joshua’s invasion in The Uttermost Part of

42

Chapter Two

the Earth: A guide to Places in the Bible, Losh states that “this is consistent with military standards of the time, when the philosophy was when there is no home to rebuild, and no one alive to rebuild it, an enemy is no longer a threat.”18 Accounts of Joshua’s invasion of a part of Palestine and the ferocious extermination of its population are regarded by mainstream Zionist historiography as glorious and referred to as the historical claim to the land. In History of the People of Israel till the Time of King David (1890), French historian Ernest Renan comments on the savage raids performed by Joshua’s army in the following passage: The recollection of the skillful stratagems attributed to Joshua, the chief who personified all this period of military raids, was preserved. Every one was killed, and the king was nailed to a tree until the evening… Terror spread through the country. Many [Canaanite] tribes submitted and accepted the yoke in order to escape death.19

There is little mention in mainstream Zionist discourse, though, of the destruction of life and cruelty affecting the inhabitants of the invaded land who suffered the attacks of Joshua’s army. According to Ricoeur, “this tie between memory and place results in a difficult problem that takes shape at the crossroads of memory and history, which is also geography … Dating and localization constitute in this respect solidary phenomena, testifying to the inseparable tie between the problematic of time and space.”20 But what if the geographical site in which the recollected memory took place witnesses major transformations? Or as framed by Ricoeur “would the places of memory be the guardians of personal and collective memory if they did not remain ‘in their place,’ in the twofold sense of place and site?” The Nazi concentration camps for instance no longer exist, and from the Jewish exiles to the birth of Zionism, the land in which the Jews once co-existed with other tribes no longer has the same frontiers or cultural definition. Yet, the remembrance of these places as witnesses of Jewish history was to the Jews one of the “mnemonic” modes of remembrance that allowed them to formulate the project of the “return to Zion.” The religious aspect of Jewish group identity, prior to the creation of Israel in 1948, does not rule out the fact that the Jews had for long had an impression that a historical bond connected them to the land of Palestine. It is that impression that created in the Jewish memory and future aspirations a diasporic community or as it is also conceptually framed, a “chosen people.” Continuous reference to Jewish history and religion forged the Jewish group identity at a great scale and paved the way for territorial aspirations that would fulfil the Jewish national identity. Oliver

Politics of the Dispersed: The Jewish Diaspora prior to 1948

43

Revilo argues in The Jewish Strategy that the Jews use their impressions of a historical bond to a land to give legitimacy to its invasion. Revilo qualifies the Talmud as “Jewish tales” and “myth,” and depicts the Jewish historians of the first century, Philo and Josephus, as “apologists” and “propagandists.”21 Arab scholars Mustapha Kamal Abdul-Aleem and Sayed Faraj Rashed concur with this view on the basis that the Judaic sources for legislation and history are not fixed but evolving with time. Abdul-Aleem and Rashed argue that the constant modification of Jewish scriptures and the addition of other sources that became of equal sacredness to the Old Testament—which was also modified several times—allow for a more biased understanding and interpretation of the Old Testament. Interest in Oral Law (the Mishna) and in the various Talmuds that exist (The Babylonian Talmud and The Jerusalem Talmud) grew to such proportions that these were considered the sources that most Jews and even Christians check to extract information about the early times of Moses and the evolution of Judaism.22 As non-Orthodox interpretation of the Jewish scriptures focuses on the return to the “land of Israel,” this belief became incrusted in mainstream Jewish thinking and collective memory as God’s will for the “chosen people.” Within the same spatio-temporal framework, by the late 19th and early th 20 century, the members of the Jewish Diaspora located in Britain and the United States began to look toward Palestine as the locus of their homeland. The main argument that was propagated by Zionists to justify their interest in Palestine was the right to return to the Promised Land. However, there exists another perspective corroborating Jewish interest in Palestine. I can here cite the influential Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann’s view. The latter addressed the Canadian Jewish Congress on June 1st, 1947 in Montreal, Canada, stating that other benefits that might result from the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine might exist.23 He mentioned Palestine’s oil reserves, which equal twenty times those of the two Americas, united. According to Goldmann, Palestine is also the point of intersection between Europe, Asia and Africa, which makes of it a strategic military center. He also quoted Ernest Bevin (The British Foreign Secretary in service from 1945-1951) when the latter said to him: “you know, doctor, what you want me to do by establishing a Jewish State? You want me to deliver into your hands the keys to the most important strategic area in the world. You will allow me to think once and twice before I give you this key.” Goldmann then adds: “Once we have established a Jewish State in Palestine, all this will be in our favor.”24 Such straightforward public claims made during the critical years of the Arab-Zionist conflict undermine, in a way, the Zionist religious

44

Chapter Two

discourse of a pressing need to “return to the promised land” and favor instead a solely profit-oriented discourse. Goldmann’s words were quoted and used by scholar and editor A. R. Armush in his foreword to the Arabic edition of The Ancient History of Palestine 1220 B.C. – 135 C.E.: From the First Jewish Invasion to the Last Crusade25 by the specialist in Islamic History Zafarul Islam Khan. Armush argues that the Jews did not want Palestine for its biblical value nor for its religious significance; nor did they choose it for the benefits of the Dead Sea’s water evaporation worth three trillion dollars of metals and para-metals. After citing the arguments that Goldmann himself presented in 1947, Armush affirms that the Jews had selected Palestine because it is the strategic military centre of the world.26 Like several Arab and Muslim thinkers, Armush believes that the Jews have always strived to achieve world domination, whence the strong Zionist lobby in the United States today. And recent history has so far shown how non-Orthodox Jews managed, despite their sub-ethnic differences and diasporic conditions, to use their history, religion and collective memory (mainly traumatic experiences) to unite and side with Zionism, no matter how contradictory to Orthodox Judaic beliefs it might be. Yet before assessing the Zionist orientation of the Jews towards Mount Zion, it is necessary to overview the concept of nationalism. According to Anthony D. Smith , national identity is premised on the co-existence of five characteristics that define the nation, which are: “common myths and memories,” a shared public culture based on native language or worship, clear boundaries of a historical land, a socio-economy that unifies local economic units, and “common codes and institutions of a single legal order” that ensure common rights and common duties to all. 27 The purpose of briefly mentioning the various characteristics of a nation at this stage is twofold: first, to remind that the Jews had used the above characteristics in their favour to claim land rights in Palestine to complete their national claim. This process is ancient and dates back to the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century C.E.,28 after which the Jews claimed to have been “uprooted from [their ancient] homeland,” as echoed in most Jewish encyclopedias and history books written by Zionists.29 Second, it is important to demonstrate how the focus on religiosity and Judaism favoured the achievement of a critical feature of the Jews’ future national identity: the creation of a territory, a process that started to take concrete form mainly in the years during and following World War II. Towards the realization of this goal, the Jews who either lived in or immigrated to the United States and the United Kingdom, before and

Politics of the Dispersed: The Jewish Diaspora prior to 1948

45

during the two World Wars, started carving their own politics of recognition through political activism that highly influenced the decision to create a state for the Jews. Therefore, the Jews played the role of key actors and lobbied for their scheme. In this respect, Rodney Hall asserts that “sovereign state actors may well have autonomous interests that help shape state policy, but the influences, beliefs and prejudices of individuals and sub-state groups within society help to determine how ostensibly objective state interests get translated into state policy.”30 Hall’s discussion of the role of state actors and sub-group state actors clarifies the dialectic within which the Jews’ quest for a homeland may result in transitional change for their direct interests. In his book National Collective Identities (1960), Hall analyses the way social identities generate “epochal change” in international systems. Upon examining the characteristics of the Jewish social identity in each social milieu in which it co-existed with and confronted other identities prior to the creation of Israel in 1948, one may notice how that specific religious identity based its continuity primarily on Judaism. One may even argue that the Jewish identity retrieved its strength from ancient Jewish historiography, such as that written by the first century Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. More importantly, the Jews extracted their strength as a community from Jewish mythology related to the commencement of the Jewish dispersion. The following part discusses the various claims pertaining to the attachment of the Jews to the land of Palestine and the evolution of their journey. It draws on diversified sources of information from Arab and Zionist perspectives, which will help confront opposing historiographical accounts. The point from using Zionist sources is to examine the multiple historiographical uses of the past in Zionist discourse in the process of building a selective memory. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica,31 the commencement of the Jewish dispersion dates back to 1050 B.C.E., the year estimated to be that of the destruction of the Temple of Shiloh by the Philistines. Shiloh was the central temple of the people of Israel (Israel being the other name of Prophet Jacob), called in biblical terms “the House of God”32 and “the House of the Lord.”33 It was claimed to be of tremendous importance to the Jewish people for a number of reasons, but most significantly so because of its location, as the temple was named after the place in which it was built—Shiloh—then religious capital of the land of the people of Israel and an ancient biblical city. Biblical geographer and scholar Edward Robinson, known for his geographical (not archaeological) investigations in biblical and holy sites, especially in Palestine, located the Shiloh Temple in “Khirbet Seilun” in the West Bank during his visit to Palestine in 1838.

46

Chapter Two

According to Jewish historiography, the Philistines captured Jerusalem and seized the temple’s most valuable historical possession:34 the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark was of significant symbolism to the Jews as it was one of Prophet Moses’ most cherished and precious legacies. In addition, the Ark was said to have contained the two stone tablets on which God’s Ten Commandments were inscribed. The Ark is actually a wooden vessel surrounded by gold, manufactured by Bezalel, a grandnephew of Moses, who was a very skilled artist.35 The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (1997) states that Moses actually manufactured the Ark out of simple wood, thus confirming the version stipulating that the Philistines took the Ark during the invasion.36 Yet regarding the Philistinian invasion of the Israelite tribes of Judea and Samaria, Encyclopaedia Judaica withholds certain facts of important historical value. According to Khan, the history of the capture of Jerusalem goes far beyond 1000 years B.C. Khan relies on significant varied Arab and foreign sources such as Tarikh Al Tabari, H. Bentwich’s Palestine, S. Macalister’s The Philistines, their History and Civilization, A. Hyamson’s Palestine, the Rebirth of an Ancient Nation, Gustave Le Bon’s Role des Juifs dans la civilization as well as on older Encyclopedias such as Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (1948), Jewish Encyclopedia (1905) and Encyclopedia Britannica (1960). Khan’s findings point to one direction: the people of Philistia recaptured their land from the Jewish expansionists who invaded it 14 centuries B.C. Upon the destruction of the Temple of Shiloh and the capture of the Ark by the newcomers from Philistia, located in the Southern coasts of Syria and East of the Mediterranean Sea,37 the Jews lost their sacred monument and place of worship. Subsequently, most of them began to wander throughout the world, starting by this dispersal the legendary series of Jewish exiles, also called the Jewish wandering. The term exile, here, refers to either voluntary or forced migration from the lands of Canaan in which the Jews settled. Yet, after every exile, historical accounts cite a return of the Jews to what they believed was their historical property for a reconstruction of the destroyed temples. Nonetheless, stories about historical returns to Palestine are also debatable, considering the major geographical and historical divergences between some historical Jewish writings and other historical sources such as Robinson’s Biblical Researches in Palestine and in the Adjacent Regions: A Journal of Travels in the Year 1838, Joseph Jeffries’ Palestine, The Reality (1939) and Harry Charles Luke’s The Handbook of Palestine (1922). Luke occupied the position of Assistant Governor of Jerusalem.38 He states in his handbook that early Jewish history started with Moses and that Jewish settlement in “the country west of the Jordan was effected very slowly, partly by force

Politics of the Dispersed: The Jewish Diaspora prior to 1948

47

of arms, partly by peaceful assimilation with the Canaanites who at the time occupied a much higher plane of culture than the Israelites.”39 The present paper does not intend to solve the debate over the origin of ownership of Palestine as much as it hopes to show the dominance of special accounts on the issue over others in Jewish collective memory by confronting these accounts with their counterparts in the dominant historiography of the Jews and of Zionism. Jewish and Zionist scholars tried to endow their ancestors’ exiles with an explanation. Some referred them back to accounts of exile as recorded in the Old Testament, qualifying Jewish wandering as having been engaged in a universal mission. Others preferred to think of them as a blessing, justifying their claims by hints at the thriving of the Jewish Diaspora in their host countries following the exiles.40 In the dominant Jewish discourse, after the various exiles that followed the destruction of Shiloh, the Jews always returned to the land of Israel and re-built their temples. Gafni’s account of the return of the Jews to “rebuild” the destroyed city in addition to accounts cited by several updated contemporary Jewish encyclopaedias contrast with the historical interpretation of the events of the time, presented by Robinson in his 1838 journal. Robinson points out that there is room to believe that it was the Roman Emperor Adrian who asked for the rebuilding of Jerusalem “as a fortified place, by which to keep in check the whole Jewish population.”41 Additionally, Robinson emphasizes another significant historiographical point. When Emperor Adrian undertook the reconstruction of Jerusalem, the famous Jewish rebellion, nicknamed after its leader Simon Barcochba, fiercely broke out. The Emperor, who at first took it lightly, interfered with Roman legions that besieged the city, and led the reconstructions into completion.42 According to Robinson, there exist no accounts on this siege in any Jewish texts about the period. He says in this respect It is singular that the siege and capture of Jerusalem by the Romans during this war, is nowhere described, and only once mentioned by a contemporary writer. The historian Appian in the same century gives it a passing notice; but all we know further is from the slight mention of it by Eusebius and later authors, the earliest of whom wrote two centuries after the event. The writings of the Rabbins, the repositories of Jewish tradition, are silent as to the siege; though they speak of the desecration of the site of the Temple. Yet the various testimonies although scattered, are too numerous and definite to admit of doubt as to the fact… Of the circumstances of the siege and capture we have no account.43

Robinson also highlights discordance in historical accounts as to the intention of Adrian to destroy Jerusalem. Early historians such as Jerome,

48

Chapter Two

Eusebius and Munter allude to the way Jerusalem was ruined by this Roman Emperor while, in fact, the latter ordered the reconstruction of the temple and the city before the rebellion erupted and led it to completion after the rebellion was tamed. Other Jewish accounts also refer to the governor of the province (Jerusalem), Rufus Titus, as a tyrannical figure who imposed a ban on the city and desecrated it. “There is no evidence, [Robinson says] that Romans ever applied this symbol of perpetual doom to the sites of single edifices.”44 He reminds the reader that the three historians who made such claims existed three centuries or more after the event, thus questioning their ability to provide accurate evidence or historical interpretation of the events surrounding the siege. Accounts from the Old Testament credit the building of the First Temple to Solomon, King of Israel and son of King David,45 in the fourth year of his reign as it is cited in the book of Kings. Yet, no archeological remains testify to King Solomon’s reign in the allotted land thought to have had contained the First Temple. This temple was reportedly destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian ruler who fought against the Egyptian kingdom over Jerusalem and Syria. The latter deported the Jews from the land in which they settled by force, causing what was called in Jewish history the Babylonian exile in the 6th century B.C.E. The Jews returned from the Babylonian exile determined to build a Second Temple, a fact reported in most of the accounts provided by Encyclopedia Judaica. However, according to Robinson, the Jews were banned from Jerusalem and “by a decree of Adrian… forbidden even to approach their holy city; and guards were stationed to prevent them from making the attempt.”46 Another Arab perspective, by Ahmad Shalabi, states that the Jewish economy thrived in Babylonia leading most of the Jews to settle there. Shalabi also asserts that the Jews hesitated for long before returning to Jerusalem, the majority having decided to remain in Babylonia and Egypt. The return of a few Jews to Jerusalem was a return of individuals and not a return of an Israeli nation. The returnees remained under the rule of the Persians as a minority group.47 The Second Temple, also called the Temple of Jerusalem, and the Temple of Zerubbabel, was built by the returning exiled tribes, who went back to their land after they were permitted to do so by a decree issued by Cyrus the Great—king of Persia and founder of the Persian empire— allowing them to return and re-build their temple. The importance of these temples in Jewish historiography reflects itself in the fact that ancient historical periods were divided into “pre-exilic,” “exilic,” and “post-exilic” and most of the historical accounts about the early history of the children

Politics of the Dispersed: The Jewish Diaspora prior to 1948

49

of Israel cite these periods only with reference to the temples mentioned above. In sum, this paper purposefully presents some basic Jewish identity and memory constructs within their theoretical and historical frameworks to shed light on national identity formation within the Jewish diaspora before 1948. As this process also relies on the traumatic aspect of Jewish history, one can interpret the historical and political implications of life in the Diaspora in relation to identity trans-formation, thereby eliciting the dialectics of identity, space and place. The present article is based on a number of historical milestones that were determinant to the emergence of a national identity from within the Jewish diaspora, hence the recurrent reference to places that had marked Jewish history and reinforced the Zionist quest for a territory to achieve national fulfilment. Zionist historiography is not exempt from diverging accounts that purposefully served the burgeoning Israeli Identity. However, after decades from the establishment of the State of Israel, Israeli archives revive the past in an unprecedented way leading to what has come to be called “the rise of New Historiography.

Notes 1

The quote in French says: “Quel besoin les juifs d’aujourd’hui auraient-ils d’étudier le Talmud? Il est imprimé dans leur cerveau par la loi de l’hérédité, il est l’héritage mental légué par d’innombrables générations qui ont pâli sur ses préceptes, qui se sont assimilés ses doctrines. Les Juifs en sont pétris, saturés de ce Talmud” in the Preface of Auguste Rohling’s Le Juif Selon le Talmud (Paris: Albert Savine, 1889), vi. 2 Lourdes López Ropero “Diaspora: Concept, Context, and its Application in the Study of New Literatures.” Revista Estudios Ingleses 16 (2003): 10. 3 Encyclopaedia Judaica, V. 07, 353-54. 4 Ropero, “Diaspora,” 10. 5 Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “Galut,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, V. 07, 352. 6 Rashad Al Shami, Ishkaleyat Al Houweya fi Israil (Kuwait: Alam Al Maêrifa 1997), 26-27. 7 Sigmund Freud. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), 3. 8 Ibid., 53. 9 I believe using the word “religion” in this context is in itself debatable as it presupposes common beliefs and unified biblical scriptures whereas Judaism has been surrounded by several allegations as to the prophetic nature of the Talmud and as to the correctness of the Five Books of Moses. In order not to trespass the scope of this research, the use of religion will signify the Jews’ understanding of Judaism as it is preserved in canonical Hebrew scriptures.

50 10

Chapter Two

“Facts about Israel: The State-State Symbols” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accessed December 27, 2016, http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/aboutisrael/state/pages/the%20state.aspx/. 11 Aristotle, The Complete Works. 2 vols. Edited by Jonathan Barnes (1984). 12 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 21. 13 Mneme is a Greek term that signifies pertaining/assisting the memory. In his work De Memoria et Reminiscienta, Aristotle explained the two terms mneme and anamnesis as “simple evocation” and “effort to recall.” 14 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 38. 15 Ibid., 39. 16 Ibid. 17 Rashad Al Shami, Ishkaleyat Al Houweya, 79. 18 Richard Losh. The Uttermost Part of the Earth: A Guide to Places in the Bible. (Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005), 114. 19 Ernest Renan, History of the People of Israel till the Time of King David, vol. 1 of History of the People of Israel, trans. Joseph Henry Allen, Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894), 202. 20 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting 41. 21 Oliver Revilo. The Jewish Strategy (Virginia: Kevin and Alfred Publishers and Booksellers, 2005), 29. 22 Abdul-Aleem and Rashed, Al Yahudeya fi Al Alam Al Qadim (1995), 11. 23 Goldmann’s speech was delivered before the Seventh Plenary Session of the Canadian Jewish Congress held at the Mount Royal Hotel in Montreal, Canada on June 1, 1947 and then published in The Congress Weekly, Vol 4 n° 9 (September, 1947). Extracts from this speech were also reproduced in the December 1958 issue of The American Mercury under the title “Jews in the World of 1947.” 24 Nahum Goldmann, “Jews in the World of 1947,” The American Mercury (December 1958): 72-73. 25 1973 edition. 26 A.R. Armush, Foreword to the Arabic edition of The Ancient History of Palestine 1220 B.C. – 135 C.E.: From the First Jewish Invasion to the Last Crusade by Zafarul Islam Khan (Lebanon: Dar Al Nafaes, 1973), 8. 27 Quoted in Rodney Hall. National Collective Identities: Social Constructs and Internal Systems, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1999), 9. 28 Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 07, (2006), 352. 29 Ibid. 30 Hall. National Collective Identities, 7. 31 Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol 19, 601-06. 32 (I Kings 3: 1). 33 (Dan. 1: 2). 34 Encyclopaedia Judaica vol 19, 601-06. 35 Ibid. 36 Adele Berlin, The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion. (Oxford University Press, 2011), 67. 37 Khan, Ancient History of Palestine, 18-19.

Politics of the Dispersed: The Jewish Diaspora prior to 1948 38

51

In the Preface to this work, Luke mentions that the book was still being printed when the League of Nations gave Britain the Mandate for Palestine. Harry Charles Luke. The Handbook of Palestine. (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1922), v. 39 Ibid., 9. 40 Isaiah Gafni. Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 19. 41 Edward Robinson. Biblical Researches in Palestine and in the Adjacent Regions: A Journal of Travels in the Year 1838. Vols I & II, eds. E. Robinson and E. Smith. (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1856), 367. 42 Ibid., 368. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 369-70 45 Both Kings David and Solomon son are considered prophets in the Quran. Referred to as Daoud and Sulaiman, the Quranic version confirms their reign as kings. 46 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, 369. 47 Ahmad Shalabi, Al Yahudeya. (Cairo: The Renaissance Bookshop, 1978), 93-94.

PART II: POST-MODERN MAPPINGS

CHAPTER THREE ALIENATION IN OLD PLACES, CREATION OF NEW SPACES: THE ROLE OF DIGITAL MEDIA IN SOCIALIZING, LEARNING, AND PROTEST IN TUNISIA KARIM HAMDI

Traditionally, governments controlled physical space to restrict their subjects’ movements and actions. One’s own place—home or local coffee shop—was no longer safe. Authoritarian measures even alienated subjects from these old places. Fortunately, that has become less feasible of late. New spaces were created, transcending state control. This paper focuses on the role of digital media in socializing, learning and protest in Tunisia. When Tunisian blogger Slim Amamou was arrested in January 2011, he used foursquare social network to tell the world where the police had taken him—an embarrassing moment for the faltering Government.1 Countless youth groups created instant flash-mobs to express their discontent and posted the video-clips of their choreographed moves on YouTube and Twitter to transmit their anger and frustration to the whole world. Protests were hatched, coordinated, and conducted in newly created virtual spaces, out of reach of Big Brother. While the use of social networks in Tunisia did not a revolution make,2 it allowed the creation of new, unimpeachable spaces for free expression and vigorous resistance to oppression. For a decade and a half prior to the Jasmine Revolution,3 Tunisians—mostly youth—had been socializing, learning, and globally interacting, even dreaming in new spaces afforded them by the Internet. Today, now that the democratic process has taken root in the country, it is important to analyze the new dynamic of place, space, and expression between government and society. The Government is expected to respect fundamental freedoms enshrined in the new Constitution, but protests are expected to continue.

Alienation in Old Places, Creation of New Spaces

55

People will continue to use new spaces to socialize and interact. Students will supplement a weakening education system with online learning. Unemployed youth, dreaming of a better economic opportunity across the ocean, will squat on Facebook, LinkedIn and other networks, unobstructed by territorial limitations. How successful a well-meaning, democratically accountable government will be in dealing with massive economic and social crises, will depend on their clear understanding of the potential of these new spaces, and on their ability to implement a strategic move toward a knowledge society.

Experiencing “Unfree” Spaces in Tunisia Before 2011, it was a common experience for Tunisians participating in academic, economic or artistic conferences in Tunisia to find that the Government-appointed official in the region of the conference venue (usually an RCD4 ruling party top-dog) had appropriated the role of dictating upon organizers what could and could not be addressed in the events. One example of how pre-revolutionary digital space was controlled by government officials will suffice: in 2006, I helped the University of Gabès (southern Tunisia) set up a video-dialogue project between two groups of women: one in Gabès and one at Columbia University in New York City. It was a case of setting up a digital space for cross-cultural communication about gender and development. Given the comparatively great achievements in women’s empowerment in Tunisia, thanks to Bourguiba’s Code of Personal Status (1956), we thought that such a project would be easy to organize. It would make Tunisia shine. We were sorely mistaken. Not only did the approval process take several months, the dozen or so conversation topics were carefully reviewed and vigorously “sanitized” by the higher-ups at the Ministry level. No talk of freedom or democracy was allowed. On the other hand, topics such as fashion, cuisine, even dating, were “halal.” This was a blatant illustration of government control of the public sphere during Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s era. Yet with dedication and patience, and a digital home outside Tunisia, my colleagues in Gabès made a success of this project, entitled 12 Hours of Dialogue, and the organizational structure, photographs, discussions, videos and blog entries are still available as an online record.5 The members of the new Government have their work cut out for them. As Tunisian intellectual Mustapha Tlili, founder and director emeritus of New York University Center for Dialogues, put it:

56

Chapter Three The country’s secular democracy owes much to cultural factors: the peaceful character of its people, their middle-class culture, respect for women’s equality, regard for education, moderate practice of Islam and social tolerance. Unfortunately for the hopes of many at the outset of the Arab Spring, these preconditions for democracy simply did not exist in the rest of the Arab world.6

Traditionally, democratic governments are expected to control physical “public” space to restrict their subjects—not to alienate them—within the limits of the law of the land. On the other hand, authoritarian governments do behave like Orwell’s “Big Brother” in their ways of restricting freedoms and controlling spaces. Everything is under surveillance. Ben Ali’s regime was no exception. Under these circumstances, one’s own place—home, school, public library, club, or local coffee shop—became unsafe. Most Tunisians had personal experience with fear of speaking up, even in the most private spaces… Or fear of being “quoted” or reported. They are not “felicitous spaces” in Judith Fryer’s apt terminology.7 Tunisian pupils of many generations would recall the recitation poem by Lebanese diaspora poet, Mikha’eel Nu’aima, about “Tuma’neenah” (quietude): The roof of my house is made of steel The walls of my house are made of stone Let the storms roar Let the trees groan Let the clouds roam Let the rains drown8

In Ben Ali’s Tunisia, roofs of steel and walls of stone had developed ubiquitous eavesdropping “ears”! Cultural events in various places, set up by civil society activists were perceived as serious threats to the state. Stuart Hall would have had a much harder time in Tunisia than he experienced during the 1980s of Margaret Thatcher in the UK. In Tunisia, the likes of him were either under arrest (and torture), on the run in exile, or muted in self-imposed silence. These authoritarian measures of control were direct assaults on freedom. They caused fear and alienation to the users of these “old” places of socializing, conversation, and leisure. The 2002 report on Human Development in the Arab World (AHDR), diagnosed this oppressive state of things as a “freedom deficit,” one of the three deficits that had been pushing the entire region toward a predictable explosion. The other two deficits diagnosed by AHDR Report were the “knowledge deficit” and “the lack of women’s participation deficit.”9 In hindsight, what happened in Tunisia following the self-immolation of

Alienation in Old Places, Creation of New Spaces

57

Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010 becomes quite understandable, if not predictable. In the case of Tunisia, a fairly good education system and a modernist family law were not enough to weather the storm of social unrest, or to preempt the breaking point and the transformation of a popular uprising into a full-fledged revolution and regime change. Lack of freedom was a sufficient trigger for what happened during the revolution that toppled Ben Ali. Fortunately then, the attempts by Ben Ali’s Government to control “nearly everything” had become less feasible after the generalization of Internet use in the country. In1995-96, Ben Ali tried unsuccessfully to ban Internet, before setting a stringent set of rules: In Tunisia, the liability of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is governed by the Decree No. 97-501 of 14 March 1997 concerning value-added telecommunications services (the Telecommunications Decree) and the Regulations of 22 March 1997 concerning the specifications for setting up and operating value-added Internet telecommunications services (the Internet regulations).10

As Article 19, an NGO established in the UK to defend the right to freedom of expression went on to specify in its analysis of the Tunisian situation, the Ben Ali regime violated international law in its efforts to make ISPs responsible for third party content and for monitoring and taking down postings that were contrary to “public order” or to “good morals.” According to Article 19, the Decree also breaches international law in requiring ISPs to provide monthly lists of subscribers, and in forbidding encryption technologies without prior approval from the powers that be, and in criminalizing defamation in the Press code.11

Digital New Places and Spaces Prior to the Revolution, in the last months of the Ben Ali regime, there was a wave of massive online censorship. It hit several platforms, including “popular video-sharing websites, Flickr, blog aggregators, blogs, Facebook pages and profiles.”12 Famous cyber-dissident Sami Ben Gharbia (in exile between 1998 and 2010 and on the Wanted List of Ben Ali’s Police) goes on to say: The anti-censorship movement adopted very creative, outspoken and brave tactics in protesting the online censorship. A censorship that is not only harming the country’s average Internet users but is also affecting professionals whose work is relying on web 2.0 services and platforms, like YouTube, Flickr and other media-sharing websites.13

Chapter Three

58

Ben Gharbia cites a number of examples of this cyber dissidence, including: x

x x

a virtual and online protest, banned few hours after its launch and called Sayyeb Sal7 (Facebook page), an expletive in Tunisian dialect which means “leave me with peace!” and mockingly refers to “Ammar 404,” an “imaginary person invented by Tunisia as a metaphor for the invisible censor blocking their access to many websites;” An effort to index all banned blogs, websites, Facebook and twitter accounts; Providing tips, on how to bypass the ban, and easy circumvention tools to access banned websites and blogs using the viral twitter linking technique.14

As early as 2004, Ben Gharbia, Sufian and Riadh Guerfali founded the collective blog Nawaat as a platform for dissident voices. Winner of many international awards, Nawaat and its founders are seen as the gold standard for the defense of freedom of speech on the internet.15 This record of resistance to oppression in Tunisia may in fact explain the success of the mass uprising after 17 December 2010. Slim Amamou, who went on to gain fame through persistent activism and later becoming a junior Minister in Essebsi’s transition government, was joined by Yassine Ayari and Lina Ben Mhenni in mastering “the art of communication by making sure to update their friends and sympathizers about each step they are taking, producing a series of videocasts published on the not-yet-blocked video-sharing website Vimeo as well as on Facebook.”16 In her essay, “Architecture of Resistance in Tunisia,” Laryssa Chomiak explains the importance of the platform Nawaat: [Nawaat] played a critical role in information dissemination before, during, and after the Tunisian Revolution. Nawaat, for instance, published a subset of the November 2010 Wikileaks data dump under the name TuniLeaks, as well as videos and commentaries about the protest activity and police violence in Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine, Thala, and Gafsa in December 2010.17

In the same vein, Kerim Bouzouita uses the concept of mimesis to explain the spread of “symbolic weapons” among cyber-dissidents in Tunisia’s revolutionary protests: Hitherto confined to the world of hacktivists and cyber-utopians, mimesis was one of the most remarkable mechanisms of dissent during the initial stages of the Tunisian uprising. Facebook was the vector of anti-regime

Alienation in Old Places, Creation of New Spaces

59

symbols, which were spread and replicated at exponential speed by everyday users. … [T]he adoption and propagation of these symbols of dissent were one of the most important phenomena of the Tunisian revolution. Indeed, during the Tunisian Revolution, 812 of my 867 Facebook contacts—close to 94 percent—changed their Facebook profile picture to my subversive black Tunisian flag.18

Walter Benjamin wrote convincingly about the “Mimetic Faculty:” The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.19

In the final phases of the Revolution, Tunisian protesters were no exception. Through digital media it was easy for them to discover daring statements of resistance, and they did. The same digital media played an exponential multiplying tool of “spreading the word” like brush fire. It overwhelmed Big Brother’s army of control. To quote blogger activist Kerim Bouzouita, “the Tunisian Revolution is not just a revolution. Rather, it revolutionized the way of making revolution.”20 Mohamed Ben Soltane, at the time in January 2011 a graduate student at the Arts School in Tunis, maintains that Tunisia’s was the first e-revolution in history: New technologies of communication have played a key role in the Tunisian revolution, specially thanks to the social network “Facebook.” We can say that it was the first E-Revolution in history. The night of the 13th of January 2011, 1.5 million out of a population of 10 millions) was connected to Facebook, to share videos and comments on the barbarism of the old regime.21

We may disagree with Ben Soltane’s assessment. For example, Evgeny Morozov, sometimes referred to as a cyber-skeptic, maintains that it is critical to take a “less starry-eyed” view of the Internet’s potential. He states: “The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to admit its downside.”22 In his book, The Net Delusion: the Dark Side of Internet Freedom (2011), Morozov rejects the belief that the Internet is a liberating force, noting how this double-edged weapon can also be exploited “for propaganda purposes,” and “how masterfully

60

Chapter Three

dictators would learn to use it for surveillance.”23 While we agree with Morozov that we should resist the tendency of “hunting for a singular explanation,” Juan Cole describes Tunisia’s events as “multiple revolutions happening simultaneously.”24 Notwithstanding Morozov’s, Malcolm Gladwell’s, and other cyber-sceptics’ doubts, and without going to the extreme of explaining an entire revolution through the prism of digital media, it is true that there was a snowball effect after protests started in Sidi Bouzid. This effect was made easier by the round-the-clock use of Internet tools, particularly social media (as well as by the word-of-mouth “Arab Telephone” rumour mills). Hundreds of protesters were killed, many more injured, and those were not victims sitting in safe and “felicitous places” tapping at their keyboards. They were some of the tens of thousands of demonstrators defying the once fearsome power of dictatorship in the public sphere—the places designated by the Government as off-limits to protest and free expression, including in front of the Ministry of Interior, the den of the Police State. In Gramscian terms, the Tunisian Police State lost the ability to produce “consent and coercion.” As Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks of the relationship between the disenfranchised countryside and the Government apparatus anchored in the capital city: This complex city-countryside relationship can be studied in the general political programs which were striving to assert themselves … [Organized resistance] was kept “disciplined” by measures of two kinds. First, police measures: pitiless repression of every mass movement, with periodical massacres of peasants. Second, political police measures: personal favours to the “intellectual” stratum … in the form of jobs in the public administration; of license to pillage the local administration with 25 impunity.

Or in Stuart Hall’s words, cultural expression, in dire political times, is a “critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled.”26 To stay with Hall’s terminology, Tunisians were decoding protesters’ messages with sympathy, understanding and acceptance, and they rejected the coding of the news by Ben Ali’s media denigrating protestors as terrorists threatening peace and stability and acting on behalf of foreign agents. Just as US Supreme Court justices once admitted that they were behind the times in terms of digital media,27 all the presumed savvy of “Ammar 404” censors, and even the floated cyber-literacy of Ben Ali himself, were no match to the youthful, organic, mass movement of Facebook and Twitter users.

Alienation in Old Places, Creation of New Spaces

61

Tunisia in 2017 Since 23 October 2011, the date of the first free elections, Tunisia has gone through a hectic five and a half years of trial and error, a necessary transition from dictatorship to a government system guided by the free consent of the governed. The role of digital media in creating places for information exchange, debate, socializing, and leisure, among other social uses, continues unabated. There is a race between the structures of government in its new form, on one side, and the mass of liberated people, on the other. Certainly, many abuses in the use of digital media have happened and continue to happen. Some of these abuses are caused by lack of experience with free social intercourse all around. For instance, some private Facebook accounts are at times quoted, as proof, by politicians, and by some “professional” media outlets. Such abuse is embedded in a level of ill-will or bad faith, one might say, from all sides. Although it is outside the scope of this paper to delve into details of these abuses, one might mention the multi-layered and confusing crisis of September 2016, surrounding the activities of Petrofac (a Petroleum and gas multinational corporation), offshore from the Kerkennah archipelago, near Sfax. Dozens if not hundreds of individuals and small group activists, savvy in digital production, have been flooding cyberspace with few facts and huge amounts of whimsical analyses and outright fabricated claims. Nonetheless, it is true that the youth are continuing to create new places of comfort and expression. These places are used for various purposes. Tunisian professionals are quite adept at using LinkedIn to communicate their skills to potential employers. On the other hand, many Tunisian youth literally “squat” on Facebook to create an opportunity for themselves to interact with people from around the world. There are perhaps thousands of Tunisians, if not more, (mostly males), who hooked up, through Facebook, with Europeans (and people from other parts of the “rich” world) to invent a solution for their lives away from the worsening economic conditions around them. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the Bardo Museum, Tunis, on the Sousse tourist resort (2015), and on the town of Ben Guerdane, Medenine (March 2016), it is hard to speculate about the role of the Government and the specific strategies that it should adopt to stem the economic crisis and reduce the flight of the desperate youth. Massive economic investments are needed to address these problems, but the financial resources are simply not available. President Essebsi’s active participation in the meetings of the UN Summit and in the US-Africa Business Forum (New York, September 2016) as well as Tunisia’s 2020

Chapter Three

62

International Conference for Investment (November 2016) are presented as the last glimmer of hope to secure a “Marshall Plan” for Tunisia before the fatal date of 2017, when a big portion of Tunisia’s debt comes due. In 2015, Mustapha Tlili provided a well-reasoned action plan to help Tunisia in her “Hour of Need.” He suggests: x

x x

x

x

America’s president should schedule an early visit to the country, address its newly elected Parliament and let Tunisians know that they are, from now on, among the strategic allies of the United States on the basis of shared democratic values and interests. Congress should, for its part, promptly issue an invitation to Mr. Essebsi to address a joint session of the legislature upon his first official visit to the United States. A donor conference, including other major Western countries, would provide the setting for an effective response to Tunisia’s economic needs. Tunisia needs more than symbolic gestures to combat Salafist terrorists determined to cripple the Tunisian economy by frightening off Western tourists and investors. The Need for “Effective exchange of information between the American intelligence community and the Tunisian security apparatus should be mandated by Congress.” Cooperation on security [with Tunisia] should extend to NATO countries.28

These are reasonable suggestions one can agree with, but I consider them to be wishes expressed without taking into account the diplomatic and strategic realities of today’s world. What should be emphasized are the grassroots, homegrown changes in policies that could increase the chances of resilient and sustainable development. Two major components of the Tunisian experience stand out. They are the sectors in which Tunisia did not have a deficit in the terms spelled out by the 2002 AHDR Report— Education and Women’s Empowerment. The Tunisian education system, although weakened by IMF policy prescriptions in favour of the private sector, since the Structural Adjustment diktat of the mid-1980s, is still expending the capital of success achieved under Bourguiba’s leadership, and can and should be relied upon through an urgent genuinely homemade reform, a reform that is presently experiencing a painful birth. Tunisia has what it takes to put into effect the features of a real “Knowledge Society.” A good example is the initiative by the Gabès Technopole to invite the futurist/economist Jeremy Rifkin, in winter 2017, to share his vision on the “Third Industrial Revolution” with Tunisian decision makers. Instead of ignoring the youth and leaving them to their own desperate devices—using their knowledge skills to plan their own migration/exile—

Alienation in Old Places, Creation of New Spaces

63

legal or illegal—the Government should strengthen the start-up culture and multiply micro-initiatives that give skilled youth a chance to become entrepreneurs. Some effort is being done in this direction, but it is far from sufficient. Creating new places through digital media should be encouraged rather than feared. The same can be said about the advantages Tunisia has in terms of women’s empowerment. It is not a coincidence that the Arab Region Office of International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) chose Tunis as its site. Tunisian law of 1956, regarding family and personal status (“Code du Statut Personnel,” CSP), could teach lessons to more than the Arab World and parts of Africa; some of its achievements are perhaps of higher quality than many countries in the “advanced” world. Homi Bhabha’s recent essay on Stuart Hall is an appropriate place to conclude this paper: Stuart’s reading of Thatcher’s bid for national-populist hegemony focuses on shifting significations within the definitional discourses of “the people.” “The Great Moving Right Show,” as Stuart names the era, does not merely manipulate political rhetoric to prescribe an alternative Tory social reality. Thatcher stakes her claim on reconfiguring the commonplace and commonsense parole of populism; she shifts the mode of address of both major parties, Labour and Conservative, in the process of establishing her agenda.29

I would just add that most Tunisians can see through the rhetoric of “national-populist hegemony.” Although they bitterly remember the failures of the Troika Government of 2011-2014, and punished all three parties of the Troika in the recent elections, Tunisians do not want the current winner of these elections, Nidaa Tunis, to emulate the 1980s Thatcher’s conservatives, nor do they want President Essebsi to be a carbon copy of Margaret Thatcher, no matter how hard the international partners push him in that the direction of neoliberalism. Since Essebsi became president on 21 December 2014, Tunisia has gone through increasingly difficult times, economically and in terms of security. The spaces created by Tunisian youth, digital and otherwise, continue to challenge authority, to benefit from newfound freedoms, but also to make the task of the weakened government even more complex.

64

Chapter Three

Notes 1

“Tunisia: Blogger Slim Amamou arrested today,” Nawaat (January 06, 2011), http://nawaat.org/portail/2011/01/06/tunisia-blogger-slim-amamou-arrested-today/. 2 Evgeny Morozov, in Dave Gilson, “The Tunisian Twitter Revolution That Wasn’t,” Mother Jones, January 27, 2011, http://www.motherjones.com/media/2011/01/evgeny-morozov-twitter-tunisia 3 The “Jasmine Revolution” label is a contested one. A few other labels have been used to refer to the Tunisian revolt against the Ben Ali regime, such as the “Cactus Revolution” and the “Dignity Revolution.” This multiplicity of names is one of the unexpected effects of social networks and of real-time “coverage” of revolutionary events by “citizen journalists.” 4 Democratic Constitutional Rally, in French, Rassemblement Constitutionnel Démocratique, the ruling party before the revolution. 5 12 Hours of Dialogue: a video dialogue program for young women in the USA and Muslim countries. http://www.12hours.org/?page_id=210 6 Mustapha Tlili, “Tunisia’s Hour of Need,” New York Times, March 27,2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/opinion/tunisias-hour-of-need.html 7 Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986). 8 Mikha’eel Nu’aima, Mikha’eel. “Tuma’neenah” [Quietude], El Fann, accessed 02 July 2015, http://www.elfann.com/news/show/1116565/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B7%D9% 85%D8%A3%D9%86%D9%8A%D9%86%D8%A9 9 Arab Human Development Report 2002, United Nations Development Program, Regional Bureau for Arab States, 2002, www.arab-hdr.org/publications/other/ahdr/ahdr2002e.pdf 10 “Tunisia: Internet Regulation,” Article 19, April 04, 2012, https://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/3014/en/Tunisia:%20Internet%2 0regulation 11 Ibid. 12 Sami Ben Gharbia, “Anti-censorship movement in Tunisia: creativity, courage and hope!” Nawaat, May 29, 2010, https://nawaat.org/portail/2010/05/29/anticensorship-movement-in-tunisia-creativity-courage-and-hope/ 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. http://nawaat.org/portail/about/awards/ 16 Ibid. 17 Laryssa Chomiak, “Architecture of Resistance in Tunisia,” in Taking to the Streets: The Transformation of Arab Activism, ed. Lina Khatib and Ellen Lust (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 48. 18 Kerim Bouzouita, “Memories from the Underground,” in Taking to the Streets: The Transformation of Arab Activism, ed. Lina Khatib and Ellen Lust (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 35. 19 Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections (NY: Schoken, 1986), 333.

Alienation in Old Places, Creation of New Spaces

65

20 Kerim Bouzouita, “Memories from the Underground,” in Taking to the Streets: The Transformation of Arab Activism, ed. Lina Khatib and Ellen Lust (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 35. 21 Mohamed Ben Soltane, “Stories from Tunisia,” Academia.edu, http://www.academia.edu/954147/Stories_from_Tunisia 22 Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (NY: Public Affairs, 2011), xiii; see also, Gilson, “Tunisia Twitter Revolution.” For a good example of this mindset, consider this Tunisia-inspired letter to the New York Times: “Anyone subject to political repression anywhere can now be an influential ‘minister without portfolio,’ able to organize and call the people into the streets to demand reform. Tim Burke, “To the Editor,” in “In the Heat of the Tunisian Revolution,” New York Times, January 20, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/opinion/l21tunisia.html?_r=0. See also Gilson, “Tunisia Twitter Revolution.” 23 Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion, xiv. 24 Juan Cole, “The First Middle Eastern Revolution since 1979,” Informed Comment, January 14, 2011, http://www.juancole.com/2011/01/the-first-middle-eastern-revolution-since1979.html. 25 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonia Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (NY: International Publishers, 1971, 94. 26 James Procter, Stuart Hall (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2004), 1. 27 Will Oremus, “Elena Kagan Admits Supreme Court Justices Haven’t Quite Figured Out Email Yet,” Slate, August 20, 2013. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/20/elena_kagan_supreme_court_ justices_haven_t_gotten_to_email_use_paper_memos.html. 28 Tlili, “Tunisia’s Hour of Need.” The New York Times, March 27, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/opinion/tunisias-hour-of-need.html. 29 Homi Bhabha, “The Beginnings of Their Own Enunciations: Stuart Hall and the Work of Culture,” Critical Inquiry, Vol 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2015), http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/homi_k._bhabha_on_stuart_hall.

CHAPTER FOUR BETWEEN RELIGIOUS SACRALIZATION AND POLITICAL DESACRALIZATION: REMAPPING THE MASJID IN THE WAKE OF THE TUNISIAN REVOLUTION FATIMA RADHOUANI

ȏ ȏ ˌȏ ˷ȍ ̬ȑ ̉ȍ ̣ҧ ̀ȍ ̬ȑ ̫ȍ ˈȏ ߻Ȏ ȍ ȑ̊ȍǦ ̸ȍ ̵Ȏ ̞ȍ ҧ ˈǵȍ ȅҧ Ǩȏ ̬Ȏ ˸ȍ ˧ȑ ȍǦ ࠘ .̬̽ȍ ˰ȏ ȍ˕ȑ̶̫Ȏ ȑ̤Դȏ ߻Ȏ ȍ ȑ̊ȍǦ ̸ȍ ̵Ȏ ȇȍ ࠁ̀ ȍ ȏ ܱȏ ҧ ̤Դȏ ̩ȑ Ȏ̶ȑ̤dz˅ȏ ˡȍ ȇȍ ːȏ ȍ̰˸ȍ ˩ȍ ȑ̤Ǫ ːȏ ̇ȍ ̉ȏ ̸ȑ ̫ȍ ȑ̤Ǫȇȍ ːȏ ȍߟȑ ˩ȏ ȑ̤Դȏ ̞ȍ ҩ ˈǵȍ ̣̀ȏ ˌȏ ˷ȍ ࠃȍ Ǩȏ ǽȎ dzǪȑ 125-̣˩Ȑ̰̤Ǫ ǭǵ̸˷ Call to the way of your Lord with wisdom and kindly exhortation. Reason with them in the most courteous manner. Your Lord best knows those who stray from His path, and those who are rightly guided. The Holy Quran, Surah Nahl, (the Bee) [16.125]

In the context of post-revolutionary Tunisia, the waning of dictatorship and the democratization process, new religious-based parties have emerged and assumed power. A new discourse emanating from new actors has crept into the heart of the Tunisian mosque or masjid1 and affected religious sermons. The mosque has witnessed a shift from devotional purposes and sanctifying character to a desacralization process whereby new actors framed a new discourse operating beyond the state established policy. The mosque has evolved into a key venue for political resistance. Since January 14th, 2011, such a public space of worship, be it urban, suburban, or a mere religious landmark, has constantly broken codes and become a site of political decision. Post-revolutionary Tunisian mosques have been marked with tumult and conflicts, hence veering from the fundamental purpose of preaching the sacred message and the spiritual revelation of the word of Allah. Such a sprawling phenomenon has made its way into the public sphere, thus causing instability across the country, fomenting

Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization

67

religious discord and impairing peace. Attempts of reshaping the mosque by new actors by no means represent an isolated phenomenon, or a single event but rather a tendency that accompanied the democratization process. The debate over the role of the mosque nowadays has made it the site of much controversy. In fact, since the revolution, the mosque has become subject to a process of sacralization and desacralization. In the past, the mosque was considered a place of worship and an educational institution where exegesis of the Quran, jurisprudence, and religious sciences was taught. My paper aims at contributing to the debate that has brought the issue of the mosques centre stage during the Tunisian transition to democracy. It seeks to reveal the way this religious institution has been entangled in a wave of secularization and politicization. In this context, it is important to examine several definitions of the word masjid. The Oxford English Dictionary literally defines the word “masjid” as “place of worship or prostration in prayer... The term derives from Aramaic “masgid,” a place of worship, from “sΩged,” i.e. to bow down, worship.”2 Here, it is all-important to lay emphasis on the “place of worship” that the masjid holds. Upon consideration of the etymology of the term, it is worth noting that this space owes much of its religious significance to the verb sΩged, i.e. to bow down in awe or reverence to God. Religious practices inside this sanctuary are further evinced in The Encyclopedia of Islam, which defines Al-Masjid as follows: As Muslim religious architecture developed, masjid came to refer to a place of congregational worship that had facilities for ablutions, a minaret for the call to prayer, a minbar or pulpit for a sermon, and a mihra’b or niche to indicate the qiblah, the direction of prayer. It was used as a centre for worship, but also the center of community life. So important was the model that Muhammad had established by building the masjid in Madˆnah, that Muslims established mosques wherever they went spreading Islam.3

In his reflection on “the mosque as the centre of religious life,” Negar Hakim adds to this sanctuary other meanings through highlighting the role and significance of its constituent elements: By the 7th century, the following elements were already constituent parts of a mosque: the qibla wall which faces in the direction of Mecca; the mihrab, a niche or depression in the qibla wall from which the imam leads prayers; and the minaret, a high tower from which the call for prayer is more audible. A mobile lectern, or kursi, on which the Koran was placed was also common. For Friday prayers, a minbar, a pulpit raised on several steps was created, sometimes along with a dikka, a raised tribune in the

68

Chapter Four centre of the room from which the imam’s prayers are repeated for the rows at the back. Fountains located in a forecourt allowed Muslims to conduct ritual purification before prayers.4

In addition to its religious importance and its specific spatial arrangement, the mosque fulfils an important social function. As Hakim argues, “the mosque is not solely for prayer but is also visited on social and family occasions,” while “larger mosques include spaces for religious instruction.”5 Hakim thus draws attention to the mosque as a multivalent institution, which fulfils not only a devotional function, related to preaching or daawa, but also a communal function. In fact, the mosque is also a sanctuary for religious purgation, a setting where important rites of passage are celebrated, and a space where a social nexus among members of the Muslims community is reinforced. In fact, this last dimension is inherent in the Arabic term Al Jami, which literally means that which gathers or brings together, and which refers to a larger mosque where Friday prayers are conducted and sermons are delivered.6 Another key architectural feature of the mosque, which the two previous definitions account for, and which is of crucial relevance to this discussion, is the minbar, or rostrum. In the Dictionary of Islamic Architecture, the minbar is defined as a “pulpit usually found in mosques from which prayers, speeches, and religious guidance are given.” In addition to its being “one of the earliest architectural features to be identified with Islam,” the minbar was used after the death of the Prophet “by caliphs and governors as a symbol of authority,”7 a dimension that further reinforces the authoritative character of the mosque and explains its seizure by Salafi preachers to gain power and legitimacy. The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture particularly dwells on the minbar’s political rather than liturgical symbolism, stating that “the minbar derived from the judge’s seat in pre-Islamic Arabia,” hence establishing its historical roots in Pre-Islamic jurisprudence. “As a sign of legitimate authority, minbars were used by the Umayyad caliphs and governors to make important announcements” and “deliver Friday sermons,” during which it was “customary for the name of the reigning sovereign to be mentioned.” This very rite represented “one of the two most important public signs of political power, the other being the inclusion of the ruler’s name on the coinage.”8 In “The Sound of Space as a Symbol of the Sacred,” Dorothea Baumann and Christina Niederstatter reflect on the acoustics of this space and their role in reinforcing its holiness and religious influence, thereby establishing its aural dimension as an integral part of its spiritual character. Most importantly, Baumann and Niederstatter associate this acoustic

Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization

69

quality with the spatial arrangement inherent in the architecture of the masjid. “In mosques,” they explain, “the need to hear the sermon or prayers clearly has always been and still is of greater importance,” as this holy space, with its “mihrab, the deep niche for the imam in the qibla wall that faces Mecca … ha[s] a certain numinous quality.”9 George Makdisi brings into focus another important function of the mosque, notably the educational function, which consists in instructing in theology and other fields of Islamic Studies and comparative jurisprudence as well as other branches of learning. Makdisi states that in “medieval Islam,” and “prior to the colleges of law,” it was the “masjid mosque” that “evolved into the first type of Law College in the legal guilds of Islam.” In fact, the masjid “had existed from the early days of Islam, and had served as the school for the religious sciences and the ancillary literary arts.”10 This function was aided and facilitated by the mosque’s adjacent buildings, which serve this holy space and complement its role. In this context, Makdisi refers to the Khan, an inn designed as “a place of lodging for law students from out-of-town. During the four years of the undergraduate law course, [they] pursued [their] legal studies with the institution’s professor of law.”11 The “mosque-inn college of law”12 development actually shows traces of the tradition of Prophet Muhammad whose mosque adjoined a premise serving as a school and accommodation for both poor students and those who came from afar. Whatever the legacy, the khan was amongst the premier madrassas, hence contributing to Islamic learning and establishing fundamental elements in the teaching of the Quran and Jurisprudence. Later in the ninth century, the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) was founded in Kairouan and Ez-Zitouna in Tunis to disseminate Islamic learning as well as the study of medicine, astronomy, engineering and translation. An Educational function, which consists in instructing in theology and other fields of Islamic Studies and comparative jurisprudence as well as other branches of learning. This function has been brought into sharper focus after January 14th, 2011. Dating back to the fifth century B.C., the term masjid was also used in the Quran to define the Mekkan sanctuary Al Masjid Al–Haram in Saudi Arabia. In his Muhammed in Medina, 1882, Julius Wellhausen reports how “the non-converted Thakafites had been welcomed by the Prophet Muhammad in the mosque for negotiations” and how the prophet “made three tents in the mosque courtyard where a prisoner was tied to one of the pillars.13 Wellhausen also notes how: Ibn Yunais brought the cut-off head of Sufien Al Huthaili, and threw it at the prophet’s feet and how The Iwan of Kisra in Al-Madaein city,

70

Chapter Four conquered in 16 Hejire /637, was turned into a mosque where the Muslim conqueror Saad Ibn Abi Wakkass prayed Salat Al–Fath.14

Wellhausen’s explanation of the term “masjid,” of its various functions and its alternative definition, somehow explains the deviation from the traditional role of the mosque. Wellhausen defines the mosque as headquarters and as governmental site and a symbol of authority and sovereignty, rather than a sanctuary. He goes so far as to argue that, during early Muslim battles, mosques were the meeting sites and gathering points for warring tribes, some sort of MajƗlis where logistical organization and deliberations took place. It was actually on the pulpit that soldiers received instructions.15 This last instance reveals how, in addition to its devotional and educational functions, the mosque can also serve political purposes. The above-mentioned definitions can then account for the newly emerging religious practices within this holy site. Indeed, in post-revolutionary Tunisia, this religious institution has undergone a three-fold change that has exhibited itself in three distinct stages: sacralization, desacralization, and resacralization. If sacralization refers to the mosque as a symbol of Islamic faith and the way its architecture reinforces its religious significance, then desacralization denotes the process whereby this site of prostration begins to assume a different role and purpose. Finally, resacralization is used in this study to account for the government’s attempts to counter such a flow through the restitution of sacred purposes to this powerful religious symbol. This paper will be explored following the qualitative method. I will adopt a qualitative research method grounded on content analysis of available data collected from mass media and published reports, as well as data collected from interviews with informants. The sampling for the interviews targeted informants from various social groups, ages, and occupations. I interviewed imams, Muslim scholars, official male and female preachers, and Salafi preachers and officials at the Ministry of Religious Affairs in an attempt to conduct on-ground research on the re/shaping of the Tunisian mosque. Data are collected in different settings and contexts. Some interviews took place in the ministry of Religious Affairs’ offices, while others were conducted in mosques, houses and other private gatherings. Nonetheless, I have to maintain confidentiality for those who helped scrutinize the spatial practices with which the Tunisian masjid has been associated at a crucial juncture of the country’s history. I will refer to the informants by their initials. This paper intends to shed some light on the initial emergence and ascending role of new religious actors, as well as the nature and content of the new impulses they have so far brought to holy shrines and religious

Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization

71

landmarks in Tunisia. As the phenomenon is not readily found within the literature, the objective of this paper is to explore new religious practices within the mosque through highlighting instances of intolerance and reported acts of violence. This will help contribute towards a broader understanding of the status of the Tunisian mosque in a stormy context covering the period from 2011 through 2013. I have dwelled on this period for two reasons: the uncertainties of a vulnerable historical phase in Tunisia’s political transition gave birth to a new religious-cum-political rhetoric. Besides, the winds of change that brought freedom of expression and legislative amnesty gave impetus to Islamists, allowing them to gain ground and take advantage of the electoral results with the Troika government.16 In fact, “immediately following the revolution, new freedoms extended to political prisoners, including many jihadi-Salafists” who were incarcerated during the Ben Ali regime.17 Tunisia’s first interim government also released “hundreds of political prisoners with a general amnesty law in February 2011,” most of whom were either jihadi-Salafists or criminals who “embraced Salafi narratives of redemption.”18 In this context, I seek to explore the mechanisms deployed by new and unofficial religious actors in their con(quest) of/for the mosque’s Minbar, while exploring how the holy shrine of the mosque has been brought into a ground struggle, thereby incentivizing heated debates and triggering continual clashes. The seizure of the pulpit by new and unofficial actors has left behind a storm of tumult and disquiet that still reverberates today. Such a shift in religious conduct and spatial practices will be duly discussed in the paper. The paper revolves around three interrelated elements for thought. The first axis explores the interaction of post-revolution controversial contexts and the transgression of customary religious boundaries within the Tunisian mosque. The second part of this paper examines the controversial status of the masjid and its meandering between sanctity and politicized discourse. The paper concludes with an investigation of the status of EzZitouna grand mosque, Tunis, and its subsidiary bodies. This contribution largely draws on the continual upheavals affecting democratization and entangling the mosque in a new discourse over the years 2011-2013.

Nascent Democracy and the Desacralization of Al-Masjid The diversity and richness of this religious space as well as the multiplicity of its functions made of the mosque a key venue for ideological dissemination. Backed up by large masses of supporters, new Salafi groups embarked in an extensive, determined attempt to seize the

72

Chapter Four

mosque’s rostrum. In this respect, Michael Hoffman and Amaney Jamal argue that mechanisms of collective religious protest occurring amidst the transitional phase of Arab democratization can operate at both the organizational level and the individual level. The religious institution itself may enhance social capital. A possible mechanism involves political mobilization, primarily derived from the “mosque to the square” formulation. Here, mosques serve as vehicles of political mobilization. Not only do they structure participation but they equip participants with the necessary organizational resources to influence policy and participate in collective action.19

This has led to a series of changes in devotional practices, which new actors claim as a necessary shift through contest and violent, war-like confrontations with the state. There have been videos of contests and violent clashes inside the mosques about who seizes the pulpit and leads the Friday prayer in an attempt to re/conquer the holy space. This rostrum battle over the imama affected one tenth of the mosques whose total number accounts for 5140. Out of the 5140 Tunisian mosques, 3000 are labelled Masjid Ja’maa in that they can embrace the congregational Friday prayer. The remaining 2140 embrace the five daily prayers only.20 The number of seized mosques reached 1200 in 2015. On Friday, January 21st, 2011 after Ben Ali fled the country, Mohamed Khélif, son of Abderrahmane Khélif,21 a pediatrician and religious scholar who had been banned from preaching for 20 years, mounted the pulpit of the historic Kairouan Grand Mosque, Ja’maa Uqba22 to deliver a sermon attacking the country’s corrupt culture, despite all blocking orders. Guided by a spirit of risk, from the minbar of Kairouan Grand mosque, Mohamed Khélif overtly condemned the government and indicted its close ties with the West, calling for a new Islamic law.23 Leading thousands of individual worshippers, associate members and entities, he vehemently addressed the crowd with harangues and scolding: “They’ve slaughtered Islam. Whoever fights Islam and implements Western plans becomes in the eyes of Western politicians a blessed leader and a reformer, even though he was the most criminal leader with the dirtiest hands.24 By far, the two years 2011 and 2012 have witnessed the most salient containment of places of worship. Mosques across Tunisia embraced a similar discourse. On every subsequent Friday, worshippers engaged in a ruthless battle over the minbar. The government’s advanced persistent threats incited more clashes and indictment. Imams’ religious rhetoric in sermons veered from the state’s discourse. Youth were most affected by Salafi clerics. Sheik Khatib al-Idrissi, considered the spiritual guide of the

Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization

73

Tunisian Salafi activists, contended in one of the Friday sermons: “If the majority is ignorant of religious instruction, then they are against God. The majority is corrupt, how can we accept them? Truth is in the governance of God.”25 Friday sermons swayed the worshippers as mosques “functioned as a locus of anti-government agitation and logistical centres of preparation for demonstrations.”26 Religious learning circles bloomed, as did the demand for such discourse, which consisted in sermons of takfeer and speaking out strongly in defiance of the rule of law. The mosque has been influential in Jihad awareness-raising as religious clerics dedicated Friday sermons to the fight in Libya and Syria. Many new Salafi factions, immersed in religious scriptures, seized control of up to 500 mosques by government estimates. One of my interviewees, S. A, a senior official at the Ministry of Religious Affairs, Tunisia, stated that the government had then recovered 337 mosques. Currently, the number of Salafi mosques is still undetermined yet is prone to drop. Other violent behavioural patterns could be observed starting from January 2011, when thousands of newly based Salafists became vocal. Some set about keeping officially appointed imams and preachers away. Some imams were battered and injured by repeated blows. Others underwent atrocious assaults. Abdelfettah Mourou, deputy of Al Nahdha Movement Party was himself assaulted in Kairouan. Noureddine Khadimi, then Minister of religious affairs, was booed and forced to step down the pulpit in The Mosque of Al Ghazala, Ariana, Tunis. El Khadimi’s shoes were taken from the mosque’s maqsoura and one of the worshippers had to walk down the shoe shop opposite the mosque to get Al Khadimi a new pair.27 There have been clashes inside the halls of several mosques across the country. Salafi worshippers drove out moderate worshippers in Ghardimaou, not far from Algeria, in Mosque Arrahma in Jendouba, in the northwestern part of the country, and in the Grand Mosque of Sidi Lakhmi, Sfax. These clashes spread to include other mosques such as AlFath Mosque, situated in the heart of Tunis, from which numerous Salafirelated demonstrations emerged. Most notable was the Salafi attack of the US embassy on September 14th, 2012. The intensity of violent acts has sharply risen. Religiously-violent assaults erupted months after AnNahdha-dominated government took office in December 2011. Numerous zawiyas28 (Arabic for mausoleums), and other religious landmarks, most of which are Sufi—have endured desecration and many have been burned down. Saïda Manoubia Mausoleum was desecrated on October 16th, 2012 while part of Sidi Bou-Said mausoleum, a thirteenth-century shrine embodying cultural wealth, was profaned on January 12th, 2013.

Chapter Four

74

The killing of military officials and beheading of soldiers in the Chaambi Mountains29 are reflective of the tumult hovering around the mosque. The religious discourse has become thoroughly political. Takfeeri preaching and incitement to violence30 spread through four hundred mosques in the aftermath of the revolution. This number dropped to one hundred and fifty by 2014. At times Salafi activists stopped moderate worshippers from praying through confrontations over which an imam seizes the pulpit and delivers the Friday sermon. This phenomenon has been occurring with little or partial official control. The most recent protest occurred in the mosque of Sfax, on Friday 11th, 2015, when the government-appointed Iman was forced to step down the rostrum twice, which hampered the Friday sermon for two subsequent weeks. On March 13, 2014, a senior official at the ministry of religious affairs revealed that the figure was fluctuating from Friday to Friday. There was thus a real potential for more violent confrontations and the likelihood of more ruthless clashes. The table below indicates the number of Tunisian mosques that were out of government control in 2015. They are distributed as follows: City Tunis Ariana Béja Ben Arous Bizerta Jendouba Gabès Gafsa Kairouan Kasserine Kebilli Kef Mahdia Mannouba Medenine Monastir Sfax Sidi Bouzid Siliana Sousse

Number of seized mosques 14 7 4 4 16 1 5 2 9 3 8 5 11 6 5 1 9 10 1 15

Table n. 4-1. Number of seized mosques31

Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization

75

Considering the distribution of seized mosques, it is worth noting that, except for Kairouan and Sidi Bouzid, the coastal cities of Tunisia (Tunis, Bizerta, Mahdia Sousse and Sfax) outnumber the interior cities. Coastal cities welcome more tourists and are venues for more unemployed youth recruitment within the radical Salafists. In their article, “Salafism in Tunisia: Challenges and Opportunities for Democratization,” Stefano Torelli et al. account for the “occupy mosques” phenomenon that swept the country through a cogent analysis of the pre and post-revolution political environment.32 In this context, they argue that Tunisian Salafism “is not a foreign import, but represents the political demands of a sector of the population” namely the poor, uneducated, or unemployed, who felt worthless and marginalized. Disappointed by society and the state, such segments of the population have “found in the liberal post-Ben Ali atmosphere an opportunity to organize openly and proselytize for a social project that stands in sharp contrast to the direction taken so far.” Finding refuge from alienation and disillusionment in jihadi discourse, these frustrated youths in fact represent the outcome “of Ben Ali’s authoritarian, secular and mafia-style political economy. Its legacy is an impoverished country in which a part of the population, however small, has been radicalized to the extent of embracing Salafism.”33

The Case of Ez-Zitouna Mosque: the Policy of the Shaken Hands Located in the heart of the Medina as a religious educational establishment, Ez-Zitouna mosque was founded in 863 A.D. It flourished as a centre for Islamic studies from 1228-1535 during the Hafside Dynasty (XIII-XIV centuries). It is “the largest and most venerable sanctuary in Tunis, having been founded at the same time as the city itself.” Known as Al-Jemaa Al-Aazam, Ez-Zitouna holds a particularly outstanding place in the life and imagination of Tunisians and around the Maghreb.34 A penetrating example and an acute manifestation of the dilemma of the contest over the minbar is witnessed in the Mosque of Ez-Zitouna and in the unrest this holy site has endured in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Hssine Labidi, Sheik of the Grand Mosque and chair of Ez-Zitouna Scientific Board grabbed twenty-four mosques under his absolute control, considering them subsidiaries of Ez-Zitouna. He went so far as to appoint imams and preachers with total infringement of the 1988 Mosques’ Law,35 which stipulates that only government appointed imams can preach and lead prayers in mosques, and without the slightest legal restrictions imposed upon him. The matter had to go to the court for adjudication.

76

Chapter Four

Inadvertently, all the official charges against him were turned down. Labidi had an acquittal and was free from the 26 allegations initiated against him by the Troika government. Neither res judicata over the disputes nor the court’s multiple restraining orders to make Labidi step down the rostrum of Ez-Zitouna mosque could be carried out. Labidi further changed the lock of Ez-Zitouna mosque, thereby expelling the Troika government’s newly-appointed imam on August 9th, 2012. Efforts to resacralize Ez-Zitouna failed and other subsidiary bodies were attacked, among which Al-Khaldunia Society, Tunis, was founded in 1896. Known as Al’Jamayia Al Khaldunia, this cultural and educational society was located within walking distance from the mosque. On January 4th, 2013, its managing director was assaulted. Labidi and the takfeeri activists might have temporarily taken comfort in a legal document he had signed on May 12, 2012 with three ministries, notably the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Religious Affairs. The law provided for the restitution of the Ez-Zitouni model of learning. The obligation document provides that the Mosque of Ez-Zitouna is “a Tunisian independent Islamic, scientific and educational non-affiliated institution with independent financial and administrative management.”36 Claiming the adjectival phrase “non-affiliated” as a binding agreement, Labidi made a unilateral disengagement contending to be a right(s) holder of Ez-Zitouna Mosque. He alleged that this foreclosed the state’s responsibility over the mosque. A senior official at the ministry of religious affairs argues that they have been deceived and that the abovementioned obligation agreement ruled out any further opportunity for the state to reclaim the religious space of Ez-Zitouna mosque. The rostrum seizure game has thoroughly desacralized and politicized the holy shrine of the mosque, thereby bringing it to the forefront of the political debate in Tunisia. These events may be deemed to be inauspicious or to have nefarious effects. However, such incidents represent a temporary divergence rather than a permanent phenomenon, as they are the children of their time. As Torelli et al. point out, “Tunisian Salafism is unlikely to derail the Tunisian transition” as long as “it feeds on the deficiencies of nascent institutions and on worsening living conditions.” In fact, “the success of the Tunisian transition,” Torelli et al. explain, “particularly in its economic and social dimensions, is likely to pre-empt the further growth of the Salafist phenomenon.”37 Apprehending the events might not lead to adequately understanding them or recognizing the aims of new actors on the mosque hub. Such

Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization

77

fluctuations remain open to other interpretations. An ad hoc commission for the structural readjustment of the mosques as well as further diagnosis of their status are worth re/considering as one hundred eighty-seven out of the seized mosques are not registered and many of them were built sometime before the January 14th, 2011 Revolution. M.F., a woman preacher, whom I interviewed, stated that in Cité Helal, a mosque was built on Jewish estate. It is worth noting that Cité Helal is one of the most dilapidated slums in Tunis and an area that is socially excluded from growth benefits and equal economic opportunities with considerably high levels of poverty, social inequality, and marginalization. Other mosques were erected on either foreign or private property. Furthermore, a great number of issues arise as to the management of mosques in general and the recruitment of imams in particular. In this respect, it is worth noting that the majority of the six hundred seventy government-appointed imams and preachers, 40% of whom are women, happen to be retired security officers.38 Considering the need for understanding and the urge for further discussion of state and role(s) of this institution, think tanks should appeal for an international conference on the encouragement, understanding and respect in matters of freedom and religious practices. This could prompt laws governing legislative and legal authority over the quality of religious discourse in the mosques to avoid dissension and halt instability. A pending project law on mosques is yet being hotly debated in the Assembly of the Representatives of the People, ARP.39 I have attempted to explore how the mosque as a religious space in Tunisia’s democratic transition has become a hub for organizing protests and home to new actors who have sought a new religious discourse by desacralizing the masjid. Highly contentious post-revolutionary events have so far shaped and reshaped the mosque. New waves of religious practices and conflictual conduct were further speeded up by street protests. Such turmoil and heresy led to the closing down of nearly eighty mosques and raised concerns about more conflictual situations mainly in the aftermath of the Sousse terrorist attack against tourists, June 26, 2015. Breaking loose from state allegiance further indicates that there is no determined static institutionalization of the mosque. Rather, the new religious discourse disseminated within the mosque central court along with Jihadi fighters’ recruitment of both young men and women entails sharp and profound socio-political shifts locally, regionally, and globally. Recall that Arabic TV channels have been impregnating a particular religious discourse for 36 years. This has swept over the Arab region on a daily basis of 20 hours a day addressing youth and likely to flare continual

78

Chapter Four

instability. Today with the return of 800 Jihadi Fighters from Syria, the destabilizing threat of more violent discourse is likely to reappear.

Notes 1

The terms Masjid, Al-Masjid or mosque are used interchangeably in the text therein. They refer to the Muslim place of worship. 2 Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “masjid,” accessed January 22, 2015, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/masjid. The minaret is a tower attached to a mosque from which the muezzin issues the call to prayer or Azan. The minaret is often decorated with elaborate tracery, ornamental work, as in carvings or embroidery, and texts from the Quran. 3 Bearman, Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs eds., Encyclopedia of Islam. “Al-Masjid,” 629, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopedie-de-l-islam/alpha/ m?s.rows=50&s.start=500, accessed August 10, 2015. 4 Negar Hakim, “Mosque Architecture Past and Present,” in Sacred Buildings: a Design Manual, Rudolf Stegers, ed. (Birkhauser, Basel, 2008), 46. 5 Ibid. 6 Titus Burkhardt, “Art and Liturgy,” in Voices of Islam: Voices of art, beauty, and science Science, vol 4, ed. Vincent J. Cornell (Connecticut, Waesport: Praeger, 2007), 53. 7 Andrew Petersen, ed. Dictionary of Islamic Architecture (Routledge, London, 2002), 191. 8 Jonathan M. Bloom and Sheila S. Blair, eds. The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture (Oxford University Press, 2009), 534. 9 Dorothea Baumann and Christina Niederstatter, “The Sound of Space as a Symbol of the Sacred,” in Sacred Buildings: a Design Manual, Rudolf Stegers, ed. (Birkhauser: Basel, 2008), 54. 10 George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 24. 11 Ibid., 25. 12 Ibid., 24. 13 Julius Wellhausen, ed., Muhammed in Medina, a Translation of Muhammad ibn ‘Umar Al-Waqidi. Berlin: G Reimer, 1882) in Encyclopédie de l’Islam, vol VI (1991), 631. Salat Al -Fath is the prayer Muslim conquerors perform when they seize a city. Translation from French into English is mine. 14 Ibid., 631. 15 Ibid., 633. 16 Troika is a governmental alliance made up of An-Nahdha movement Party, Front démocratique pour le travail et les libertés (FDTL) and Congrès pour la République (CPR). Former President Moncef Marzouki is the CPR leader. 17 Haim Malka and Margo Balboni, “Tunisia: Radicalism abroad and at Home: Domestic Context after the Revolution,” CSIS: Center for Strategic and International Studies, June 2016,

Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization

79

http://foreignfighters.csis.org/tunisia/why-tunisia.html, accessed January 2, 2017. 18 Ibid. 19 Michael Hoffman and Amaney Jamal, “Religion in the Arab Spring: Between Two Competing Narratives,” March 20, 2013, 8. http://aalims.org/uploads/Hoffman_and_Jamal_AALIMS.pdf. Accessed August 31, 2015. 20 The figures are provided by an official of the ministry of religious Affairs. March, 15, 2015. The interview is mine. 21 Abderrahmane Khélif was an imam of the Grand mosque, first mosque in the Maghreb, Kairouan since 1955 until his death in 2006. 22 The Grand mosque, Al-Jamaa al-Kabîr or Jamaa’ Uqba was built in 50 Hegir / 670, the same year as the city of Kairouan; and has since been embracing all religious rites, preaching and Imlaat. 23 Such events and the like strongly recall the heated political climate of postindependence Tunisia as well as the belligerent sermons Khélif delivered to the angry masses to castigate the religious policy of the Bourguiba administration. In this respect, Muhammed Kerrou argues that since Independence, the institution of the mosque has constantly been re/shaped in times of socio-political change, thereby meandering between pious and political purposes. Kerrou draws attention to the subversion of customary rites and prophetic ethics, which represent the fundamentals of Islamic jurisprudence. Exploring the spatial pattern of the Grand Mosque of Kairouan’s architecture (central court, domes, minaret, axes, adjacent areas, etc…), Kerrou also points to considerable architectural changes within this sanctuary earlier at the beginning of the 20th century. The central court of the Great mosque, its minbar, maqsoura and all related accesses have moved to the exterior and embraced the street where worshippers demonstrated in resistance to the established order. In his article “The Great Mosque of Kairouan: the Imam, the City and the Power,” Kerrou expounds on the controversial emergence of the politico-religious figure of Imam Abderrahmane Khélif in the late 1950s. He explains that Khélif is the outcome of the “delegitimation of aristocracy and religious memory” and that he represents “the model of transition from the figure of the scholar, or ‘alim’ that he could not become in the 1950s, to the figure of the Islamist radical that he represented in the 1970s and 80s.” Upon his dismissal from the Grand mosque, Kairouan, and his mutation to Gabès on January 17, 1961, a group of Khelif’s disciples gathered in the Grand Mosque, took to the streets, and spelled social turmoil and instability before heading to the headquarters of the governorate. Along the way, they harangued the slogan “God is great, he will not go!” (“Allahu akbar, mayimchich!”), referring to Imam Abderrahmane Khélif. Prompted by the heated sermons in the mosque, the 1961 events escalated into more acts of violence sparking greater surge and unrest. (Translation is mine) Mohamed Kerrou, “La Grande mosquée de Kairouan : L’imam, la ville et le pouvoir,” Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée (July 2009): 125, accessed November 28, 2014, http://remmm.revues.org/6237. 24 “Tunisia Battles over Pulpits, and Revolt’s Legacy,” in The New York Times, Nov.12th, 2012.

80

Chapter Four

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/world/africa/tunisia-battles-over-pulpits-anda-revolutions-legacy.html?_r=0, accessed April 1, 2015. 25 Ibid. 26 Nurullah Ardc, “Understanding the Arab Spring: Justice, Dignity, Religion and International Politics,” Afro Eurasian Studies 1 (2012): 38. 27 “Tens of Mosques under Salafi Control,” http://africanmanager.com/site, September 22, 2012, accessed November 17, 2014. Translation from Arabic into English is mine. 28 90 Zawiyas are governed by the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Other Zawiyas are governed by the ministry of Culture. 29 In 2013, eight soldiers were beheaded and mutilated by terrorists on July 29, which corresponds to the 19th day of Ramadan, “barely four days after the assassination of leftist deputy Mohamed Brahmi in Tunis on Republic Day.” Synda Tajine, “Tunisia Suffers Bloodiest Day in 50 Years as Terror Strikes Border,” Al Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East, accessed January 2, 2017, http://www.almonitor.com/pulse/security/2014/07/tunisia-anti-terrorist-lawattack.html#ixzz4UbJPKSdq. 30 “Radical Mosques Invite Young Tunisians to Jihad in Syria,” Al-Arabiyya, May 18, 2012. 31 Data provided by the Ministry of Religious Affairs officials. To the best of my knowledge, it is unclear that the data submitted during the interview remain unchanged. No official data have been released so far. As Haim Malka argues, “the real figures were likely higher, given that the government sought to downplay its lack of control,” even if by 2014 ministry officials claimed in the media that only “150 mosques remained under the control of Jihadi Salafists.” Haim Malka, “Tunisia: Confronting Extremism,” in Religious Radicalism after the Arab Uprisings, ed. Jon B. Alterman (MD, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 113-14. 32 Stefano M. Torelli, et al., “Salafism in Tunisia: Challenges and Opportunities for Democratization in Middle East Policy,” Middle East Policy XIX, no. 4, (Winter 2012): 149. 33 Ibid., 151. 34 Mohamed Béji Ben Mami “Great Mosque of Zaytuna,” Discover Islamic Art, http://www.discoverislamicart.org/database_item.php?id=monument;ISL;tn;Mon0 1;1;en, accessed January 3, 2017. 35 The 1988 Law on Mosques provides that only staff appointed by the Government are allowed to “lead activities in mosques and that mosques must remain closed except during prayer times and authorized religious ceremonies, such as marriages or funerals.” The law also stipulates that “imams who used mosques to ‘spread ideologies’ would be prosecuted.” “Tunisia: International Religious Freedom Report 2009, Section II. Status of Government Respect for Religious Freedom: Legal/Policy Framework,” October 26, 2009, https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2009/127359.htm, accessed January 3, 2017. 36 Al-Machhad Attounsi, http://www.machhad.com/17748, August 18, 2012, accessed May 14, 2013. Translation from Arabic into English is mine. 37 Torelli et al., “Salafism in Tunisia,” 152-53.

Between Religious Sacralization and Political Desacralization

81

38 The figure is provided by a senior official at the Ministry of religious Affairs. Interviewed May 15, 2013. 39 The law is still pending up to the writing of this paper.

CHAPTER FIVE ISLAMISM, ISLAMOPHOBIA AND SHRINKING SPACES IN THE AGE OF INHUMANITY HAIDEH MOGHISSI

In his study of the world’s momentous events, Eric Hobsbawm designated the twentieth century, between 1914 and 1991, as “the age of extremes.” The end of empires, the rise and fall of socialism and fascism, the division of the world into rich and poor nations, the Cold War, the unleashing of the all-powerful market forces, the rise of ethnic hatred, civil wars, xenophobic nationalism, were some of those extreme changes he analyzed.1 I suggest that, with the horrific events that the world has already seen in only one decade and a half through the present century, vindicating the twenty first century as the age of inhumanity may not be too unpalatable. From Abu Ghraib cruelty to ISIS monstrosities, the total devastation of some nations, life in fear for others, the mass flight of refugees and the thousands of massacres in the process, not to mention the extraordinary accumulation of wealth by a handful, matched by the rise of appalling poverty for the majority, the brazen assaults on the environment, all support the warning that humanity is sliding down the slope of savagery, cruelty and inhumanity. Drawing, but expanding on Theodor Adorno’s sense of “barbarism,” Hobsbawm defines this term in two interconnected ways. First, he connects barbarism to “the disruption and breakdown of the systems of rules and moral behaviour by which all societies regulate the relations among their members and, to a lesser extent, between their members and those of other societies.” Second, he defines barbarism as “the reversal of what we may call the project of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, namely the establishment of a universal system of such rules and standards of moral behaviour, embodied in the institutions of states dedicated to the rational progress of humanity.”2 In this chapter, I would argue that in the present state of the world, there is a desperate need for “space,” or what Nancy Fraser has called a “subaltern counter public”—a space that would allow subordinated social

Islamism, Islamophobia and Shrinking Spaces in the Age of Inhumanity

83

groups to “formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”3 For what we have now is a monopolization of discursive space by world powers, backed by the mainstream media, which fabricate, circulate and promote singular “truths,” and take away the chances of counter narratives, narrow people’s options and criminalize political dissent. This is particularly true for Muslims and those classified and labelled as such by others.

The Shrinking of Political Space In a piece I wrote immediately after 9/11, I reflected on the terrifying impact of the so-called war on Terror on people in and out of the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. I then argued that “the first direct experience in the US of feeling that their cities are under attack has been a way of life for many people from the Middle East.”4 Pointing out the harassment of people who were or appeared to be Muslim, I worried that if one stands against war and in solidarity with the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, then Libya (and now Syria and Yemen), not to mention North Africa, one risks being accused of supporting terrorism. I warned that the ever deepening psychological, emotional, and increasingly, cognitive gulf between the western and Muslim-majority nations, and by extension between the citizens of European ancestry and diasporas of Muslim origin in the west has been a most tragic and perhaps lasting calamities caused by 9/11. For the live-and let-live attitude that by and large pervaded the relations among citizens in these societies for decades, has now been replaced by a mutual sense of resentment and distrust, fear, anxiety and psychological insecurity. What we subsequently witnessed was the extensive build-up of intelligence and surveillance apparatuses and security measures in the United States, Canada, the UK and other Western countries, racial profiling, severe restrictions on the liberties of ordinary citizens and widespread interrogation and detention of individuals of Middle Eastern and North African origin. Furthermore, we saw how selective, partial and hypocritical are the celebrated national narratives of western democracies about human rights, the rule of law, equality before the law, respect for civil liberties and democratic rights.5 All this escalated tensions, conflicts and lawlessness in the region as a result of the so-called war on terror. But no one should have really been surprised by what the world has come to. All sensible people knew how toxic for the well-being of people in the region and for the global peace would be the aggressions committed by Western powers in the name of war on terror.

84

Chapter Five

And now we are bombarded daily with media commentaries, pseudoscholarly analyses and politicians’ statements about the threat to peace and humanity coming from Islamic terrorism. The political amnesia conveniently veils the fact that violent groups such as Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e Islam, ISIS, Alshabab, Buko Haram and many more self-appointed Saviors of Islam in the region are the result of aggressive policies of Western governments and the Saudi kingdom, which created, funded, and supported Taliban against their ideological enemy, the former Soviets.6 Now they wonder about the mobilizing power of these groups and ask why so many people, including, by some accounts, thousands of European and North American youth of Muslim origin, boys and girls leave the comfort of their homes to join the ranks of militant Islamists. In all Western countries law and policy makers are now mobilized to better understand and find measures to root-out the causes for the radicalization of youth. The superficial measures such as training moderate imams in France, trying to get Muslim families to report their sons and daughters’ suspicious behaviour in England, and similar practices in other countries however so far have not shown much success regarding the potency of the militant Islamist groups in recruiting tens of thousands of people to their ranks.7

The Appeal of Militant Islamism The theories in circulation about this phenomenon are many. The familiar explanation is that unrestrained capitalist economic growth and the lopsided modernization policies followed under the auspices of multinational corporations, led by authoritarian regimes, served only the interests of a privileged minority and opened a huge gap between this minority and the majority which remained virtually untouched by the economic growth, or which suffered from it. In the process, no one asked what constitutes modernization, who profits from it, and at what costs. The argument is that the consequences of decades of neo-liberal economic policies, pushed on various MENA nations and obediently followed by corrupt local tyrants—including state retraction from welfare services, privatization, unemployment, and the breakup and distribution of public assets among the regimes’ cronies—enriched a small minority while squeezing the rest of the population. No one had thought of how disenfranchised masses, without any chance for political education, whose sense of dignity, economic security and hope have been taken away, would turn to religious institutions who, in absence of the suppressed and silenced secular and liberal forces appeared as the only viable and

Islamism, Islamophobia and Shrinking Spaces in the Age of Inhumanity

85

culturally suitable response to social injustice and misery. It is also worth noting that parallel to the regime’s total neglect of and indifference toward the pain of the people, jobs, medical and some welfare services were offered through dollars pouring in from cynical regional oil-rich powers. Nonetheless, given the negative reaction of the majority of populations in almost all Muslim countries to Islamist parties which rose to actual or virtual power, extremist tendencies remain pretty marginalized in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and of course Iran, despite the fact that Iranian people have remained under the iron grips of an Islamic regime. This implies that ordinary people may have entered alliance with Islamist parties to revolt against poverty, unemployment and unaccountability of their corrupt politicians, but they would not necessarily want religious states. Another explanation for the support for or silence against militant Islamist groups, particularly by migrants of Muslim origin in the West, is the unhospitable treatment the latter receive by the host society where they live. The argument is that the naïve, narrow focus on ‘culture’ and cultural differences that sets Muslims apart from the rest of the society, has had disillusioning and alienating consequences. It affects day-to-day lives and socioeconomic status of self-identified Muslims and leads to what has been called “long distance nationalism” and support for militant groups. This theory while having much truth to it, but for reasons that I will shortly discuss does not totally add up either Take the example of self-identified Muslims in Canada. The growing political turmoil and economic chaos, along with more cultural and religious intolerance and uncertainty of life that have triggered migration of peoples from their homelands, have also dramatically increased the size of self-identified Muslims in Canada. For example, according to a 2011 Canadian National Household Survey, Islam constitutes the second largest religion in Canada, (1,053,700), following Christians. In one decade, the Muslim population in Canada grew by 128%.8 Compared with almost all other western democracies, Canada has a rather liberal policy for accommodating diversity. Through adoption of formal Multicultural Policy, Canada grants migrants cultural and religiousbased demands, such as public funding for a wide range of community activities and infrastructures. These policies, however, do not seem to have provided the conditions for Muslims to participate in economic, political and cultural lives of the country as valued citizens, free from discrimination. A very good example is the experience of individual Muslims in the job market. For instance, despite a high level of post-secondary education (almost double the national average), Canadian Muslims have a very high

86

Chapter Five

level of unemployment, which in 2006 was reported to be almost twice the national average of 7.4 percent. Muslims’ median income at the time of our study was also about 37 percent below the Canadian median income. Comparing these figures with the findings of a study conducted almost 20 years earlier in 1983, showed little encouraging changes in the situation of Muslims in the country. All this leads to the social exclusion of Muslims and the formation of self-contained, isolated and exclusivist enclaves or what the French call ‘development of nations within nations,’ making some prone to the propaganda of religious extremism. But in the same study we found that despite the relatively inhospitable conditions of the post-9/11 for Muslims, the overwhelming majority has a very positive feeling for the choice of their new home country. Despite dissatisfaction with the low levels of occupational and economic achievement, 70% of male and female participants in the study thought their decision to migrate to Canada was the right one. And by and large they expressed support for Canada’s liberal democracy and its multicultural tolerance from which they benefit. What I am suggesting is that none of the two theories mentioned earlier totally and by themselves explains the alienation and sense of frustration that lead to the rise of Islamism as the mightiest force in the MENA region. Therefore, we need to look to other political and psychological factors that may assist in better understanding the appeal of the long distance nationalism of Muslims, mentioned earlier. One must examine the impact of global politics as the main stimulus for active or quiet support for Islamist parties in the region and beyond. In other words, the West’s selective application of international rules of conduct or human rights standards may affect the psyche of individual Muslims, within and outside Muslim-majority countries, more than social and economic factors. In the post-9/11 world, limited space for political sensibility and reasoning did not allow a realistic analysis of the consequences for the region of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the total devastation of Iraq, and the disintegration of Libya. These aggressions, along with Israel’s war in Lebanon and in occupied Palestine without impunity, the siege of Gaza, and multiple wars against civilians, mean that politics of oil and geopolitical colonial interests define when and where Western powers start a war in the Middle East, Africa or South Asia with no consideration for the lives of innocent people. These aggressions send the message that the West stands above the system of international law, and that American, and indeed, Western values are of higher moral order and, as such, their imposition on others is justified.

Islamism, Islamophobia and Shrinking Spaces in the Age of Inhumanity

87

In fact, from the vantage point of Western politicians and mainstream media, Muslims are an un-differentiated population, with potential/capacity to terrorism. All Muslims are collectively responsible for the acts of terror of a small minority. Or they are guilty by association, regardless of ample evidence of the diversity and indeed sharp disunity of Muslims either in the West or in Muslim Majority countries. Events such as Saudi jet fighters bombarding Yemen as well as brutal wars among Muslims in Iraq, Syria and Libya testify to this fact. The point is that more than concrete inequalities and marginalizing discrimination, it is this dehumanizing view of Muslims, this arrogant sense of moral superiority that see Muslims not as individuals but as pointers of backwardness, (the embedded Islamophobia that produced Abu Ghraib) that further alienated people. How was it possible for the people of North African descent in France not to be enraged, when former President, Sarkozy sent a bill to the parliament, aiming at the inclusion of positive aspects of French colonialism in the Maghreb in school curricula? The examples of such arrogant insensitivity are really too many to quote. Compare the reactions of Western politicians and the public to two horrifying acts of terror that sent shock waves throughout Europe: the brutal murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and the Jewish supermarket customers in Paris in 2015 and the murder of seventy-seven youth in the summer camp of the Norwegian Labour Party by a right wing Islamophobe in 2011. Everyone in their right mind strongly and unconditionally condemned these senseless crimes as they should have. But there was a remarkable difference between how the terrorists who committed these horrific crimes were identified by the media. In Charlie Hebdo’s case they were (Muslim) terrorists, a plain and obvious fact. In the Norwegian case, it was the act of a deranged, disturbed criminal, which suggests that the term “terrorism” applies only to persons of Muslim origin. In fact, one cannot deny that the identifier “terrorist” has become a code for Muslims. Regardless of how strongly and unconditionally we abhor the senseless crimes of militant Islamists, watching European politicians at the forefront of people’s marches in Paris holding hands in an expression of unity and solidarity was offensive, to say the least.9 When in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, three Muslim University students were murdered in the parking lot of their apartment building, the white man who committed this senseless, obvious hate crime had been harassing them for some time.10 Again, the media immediately identified his crime as resulting from mental disturbance. It does not take much imagination to think that were he a Muslim and those he murdered Jews or Christians of European origin, he would have been identified differently, that is, either as a terrorist or at

88

Chapter Five

least as someone who had been influenced by Jihadi propaganda. An interesting study of the media portrayal of crimes in the US shows that the terms used to describe or identify those committing a crime in that country varies. White criminals, for instance, are described as being “mentally disturbed,” “loners,” or “lone wolves.” The terms “thugs” and “terrorists,” however, are used for Blacks and Muslims. The burning alive of the captured Jordanian pilot by ISIS forces got much media attention and rightly invoked the revulsion and condemnation of the world. But was it not comparable to the kidnapping, murder and burning the body of a 16 year old Palestinian youth, Muhamad Abukhdeir, by Zionist settlers in July 2014. Needless to say that the tales of the two horrendous murders were told using different discourses and characterization.11 One cannot help ask what prompts such indifference, or at best, different degrees of outrage to the pain of those considered as ‘other?’ Contexts and perspectives are most important in understanding the political dynamism of present time, confusing as they might be. The choice of a small minority of Muslims who turn to militant Islamists cannot be understood without attention to the causes of their psychological, emotional and practical security and discontent. They are not driven by the inherited religious beliefs and practices. In other words, “the retreat into religious identity” is inflicted rather than desired, as Emanuel Terray argues.12 In a hostile setting, that which is stigmatized can be transformed into an emblem of pride. Several years ago, 18 youths were arrested in Toronto as members of a terrorist cell. Several of them were later released without any charge. In the trial of one of them, Fahim Ahmad, a so-called ring leader among them identified as a home-grown terrorist, it was revealed that he was not a practicing Muslim at all and barely remembered his homeland Afghanistan. Yet after Sept 11 and the war on Iraq, he started going to a Mosque out of frustration, met other like-minded youth and was influenced by the imam of the Mosque and this changed his life.13 The role of social media, funded and promoted by some cynical oil rich countries in further mudding the already confused and frustrated brains of youth should not be overlooked in this regard either. Young people who move away from their parents’ peaceful way of life in Canada, France, Sweden and other European countries, and end up in the Middle East, North African and South Asian battlegrounds are in search of a space to raise their voices. The only means by which they think they can be heard is through assuming an assertive, transnational identity, through the medium of a religious ideology, that is presented to them as an ideology of resistance and the only force that challenges effectively global

Islamism, Islamophobia and Shrinking Spaces in the Age of Inhumanity

89

power structures and domination systems. The ideal place for them is then the blood fields of the Middle East. Many studies on the subject have pointed out the fact that global political events led people who previously had paid no attention to that part of their identity to discover that they were Muslim. Stating these realities by no means justifies the horrendous crimes committed by the brainwashed youth who are being increasingly desensitized against violence and trained to commit unimaginable crimes against whoever stands on their way. The other aspect of this unsettling political climate is the dilemma faced by all people, Muslims, non-Muslims, believers and non-believers alike, who stand against both sides in this unholy war for power, most notable by the change-seeking groups, forward looking individuals within and outside the Middle East and North Africa. Surely, I am not the only one who is concerned about the shrinking of political space for the campaigns for human rights, for democracy, social justice and gender rights, particularly in the post 9/11. The climate of fear on both sides inevitably stifles activities within the civil societies in the region and beyond. On the one hand, securitization of citizenship, the invention of multiple mechanism of control of racialized groups, particularly Muslims, and the freedom given to police and security forces everywhere have done much to cause more frustration and anger as the hallmark of Muslims’ relations with the West. As an example, an anti-terror bill, Bill C-51, passed during the conservative-led Canadian parliament in 2015, gives “disruption” power to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS. What disruption means is that the agency can arrest and detain whoever it considers as advocating (not actually joining) terrorist activities. Legal experts argue that the Bill violates people’s fundamental rights and criminalizes different forms of civil disobedience.14 On the other hand, the atrocities committed against Muslim populations in the name of war on terror, create a moral dilemma for democracy seeking activists.

The Dilemma of Women’s Rights Activists After September 11, issues of women’s rights in Afghanistan were cynically used amidst war drums beating; United States and British governments and the media presented as humanitarian efforts the use of laser-guided missiles, apache helicopters and B 52s in Afghanistan, in the service of “liberating Afghan women.” This inevitably produced lots of anxiety and rage in Muslim-majority countries, with no exception. It also hardened the position of conservative Muslims who resist opening the gates of their faith to debates, to new ideas and hence modifying useless,

90

Chapter Five

or worse, harmful practices. In the name of resisting neo-colonial policies that target issues of women’s rights as the emblem of Muslim identity, these conservative men became more determined to freeze attempts at critical thinking and struggles and negotiations for change. Worse, as I argued elsewhere,15 the hypocritical and cynical use of issues of women’s rights has forced upon many individuals who are concerned with, and active in campaigns for women’s rights, a great deal of personal and political moral anguish, even defensiveness. Women’s rights activists faced the dilemma of how to defend and promote feminist ideas when feminism has been so badly tainted by colonial interests and an arrogant sense of moral superiority. It has become difficult nowadays to challenge inferiorizing stereotypes about Islam and Muslim women, serving to justify new colonial policies in the region, without resorting to apologetic and self-glorifying practices hostile to equal rights for women. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to any of these questions. We certainly appreciate solidarity and support of global feminism for gender equality regardless of the soil on which the struggle is waged. We do not appreciate the “hands off” approach which, under the banner of “cultural sensitivity” and “cultural tolerance,” denies support to women and men who live under repressive cultural and political regimes in their struggle for democracy, human rights and gender equality in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, real solidarity is offered regardless of one’s government’s foreign policy priorities, and without a sense of superiority or a charity-driven or paternalistic support. Such is the solidarity that does not focus only on issues of gender violence or honour killing, for example in occupied Palestine, but also defends the right of Palestinian women against the daily harassment they encounter at checkpoints and the denial of freedom of movement by the occupying forces. Having said this, however, I think that the political choice facing progressive, change-seeking women and men in and from the Middle East is not as limited as it is often implied. We are able to keep our critical stance against various forms of violence and terrorism that have engulfed Islamic societies and, against foreign interests and policies, which have in fact nourished and sustained them. We should be able to clearly and unconditionally condemn the horrifying loss of life of innocent people in senseless and fruitless terrorist attacks as well as various acts of state terrorism, such as the wanton bombing of innocent people in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere, in the name of spreading democracy and protecting human rights. This means having the moral commitment and political fortitude to criticise what needs be criticised. It means not losing focus. Contrasting

Islamism, Islamophobia and Shrinking Spaces in the Age of Inhumanity

91

the stereotypical images of Islam and Muslims does not require refraining from denouncing the inhumane and despicable violence committed in the region and beyond in the name of defending cultural authenticity or religious values. What better than self-critique can challenge the perceptions that obscure the profound heterogeneity of peoples from Muslim societies within or without the Middle East? To secure a space for countering the recurrent Islamophobia of western media and politicians and the racist imagery about Islam and Muslims— the imagery that reduces the life experiences of people from the region to religion and religion alone, requires the courage to also unconditionally condemn the practices that have no place in the world we live in. To make excuses for such practices, regardless of the intention, is to defend the undefendable.

Notes 1

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, (London: Abacus, 1995). Eric Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: a User’s Guide,” New Left Review, 206 (JulyAugust 1994), 45. 3 Nancy Fraser, “Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Toward a Postmodern Conception,” in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, eds. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 291. 4 Haideh Moghissi, “Women, War and Fundamentalism in the Middle East,” Social Science Research Council / After Sept. 11, accessed January 3, 2015, http://essays.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/moghissi_text_only.htm. 5 Haideh Moghissi, “What We Have Learned from 9/11,” American SSHRC Forum, accessed January 22, 2016, http://essays.ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/whatwe-have-learned-from-911/. 6 For a compelling analysis of how the United States and its allies found political Islam a reliable partner during the cold war see Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, (New York: Owl Books, 2005). 7 According to The International Centre for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR), 17.9% of mercenaries in Syria are from the UK. 8 For an extensive analysis of the experiences of Muslims in Canada and several other comparative countries, see Haideh Moghissi, Saeed Rahnema and Mark Goodman, Diaspora by Design: Muslims in Canada and Beyond, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 9 Ashley Fantz, “Array of world leaders joins 3.7 million in France to defy terrorism,” CNN.com, accessed February 25, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/11/world/charlie-hebdo-paris-march/. 10 Jonathan M. Katz, “In Chapel Hill, Suspect’s Rage Went beyond a Parking Dispute,” The New York Times, accessed April 5, 2015, 2

92

Chapter Five

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/chapel-hill-muslim-student-shootingsnorth-carolina.html?_r=0. 11 Lizzie Dearden, “Mohammed Abu Khdeir murder: Israeli man convicted of burning Palestinian teenager to death in revenge killing,” Independent, Tuesday 19 April 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mohammedabu-khdeir-murder-israeli-man-convicted-of-burning-palestinian-teenager-todeath-in-revenge-a6991251.html. 12 Emmanuel Terray, “Headscarf Hysteria,” New Left Review, 26 (March-April 2004): 118-127, accessed November 24, 2014, https://newleftreview.org/II/26/emmanuel-terray-headscarf-hysteria. 13 “Toronto 18 Ringleader, Fahim Ahmad, Denied Parole,” The Star, accessed September 24, 2014, https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2014/09/24/toronto_18_ringleader_fahim_ah mad_seeks_parole.html. 14 Haydn Watters, “C-51, controversial anti-terrorism bill, is now law. So, what changes?” CBC News, accessed July 30, 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/c-51-controversial-anti-terrorism-bill-is-now-lawso-what-changes-1.3108608. 15 Haideh Moghissi, “Women, War and Fundamentalism in the Middle East,” American SSHRC Forum, accessed June 29, 2015, http://essays.ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/what-we-have-learned-from-911/.

PART III: LITERARY ROUTES: GEOGRAPHIES OF EXISTENCE AND RESISTANCE

CHAPTER SIX “TRAVELLING CULTURES:” TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL READING OF SPACE AND CULTURE IN PAUL BOWLES’S THEIR HEADS ARE GREEN AND THEIR HANDS ARE BLUE SAMIRA MECHRI

Like words, places are articulated by a thousand usages. They are thus transformed into “variations”— not verbal or musical, but spatial—of a question that is the mute motif of the interweavings of places and gestures: where to live? Michel de Certeau, Practices of Space The area where ideology and knowledge are barely distinguishable is subsumed under the broader notion of representation, which thus supplants the concept of ideology and becomes a serviceable (operational) tool for the analysis of spaces, as those societies which have given rise to them and recognised themselves in them. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

This study is inspired by James Clifford’s essay “Travelling Cultures,” in which he examines travel in relation to space. According to Clifford, spatial dynamics are manifested in cultural encounters: “travel encounters,” “chance encounters,” “arbitrary encounters,” “uncomfortable encounters,” “transforming encounters,” “local/ global historical encounters,” and most importantly “anthropological encounters.”1 Paul Bowles’s multi-faceted experience in the Maghreb as a traveller, composer, writer, folklorist and translator can be inscribed in a Cliffordian cultural studies approach. Having lived in Morocco from 1947 until his death in 1999, Bowles has evoked so much literary criticism focusing especially on the writer’s

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 95

aesthetic, creative, psychological, ideological and political renderings of space and place in Morocco, particularly the city of Tangier. Wayne Pounds points out the psychic effects of space on Bowles; a split self and a schizophrenic condition caused by the writer’s escape from Western modernism and the destruction of the old ego:2 In the representative design of Bowles’s fiction, the isolated individual, typically the Western pilgrim abroad, confronts a violent destiny in which he is prey to the primitive forces which are aroused by his odyssey. These forces may be internal, the repressed areas of his own psyche, or external, in alien peoples or hostile landscapes.3

Timothy Weiss analyses several aspects related to Bowles’s involvement in the Maghreb. He highlights his “artistic, inspirational” experience with “landscapes and cityscapes” and correlates it with “cultural interactions.” Weiss also emphasizes the local terrains that provide the writer/traveller with a “fertile ground” to “cultivate his particular existentialist and sublime sensibilities;” obviously echoing the psychological analysis of Wayne Pounds. Finally Weiss shows how “the Orient” has become “a line of escape” in which Bowles ‘set himself apart from things Western.”4 In his article “Sense of Place in the North African Writings of Paul Bowles,” Michael K. Walonen draws attention to this schizophrenic ambivalence in Bowles: The representations of the spatial dynamics of decolonizing North Africa Bowles employs in [his] works manifest a deeply seated tension between two countervailing impulses: a movement towards greater engagement with Morocco under its own cultural terms and a flirtation with the standard tropes of conventional Orientalist discourse mixed with a nostalgic longing for the old colonial order and the privileges it afforded the Western expatriate.5

Most of the literature on Bowles, including the criticism mentioned here, focuses on fictional/imaginative works. Critics tend to overlook the traveller’s/composer’s/ethnographer’s practical and pragmatic relation to space. Bowles’s “anthropological encounter” with the region has remained an unbeaten track that needs exploration. This paper examines how an anthropological/ethnographic reading of Bowles’s experience with the Maghreb in general and Morocco in particular reveals the way space is both commodified and appropriated in the post-independence era. This study mainly focuses on Bowles’s travelogue Their Hands Are Green and their Heads Are Blue (1963), his experience with ethnomusicology, and his collection of Moroccan folklore from the late 1940s to the 1970s.

96

Chapter Six

Because of the anthropological and cultural studies approach I apply to this reading of Bowles’s spatial experience with the Maghreb, I will incidentally refer to Bowles’s autobiography Without Stopping (1972), his novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), and his translations from Moghrebi that have also shaped much of his renderings of Moroccan folklore. This paper also shows how travel and culture in Bowles’s writings are “coded” spatial practices, or “semantic and semiological categories”6 that have been read, interpreted, negotiated and resisted by post-independence/colonial intellectuals. This multiperspectivist analysis of Bowles’s encounter with the region will open up the way for a postmodernist reading that ultimately reveals the writer’s ambivalence towards and anxiety about place and identity, echoed in Michel de Certeau’s question: “where to live?”7

Beginnings: The Tangier Syndrome Bowles’s encounter with the Maghreb started in 1931 when he was travelling with the American composer, Aaron Copland and met Gertrude Stein in Paris.8 Gertrude Stein, the leader of the American expatriates in Paris, recommended Morocco to them: “The place you should go is Tangier.”9 The idea appealed to Bowles since it would be an escape from New York. The trip to Morocco “would be a rest, a lark, a one-summer stand.”10 This first trip to Tangier would shape the intellectual and psychological framework of the young man and his literary career. Morocco was in fact his destination in the two decades that preceded his settlement in Tangier in 1949. Since his first visit to the region in 1931, Bowles had been attracted to the Moroccan people and their culture, and the place nearly became his second home instead of a temporary vacationland. In his book Paul Bowles Wa ‘Uzlat Tanja (Paul Bowles and Exile in Tangier), the Moroccan novelist Mohamed Choukri claims that, contrarily to William Burroughs who stayed in Tangier for the boys and the kif, Bowles settled in Tangier because of his anthropological interests.11 Bowles himself states that his non-fiction writings about Morocco could be considered anthropological.12 He starts his collection of travel essays, Their Heads Are Green with an anthropological note stating that the human element—people’s lifestyles, manners and behaviour—is the most important thing in the encounter with an “alien” culture. The picturesque is of no importance in itself: the architecture and the arts of a given country would have no meaning if they were not used in people’s daily living, for they would just take on “the qualities of decoration:”

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 97 What makes Istanbul worthwhile to the outsider is not the presence of the mosques and the covered souks, but the fact that they still function as such. If the people of India did not have their remarkable awareness of the importance of spiritual discipline, it would be an overwhelmingly depressing country to visit, notwithstanding its architectural wonders. And North Africa without its tribes, inhabited by, let us say, the Swiss, would be merely a rather more barren California.13

Even though Bowles is quite aware that culture undergoes constant transition and evolution and that people’s way of life is always changing, he maintains that for the traveller, the charm of the place always resides in its traditional modes and rituals. The visitor is inclined to hope that the place he intends to visit will remain fixed in time and space, no matter how the inhabitants might feel. Bowles accuses Western civilization for demolishing the charm of more traditional cultures. The spread of technology is only an “abomination.” Here, Bowles cites the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss who criticised the Western world for inflicting damage on the “less unfortunate world” by sending its rubbish to these areas: “‘what travel discloses to us first of all is our garbage, flung in the face of humanity.’”14 Their Heads Are Green takes the reader away from the hasty impressions of the casual traveller to the experiences of an “expert” on the Maghreb. Nonetheless, one should refrain from an unquestioning acquiescence to a personal view, which is not free of ideology in the context of the 1950s, when newly independent countries of the Maghreb introduced political as well as socio-cultural changes. It was in this era that Bowles had wished that everything remained, as it was, ancient and primitive. Although his travelogue, Their Heads Are Green, is not about Tangier, Bowles’s experience with this city had shaped his views about Maghrebi culture in general and Moroccan culture in particular. This relationship with Moroccan folklore started with the “dream city” of Tangier in which he settled since 1947. Although Tangier was already known for its cosmopolitanism at the time Bowles visited it in 1931, the city still had some of its traditional charm and mystery. It struck the traveller as a “dream city” for it was still far away from modern technology and “had not yet entered the dirty era of automotive traffic.”15 Thus he fell in love with the city and prepared himself for more encounters with the intensely exotic. Even when he went back to New York during the Second World War, Tangier was there calling him; and right after the war (1947), he had the following mental record:

98

Chapter Six One balmy night in May, asleep in my quiet bedroom, I had a dream. There was nothing extraordinary about that. . . . This dream was distinctive because although short and with no anecdotal content beyond that of a changing succession of streets, after I woke, it had left its essence with me in a state of enamelled precision: a residue of ineffable sweetness and calm. In the late afternoon sunlight I walked slowly through complex and tunnelled streets. As I reviewed it, lying there, sorry to have left the place behind, I realized with a jolt that the magic city really existed. It was Tangier. My heart accelerated, and memories of other courtyards and stairways flooded in, still fresh from sixteen years before. For the Tangier in which I had wandered had been the Tangier of 1931. The town was still present the following morning, fresh and invigorating to recall, and vivid memory of it persisted day after day, along with the inexplicable sensation of serene happiness which, being of the dream’s very essence, inevitably accompanied it. It did not take me long to come to the conclusion that Tangier must be the place I wanted to be more than anywhere else. I began to consider the possibility of spending the summer there.16

For Bowles, Tangier remained a “dream city” until his death in November 1999. The concluding pages of his autobiography, Without Stopping, describe his fascination in such a way as to justify his expatriation in Tangier: I relish the idea that in the night, all around me in my sleep, sorcery is burrowing its invisible tunnels in every direction, from thousands of senders to thousands of unsuspecting recipients. Spells are being cast, poison is running its course; souls are being dispossessed of parasitic pseudo-consciousness that lurk in the unguarded recesses of the mind. There is drumming out there most nights. It never awakens me; I hear the drums and incorporate them into my dream, like the nightly cries of the muezzins. Even if in the dream I am in New York, the first Allah Akbar! effaces the backdrop and carries whatever comes next to North Africa, and the dream goes on.17

The complex tunnelled streets, the sorcery, the spells, the poison, the drums, and the cries of the muezzins are recurrent elements in Moroccan folklore. These elements would later shape Bowles’s literary works and more importantly his rendering of Moroccan space. In Clifford’s words, this “passionate encounter” with space is what would produce a whole culture à la Bowles, i.e. “spatial practices that produce knowledges, stories, traditions, comportments, musics, books, diaries, and other cultural expressions.”18 Bowles’s multifaceted relationship with space in the Maghreb reveals an interdisciplinarity that has made of the author the

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 99

traveller, the composer, the novelist, the translator and the ethnographer. In his geocritical approach to space, Bertrand Westphal shows how the geocritic of literature and travel writing uses the “spatial referent,” the place, rather than the author, as a basis for analysis.19 In this context, Westphal points out how Bowles involves all of his senses, adopting “polysensoriality”20 to explore place. In Bowles’s Tangier, the taste of food, the smells of spices and incense coming from the houses and the bazaars, the sounds of drums, the voices of the call for prayers, and the landscape, which represent a “feast” for all senses, define Bowles’s relationship with the place. Focusing on senses other than merely the visual, he synesthetically drinks in the sensuous plenitude of Moroccan space, its tales, its flavor, and its fragrances. His wife Jane and her experience with Cherifa, the stories of the Moroccan young men he had frequented, especially Mohamed Mrabet and Mohamed Choukri, also strengthen his sixth sense that was feeding on the underworld of Moroccan secret life full of tales of magic and superstition. In Morocco, especially in Tangiers, Bowles melts with the space and the text. In the same vein, Westphal cites Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg, Joyce’s Dublin, Kafka’s Prague, Bowles’s Tangiers, and Pessoa’s Lisbon where “human spaces and literature have become inseparable, and so also have the real and the imaginary.”21

Collecting Art and Culture Tangier is Bowles’s starting point for a long journey, his quest for collecting and marketing Moroccan folklore.22 Bowles’s visits to the Rif area—described in his essay “Rif, To Music” is here examined in relation to the concepts of travel and anthropology, the “hybrid activit[ies]” which appear via writing and collecting as modernist collage, imperial power, and subversive critique.23 It is through this ideological framework that Bowles explored a wide range of popular music in different Berber tribes. Bowles’s ethnomusicology hides behind it the pragmatic, individualistic tendency of the Western subject who longs for possession and “appropriation” of the “Other,” his culture and his art. In his application of “sensuous geography,”24 Westphal shows how “sensory experience” can have “implications” on different disciplines such as “psychology, anthropology and even marketing,” for it is “involved” in the consumption process of products.25 Bowles’s ethnomusicology can also be examined with reference to Clifford’s concept of “art-culture system” in which art is “possessed and collected by individuals,” thus revealing the dynamics of the “formation of Western subjectivity.”26 For Clifford, collecting involves subjective and

100

Chapter Six

political processes that shape and reinforce an “art-culture system” through which “exotic objects have been contextualized and given value in the West.”27 But Clifford’s analysis of the “art-culture” system in connection with the process of collecting overlooks processes like exploitation and power relations. Bowles showed interest in ethnomusicology as early as 1932, during his second visit to Morocco. As a composer he visited Tunisia crossing Algeria, Oued Souf, Nefta, Kairouan, Tunis to Sidi-bou-Said to meet the Baron d’Erlanger who had written a large volume on Arab music.28 He also started buying records of Berber Chleuh music and incorporated several of its rhythms and themes into his own composition. Cristopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, Bowles’s biographer, states that the traveller’s interest in music at this stage was for “music for its own sake.” He also argues that Bowles’s initial acquisition would become in twenty-five years, around 1959, a “consuming passion” that would enable him to become “one of the leading authorities on North African music and play an extremely important role in its preservation.”29 This last optimistic statement by Sawyer-Lauçanno remains controversial for different ideological reasons. Since the 1930s, Bowles had tried to get financial aid from different American institutions to collect Moroccan folk music. Finally, between 1956 and 1957, he managed to get a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation with the help of the director of the Library of Congress’s Music Division. And here are extracts from Bowles’s proposal to the Library of Congress: With regard to material I hope to collect: a recording project in Morocco is a fight against time and the deculturizing activities of political enthusiasts, and because of that I want to get down both folk and art music. Even in the latter, to which on principle no one is definitely opposed, public apathy is destroying the performance traditions, and to me it is important to capture whatever examples I can of andaluz music. It is the folk music, however, which is most in danger of disappearing quickly, and it is upon that I should concentrate. It is already too late to embark on a program of recording folk music without governmental permission (which will doubtless involve a certain amount of interference)… A certain amount of the music I hope to be able to get by installing myself in strategic spots and capturing it without the knowledge of the people making it… By far the greatest part of the material, however, would be performed by professionals, and would have to be paid for—after, needless to say, innumerable hours of haggling, gifts, offers and counteroffers. Even if one had an unlimited purse from which to pay them, without her haggling there would be no bringing forth of their best material or their best performing efforts.30

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 101

This letter shows that Bowles’s intention is far from being art for art’s sake as was the case in his first years in Tangier. His ideological overtones are very clear: his objective in collecting folk music is to preserve it from disappearance and destruction at the hands of young nationalists and the Moroccan government, who abhor this genre of music for its alleged backwardness and association with a past that they want to negate altogether. Here, Bowles presents himself as the saviour of Moroccan folklore, which needs to be rescued from an inevitable historical loss. According to Clifford, “cultures” are “ethnographic collections,” and Collecting—at least in the West, where time is generally thought to be linear and irreversible—implies a rescue of phenomena from inevitable historical decay or loss. The collection contains what “deserves” to be kept, remembered, and treasured. Artefacts and customs are saved out of time. Anthropological culture collectors have typically gathered what seems “traditional”—what by definition is opposed to modernity.31

Bowles considers himself the defender of “tradition” against modernity, and whatever musical material he acquires is destined to the archives of the Music Division of the Library of Congress. This attitude elicits what Clifford calls “the modern appropriation of non-Western works of ‘art’ and ‘culture.’”32 Collecting and preserving Moroccan popular music reminds one of the relocation and display of “exotic” objects, non-Western artefacts and practices in European ethnographic museums to be consumed, gazed at, and possessed by visitors. Driven by a longing for the foreign and unfamiliar, the Western cult of the exotic was in fact legitimised by an act of “appropriation” that Clifford explains as follows: “the history of collections (not limited to museums) is central to an understanding of how those social groups that invented anthropology and modern art have appropriated exotic things, facts and meanings. (Appropriate: ‘to make one’s own’, from the Latin proprius ‘proper’, ‘property’).”33 In his Introduction to The Predicament of Culture, Clifford sounds even more critical of the Western tradition of collecting, and particularly the classification and display of “Other” cultures, as he questions the validity and authority of such ethnographic practices. In this context, he diagnoses the “symptoms of a pervasive postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority” through asking the following questions: Who has the authority to speak for a group’s identity or authenticity? What are the essential elements and boundaries of a culture? How do self and

102

Chapter Six other clash and converse in the encounters of ethnography, travel, modern interethnic relation? What narratives of development, loss, and innovation can account for the present range of local oppositional movements?34

“The Rif, to Music” begins with an authoritative voice, claiming that illiteracy in the region has precluded the production of written literature and abetted the development of music. For this travel writer and composer, “the entire history and mythology of the people is clothed in song. Instrumentalists and singers have come into being in lieu of chroniclers and poets.”35 Bowles condensed Moroccan culture in music, which represented “a forum, par excellence, for the ‘work’ of appropriation, that is, a space for ‘work’.”36 This study also includes an elaborated account of the difficulties Bowles had to face in the process of recording music in the Rif area. He had to go through numerous administrative formalities such as getting a document from the Moroccan government to start recording. In his article “The Power of Place and Space,” Robert D. Sack elaborates on how territorial rules can shape the traveller/ethnographer’s relations to place and space. He argues that “the various forms of social power cannot exist without these territorial rules… In or out of place refers to territorial control as constitutive of social relations and power.”37 Bowles’s efforts were also hampered by the local authorities’ unwillingness “to give formal approval to the project.”38 At that time, people were occupied with their new government and no one was ready to assume the responsibility of giving him a permit to record music. In Without Stopping, Bowles states that “there was no official attitude toward Moroccan culture in general. Each man had his own ideas, but no one felt qualified to make a definite statement.”39 Bowles himself never complied with the rules of the country and he carried on his project with the support of the American Embassy. By the time he was asked for permission from the Ministry of the Interior, he “already had more than two hundred and fifty selections from the rest of the country, as diversified a body of music as one could find in any land west of India.”40 The heroic deed is recorded with pride by the hero himself. Equipped with a professional-quality Ampex tape recorder, Bowles set out on a four “roughly circular itineraries of five weeks’ duration each to different parts of Morocco—the second of which he recorded in ‘The Rif, to Music.’” During that period, Bowles “travelled some twenty-five thousand miles around Morocco”41 when he tried to capture every single genre he could come across: Berber, Arab, Jewish, Andaluz, Gnawa, Ramadan, and Sufi music. His favourite remains the Berber performances found in the mountains and high plateaux, that remained as “intact, a

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 103

purely autochthonous art”42 as the qsbah solo genre that will be accounted for later. Like any ethnographer/anthropologist, Bowles dwelled in the villages of the Rif area to conduct his research (his fieldwork) on Moroccan music, “[c]entering the ‘culture’ around a particular locus, ‘the village’ and a certain practice of dwelling/research which itself… depend[s] on a complementary localization—that of the field.”43 On this trip, Christopher Wanklyn, a Canadian who had lived in Tangier for five years and spoke good Moghrebi accompanied him in his expedition together with an experienced Djibli, Mohamed Larbi Jilali, who had gone on a British expedition across the Sahara and Sudan. These two served as his interpreter and informant: “Christopher spoke good Moghrebi, but he was a Nazarene. It is always better to have a Moslem with one, no matter where one goes in Morocco.”44 Bowles was eclectic as far as music instruments and players were concerned. At first he was interested in the rhaita players and was most disappointed when there were no zammars among the Beni Uriagel tribe “who were summoned from the mountains to the village for the ‘festival.’” But he was pleasantly surprised during certain performances in Alhucema when certain Berber tribes were invited to sing in sets of duo-vocalists. Some of them were making up the words on the spot as they were singing and Bowles was pleased “to hear that the texts were improvised.”45 He was exhilarated to be exposed to a “first hand” material made for the occasion, and was overjoyed when he found one who “was an expert on his instrument, and he played it in every conceivable manner: standing, seated, while dancing with horns, without, in company with drums and vocal chorus, and as a solo.” Bowles’s chief discovery was a most exotic instrument, qsbah, “the long reed flute with the low register, common in the Sahara of Southern Algeria but not generally used in most parts of Morocco” wanted a qsbah solo under his own conditions. At first the player, Boujemaa ben Mimoun, refused to play the qsbah without singing, but after the intervention of the Caid of the village who thought that “a qsbah could play alone if it were really necessary,” especially when he heard Bowles’ statement that “the American government wished it.” Happy with the results, Bowles boasts that “the solos are among the very best things in the collection.”46 The Caid’s attitude does not fit the image drawn by Bowles of the Moroccans who were supposed to be totally against the recordings of traditional music. Young Moroccans refused to help him record their folk music for nationalistic reasons, according to Bowles. The Governor’s secretary whom he met in Oujda denied that there was music in either Beni Snassen or Figuig. Bowles was convinced that this young official

104

Chapter Six

would do his best to prevent the recording of any music, for like other young, partially educated Moroccans, he rejected folk music. In “The Rif to Music,” Bowles quoted a Fezi who expressed utter disdain: “it sounds like the noises made by savages. Why should I help you to export a thing which we are trying to destroy? You are looking for tribal music. There are no more tribes. We have dissolved them. So the word means nothing. And there never was any tribal music anyway—only noise.’”47 In Without Stopping, Bowles states that Moroccan authorities and local people in general conceive of his project as “part of a conspiracy to present Morocco as a backward nation, a land of savages.” It is therefore “their patriotic duty to see to it that the shameful sounds made by their countrymen did not reach alien ears.”48 The only music that Bowles and his companions were allowed to record was the much-refined Andaluz music. In the post-independence era, the Moroccan government also encouraged the composition of “patriotic” music, which contained a political message.49 In Morocco, Bowles’s project of recording folk music was never appreciated. In post-independence Morocco, educated people were aware of certain Western writers’ cultural and imperial involvement. They resisted Western modes of representation of Maghrebi culture and folklore. Bowles himself argues that the Moroccan thinks that to “be taken seriously he must cease being picturesque.”50 Young educated Moroccans never hesitated to denounce brotherhood practices and certain tribal genres of music. In the same context, Amanda Petrusich points out that Irresolvable questions of cultural imperialism have plagued professional folklorists for decades. They’re perhaps asked most aggressively of the white men who lugged recording machines around various backwaters, many in cahoots, in one way or another, with the Library of Congress, having appointed themselves responsible for making a material record of some of folk music’s many vernacular iterations.51

Bowles who writes in a postcolonial context is aware of the criticism that his own writing about the Maghreb can engender. He comments on what a French writer had said about one of his stories as follows: “at the other end of the ideological spectrum are those who regard any objective description of things as they are today in an underdeveloped country as imperialist propaganda.”52 Despite such awareness, Bowles overlooks complex religious and nationalist criticism and rejects any kind of change in Moroccan culture, be it from young nationalists and ulama (Muslim conjurists) or from the Maghrebi governments themselves whether in Morocco or in Tunisia. Choukri, the Moroccan novelist who cooperated with Bowles, attacks the latter’s views on Moroccan culture by stating that

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 105

if Bowles wanted Morocco to remain as he had seen it for the first time in the early 1930s, it is merely due to an imperial idea.53 In Orientalism, Edward Said explains Westerners’ longing for an archaic traditional “Orient.” Orientalists see the relation between East and West in terms of inequality, inferiority and superiority. In Islamic Orientalists’ view, it is the destiny of the Muslim world to remain archaic and primitive. There is no chance for Muslims to change: The Islamic Orientalist expressed his ideas about Islam in such a way as to emphasise his, as well as putatively the Muslim’s, resistance to change, to mutual comprehension between East and West, to the development of men and women out of archaic, primitive classical institutions and into modernity. Indeed so fierce was this sense of resistance to change, and so universal were the powers ascribed to it, that in reading the Orientalists one understands that the apocalypse to be feared was not the destruction of Western civilization but rather the destruction of the barriers that kept East and West from each other. When Gibb opposed nationalism in the modern Islamic states, he did so because he felt that nationalism would corrode the inner structures keeping Islam Oriental; the net result of secular nationalism would be to make the Orient no different from the West. 54

The reader can easily detect that Bowles is totally against Moroccan independence. Like other Westerners who by that time settled in Cosmopolitan Tangier, he thought that the wind of liberation would spoil everything around him and this has been demonstrated in his citing of Levi Strauss’s anti-modernist view mentioned above. The following are instances of how the latter responds to Moroccans’ readjustments to the modifications of the postcolonial era and questions their sense of identity and nationalism. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida cites Levi-Strauss who criticises Maghrebi nationalism and calls into question its potential for resistance and liberation from colonial oppression, arguing that it actually represents an ideology of state nationalism that emerged in the 1950s with independence.55

Folklore à La Bowles: Negotiations and Resistance Bowles accuses the young educated Maghrebi class of becoming “fanatical” in their relationship with Europeans and Americans. He believes that the people of “the alien cultures are being ravaged not so much by the by-products of our civilization as by the irrational longing on the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners.”56 He abhors the fact that North

106

Chapter Six

African Muslims try passionately to prove to themselves that they are of “the same stature” as Westerners. He has also come to terms with the fact that Maghrebis are quite aware that Westerners’ interest in Muslim culture does not go beyond “condescending curiosity.” For the European, the North African is merely “picturesque.” The Moroccan thinks that to “be taken seriously he must cease being picturesque.”57 Therefore, young educated Moroccans never hesitate to denounce old tribal musical practices or cults violently, especially when they think about the official attitude towards them. As early as the mid-thirties, various restrictions were placed on brotherhood practices and music. After independence, their public manifestations were effectively suppressed and they were driven underground, which led Bowles to criticize the newly independent states: Many post-colonial regimes attempt to hasten the process of Europeanization by means of campaigns and decrees. Coercion can destroy the traditional patterns of thought, it is true, but what is needed is that they be transformed into viable substitute patterns, and this can be done only empirically by the people themselves. A cultural vacuum is not even productive of nationalism, which at least involves a certain consciousness of identity.58

Here, Bowles’s reaction recalls Homi Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence. In this context, Bhabha argues that “colonial discourse is compelled to be ambivalent because it never really wants colonial subjects to be exact replicas of the colonizers.”59 Bowles’s ambivalence is further revealed when he includes in his narrative Moroccan voices that challenge his dominant viewpoint and cause a split in his Orientalist discourse. Bowles felt unsettled when an illiterate Moroccan taught him the principle of cultural relativism and drew his attention to the fact that Western standards and norms of knowledge could easily and spontaneously be undermined: Not long ago I wrote on the character of the North Africa Moslem. An illiterate Moroccan friend wanted to know what was in it, and so, in a running translation into Moghrebi, I read him certain passages. His comment was terse: “That’s shameful.” “Why?” I demanded. “Because you’ve written about people just as they are.” “For us that’s not shameful.” “For us it is. You’ve made us like animals. You’ve said that only a few of us can read or write.” “Isn’t that true? “Of course not! We can all read and write, just like you. And we would, if only we’d had lessons.”

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 107 I thought this interesting and told it to a Moslem lawyer, assuming it would amuse him. It did not. “He’s quite right,” he announced. “Truth is not what you perceive with your senses, but what you feel in your heart.” “But there is such a thing as objective truth!” I cried. “Or don’t you attach importance to that?” He smiled tolerantly. “Not in the way you do, for its own sake. That is statistical truth. We are interested in that, yes, but only as a means of getting to the real truth underneath. For us there is very little visible truth in the world these days.”60

This is a clear statement of how educated Moroccans resist Western modes of representation of the Muslim Maghrebi culture that is definitely different from the Western one, but not inferior to it as both illiterate and educated Moroccans assert in the above quotation. Both Moroccans demystify the myth of Western knowledge much earlier than Jacques Derrida and his notion of deconstruction61 or Michel Foucault and his discussion of the “Western episteme.”62 The Moroccans Bowles met are not of the type he expected. They are not the interlocuteurs valables, those compliant subjects who nourish Western fantasies and align with his views. They rather typify the native interlocutor Said cites with reference to Frantz Fanon and the liberation movement in Algeria: “Fanon’s native intellectual simply refuses to talk, deciding that only a radically antagonistic, perhaps violent riposte is the only interlocution that is possible with colonial power.”63 The only difference between Bowles’s interlocutors and Fanon’s is that the former are not necessarily intellectuals. The response to Bowles’s views also comes from postcolonial Maghrebi thinkers. Abdallah Laroui elaborates on the idea of folklore and its construction in colonialist and nationalist debates and discourses. In Morocco, during the Protectorate, Marrakech was considered as an open Museum by tourists. This was a subject of disgust and repulsion for young nationalists. The latter incessantly attacked all forms of superstition and backwardness in the city in order to eradicate the image that colonials wanted Morocco to preserve forever. The nationalists were convinced that the colonial authorities intentionally used these unorthodox rituals and practices against a Salafi Sunni Islam in order to keep people away from modernity and progress. Laroui adds that the very first thing the governments of the newly independent state of Morocco did was to prohibit all the popular practices and ritual dancing that used to be held in the famous square of Djemaa el Fna. But these restrictions did not last for a long time. The government soon realised that these folkloric practices were vital for Moroccan tourism. Here, Laroui draws attention to the political economy of popular culture: the revival of Maghrebi folklore has been urged by the

108

Chapter Six

development of tourism, which has led to the bourgeoisification of the culture.64 Since 1949 and with the publication of his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, Bowles had switched to writing and had given up composition little by little. Around the mid-1950s, he had been also preoccupied with the “preservation” of oral literature, especially folktales, through translation from Moghrebi into English. Bowles had actually attained most of his personal achievements especially in the 1960s and 70s through his association with storytellers among the poor and uneducated young Moroccans. As early as 1952, when he decided to settle in Tangier, Bowles began to record Ahmed Yakoubi’s folktales. During the 1960s, he got to know Larbi Layachi—under the pseudonym Driss ben Hamed Charhadi— the first narrator who recorded extensively for him. The result of this collaboration was the publication of a novel, A Life Full of Holes, based on Layachi’s autobiography. Among Moroccan storytellers, however, Mrabet is the best known to the West for the work he has done with Bowles. In the 1960s and 70s, more than eight volumes had been produced, the best known of these novels being Love with a Few Hairs and The Lemon. Choukri was the only educated literary figure who had collaborated with Bowles. His autobiography, For Bread Alone (1973), was first written in Classical Arabic, and then orally translated to Moghrebi, Spanish, and French for Bowles.65 Bowles resorted to translation from Moghrebi when he was unable to produce any creative writing at the time of his wife’s illness. Since Jane Bowles had her first stroke in 1957, he had found it hard to write any novels or even short stories. As a writer, he depended solely on translation works for his survival. Bowles’s race for recording and translating storytellers’ autobiographies and folktales resulted in a whole series of publications in Britain and the United States. Morocco and Moroccan folklore have thus been marketed to the West with a Bowlesian trademark. This is an expanding market where “the metaphor of the text … involves a fetishism of culture, of transforming the use-value of everyday life into the exchange value of exotic commodities for sale on the international academic market.”66 Choukri is quite aware of being exploited and openly attacks Bowles and his publisher, Peter Owen, describing them as vampires and gangsters for usurping and using his artistic creations and those of others like Ahmed Yakoubi, Larbi Layachi and Mohamed Mrabet.67 When I asked Bowles during a personal interview about his relationship with Mrabet and Choukri, he arrogantly and patronisingly responded “I can acknowledge Choukri’s work; at least he had some schooling. But who is Mrabet? It’s me who made him. He is an illiterate.”68 This reveals

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 109

Bowles’s disrupted relationship with his two Moroccan collaborators, because of disputes over royalties of the translations from Moghrebi. Choukri himself accused Bowles of being an exploiter. Laroui criticises this representation of folklore in its Westernised mode, a product curiously consumed by both the Maghrebi middle class and Western tourists. He argues that the concept of folklore consists of a centre and a periphery and gives the example of Bowles who consolidates and disseminates myths about certain aspects of Moroccan culture and heritage, drawing a denigrating image of this society. Bowles asks illiterate young Moroccans to tell him stories and folktales and when he records and publishes them, he thinks that he renders a true and realistic picture of Moroccan life to the Western reader. Laroui sarcastically comments on Bowles’s depiction of Maghrebi society as follows: “But does Bowles realise that what he publishes reflects only his inner hallucinations?” (My translation).69 According to Laroui, the Moroccan folktales reflect Bowles’s nihilism and existentialist crisis. Laroui thus raises a fundamental question about the validity of Western representation of the “Other” as well as the strategies involved in the construction of Western subjectivity and identity, thereby inviting an analysis of the various methods and forms of collecting and exploiting Maghrebi folklore from a foreign perspective. To discuss Bowles’s relationship with Moroccan folklore one has to track back to space. The writer, artist, traveller or ethnographer engages with space according to different “variations” as Bertrand Westphal puts it: the “endogenous,” the “exogenous,” and the “allogeneous”70 depending on situations. The “endogenous” narrator reveals familiarity with the environment, as is the case of local writers such as Mrabet, Choukri and Tahar Ben Jalloun, who write about Tangier from a perspective that rejects the “exotic.” The “exogenous” perspective, however, deals with space through exteriority and this is the case of travellers such as Jean Genet, Jack Kerouak, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, whose rendering of Moroccan space “exudes exoticism.”71 The last category, the “allogeneous,” occupies a middle position in that the subject is familiar with the environment, having settled there for a long time, but is still considered “alien” by the local people. This is the case of Bowles whose intention to preserve and appropriate Moroccan folklore, be it music or folktales, was resisted by locals, including intellectuals, despite having settled in Tangier for decades. It is this situation of in-betweenness, of the in and out, that would aggravate Bowles’s perpetual disconnection from Moroccan society. Bowles had escaped New York earlier and swore never to turn back, just like his characters in the Sheltering Sky, and Let It Come

110

Chapter Six

Down, those “expatriates manqué… who inhabit alien terrains of the self” scarred by “psychic fissures, cliffs, and abysses.”72 This last note can evoke a postmodernist reading of Bowles’ nomadism through which his relationship to Moroccan space appears ambivalent: Morocco is at once desirable and inevitable, which demonstrates Bowles’s split subjectivity. He is neither here nor there. He abhorred New York and liked Tangier but could never feel close to the Moroccan people. He remained an “invisible spectator” as Sawyer-Lauçanno puts it.73 Bowles never wanted to integrate in the Moroccan society despite having been depicted as a Western “expert” on Moroccan culture and folklore. The following is a remarkable illustration: Even with my past practice of pretending not to exist, I could not do it in Morocco. A stranger as blond as I was all too evident. I wanted to see whatever was happening continue exactly as if I were not there. Harry could not grasp this; he expected his presence to change everything and in the direction which interested him. I told him that was not an intelligent way to travel. Obviously he could not change; he continued to make his presence felt in situations where I believed we should both strive for invisibility. Harry thought in terms of confrontation rather than conspiracy. I, however, was so used to hiding my intentions from everyone that I sometimes hid them from myself as well.74

Beyond Orientalist discourse and the traveler/local and Occidental/Oriental dichotomies, this passage reveals Bowles’s inner side; a “divided self”75 and a nihilistic subject in perpetual wandering. This tendency is reasserted in his portrayal of Porter, the protagonist of his bestseller, The Sheltering Sky: He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of the time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.76

Porter’s sense of nomadism in The Sheltering Sky is also echoed in Bowles’s Without Stopping. As the title reveals, the composer/traveler/ writer/ethnographer/translator remains an eternal expatriate, an everlastingly alienated traveller, a permanent exile who turns intense mental states into psychic literary landscapes. This points to the ambivalence and complexity of Bowles’s conception of space. Space is not only geographical and

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 111

socio-cultural but also mental and psychological. It is a state of mind and a structure of feeling that he shares with the “lost generation,” an expression coined in the 1920s by his friend Gertrude Stein who first introduced him to the “dream city” of Tangier.

Notes 1

James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96, 97, 100, 101, 105. 2 Wayne Pounds, “Preface” to Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography (New York: Lang, 1985), vii. 3 Wayne Pounds, “Paul Bowles and The Delicate Prey: The Psychology of Predation,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 59, no.3 (1981): 620. 4 Timothy Weiss, Translating Orients Between Ideology and Utopia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004), 45-46. 5 Michael K. Walonen, “Sense of Place in the North African Writings of Paul Bowles,” in On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 9. 6 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 161. 7 Michel de Certeau, “The Practices of Space,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Maryland: Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 131. 8 Aaron Copland was as Bowles describes him, “the most important composer in the United States.” Before becoming his protégé and going together to Paris on a trip, the young Bowles used to take music lessons in composition daily at the hands of Copland. Paul Bowles, Without Stopping: An Autobiography (London: Peter Owen, 1972), 98-99. 9 Ibid., 123. Also, refer to Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles (New York: Weidenfeld, 1989), 109. 10 Paul Bowles, Without Stopping: An Autobiography by Paul Bowles (London: Peter Owen, 1972), 124. 11 Mohamed Choukri, Paul Bowles Wa ‘Uzlat Tanja (Köln: Al-Kamel Verlag, 1997), 33. 12 In an interview with Abdelhak Elghandor, Paul Bowles states that his nonfiction writings about Morocco could be read as anthropological texts even though he did not mean them to be. Abdelhak Elghandor, “Bowles’s Views of Atavism and Civilization,” Journal of Maghrebi Studies, 1 (1993): 78-79. 13 Bowles, Their Heads Are Green (London: Abacus, 1963), 7. 14 Ibid. 15 Bowles, Without Stopping, 128-29. 16 Ibid., 274. 17 Ibid., 366. 18 James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” 108.

112 19

Chapter Six

Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 112. 20 Ibid., 121. 21 Ibid., 156. 22 I am indebted to Clifford’s article “On Collecting Art and Culture” for the subtitle of this section and the analysis of the “appropriation” of Moroccan art and culture. James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993). 23 Clifford uses this term to define anthropology. I have found it relevant to include travel here for Bowles’s trip to the Rif is multifunctional; part of it is ethnographic. He visited these places to study, collect and record the music of the different Berber tribes. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 13. 24 Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, 121. 25 Ibid., 134. 26 James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” 49. 27 Ibid., 50. 28 Bowles, Without Stopping, 162. 29 Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, An Invisible Spectator, 346-47. 30 Ibid., 346-347. Refer also to Bowles, Without Stopping, 344. 31 James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” 50-51. 32 Ibid., 50. 33 Ibid., 54. 34 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 8. 35 Bowles, Their Heads Are Green, 83. 36 Tia DeNora, “How is Extra-Musical Meaning Possible? Music as a Place and Space for ‘Work’,” Sociological Theory, 4, no. 1 (1986): 93. 37 Robert D. Sack, “The Power of Place and Space,” Geographical Review, 83, no. 3 (1993): 328. 38 Bowles, Their Heads Are Green, 84 39 Bowles, Without Stopping, 344. 40 Bowles, Their Heads Are Green, 85. 41 Ibid., 132. 42 Ibid., 84. 43 Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” 98. 44 Bowles, Without Stopping, 345. 45 Bowles, Their Heads Are Green, 96 46 Ibid., 105, 106. 47 Ibid., 114. 48 Bowles, Without Stopping, 346. 49 Ibid., 346. 50 Ibid., 77.

“Travelling Cultures:” Their Hands Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue 113 51

Amanda Petrusich, “The Sheltering Sound,” The New Yorker, February 24, 2016, accessed December 30th 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-sheltering-sound-paulbowless-attempt-to-save-moroccan-music. 52 Ibid. 53 Choukri, Paul Bowles Wa Uzlat Tanja,12 54 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), 263. 55 Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Introduction, Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics, ed. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida (New York: Palgrave, 200), 6. 56 Bowles, Their Heads Are Green, 8. 57 Ibid., 77. 58 Ibid., 8. 59 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), 13. 60 Bowles, Their Heads Are Green, 75-76. 61 Robert Young discusses the notion of deconstruction as a strategy of decolonising the forms of Western thought and considers Derrida’s work postmodern as it sets the ground for “culture’s own historical relativity.” Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 17. 62 According to Michel Foucault, the term “episteme” is what has made man a “possible area of knowledge.” He postulates that “Western culture has constituted, under the name of man, a being who … must be a positive domain of knowledge and cannot be an object of science.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1989), 400. 63 Edward W. Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 209-10. 64 Abdallah Laroui, Al Idyulugia al Arabia al Mua’asira (Addar al Baidha: Al Markaz Athakafi al Arabi, 1999), 209-10. This book was first published in French under the title L'Idéologie arabe contemporaine: essai critique (1967). 65 Mary Martin Rountree “Paul Bowles: Translations from the Moghrebi,” Twentieth Century Literature 32. 3-4 (1986): 389-99 and Sawyer-Lauçanno, An Invisible Spectator, 362-63. In contrast to Sawyer-Lauçanno, Choukri states that he did not tell his story in Moghrebi. In fact, he used Spanish for the simple reason that he was not skilled in telling stories in Moroccan vernacular. Bowles translated the material from Spanish into English. Choukri also adds that Bowles used to rewrite the text several times before presenting the final version even though Bowles himself denied this for he wanted to show that he was faithful to the original story. Mohamed Choukri, Paul Bowles Wa Uzlat Tanja, 41. 66 Gísli Pálsson, “Introduction: Beyond Boundaries,” Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse, ed. Gísli Pálsson (Providence: Berg, 1993), 32. 67 Choukri, Paul Bowles Wa Uzlat Tanja, 39-40 and Elghandor, “Bowles’s Views of Atavism and Civilization,” 84. 68 Samira Mechri, personal interview with Paul Bowles, 27 July 1999.

114 69

Chapter Six

I have translated this sentence from Laroui’s Al Idyulugia al Arabia, 210. Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, 128. 71 Ibid. 72 Steven E. Olsen, “Alien Terrain: Paul Bowles’s Filial Landscapes” Twentieth Century Literature 32, no. 3/4, (1986): 336. 73 Sawyer-Lauçanno, An Invisible Spectator, 109. 74 Bowles, Without Stopping, 131-32. 75 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Penguin Books, 1990). 76 Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (London: Flamingo, 1993), 13. 70

CHAPTER SEVEN TRANSNATIONAL SPACES, METANARRATIVES, AND IDENTITIES ON THE MOVE IN MAXINE HONG KINGSTON’S I LOVE A BROAD MARGIN TO MY LIFE SIHEM ARFAOUI

As Empress of the Centre, I see from on high: All / no space and time, human populations and individuals forever on the move, migrating like bears and whales and cranes, walking, riding, flying along and across rivers and oceans, islands and continents Maxine Hong Kingston, Broad Margin

From Multiculturalism to Transnationalism The postmodern age has witnessed the de-centring of notions such as nation and nationalism, which have turned too fixed and static to encompass transcontinental fluxes. In the contemporary globalizing world, new discourses have also displaced multiculturalism in favour of transnationalism. As Silvia Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu argue, tracing the development of multiethnic studies demonstrates a “paradigmatic shift from a multicultural to a transnational focus.”1 To this extent, transnational studies are developing into a norm, rather than an exception. Since mapping American ethnicities has increasingly become enmeshed with the globalization of both the dominant and the marginal, the existent conceptions of Americanness in the context of multiculturalism can no more account for either the ethnic text or the moves within and without, including the flows of bordercrossings. Commenting on the intricacy of ethnic Americans’ hyphenated identities, Arjun Appadurai points out that “the formula of hyphenation…

116

Chapter Seven

is reaching the point of saturation, and the right-hand side of the hyphen can barely contain the unruliness of the left-hand side.”2 For a proper contextual understanding of recent ethnic texts, and their explorations of delimited spaces and places, the current paper tries to argue that the alternative is to adopt a transnational perspective, one “that defines borders as permeable and flexible.”3 The considered discussion of space and place in Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to my Life (2011) in transnational terms is theoretically informed by several endeavours to “redefine identity politics in a transnational context where place ceases to be the sole representational parameter of identity and movement between places becomes the central space [in] a person’s agency.”4 As pointed out by Linda Basch et al., “transnationalism is a process by which migrants, through their daily life activities and social, economic, and political relations, create social fields that cross national boundaries.”5 From the perspective of cultural studies, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih further point out that the transnational emerges “as a space of exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridization occur and where it is still possible for cultures to be produced and performed without necessary mediation by the center.”6 Broad Margin exhibits a continuous tendency to write about marginal voices as well as about oneself through others. What is striking, however, is the endeavor to step over writing within Kingston‫ތ‬s own cultural group and towards writing about Iraq and China, thereby reasserting the fluidity of the transnational boundaries between these spaces. As the subtitle “Transnational Spaces, Metanarratives, and Identities on the Move” indicates, the analysis essentially focuses on the flux characterizing Kingston’s poetry memoir, Broad Margin.7 In moving from the United States to China and back, between different genres and texts, and along various other excursions, pleasant and unpleasant, real and imaginary, Kingston’s text cuts with multicultural discourses and speaks to transnational, metanarrative/metafictional literary models. In fact, some of these travels are historical or spatial, others literary or cultural, embodying the transnational at all levels. As it will be discussed in some length, Broad Margin occupies a complex liminal space between genres and literary discourses, seeking to revisit Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior and her postmodernist novel Tripmaster Monkey. Not only does Kingston rewrite particular details from her “No Name Woman” and “White Tigers,” but she also mingles the poetic and the prosaic by tracing the growth of the character Wittman Ah-sing, the protagonist of her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey. Similar movements between different voices, texts, genres, and continents

Transnational Spaces in Kingston‫ތ‬s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

117

focus the reader’s interest on a persistent concern with meta-narratives and moving identities.8 .

Familiarizing the Unfamiliar This analysis will alternate between the writing history of Broad Margin, its synopsis and the reviews it has received. At this stage, it must be admitted that Kingston is less known as the author of Broad Margin, her new free-verse non-fiction book, than The Woman Warrior. Almost thirty years after the publication of The Woman Warrior, Kingston approaches “the memoir again, from a new direction.”9 Commenting on the author’s poetic style, Melinda Miller admits that poetry is “an unusual choice for autobiography,” which yet “makes sense for a writer who learned from an earlier age the ‘talk-story’ tradition of her Chinese forebears.”10 In fact, poetry is not alien to Kingston, since she previously published a collection of poetry entitled To Be the Poet (2002). The reviews that this memoir in verse has received emphasize its multi-layered genres and stream of consciousness style. In this context, David L. Ulin refers to the destabilization of the dividing lines between genres. He states that the text “takes shape in a similarly elusive territory, blurring the lines among poetry, fiction and memoir.”11 Reviewer Carmela Ciuraru rather draws attention to the fact that Kingston “writes in a streamof-consciousness style, recording her thoughts as a single column of verse on each page.”12 The stream-of-consciousness style renders the book “very much interior in its focus, a journey of self-discovery and reckoning” in the sense that Kingston writes of herself, her husband, her son, and her parents.13 In a close context, McAlpin stresses the reference to Walt Whitman and the influence of his style, asserting that the free verse form of Broad Margin “owes much to Walt Whitman, after whom Hong Kingston named Wittman Ah Sing, the hero of her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey (1989).”14 In her interview by Koa Beck, Kingston points to another reason behind her choice of Whitman, referring to him as A guide through journeys, through crowds, which he adored … And another way that he helped was that he guided me in writing the poetic line. What I would do to capture his influence was I would quote his lines and embed his lines in my lines. From there I lead up to his rhythms and then he would influence my voice. My voice would become in harmony with his. I used him as a poetic and musical guide.15

118

Chapter Seven

In such a way, Whitman serves the function of a muse to Kingston as well as a poetic license. Following on his rhythms, Kingston easily finds her own voice. In connection to the question of literary influence, the title I Love a Broad Margin to My Life is mainly informed by two sources. The first source is “the wide margins on the pages of the Chinese editions of [Kingston’s] works,” that is, the margins that the writer’s father used to write in.16 Miller explains that Kingston’s father who is also a poet “wrote verse in Chinese in the margins of her books.”17 On the other hand, Ciuraru sees in the title a muse “from Thoreau’s description of time for leisure, openness, and reflection.”18 According to Miller,19 Kingston chose her title “from a quote from Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ that hangs in her office. The idea of having this ‘note taking’ space, this area to think about the main body of one’s life, inspired her reflections on aging” and on the space women could occupy or “fit in when they have lived for a long time.”20 In this context, much of Broad Margin broods on the anxiety of immortality and literary legacy. Regarding the textual and thematic prevalence of space and place, Kingston’s free verse poem is based on a spatial division, as it starts with “Home” and “Leaving Home,” and ends with “Home Again.” The opening poem “Home” begins “by musing about reaching age 65 and wondering if [Kingston] is still pretty.”21 The closing poem “ends with a list of [Kingston’s] friends who died in the last four years and the intent to stop writing and just read.”22 The poems in between are similarly space-oriented. They are named after different Chinese villages, thus subsequently entitled “Rice Village,” “Bad Village,” “Art Village,” “Spirit Village,” “Viet Nam Village,” “Father’s Village,” “Mother’s Village,” and “City.” “Blending characters” with “myth and history,” these inside poems take the fictional character of Tripmaster Monkey “on a journey through rural villages in contemporary China, connecting his story with [Kingston’s] emotional experiences as a Chinese American.”23 The choice of the village over the city stems from the fact that “all the big cities are globalized,” which makes all the interest and authenticity lie in the countryside.24 It can equally stand as a criticism targeting globalization and its tendency to standardize a western model. The present section accounts for the logic behind the spatial structure of Kingston’s verse memoir. The writer notes in an interview: I’ve been working with prose for so long. [The 1989 book] “Tripmaster Monkey” took me 10 years to write; [the 2003 book] “The Fifth Book of Peace” took 10 years. When I turned 65, I thought, “I can’t afford to spend a decade per book.” So, I decided to quicken the pace. I find that prose is

Transnational Spaces in Kingston‫ތ‬s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

119

like a workhorse—I have to create entire scenes, and I have to get the setting and all of the furniture. But for the poetry, I can skip around, fly from here to there. It’s easier, and it’s more fun.25

Kingston then realizes “that Chinese doesn’t have verb tenses,” which “explained how easy it is in Buddhism or Chinese mysticism” to seize “the present moment” and “understand that eternity and the present are one.” “This is a concept I wrestle with philosophically,” Kingston admits, “and in meditation I work so hard to be in the present moment.”26 Hence, the rationale behind the choice of both genre and space as organizing principles makes of motion a key organizing feature of her poems’ internal division, let alone their thematic dimensions. Nevertheless, Broad Margin is not about space as such. Rather, it is about moving across and beyond places, times, and boundaries. For this reason, it makes more sense to view Kingston’s verse memoir as a complex journey. As David Orr observes: Instead, it is a meditation on the author’s life as she enters her twilight years. It is also a story of a journey, a trip to China that folds into her fictional protagonist Wittman Ah Sing’s (the Monkey King) first journey to China when he also enters old age. Kingston/Wittman’s journey is beautifully done, unfolded in an ambiguous way as the experience of author and character at the same time. The bulk of the book thus consists of a series of trips that Kingston/Wittman take to different villages in China, some perhaps “real” and others more iconic/mythic as types of villages and communities.27

The choice allows the reader to “journey with [Kingston] back to China, to her parents’ villages and a past that exists only in remnants and reminders, and we go with her to Washington, D.C., and her arrest during a protest of the Iraq War.”28 The journey is both physical and mental, since the reader also discovers Kingston’s “thoughts on family and politics, belief and behavior, life and death, and how life goes on.”29 Zia Helen emphasizes Kingston’s status as “a time-and-space traveler” who sets off on “a journey through the writings, the past and present lives,”30 It is a multidimensional journey through time and space, as well as through fiction and nonfiction. One of the effects of such a strategy is to stress motion as a metaphor for a travelling identity, thereby questioning the dynamics of globalization.

120

Chapter Seven

Metafictional Journeys In her article, “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History,” Linda Hutcheon introduces metafictionality as an echoing “of the texts of the past.”31 Metafictionality is about the intertexts of fiction while historiographic metafiction refers to the incorporation of fiction and history in the fictional universe of the book. Metafictionality cancels notions of the autonomous clear-cut text and redefines fiction within a Foucauldian framework i.e., as “a node within a network” of discourses and literary genres.32 The following section shall explore the ways in which Broad Margin deploys metafictional strategies, particularly by drawing on Kingston‫ތ‬s previous works. Through her first collection of poetry, To Be the Poet, Kingston announces a move from fiction to verse. As she explicitly puts it: “Let my life as Poet begin… I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.”33 Yet, this is not to be mistaken for a total breach with the conventions of fiction, for “Kingston has occupied a space between genres”34 since the publication of her first book, The Woman Warrior in 1976. This suggests that, to Kingston, the blurring of genres is something of a tradition, which the writer is unlikely to cut with even by announcing a move toward poetry. This interplay between the fictional and the poetic can be further elicited through an exploration of Kingston’s metafictional journeys. Part and parcel of the transnational conception of imaginary space is Kingston’s revisiting of her previous texts and their dominant themes. In the context of The Woman Warrior, Kingston revisits the issue of pacifist, feminist activism. A dominant theme in the book, Carmela Ciuraru observes, is “the author’s struggle to face what she feels is an increasingly violent and irrational world. She repeatedly rails against the war in Iraq and the policies of the Bush administration.”35 Suffice it to mention that the memoir incessantly returns to taking up the notion of literary resistance in response to the questionable civilizing mission and exceptionalism of the U.S.36 In addition to this thematic pattern, Broad Margin tries to revisit the spaces explored in earlier novels. Kingston presents the reader with a transnational imaging of the father’s village described in The Woman Warrior so that it looks more authentic and closer to the Chinese village, with houses close to each other and the fields out there. Kingston contemplates this necessary revision, commenting:

Transnational Spaces in Kingston‫ތ‬s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

121

After I went to China, I saw that the villages there look like pueblos, like any adobe village you could find in Africa or South America. When I wrote the book, I pictured farmhouses the way we have them in the U.S., so there would be a farmhouse surrounded by fields, and then at a distance another farmhouse with its fields. I didn’t realize that all the people lived together in a pueblo and that their common fields were all out there. Everything that one does, in your house, affects the people on the other side of the wall. So I would have written about the villages better. That is a mistake in imagining the setting.37

Besides this revisioning of the native village, which aims to “forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together [her] societies of origin and settlement,” Kingston re-emphasizes her lineage to her paternal aunt, both genealogical and symbolic, thereby building inter-textual connections that also defy “geographic, cultural, and political borders:”38 She said, “You and I are very related.” We are ho chun. I thought, Don’t touch me; I don’t want To catch your disease. I felt her hard bones Around my wrist, my arm. In her other Hand was a bowl of water. She let go of me, and with both hands offered me water. Water from the well.39

Through the symbolic gesture of the gripping hand-shake, Kingston takes up again the issue of her personal involvement in making up a story and reclaiming a voice for the deceased aunt. The revisited story of “No Name Woman” reinforces older themes, but also introduces a new one, that of the need for cleansing, redemption and forgiveness: The bad we did Be over. Punishment be over. Suffering be over. Is that it then? Wet my hands in the well Water---the bowl like the well, and my wet face Like my sinful aunt’s. Perhaps the well water Had been offered innocently, I the only one Who remembers the past, and believes in history’s influence. And believes ritual settles scores.40

The idea that the well water is no longer reminiscent of contamination or vengeance, and rather highlights the value of forgiveness, equally marks another addition to the original story.

122

Chapter Seven

Another female figure to which Kingston gives life in Broad Margin is Fa Mu Lan, herein referred to as Fa Mu Lan, who is the heroine of The Woman Warrior’s second chapter. Kingston narrates, “I read that Fa Mu Lan killed/herself by hanging; she refused the emperor’s/order that she became one of his wives.”41 Reviewer Orr argues that what Kingston offers is a troubling version of Fa Mu Lan’s fate which uses hanging to grapple with the legacy of war and raises “post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as an important issue for our militarized society.”42 This constitutes one of Kingston’s focal issues in The Fifth Book of Peace, which clearly challenges the dilemma of coming to terms with war traumas. However, apart from introducing a current thematic preoccupation, the considered textual transformation rewrites the ending of the swordswoman’s short story “White Tigers” and displaces it from a narrative of female revenge and excellence through war-making to one of self-annihilation, as it opts for suicide at the expense of confrontation. Additionally, in both versions, violence looms larger than the pacifism that forms the backbone of Kingston‫ތ‬s latest work. Further on, Broad Margin cancels the notion of closure in Fa Mu Lan‫ތ‬s story, drawing attention to this account as an unfinished story, ever open to textual transformations once and again. Yet, it should be noted that Kingston revisits her female as well as male protagonists. In fact, Broad Margin is very much about “Wittman Ah Sing, the conflicted protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey.”43 Go, live Chinese, Gladly old. America, can’t get old, No place for the old. China, there be “Immortalists. Time move slower in China. They love the old in China. No verb tenses in Chinese, present tense grammar, always. Time doesn’t pass for speakers of such language. And the poets make time go backward, write stroke by stroke, erase one month of age with every poem.44

Wittman leaves his wife momentarily in search of his image “of an idealized China.”45 He renounces claiming America in favour of claiming roots. What he achieves is instead a modernized China extremely globalized. “Old China nevermore. Too late. / Too late. Too late. Too late. / Voyage far, and end up at another / Globalized city just like the one you left.”46

Transnational Spaces in Kingston‫ތ‬s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

123

Kingston sees in Wittman not just the protagonist of Tripmaster Monkey grown older. Wittman is also Kingston’s companion on her twelfth journey to China. We read: But I don’t like Traveling by myself. I ought to learn to go Places on my own, good for my character, to be self-reliant. (A translation of my name, Ting Ting, Self-Reliance. I should Live up to my name, Self-Reliant Hong.) Why I need a companion, Monkey, along: He’s unafraid and unembarrassed to butt And nose into other people’s business. He likes chatting with them and partying with them.47

Eventually, Wittman’s travels from Tripmaster Monkey to Broad Margin blur with Kingston’s own swinging between prose and poetry. Kingston affirms: I set off on this journey, and I didn’t know how to do it alone. I didn’t know how to do it without my powers of fiction. Before [Wittman] came in, I worried that there wasn’t enough for this poem if I was just to write about me. But what is most interesting about me is that I have an imagination. So I brought in my imaginary life and my alter ego, who is more interesting than I am.48

Afresh, revisiting Wittman enables Kingston to play along generic boundaries and come up with another unconventional autobiography, albeit in verse. In Broad Margin, the metafictional journeys largely connect with the personal and make the autobiographical much more approachable. In fact, what Kingston does by giving life to her previous works and characters is shaped by her own travels to China at least a dozen times.49 The writer emphasizes the empathetic connections with her characters by admitting; “as an adult, as a writer, my imaginary friends were my fictional characters. I wanted to have them come with me on the journey. I also wanted to tell what happens to my fictional characters in their older age.”50 Besides, the fact that Broad Margin refers to Kingston’s earlier works gives an image of the writer’s career as one work in progress. To draw on Kingston’s words: There are mistakes, there are unfinished stories, there’s new information, there’s even new understanding of what happened earlier, and instead of

124

Chapter Seven going back and correcting it and making a new edition, what I’m doing is writing a new story and referring back to the old one and catching it up to date.51

In this sense, metafictional spaces offer the writer the possibility to imagine other endings to some of her stories. This very aspect stresses the process of rewriting and further aligns Kingston with postmodernist poetics.

Does Home Still Matter? Besides Kingston‫ތ‬s generic crossings, the prevalence of moving identities as well as the references to home certainly invite a thorough questioning of the traditional conception of domestic space as a signifier of fixedness and stability. In fact, Kingston’s blurred and blurring journeys call upon a reconception of home as a non-static place. They hearken back to the idea that “[h]ome is a territory or place of comfort …, but it is by no means a static place.”52 As Bruce B. Janz points out in his discussion of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of nomadism, “when we are at home, we have a set of rhythms that define a place as home, and in fact when we are away from home, we often find ourselves setting up familiar rhythms to make a new place into home.”53 In the meantime, we “cannot identify ‘home’ any more than the bird can map out in advance its territory. It is constantly in the process of deterritorializing and reterritorializing.”54 In other words, the notion of home is both destabilized and freed of any definite boundaries. The destabilization of the notion of home strongly echoes Deleuze and Guattari‫ތ‬s theory of deterritorialization. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari use deterritorialization interchangeably with the expression “line of flight,” defining it as the nomadic movement from one territory to another. As they put it, “nomadic waves or flows of deterritorialization go from the central layer to the periphery, then from the new center to the new periphery, falling back to the old center and launching forth to the new.”55 In this continuous flow, what is noticeable about deterritorialization is the dominant quality of instability and displacement, which gives meaning to the migratory principle in Broad Margin. In keeping with the flux of time and place in Kingston’s memoir, the reference to home is subject to the same fluctuation of deterritorialization. In fact, Broad Margin challenges Susheila Nasta’s argument that “[h]ome … is not necessarily where one belongs but the place where one starts

Transnational Spaces in Kingston‫ތ‬s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

125

from.”56 It thus undermines the very principle of stability attached to this concept. In the following verses, Kingston reasserts her feeling of home belonging among her kin in China: These people belong to me. The ground I’m walking belongs to me. I feel ownership Of the fields before me, and the hills I see and the hills Beyond my sight, and the river and the connecting rivers To the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean, and more Oceans, and lands the waters touch. I own And am responsible for all of it. My kuleana. My duty. My business. Up to me. I walk My land and territory, and see how, what My people are doing.57

Kingston’s sense of home is closer to the one provided by Toplu who states that “when people are relocated in various places and feel that they belong to some of these, the multiplicity of homes creates different identities.”58 In the same line, Avtar Brah further explains that home connotes our networks of family, kin, friends, colleagues and various other ‘significant others.’ It signifies the social and psychic geography of space that is experienced in terms of neighborhood or a hometown. That is, a community ‘imagined’ in most part through daily encounter.59

McAlpin comments that Kingston’s “reflections on several of her dozen visits to China meander like a traveler without an itinerary.”60 In one significant passage, Kingston reinforces the kernel of being a nomad by stressing an imagery of fluidity, of being in flux: Pulling, drafting, we flow. We are blood. No moving over to a curb, no getting off. Give in to being lost; ride to unknown parts, until the cycling mass lets me go.61

In this context, Kingston’s verse attests to the validity of Stuart Hall’s following argument: From the diaspora perspective, identity has many imagined ‘homes’ (and therefore no one single homeland); it has many different ways of ‘being at home’—since it conceives of individuals as capable of drawing on

126

Chapter Seven different maps of identity and locating them in different geographies at one and the same time—but it is not tied to one, particular place.62

The notion that home is multiple gives primacy to routes over roots, to movement over stability. In this sense, Hall’s conception of home is at the heart of Kingston’s transnational understanding of identity.

Conclusion: Across Roots/Routes In the present essay, I have tried to delve into the narrator/character’s shifting notions of space and place from stability to restlessness, which illustrates that motion becomes the primary metaphor of identity. As a journey through different Chinese villages, mythic figures and cultures, real and imaginary characters, Broad Margin not only ponders the fluidity of Kingston’s work but also brings out the problem of globalization and the loss of traditions. The considered work deconstructs prevalent essentialist conceptions of selfhood and evidences that motion is integral to the formation of a transnational identity. A transnational approach has proven broadly informative in shedding light on the explorations of space and place in Kingston‫ތ‬s Broad Margin. Hybrid identities, which are tainted with multiplicity and discontinuous shifts, such as the memoirist’s experiments with divergent modes of writing or Wittman Ah-Sing‫ތ‬s relentless journeys between China and the United States, have required discussion within a framework of transnationality. Besides, the omnipresence of generic and physical moves within the considered memoir speaks abundantly to a particular transnational model that aligns itself with spaces of trans-marginality. Through such movements, Kingston’s Broad Margin at once claims marginality and embraces the liminality of merging concrete as well as fictional journeys within the centre (the U.S.) and its peripheries (the East). In turn, the above shifts equally signal a move away from the notion of “single-root identity” in favour of “rhizome identity” as described by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. The “rhizome identity,” comments Kathy-Ann Tan upon drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, “does not comprise one single root of culture inherited from the individual’s past, but posits identity as a process of multiplicity informed by multiple nodes and roots of different cultural encounters that the present still interlaces together.”63 As such, Kingston’s life-writing exemplifies transnational literature in its transgression of separate literary modes and its challenge of the nation-state boundaries of belonging and citizenship. It replaces citizens of a nation by the concept of “citizens of the world, a world with

Transnational Spaces in Kingston‫ތ‬s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

127

no rigid boundaries.”64 In brief, Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life turns out to be about selves and narratives set somewhere along interfering roots and routes.65

Notes 1

Silvia Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu, “A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity in Anglophone Literatures,” in A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity, ed. Schultermandl and Toplu, (Krotenthallergasse: Lit Verlag, 2010), 15. 2 Arjun Appadurai, “Patriotism and Its Futures,” Public Culture 5.3 (1993), 424. 3 Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu, “A Fluid Sense of Self,” 13. 4 Ibid., 21. 5 Linda Basch et al., Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (London: Routledge, 1994), 23. 6 Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 5. 7 I borrowed the phrase “on the move” from Maxine Hong Kingston, I Love a Broad Margin to my Life, (New York: Random House Inc., 2011), 64. 8 BegoĖa Simal, “‘Moving Selves’: Immigration and Transnationalism in Gish Jen and Chitra Divakaruni,” in Transnational, National, and Personal Voices: New Perspectives on Asian American and Asian Diasporic Women Writers, ed. Simal and Marino, (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2004), 151-74. In this chapter, Simal provides an ample analysis of the concept of “moving selves.” 9 Melinda Miller, “Kingston’s Life Journey, Told in Chapter and Verse,” Review of Maxine Hong Kingston, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. Buffalo News, N.Y (30 Jan 2011). https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-27823865.html. Jan. 2015. 10 Ibid. 11 David L. Ulin, “The Writer’s Life; a Reflection on Aging,” Review of Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, Jan. 2011. Los Angeles Times, Calif, (06 Feb 2011). 12 Carmela Ciuraru, “‘Woman Warrior’ Looks at Aging, Writerly Self,” Review of I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, by Maxine Hong Kingston, The Boston Globe, Jan 25, 2011, https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-27823865.html. Jan. 2015. 13 Ibid. 14 Heller McAlpin, “Making Room For a ‘Broad Margin’ to Life, in Verse,” http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/133303006/making-room-for-a-broad-margin-tolife-in-verse. (July 2011), 3. 15 Koa Beck, “Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston, author of I Love a Broad Margin to My Life,” March 1st, 2011, http://www.smithmag.net/memoirville/2011/03/01/interview-maxine-hongkingston-author-of-i-love-a-broad-margin-to-my-life/, Feb. 2015. 16 “Review of Maxine Hong Kingston, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.” East Baton Rouge Parish Library. http://link.ebrpl.com/portal/I-love-a-broad-margin-tomy-life-Maxine-Hong/rwxSogGRPx4/. Jan. 2015.

128 17

Chapter Seven

Miller, “Kingston’s Life Journey.” Ciuraru, “‘Aging, Writerly Self.” 19 Miller, “Kingston’s Life Journey.” 20 Jason Wu reports that the connection is deeper than mere inspiration in the sense that “Like Thoreau, who once refused to pay taxes to support the MexicanAmerican war, Kingston is concerned with the value of civil disobedience. After she was arrested in a 2003 demonstration against the war in Iraq, Kingston said she questioned the value of nonviolent action.” Jason Wu, “Maxine Hong Kingston on the ‘Broad Margin’ of Her Life. Asian American Icon Reflects on Her Life and Legacy,” Asia Society, April 21, 2011, http://asiasociety.org/maxine-hongkingston-broad-margin-her-life. 21 Nancy R. Ives, “Review of Maxine Hong Kingston, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life,” Knopf. Jan. 2011, Library Journal (Sep. 15, 2010), 72. 22 Ibid., 73. 23 Ibid., 72. 24 Miller, “Kingston’s Life Journey.” 25 Amy Cavanaugh, “A Life on the Margins: Maxine Hong Kingston, ‘I Love a Broad Margin to My Life,’ at the Writer’s Center,” The Washington Post, February 3, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2011/02/03/maxine-hongkingston-i-love-a-broad-margin-to-my-life/?utm_term=.37d135b62d39. 26 David L. Ulin, “David L. Ulin Talks to Maxine Hong Kingston.” February 6, 2011. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/02/david-l-ulin-talks-tomaxine-hong-kingston.html, (Feb. 2015). 27 David Orr, “Maxine Hong Kingston‫ތ‬s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life,” http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/95186.html (Feb. 2015). 28 Miller, “Kingston’s Life Journey.” 29 Ibid. 30 Helen Zia, “Free at Last,” Ms 21.1 (Winter 2011), 58. http://www.powells.com/review/2011_02_27.html. (Feb. 2015) 31 Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History,” in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, eds. P. O’ Donnell and Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 3. 32 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans., A. M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 23. 33 Ulin, “The Writer’s Life.” 34 Ibid. 35 Ciuraru, “‘Aging, Writerly Self.’” 36 Sihem Arfaoui, “Contemporary Female Imaginaries Toying with National and Ideological Hegemonies in the Middle East,” (paper presented at the International Conference “Identity and Conflict in the Middle East and its Diasporic Cultures,” Lebanon: University of Balamand, March 20-22, 2014). 37 Ulin, “Ulin Talks.” 38 Linda Basch et al., Nations Unbound, 8. 39 Kingston, Broad Margin, 169. 40 Ibid 171. 18

Transnational Spaces in Kingston‫ތ‬s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life 41

129

Ibid 217. Orr, “Maxine Hong Kingston.” 43 Manan Desai, “Review of Maxine Hong Kingston‫ތ‬s ‘I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.’” June 8, 2011. http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2011/06 /review-maxine-hong-kingstons-i-love-broad-margin-my-life. (Feb. 2015). 44 Kingston, Broad Margin, 21-22. 45 Desai, “Review of Broad Margin.” 46 Kingston, Broad Margin, 60. 47 Ibid., 104. 48 Ulin, “Ulin Talks.” 49 Kingston, Broad Margin, 49. 50 Cavanaugh, “A Life on the Margins.” 51 Ulin, “The Writer’s Life.” 52 Bruce B. Janz, “The Territory Is Not the Map: Place, Deleuze and Guattari and African Philosophy,” Philosophy Today 45 no. 4 (Winter 2001), 396. 53 Ibid., 395. 54 Ibid., 398. 55 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 16. 56 Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain, (Ontario: Palgrave, 2002), 1. 57 Kingston, Broad Margin, 191. 58 Sebnem Toplu, “Gendered Transnational Spaces: Arab ‘Safari‫ ތ‬Situated in Hanen Al-Shaykh‫ތ‬s Only in London,” In A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity, ed. Schultermandl and Toplu, (Krotenthallergasse: Lit Verlag, 2010), 160. 59 Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. 60 McAlpin 3. 61 Kingston, Broad Margin, 197. 62 Stuart Hall, “New Cultures for Old,” A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, ed. D. Massey and P. Jess, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 207. 63 Kathy-Ann Tan, “‘All the difficult Names of Who We Are:’ Transnational Identity Politics in Chang-Rae Lee’s and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Fiction,” In A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity, ed. Schultermandl and Toplu, (Krotenthallergasse: Lit Verlag, 2010), 113. 64 Anna Izabela CichoĔ, “Identity Trajectories in V.S. Naipaul‫ތ‬s Work,” in A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity, ed. Schultermandl and Toplu (Krotenthallergasse: Lit Verlag, 2010), 48. 65 The editing remarks of Dr. Asma Hichri and her continuous help largely contributed to improving previous drafts of the present article. Her constructive, meticulous feedback and patience served as a guide all throughout the editing. Dr. Hichri‫ތ‬s cooperation is most appreciated. 42

CHAPTER EIGHT THE ART OF JUXTAPOSITION: ARAB AMERICAN WRITING AND CULTURAL CODE SWITCHING LAURA RICE

For whom does one write when there is an imagined community, but you are not part of it? And further, when you are part of an imagined community, but it has not been imagined by you or yours? This is the dilemma faced by Arab-American writers in a post-9/11 U.S. They are considered outsiders in the place where they live, trying to find space to breathe, exist and express their identities. To create a space where there is none, they have developed a highly effective poetics of juxtaposition which, placing one cultural identity next to another, one language next to another, one literary practice next to another, opens an expressive space of unexpected connections and disruptions. In this essay, I explore how “Writing while Arab” (an ironic echo of “Driving while Black” in the U.S.) is manifested in three areas: cultural identity (ethnic and diasporic), language (Arabic and English) and literary practice (transnational dialogic relationships across genres and cultural frames of reference). Cultural identity will be discussed through Stuart Hall’s argument that the postmodern subject has no fixed, essential or permanent identity but is “formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems that surround us.”1 Language will be considered via the complex transnational poetic production of some Arab American writers, and literary practice is examined through the work of Libyan American poet and translator, Khaled Mattawa. Mattawa has been chosen as a focus because, in addition to his critical analysis of poetic production and translation, his frame of reference as a Libyan has many resonances with Tunisian experience.

The Art of Juxtaposition

131

Ethnic and Diasporic Identities Arab-American writers are situated in what can only be called a global culture. Their content tends to be global; their perspective often runs against the grain of contemporary American foreign policy; the situation of their post-9/11 writing has made them an imagined community who stick together despite all the differences of their backgrounds, in defense of Arab culture. Before 9/11, the existence of a cohesive Arab American identity and literature was in question. As Lisa Suhair Majaj points out: The Arab-American community, shaped by a century-long history of migration, is remarkably diverse. It includes third and fourth generation Americans as well as recent immigrants; people from different countries and different religious denominations; those who speak no Arabic and who speak no English; people who identify primarily with the “Arab” side of their heritage and those who identify primarily with the “American” side. This diversity complicates assessment of what constitutes “ArabAmerican” identity.2

While Arab-Americans have always suffered forms of discrimination, before 9/11 they tended to be invisible within the larger culture. As a group, their cultural mores about family, education and economic stability led to their being better educated and more economically successful than the majority of Americans.3 The history of Arab and Muslim Americans has been hidden in plain sight. Arab and Muslim participation in American culture, from the “age of discovery” to the present has been documented by Jonathan Curiel in his Al’ America: Travels through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots (2008). Curiel sees the legacy of Moorish Spain in fortresses such as the Alamo, and finds traces of the call to prayer in the song Camp Levee Holler sung by slaves and African-American prisoners. P. T. Barnum’s 1848 Bridgeport, Connecticut home called “Iranistan” and Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 film, The Sheik present us with an Orient imagined by the West. Lebanese-American Gibran Khalil Gibran’s prose poem The Prophet, still sells about 5000 copies a week.4 The context in which ArabAmericans began writing at the end of the 19th century was, as Majaj points out, “heavily assimilationist:” Complicating the process of Americanization were racial definitions of American identity, which threatened to exclude Arabs. The Naturalization Act of 1790 had granted the right of citizenship to what it termed “free white persons.” … Arab immigrants, among others, became caught up in

132

Chapter Eight naturalization laws basing eligibility for citizenship on non-Asiatic identity. In a series of court cases known as the “prerequisite cases,” petitions for naturalization were challenged and in some instances denied on the basis of whether or not individuals qualified as “white.”… In the cases involving Arabs, courts argued that Arabs should be denied naturalization as U.S. citizens on the basis of dark skin color, origin on the continent of Asia, distance (literal or metaphorical) from European culture, and cultural and geographical proximity to Islam. Most of the cases before 1920 were eventually resolved in favor of the applicants, and the 1920 census classified Syrians and Palestinians under the category “Foreign-born white population.”5

This assimilationist environment, combined with a desire to hold on to Arab cultural practices, led to invisibility vis-à-vis the majority “white” population, and to a sense of personal fragmentation and isolation among the Arab population. Stuart Hall addressed the fragmentation and consolidation of identities in a lecture on the “Origins of Cultural Studies” which he delivered at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1989. Hall emphasized “how necessary the other is to our own sense of identity:” The two are the two sides of the same coin. And the other is not out there, but in here. It is not outside, but inside. And that is the profound, the very profound insight of ... Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. “The movement, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant. I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart, and now the fragments have been put together by another self.” You see here, in addition to the mechanisms of directed violence and aggression, which are characteristic of racial stereotyping, are those other things, the mechanisms of splitting, of projection, of defense, and of denial.6

As Hall noted in his essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” again following Fanon’s lead, the danger of an assimilationist context is not just the anger felt at being “othered” by the majority, but the danger of internalizing that othered self, By the power of inner compulsion and subjective conformation to the norm… This inner expropriation of cultural identity cripples and deforms. If its silences are not resisted, they produce, in Fanon’s vivid phrase, “individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colorless, stateless, rootless.”7

The Art of Juxtaposition

133

Historians now believe that nearly one-third of the slaves brought to the Americas were Muslims,8 and only now is that connection being more broadly investigated by organizations such as the International Museum of Muslim Cultures, founded in Jackson, Mississippi in 2000. In his study of the representation of Arabs in Hollywood films, Reel Bad Arabs, movie historian Jack Shaheen found that out of 1000 films only “50 portrayed Arabs even-handedly and only 12 contained positive depictions.”9 The January 2015 online exhibit at the Arab American Museum in Detroit is entitled: “Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes.”10 This ongoing, interactive exhibit is a call for agency on the part of Arab Americans to control the images that define them. On May 24, 1991, President George H. W. Bush cut the ribbon formally opening a memorial garden in Washington D.C. in honor of Gibran, praising his message of peace only a few weeks after the invasion of Iraq and the massive destruction of the first Gulf War.11 Given the dangers of assimilation, Maha El-Said, in her “Dropping the Hyphen,” looks at how theorists have argued for identity to be discussed in terms of diaspora rather than ethnicity. For James Clifford, El-Said notes, “[d]iasporist discourses reflect the sense of being part of an ongoing transnational net-work that includes the homeland, not as something simply left behind, but as a place of attachment in a contrapuntal modernity.”12 In summarizing theories of ethnic and diasporic identities, El-Said compares their larger implications as seen by various critics. Ethnic identity is seen as a “way of becoming American” and “claiming mainstream existence” in a multicultural society, according to Richard Alba. For Barbara Demott, however, “multiculturalism is the theoretical offspring of the assimilation policies of the mid-century integration movement and the essentialist definitions of culture… [u]sing the myth that North American society offers equal opportunity to all its members.”13 If ethnicity is understood as the shared cultural traits of a group, and is defined in terms of difference from the dominant culture rather than the other of that culture, then the distinction between ethnic and diasporic identification becomes “very minimal”14 and awareness of positioning is crucial. “Cultural identity … is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being,’” Stuart Hall explains: Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything that is historical, they undergo constant transformation… [T]hey are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power… [I]dentities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.15

134

Chapter Eight

Between 2000 and 2010, the Arab-American population increased by 72 percent.16 Today, 80 percent of Arab-Americans are U.S. citizens, 63 percent are Christian, while 24 percent are Muslim.17 This increase brings us back to U.S. foreign policy; after 9/11, this heretofore-invisible population became highly visible and overtly discriminated against. Profiling, surveillance and tracking of Arab-Americans became widely accepted and normalized. The writing that Arab-Americans produce is perceived as political. While some writers have enjoyed the benefits of joining the ranks of the neo-conservatives, the majority have supported one another carrying out a widespread effort to defend Arab culture and to educate the majority population through literary works, translation from and into Arabic, and conferences sponsored by organizations such as RAWI and the Arab American Museum in Detroit. They are called on, often enough, by news organizations to explain the Arab world. As David Williams, grandson of Lebanese immigrants, pointed out in an aptly entitled essay, “This Hyphen Called my Spinal Cord” (2007), heightened visibility has also meant no longer working in isolation as Arab-American writers: Being aware of a body of work, in both the individual and collective sense, helps us to move on to new themes and new approaches. Sometimes the frustrations of Middle Eastern politics suggest we could go on writing the same poem over and over, and it would stay relevant. In fact, the current situation— political and otherwise— is unprecedented in many ways, and we need imagination and creativity to deal with it— through writing and other means.18

Williams ends his essay by acknowledging that Arab American writers will inevitably “be read primarily for insights into the Arab world.” But this essentially political positioning of Arab-American writers is also an opportunity. He finally observes that some writers, “like Khaled Mattawa, can draw creatively on the traditions of both English and Arabic, not only in translations but in original work. These terrible times may also be the threshold of a great cross-fertilization.”19

Language and the Task of the Translator We could say that in the post-9/11 context, Arab-American writers have been given the task of the translator. Williams’s essay on Arab-American literature in the 21st century points out that Arab-American writers, while often rooted in the U.S., make frequent reference to “personal, cultural, historical and political realities in their families’ countries of origin,” and

The Art of Juxtaposition

135

“are often compelled to show, in intimate terms, the human cost of policies that otherwise might only be understood in abstract terms.” Standing in opposition to “those whose actions express a contempt for life equal to their capacity to destroy it,” Arab-American writers have had devolved upon them the task of demonstrating how what happens “there” is “inextricably tied” to what happens “here.”20 In his recent essay “Identity, Power, and a Prayer to our Lady of Repatriation: on Translating and Writing Poetry,” Mattawa has captured the way this task of translation is not an occasional activity but rather a way of life: Translation is something I encounter on a daily basis. As soon as I say my name I’ve put myself outside the border; I have to crawl back into the center. When a stranger asks me my name—and they ask maybe four or five times a day—every time they ask they’re telling me “I don’t know this name.” Then I have to find a way to translate or legitimate the existence of my name in this world, in their language. Translation, not alienation or estrangement, becomes a kind of existential state, a form of identity.21

This essentially political positioning of Arab-American writers—the expectation that they serve as cultural translators—is also an opportunity. The biographies of some Arab-American poets illustrate their diasporic identities and multiple cultural roots. For example, Nathalie Handal was born to Palestinian refugee parents, grew up in Haiti, and studied and lived in the United States, Britain, France, Russia, the Middle East and Latin America. While she speaks French as her native tongue, Handal writes in English and identifies as a Palestinian Haitian Latina American. Fady Joudah, son of Palestinian refugees, was born in the U.S. but grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia before returning to the U.S. He learned to memorize and recite Arabic poetry as a young child, but he writes in English, having done most of his schooling in that language. His thoughts take shape in Arabic, his first language, and then he puts them on paper in English.22 Joudah commented on the idea of a hyphenated identity in a 2013 interview with online literary magazine, The Rumpus, when asked if he minded being referred to as a Palestinian-American physician-poet whose poetry was automatically assumed political: I don’t think my poetry is political. I push back against a deeplyentrenched tendency in American culture to label quickly and no longer even examine the labels that were initially stamped on a person. I don’t have a problem with any of my “hyphenated” biography—I don’t have any problem with that at all. The world would be a better place if our thread of hyphenation were truly embraced beyond mere naming and category. I

136

Chapter Eight have a problem with the fact that when it’s brought up, it’s not really discussed… We fall back on the psychologic, the ethnic, the quota, and serve the perpetuation of the machine. So not much new is being examined or flayed open in the poetry world about a relationship between text and context, as it relates to a particular author. And this becomes even more pronounced, but by no means unique, in the case of the minority American. For example, a Palestinian American or an Arab American discussing ethics and morals becomes “political.” If a “bona fide,” non-minority American does, chances are it will be considered “moral,” “ethical,” “amazing spiritual vision,” and so forth, and barely the word “political” would get in.23

As Joudah pointed out in “The Gaza Poetry Roundtable: Part III” concerning Palestinian and Israeli Poets in Conversation: “Textuality is ours; contextuality is theirs.”24 It is by literally taking on the task of the translator, in addition to writing their own poetry, that Handal, Joudah and Mattawa have added context—despite the “machine.” Obviously, the “machine” is continually working, as Joudah, a volunteer for Doctors without Borders in Zambia and Darfur, points out in the world of medicine: “Sometimes you feel your duty as a physician is endlessly manipulated and the impartiality and neutrality of the physician is threatened... But you just close your eyes and dive into the pool of the living and the dying and try to do the best you can.” Translators “do the best they can,” because as Joudah wrote in his poem “Sleeping Trees:” Between what should and what should not be Everything is liable to explode.25

Juxtaposition: the Art of Cultural Code-Switching Code switching, for diasporic poets such as Handal, Joudah and Mattawa, is a deeply interiorized form of cultural translation in which the verbal text is not only informed by context or audience, but is also inevitably connected to a multicultural identity, the elements of which are deeply at odds. Libyan-American poet and translator Khaled Mattawa has done much to show that Williams’s prediction that “these terrible times may also be the threshold of a great cross-fertilization”26 is being borne out. A political refugee who immigrated to the United States at age 14, Mattawa was old enough to have fully absorbed Libyan culture but young enough to become a sponge for knowledge in a new place, a new language. He did not begin to write poetry until much later, but when he did, he did so in English—given that his high school education and literary

The Art of Juxtaposition

137

education was in English, and that he was living in an English-speaking environment. In a 2007 essay, “Traffic,” written when Mattawa was named “poet of the month” by PoetryNet, he explained how it happened that two different places, the U.S. and Libya, provided a poetic space that he could inhabit: Writers like me who write in adopted languages are nonetheless endowed with the spectre of their first languages. As I began writing, I was mesmerized by what translating phrases from Arabic could do to my English texts. Taking a familiar story or image in Arabic, one I had not seen rendered in English before, filled me with a sense of power over language when I wrote it in English. I think I would say the psychic tension has to do with the experience of migration, where migrants live a kind of despondent existence because they see their inheritance lying fallow before them.27

Having been called “as much a poet as a cartographer,” Mattawa describes his own work as “a kind of surveying of a difficult landscape.” Once he had realized that he could translate what he knew, the power of thinking in Arabic and having it emerge as English, he no longer felt exiled as such: “Exile, if you will, became a chronic habit I could control, and writing gave me a light and a compass with which I navigated the fog of exile.”28 The types of cultural translation Mattawa does across his four volumes of poetry—Ismailia Eclipse (1995), Zodiac of Echoes (2003), Amorisco (2008), and Tocqueville (2010)—show a trajectory in which the task of the translator shifts from an exploration of family ties, diasporic experience and cultural origins—a sort of cultural recuperation—to trace a series of juxtapositions illustrating how one place informs another and how one person’s life translates another’s. Mattawa’s poetry thus moves beyond the hyphen to reveal how our own humanity is a function of our ability to identify with and contextualize the other. Another Arab-American poet, Hayan Charara, described the role of the poet in an author’s statement for the National Endowment for the Arts: I trust poets more than politicians, and I have more faith in poems than in policies. And while I don’t believe that poems will keep bombs from falling on schools, or bullets from entering bodies, or tanks from rolling over houses, or men or women or children from being humiliated, poetry insists on the humanity of people, which violence steals away; and poems advocate the power of the imagination, which violence seeks to destroy. Poets change the world. I don’t mean literally, though some try. I mean with words, with language, they take the many things of this world and make them new, and when we read poems, we know the world and its

138

Chapter Eight many things differently—it might not be a better or worse place than the one we live in—just different—but without the imagination, without poetry, I don’t believe that the world as most of us know it would be tolerable.29

Looking at four poems written a number of years apart, we can see how Mattawa achieves an increasingly complex translation of contemporary experience by means of juxtapositions: “The Mail from Tunis” (Ismailia Eclipse), “East of Carthage: An Idyll” (Amorisco), “On the Difficulty of Documentation” (Tocqueville) and “After 42 Years” (written after the death of Qaddafi). The context of “The Mail from Tunis” is a letter from Hamida, an older woman relative of the poet, who is herself a poet. Dwelling on her life experiences, the letter begins with her memory of greeting Mussolini in 1937 when she was seven, presenting a red rose on a black velvet cushion, and being summarily discarded and dismissed: That night, I heard my father and his friends, judges and tribal chiefs, laugh at my expense, how I stood there waiting for Il Duce to peck my cheek. It took me a while to understand— Call it petty arrogance Or the irony of the oppressed.30

Hamida tells the poet some of her life stories, understanding his longing to recuperate through her a world now distant and inaccessible, and his naiveté about how poetry translates experience. We learn how Hamida and her husband, Mustafa, also a poet, lived in “Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, met Shawqi, Asmahan, even that handsome recluse Abdulwahab.”31 One day, when Mustafa goes hunting and stays away for a week, Hamida begins writing poetry again. Mustafa returns with Iraqi poet Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab who reads some of Hamida’s work: He turned to Mustafa, said “Hamida is a better poet than you!” I saw my husband four times after that. He sent letters, photographs of himself With stars— Eluard, Sartre, Natalie Wood. I’m writing from my kitchen,

The Art of Juxtaposition

139

the grandchildren living with me, asleep I have not written a poem in seventeen years. The old ones are like dried carnations, still pretty but have lost their scent.32

“The Mail from Tunis” might be, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “an easy Morning’s Ride,”33 but the emptiness the diasporic poet hopes to fill with stories of Hamida’s life involves a more difficult task. Hamida ends her letter by telling the poet that she understands his need to recuperate the place where he grew up and to deal with his feeling of exile. But her final word suggests it is useless to enter these lives unless his sadness extends beyond himself and his empathy is requited by his own community. I understand your desire for this kind of history. It lets you live again in a place from which you’re far removed. But what good will it do you to live so many lives until your sadness is not yours alone34

Mattawa’s 2008 collection Amorisco “combines the Spanish amor and ‘Morisco,’” the Muslims expelled from Andalusia during the Spanish Inquisition,35 Mattawa writes in an endnote. In the opening poem, “Against Ether,” Mattawa struggles to assemble a narrative about Libya, not out of thin air, but in the situational “irony of the oppressed” in which “daylight’s answer evaporates before our eyes” and “night remains the gist of the story.” On the one hand there are “the people of my country” and on the other, “a galaxy of lies.”36 In “East of Carthage: An Idyll,” Mattawa juxtaposes the Roman past of Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations, a work of Stoic philosophy, with a guided visit to the ruins and the transit of sub-Saharan migrants on shabby fishing boats and rafts who will be conned, caught or drowned in their effort. In the opening section of the poem, the narrator is guided through the Roman ruins at Sabratha while at the port the migrants board their ships of doom. The number of subSaharan and east Africans who try to reach Fortress Europe from the port, Mattawa tells us in an endnote, is between sixty-five and one hundred twenty thousand:

140

Chapter Eight Look here, Marcus Aurelius, we’ve come to see your temple, deluded the guards, crawled through a hole in the fence. Why your descendant, my guide and friend has opted for secrecy, I don’t know. But I do know what to call the Africans, passport-less, yellow-eyed who will ride the boat before me for Naples, they hope. Here the sea curls its granite lip at them and flings a winter storm like a cough, or the seadog drops them at Hannibal’s shores, where they’ll stand stupefied like his elephants.37

The reference to Hannibal and Marcus Aurelius suggests an illustrious past now gone, leaving in its wake the victims of history. The disconnect in the poem, between the misery of one group and the casual comic tourism of another, is reminiscent of W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux-Arts:” About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along38

But Mattawa moves beyond this disconnect to suggest that the dehumanization of one group is linked to that of the other, dehumanization being the fate of both, as a result: What dimension of time will they cross at the Hours loop tight plastic ropes round their ankles and wrists? What siren song will the trucks shipping them back to Ouagadougou drone into their ears? I look at them loitering, waiting for the second act of their darkness to fall. I look at the sky shake her dicey fists. One can be thankful, I suppose, for not being one of them, and wrap the fabric of that thought around oneself to keep the cold wind at bay.39

Mattawa has a way of shifting his voice and register from the small, particular and familiar world of informal speech to a chillingly prophetic register describing the dehumanizing limits with which we circumscribe our common dreams.

The Art of Juxtaposition

141

But what world is this that makes our lives sufficient even as the horizon’s rope is about to snap, while the sea and sky ache to become an open-ended road?40

This transgressive shift illuminates the ways we diminish the world around us by finding our lives “sufficient” and by being thankful “for not being one of them.” Yet the final verses of the poem give a new dimension of what Mattawa earlier called the “petty arrogance/ or irony of the oppressed,” because we all want in on the “sweetness” of life and hope: they will ride their tormented ship as the dog star begins to float on the water, so bright and still, you’d want to scoop it out in the palm of your hand.41

Mattawa’s 2010 volume Tocqueville is a bold experiment that includes PowerPoint poems, matrices of concepts, film scripts, stories told by individuals about their sorrows, and, of course, poetic discourses on democracy in America and in a neo-liberal world. In his introduction “The Making of a Miracle Maker” to his translation of selected poems by Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Miracle Maker, Mattawa notes: “By achieving poetic unity through juxtaposed forms, the poem creates a kind of counter-discourse to any kind of monologic or linear discourse, becomes a kind of democracy full of contradictions and retractions. But the poet’s voice never gets lost in the cacophony he creates.”42 Mattawa’s Tocqueville works along the same lines. The complex composition of the poem, “On the Difficulty of Documentation,” juxtaposes lines describing Myrtle Winter’s photographs of Palestinian refugees, lines from Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poem “They Flee from me Sometimes Did me Seek” about the beauty, aging and betrayals of women, lines from Bertolt Brecht’s “To Posterity” about revolutionary violence and the need to consider its context, and Mattawa’s own meditation on the ways art can betray life. One might think of this danger as the obverse side of the humanizing qualities Charara attributed to poetry, or perhaps liken it to the loss of contextualization of which Joudah spoke. Winter was sent by Life magazine to Jerusalem in 1951 as a photographer. “She was so affected by what she saw in Palestinian refugee camps that she quit her job and became Director of UNRWA’s Information Center,” where she documented the tragedy and daily life for 30 years.43 The book I Would Have Smiled is a tribute to Myrtle Winter and pairs her photographs of the camps with the responses of writers,

Chapter Eight

142

including Mattawa’s “On the Difficulty of Documentation,” which becomes the keynote poem of Tocqueville. The village women carry the moon on their heads Each carrying a piece. Or each carrying her own moon, the jugs of white stoneware in Myrtle Winter’s photo.44

Mattawa describes a photograph that Winter took of the Aqabat Jabr refugee camp, Jericho (West Bank), when a blind eye was turned to the devastation of a people. Winter’s photograph, beyond any documentary purpose, is an extraordinarily captivating composition.

Fig. 8-1. Aqabat Jabr Refugee Camp, Jericho (West Bank). Women carrying water. Photo by Myrtle Winter Chaumeny.45

The Art of Juxtaposition

143

Mattawa next moves to address this artistic seduction and the idea of betrayal by interspersing a quotation from Sir Thomas Wyatt’s sixteenthcentury poem on women, “They Flee from Me,” as a sort of gloss on art and its betrayals. See how light spills into their dark robes— In this array after a pleasant guise When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall. (Wyatt) Its white deluge is the phosphorescence of their headscarves radiating against twilight. Each planet then, rejoining a galaxy on the run.46

The women in the photograph, however, are not going anywhere; they are not moons, or planets, or galaxies. They are hauling water to a refugee camp. They are not the betrayers, but the betrayed. I recall: Such people have no time for beauty. I recall: Beauty is one of the great conversation stoppers of all time. Evidence is plentiful that the twilight these women walk is a betrayal: The child whose skin is a crumbled sack around the muscles of his legs and buttocks. Look how his mother’s beauty is fleeting.47

How is a poet, or a photographer, to document this history of suffering and the particular, intimate lives lived in the camps? In an interview with Joudah, “Past the Centrality of Suffering,” David Baker asks: “How do we approach the depth and reality of the genuine suffering and pain of others, without appropriation or without fashioning that pain into the aesthetically palatable?” To which Joudah replies: There cannot be one specific approach, obviously. I think the speaker in the poems has to know who he is and where he stands in relation to the ‘other.’ It is laughably sad to simply substitute pity for compassion.48

It is also laughably sad to substitute beauty for empathy, or art for action. The problem is not with beauty or with art, but rather with the substitution. Art should, as Charara said, insist “on the humanity of people, which violence steals away,” and this cannot happen without context.

144

Chapter Eight

Mattawa, having signalled the betrayal of art that displaces suffering through art, and replaces discussion with silence, then moves to investigate the opposing situation: those who are not silent in the face of violence, but who themselves become brutish. Bertolt Brecht’s poem “To Posterity” explores the various options and responsibilities people have in a “dark age” when injustice is so rampant that “to speak of trees is almost a crime/ For it is a kind of silence about injustice.”49 Not to act is to be complicit with violence, but to oppose violence is to participate in it. Look at the faces that evoke an age-old deferral: Alas, we who wished to lay the foundations of kindness could not ourselves be kind. But you, when at last it comes to pass . . . do not judge us too harshly. (Brecht) Do not judge us for this strange fashion of forsaking (Wyatt) because what beauty does is almost a crime (Brecht).50

Mattawa’s poem, like Brecht’s “To Posterity,” is a conversation about “the all too human,”51 about kindness in the root sense of recognizing our nature as kindred to one another, and understanding the need for contextualizing judgment. Mattawa’s recent poem “After 42 Years” takes up this Shakespearian idea of “unkindness” in the sense of acting inhumanely toward one’s own kind, of judging harshly, of removing oneself from responsibility. The poem “After 42 Years” was written at the time of the Libyan uprising that removed Qaddafi.52 In it we hear Mattawa’s mature poetic voice, his ability to tune into the speech of the crowd, to evoke those images that captured the moment, and to ask difficult questions about “kindness.” The poem opens with an evocation of Qaddafi’s coup: Bloodless coup, they said, The many who thought this could be good. The dictator, a young man, a shy recluse, assumed the helm, bent in piety, The dead sun of megalomania hidden in his eyes. ... Decades of people killed, 42 years. But that’s all over now—53

The Art of Juxtaposition

145

The narrator in the poem questions the idea that with Qaddafi’s fall, the rest can claim “Game Over.” He documents the monstrous human rights violations of Qaddafi, and the responsibility for such havoc for so long: What and who taught you, O sons of my country, to be so fearless cruel? Him, they say, for 42 years, 42 years of him. Who taught you to be reckless heroic? The no-life we had to live under him, the lives we were asked to live as dead. Alive we want him alive, many kept shouting. So that they could give him tastes of his own medicine?54

Is it revenge that will wipe the slate clean? After 42 years of violence, will making the dictator the scapegoat work? What about those who profited, and those who lost, and those who left, and those who remained silent, and those who rebelled? Could it be so easy—GAME OVER—the capturing of a rat? A clown in a rat-colored outfit, a wild mop of hair, a wig, high-heeled boots, Holding a golden pistol like a child playing hero— Is that what our history amounted to? Somewhere, there were suns that would never light. Somewhere, there were holes in the air that was full of death.55

After 42 years of this nightmare, could it be Qaddafi alone who was responsible? Was the “game over” with Qaddafi dead? How does one kill off 42 years of a “security pact,” those many years and compromises when “We managed to hold our breath and live our lives.” Was it now just a matter of documenting how he died or is the canker more widespread? Perhaps he was a magnet and drew evil out of men’s chests, A magnet siphoning cruelty to itself. His hands, his hands saying wait, wait, Reached into their lungs and knotted their raw souls.56

What can be the aftermath of this 42-year history of unkindness? What is the role of acceptance of responsibility and of forgiveness? Which of us is not in some way to blame? Somewhere, an earthly sun is shining on us, with us, within us again. There is air in the air again.

146

Chapter Eight What will our aftermath be then? We wash our hands, Put on spotless clothes. There is no after until we pray for all the dead.57

In “a dark age,” moral outrage followed by self-exoneration is perhaps the danger. Asked about poetry’s role in translating suffering, Fady Joudah replied: Yet in our modern times, and because of my predilection for engaging life in the administered world in which we live, I am (hyper)vigilant of the darkness that moral certainty can bring into poetry; it can bring poetry to its knees, damage the art and the artist. The contradiction is not a wily maneuver to remain elusive and to “read between the lines,” however. It is an attempt to universalize the particulars of tragedy and suffering, of humanity, that of the speaker and of the “other.” I struggle with and against the classification of suffering, which often perpetuates further dehumanization of victims, through justification of violence or of silence.58

Doubtless, the role of the poet is to know how to put one thing next to another in such a way that the world becomes kinder. It is worth noting, however, that this empathic mission does not mire Arab American poets in tradition of nostalgia and pathos. Rather, their poetry addresses a wider category of readers who would supplement their cultural juxtaposition by another kind of juxtaposition, mainly spatial and literary. As geocritic Robert Tally insightfully argues in his discussion of geocriticism as a new form of critical literary analysis, “if writers map the real and imagined spaces of their world in various ways through literary means, then it follows that readers are also engaged in this broader mapping project.”59 To the panoply of voices, discourses, textual, historical, and mythological references these hybrid texts draw upon, readers might add their own reading(s) of Arab-American writers’ rich multicultural and literary maps. In this reading “beyond the hyphen” and beyond the conventional boundaries of ethnicity and nationality, “the spirit of place emerges from the writer’s literary cartography, which the reader uses to give imaginative form to the actual world,” thereby making new “sense of both the text, the spaces it represents, and the world.”60

The Art of Juxtaposition

147

Notes 1

Stuart Hall, “The Question of Identity,” in Modernity and its Futures, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (London: Polity Press, Open University, 1992), 277. 2 Lisa Suhair Majaj, “The Hyphenated Author: Emerging Genre of ‘ArabAmerican’ Literature,” Al Jadid: A Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts 5, no. 26 (Winter 1999), http://www.aljadid.com/content/hyphenated-author-emerging-genre-arabamerican-literature-poses-questions-definition-ethnici 3 “Arab Americans better educated than most in U.S.” The Michigan Daily (March 9, 2005), https://www.michigandaily.com/content/arab-americans-better-educatedmost-us 4 Jonathan Curiel, Al’ America: Travels through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots (New York: The New Press, 2009). 5 Lisa Suhair Majaj, “Arab-American Literature: Origins and Development,” American Studies Journal no. 52 (2008), accessed March, 2, 2015, http://www.asjournal.org/52-2008/arab-american-literature-origins-anddevelopments/ 6 Stuart Hall, “Stuart Hall: The Origins of Cultural Studies,” Media Education Foundation, accessed March, 2, 2015, http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/StuartHall-the-Origins-of-Cultural-Studies-Transcript.pdf. 7 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 226. 8 Jonathan Curiel, “Muslim Roots of the Blues / The Music of Famous American Blues Singers Reaches Back to the Culture of West Africa,” SFGate (August 15, 2004), http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Muslim-roots-of-the-blues-The-music-offamous-2701489.php 9 “Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes,” Arab American Museum blog http://www.arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes 10 Ibid. 11 Stan Shabaz, “Disrepair and Neglect Mar Khalil Gibran Memorial,” Al Jadid: A Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts 5, nos. 56/57 (Summer/Fall 2006), http://www.aljadid.com/content/disrepair-and-neglect-mar-kahlil-gibran-memorial 12 Maha El-Said, “Dropping the Hyphen: Arab American Poetry from Ethnic to Diaspora,” unpublished essay, accessed March, 2, 2015, www.academia.edu/4941698/Dropping_the_Hyphen 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 225. 16 “Demographics,” Arab American Institute Foundation, n.d. accessed March, 23, 2015, http://www.aaiusa.org/demographics 17 Samia El-Badry, “Arab American Demographics,” Arab American Demographics, accessed March, 21, 2015,

148

Chapter Eight

http://www.allied-media.com/ArabAmerican/Arab%20american%20 Demographics.html. 18 David Williams, “This Hyphen Called My Spinal Cord: Arab-American Literature at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” World Literature Today 81, no. 1 (2007), 63. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 55. 21 Khaled Mattawa, “Identity, Power, and a Prayer to Our Lady of Repatriation: On Translating and Writing Poetry,” Kenyon Review (Fall 2014), accessed March, 2, 2015, http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2014-fall/selections/khaledmattawa-essay-1-656342. 22 Ghada Mourad, “‘The Best Poems Are Not Political,’ But—,” Arab Literature (in English) (October 28, 2012), accessed January 10, 2015, https://arablit.org/2012/10/28/the-best-poems-are-not-political-poems-but/. 23 Suzanne Koven and Fady Joudah, “The Big Idea #7: Fady Joudah,” The Rumpus (November 18, 2013), interview accessed January 11, 2015, https://arablit.org/2012/10/28/the-best-poems-are-not-political-poems-but/. 24 Fady Joudah, “’A Poet from Gaza Will Rise ... And Win the Nobel Prize’ The Gaza Poetry Roundtable: Part III,” Los Angeles Review of Books (December 2, 2012), accessed February 1, 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-gaza-poetry-roundtable-part-iii/ 25 Fady Joudah, “Sleeping Trees,” in Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, ed. Hayan Charara (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008), 167. 26 David Williams, “This Hyphen,” 63. 27 Khaled Mattawa, “Traffic,” PoetryNet (April 2007), accessed January, 12, 2015, http://poetrynet.org/month/archive/mattawa/intro.html 28 Ibid. 29 Hayan Charara, “Author’s Statement” Writer’s Corner (2009) National Endowment for the Arts, https://www.arts.gov/writers-corner/bio/hayan-charara 30 Khaled Mattawa, Ismailia Eclipse (Rhinebeck, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1995), 29. 31 Ibid. 30. 32 Ibid., 31. 33 Emily Dickinson, “A Route of Evanescence,” in Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012), 368. 34 Ibid. 35 Khaled Mattawa, Amorisco (Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2008), 73. 36 Ibid., 4. 37 Ibid., 55. 38 W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux-Arts,” (1940), accessed February 2, 2015, http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/musee-des-beaux-arts/. 39 Ibid., 55. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 56.

The Art of Juxtaposition 42

149

Khaled Mattawa, “The Making of a Miracle-Maker,” in Miracle Maker: Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi, trans. Khaled Mattawa (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2003), 12. 43 Nancy Eimers, “Poetry and the Difficulty of Documentation,” Pilot Light: A Journal of 21st Century Poetics and Criticism (2011), accessed February 2, 2015, http://www.pilotlightjournal.org/1/3/1 44 Khaled Mattawa, Tocqueville (Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues in Prose & Poetry, 2010), 4. 45 Photo provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 David Baker, “Past the Centrality of Suffering: A Conversation with Fady Joudah,” in Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012), http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_joudah.php 49 Bertolt Brecht, “To Posterity,” trans. H.R. Hays, accessed March, 2, 2015, http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~stephens/POEMS/brecht1 50 Mattawa, Tocqueville, 4. 51 Ibid., 5. 52 Khaled Mattawa, “After 42 Years,” Los Angeles Times (October 25, 2011), http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/25/opinion/la-oe-mattawa-poem-kadafi20111025 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Baker, “Past the Centrality,” Talk Poetry. 59 Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013), 79 60 Ibid., 85.

CHAPTER NINE ON BEDOUINS, VEILS AND THE WESTERN IMAGINATION: SPATIALISING GENDER AND HAREMISING HOME IN NADINE GORDIMER’S THE PICKUP ASMA HICHRI

I am not soft, hennaed hands, …not the enticement of jasmine musk …not a swirl of sequined hips, a glint of eyes unveiled. I am neither harem’s promise nor desire’s fulfilment. I am not a shapeless peasant trailing children like flies; not a second wife, concubine, kitchen drudge, house slave; not foul-smelling, moth-eaten, primitive, tent-dweller, grass-eater, rag-wearer. I am neither a victim nor an anachronism. …I am neither the mirror of your hatred and fear, nor the reflection of your pity and scorn. I have learned the world’s histories, and mine are among them. My hands are open and empty: the weapon you place in them is your own. Lisa Suheir Majaj, “Claims”

Since its publication in 2001, Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup has received both acclaim and harsh criticism from scholars throughout the world. The Pickup depicts a romantic relationship between two lovers from different worlds. Julie Summers is a descendent of a white aristocratic South African

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

151

family, whereas her lover, Ibrahim Ibn Musa, is an illegal immigrant from an unnamed Arab country. Gordimer traces the protagonists’ movement from Julie’s home country to her lover’s Oriental world and dramatises its implications on their lives. One of the most innovative features of this narrative is its somewhat transgressive description of the Orient. To a certain extent, Gordimer attempts to destabilise the imperial representation of the Orient in Western thought, or what Linda Nochlin has termed the process of “Orientalist mystification,” an essential attribute of imperial discourse.1 However, a postmodern reader would not fail to perceive the shortcomings of deconstructing Orientalist discourse from an outsider’s perspective. However pungent her criticism might seem, Gordimer remains a white South African whose lack of thorough knowledge of the Orient and indepth insight into its religious and cultural norms certainly dilutes the demystifying impact of her narrative. This has led several critics to warn against Gordimer’s stereotypical rendering of the Arab Muslim community. Although some readers “are reluctant to see The Pickup as an Orientalist novel,” Daniel Martin Varisco argues in this context, Gordimer’s “pervasively stereotypical rendering of Arab and Muslim as generic categories makes a strong case” for this claim.2 Likewise, Franz Meier admits that despite Gordimer’s “ironic awareness of her stereotyping ‘Orientalism,’” “an uneasy feeling of typifying simplification remains— especially if contrasted with Gordimer’s minute and intricate social realism whenever she depicts South African life.”3 Meier connects Gordimer’s ambivalence and her tendency to construct the Orient as Other to the historical and political context of post-apartheid South Africa. “Being a post-colonial country with a high degree of cultural diversity,” Meier postulates, the “New South Africa” is “threatened by the loss of its cultural and/or national identity.” It is thus “not accidental that a writer in post-apartheit South Africa becomes interested in the Orient as cultural Other.”4 Other critics overlook this significant and controversial facet of Gordimer’s narrative, rather opting for a postcolonial ecocritical reading of The Pickup. Dana Mount for instance highlights the novel’s concern with the female protagonist’s “impulse towards establishing a ‘home’ within a globalized world and the role that nature may play in constructing that sense of home.”5 Mount heavily draws on “the intersections of postcolonial studies and ecocriticism and puts Gordimer’s text in dialogue with questions of ecological imperialism and globalisation.”6 Although some critics did point out Gordimer’s exoticisation of the Orient and her paradoxically subjective treatment of postcolonial issues, their arguments tend to lose

152

Chapter Nine

their critical impulse when examining Gordimer’s representation of the Arab (mainly female) community and the interpersonal relations of its members. Other reviewers strive to eschew an essentialist postcolonial critique of Gordimer’s novel through exploring its gender dynamics. In her article, “Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and the Desert Romance Tradition in Post/Colonial Anglophone Fiction,” Hilary Dannenberg argues that The Pickup is a radical reworking of the colonial romance that reverses the “narrative dynamics of gender roles and cultural identity.”7 Most importantly, Gordimer’s narrative “parallels colonial longing for the exoticised East with contemporary Eastern longing for the West,” tracing for the female protagonist a journey that traverses/reverses such “trajectories of longing for that-which-is-not-there.”8 To substantiate this claim, she draws significant parallels between Gordimer’s The Pickup and E.M Hull’s The Sheik: “Julie Summers, like Diana Mayo,” Dannenberg explains, “desires to escape the stiflingly conservative patriarchal ambience of her home culture. If in Diana’s case this is represented by her brother …, in Julie’s case the world she wishes to escape from is personified by her father.”9 Dannenberg also dwells on Julie’s enchantment with the desert, envisioning a romantic relationship between them. This pristine setting thus “becomes the object of romance” and the “key reason for the female protagonist’s abandonment of the male lover;” hence the novel’s reversal of the traditional romance plot.10 More importantly, the genuine “emotional bonds” that motivate Julie are the ones she establishes not only with the desert, but also with “the local community,” particularly “the female members of Ibrahim’s family.”11 Such a conclusion, however, mars the critical impulse of Dannenberg’s thesis. In fact, her contribution to the debate is likewise not far from replicating and redeploying colonialist and Orientalist hermeneutics. Julie’s adjustment to the new life circumstances in the Arab village is interpreted as an articulation of her fascination with the sense of communal identity and solidarity that governs this female community, despite its patriarchal character, an argument that counteracts Dannenberg’s initial claim that Julie’s journey is prompted by the desire to break the chains of patriarchy.12 Dannenberg’s somewhat transgressive reading of Gordimer’s colonial romance, which purports to eschew typifying idealisation, is thus entrapped into an Orientalist interpretation of the novel’s ending. In an alternative romantic poiesis of the Oriental desert, Dannenberg concludes that at the end of her Bildung, Julie grows to “love the environment and family which at first she does not know and thus cannot long for.”13

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

153

In fact, few critics have attempted to examine Gordimer’s peculiar reading of the Orient, even if they have pointed out its somewhat “ironic” ambivalence;14 hence establishing Julie’s encounter with the Arab world as the telos of her journey. Meier, for instance articulates a similar idea arguing that the desert is the “ultimate sublime” that allows Julie to find a “room of her own” situated “at the border of the civilized world.” It is within “this new realm, that is comparable with Lacan’s register of the Real,” that she ultimately assigns meaning to her life.15 Likewise, Emma Hunt points out that the desert, with its intrinsic “scarcity” and “spiritual purity,” is set in stark contrast to “the global city: the desert is contrary to accumulation, ambition or ego. A kind of heterotopia, the desert is an alternative way of ordering that comments on the order of the global city.”16 Through enclosing the significance of the text within the context of globalisation and dwelling on the binary oppositions of the desert and the South African global city Johannesburg, scholars have further romanticised Gordimer’s vision of the imaginary Oriental landscape and community. It is noteworthy that Gordimer’s oscillation between thorough demystification and unconscious reinscription of Orientalist discourse is mapped onto gender and space and that critics’ sweeping judgment of Gordimer’s attitude towards the Orient stems from ignoring these interfaces. In fact, Gordimer’s portrayal of white South Africans on the one hand, and her depiction of Arab society, more specifically, Arab women, on the other, conspicuously highlight this ambivalence. Whether they are illiterate or educated, young or old, housewives, Bedouins, or schoolgirls, Oriental women are re-presented through being removed from their social realities and repositioned in an alternative Orientalist frame. Placed in an envisioned “harem” that has always pricked the Western imagination, Gordimer’s imagined female community is constructed as powerless, silent, and utterly dominated by an excessive Arab patriarchy. Gordimer’s representation of this “haremised”17 community, rather than destabilizing Orientalist myths, paradoxically revalidates them. In fact, Gordimer’s Oriental “heroines” exist in a mythical, conceptual space, which is situated at the “conceptual end of the experiential continuum”18 of the Orient’s histo-geographical map. Betraying Gordimer’s ambivalence between thorough debunking of the discourses of Orientalist mystification and restoration of the cultural images upon which such discourses are founded, The Pickup’s schizoid re-presentation of the Oriental desert invites a geocritical study of the narrative. In fact, apprehending the Orient implies an understanding of its cultural, historical and spatial cartographies, “since even the most realistic map does not truly depict the

154

Chapter Nine

space, but, like literature, figures it forth in a complex skein of imaginary relations.”19 To a certain extent, Gordimer’s dramatisation of the cultural encounter between the two protagonists helps deflate Orientalist prejudices and constructions of otherness maintained by white South Africans against immigrants. Gordimer’s staging of the first encounter between Ibrahim and Julie’s friends at the “EL-AY Café” illustrates this point: So that’s where he’s from; one of them knows all about that benighted country. The “garage man” has a university degree in economics there (the university is one nobody’s heard of) but there isn’t a hope in hell and that place is a hell … Or a job of any kind, maybe; no work, no development, what can you grow in a desert, corrupt government, religious oppression, cross-border conflict—composite, if inaccurate, of all they think they know about the region, they’re telling him about his country.20

Although Julie’s friends do not manifest any aggression or overt contempt towards the Oriental other throughout the conversation, they clearly endorse the Orientalist attitude in all its aspects. From the outset, they project onto Ibrahim a set of “regular characteristics” which have been imputed to him by an imperial and Orientalist mindset.21 Not only do they associate his “benighted country” with corruption and an environment of political and religious unrest, but they also identify its inhabitants with a debased mentality, as they correlate Ibrahim’s limited chances for getting a job with the “lack of money to pay bribes to the right people.”22 Julie’s friends’ patronising attitude evidently betrays the prejudices they have internalised about a world of which they are ignorant. Gordimer’s comment on their naïve attempt to define the Orient by claiming that “one of them knows all about that benighted country” uncovers the strategies by which they try to “produce the Orient …ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively.”23 Furthermore, her punning on the Orientalist “us vs. them” Weltanschauung through italicising the pronouns “they” and “him” ironically underscores their xenophobic attitude. The irony of the scene is heightened as Gordimer underscores Julie’s friends’ failure to value Ibrahim’s credentials. Indeed, the statement “the university is one nobody’s heard of” overtly points out their inability to know the Oriental and judge him fairly and realistically. Julie’s friends’ condescension towards the Orient is revealed in another passage where they pejoratively exoticise Ibrahim through expressing their anxiety about his relationship with Julie: “That relationship is getting heavy, our girl is really gone on that Oriental prince of hers. Where was it she picked him up again?”24 In this respect, their depreciative deployment

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

155

of the verb “pick up” to describe Julie’s relationship with Ibrahim confirms this attitude. Moreover, the use of the metaphor “Oriental prince” ironically betrays their ignorance and mystification of the Oriental other, a stance associated with a “second-order” mythical knowledge of the Orient, “lurking in such places as the ‘Oriental’ tale” and “the mythology of the mysterious East.”25 Such Oriental tropes are likewise upheld and sanctioned by Julie’s father, mainly in his reaction to his daughter’s decision to immigrate with Ibrahim to his country: [Y]ou are leaving in a week’s time for one of the worst, poorest and most backward of Third World countries, following a man who’s been living here illegally, getting yourself deported-yes-from your own country... Who is he where he comes from? What does he do there? What kind of family does he belong to? What do we know, everyone knows, is that the place is dangerous, a country of gangster political rivals… and as for women: you, you to whom independence, freedom, mean so much, eh, there women are treated like slaves. It’s the culture, religion. You are out of your mind… You choose to go to hell in your own way.26

The father’s disparaging description of Ibrahim and his country offers a perfect illustration of the workings of Orientalist ideology. For the father, travelling to “the poorest of the Third World countries” equals selfinflicted punishment. The father’s segregationist discourse conspicuously underscores the way the Orient is “penalised” by white South Africans “for lying outside the boundaries” of their society.27 Indeed, identifying the Orient with “hell” allows for the configuration of an “us” vs. “them” worldview where the distinction and antagonism between East and West are accentuated. In order to dissuade his daughter from her decision, the father engages in a process of writing and codifying the Orient in order to reinforce the myth of its inferiority and separateness. Ironically, his grammatically inconsistent statement “What do we know, everyone knows, is that the place is dangerous” mimics this process, while simultaneously unravelling his deep fear of that “other” world. Whereas the first clause “What do we know” rhetorically questions the father’s knowledge of the Orient, the second part of the sentence embodies his attempt to draw an imaginative geography for this unexplored cultural space. For Julie’s father, the Orient is equated not only with hell, but also with a prison to which his daughter is being “deported,” and a primitive place where “women are treated like slaves.” Through such a vivid dramatisation of the Orient in Western eyes, Gordimer obviously denounces Orientalist ideology and its tendency to

156

Chapter Nine

ascribe to the Oriental self a “constitutive otherness” and an “essentialist character” that cannot develop.28 In this respect, Julie’s decision to “relocate”29 to Ibrahim’s country underscores the need for coming to terms with Orientalist prejudice in post-apartheid South Africa. This choice constitutes for her an attempt not only to re-discover her own identity but also to re-locate the Oriental self that has been displaced and positioned within the bounds of otherness, inferiority, and inhumanity. Significantly, the protagonists’ movement to Ibrahim’s “benighted county” marks Gordimer’s move from mere exposure of Orientalist prejudices to direct exploration of the Oriental landscape. According to Emma Hunt, this development represents an attempt on Gordimer’s part to set up “a number of alternative spaces in opposition to the city,” such as the desert, the local village and Abdu’s home.30 In Hunt’s sense, the city is “figured as a predatory place driven by speed and movement, rather than stillness and stasis, like the desert.”31 This urban space, Hunt insinuates, obliterates individual identity, reducing human beings to a bunch of “predators round a kill,”32 hence Gordimer’s substitution of the city for the pristine desert. Yet despite Gordimer’s overtly anti-Orientalist stance, the reader cannot resist the temptation to read her text as an Orientalist romance. As soon as the characters move to Ibrahim’s village, one cannot evade Gordimer’s romanticised vision of the Arab world. In fact, Julie’s journey through the desert is experienced as a journey through time and space, as a journey back into a pre-modern age and an encounter with a primitive world. This uneasy feeling of Orientalist mystification can be detected in Gordimer’s portrayal of Ibrahim’s native country and his community. In this context, Gordimer’s dramatisation of Julie’s arrival at the airport and her first encounter with the Arab world are quite significant: The old women squatting, wide-kneed, skirts occupied by the to-and-fro of children, the black-veiled women gazing, jostling, the mouths masticating food, the big bellies of men pregnant with age under white tunics, the tangling patterns of human speech, laughter, exasperation, argument, the clumps of baggage, residue of lives, sum of lives (which?), in a common existence-that-does-not-exist. Julie is no different, she has no sense of who she is in this immersion, everyone nameless...33

Julie’s first contact with this unnamed Arab country is fruitless as she is reduced to a non-entity among a crowd of dehumanised creatures. The use of animal imagery with reference to both Oriental men and women and the reduction of the “residue of [their] lives” to a death-in-life existence, or an “existence-that-does-not-exist” ultimately yields nothing more than “a

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

157

world already clothed in [Western] systems of representation.”34 This negative impression is reinforced by the disparaging reference to old women “squatting” and “black-veiled women” chewing food, where the Orient always already appears backward and primitive, comparatively reinforcing Western superiority. Through such derogatory images, the Orient is constructed, as Edward Said argues in his critical exploration of Orientalist ethos, as “less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of text”35 rather than an empirical reality. The fact that the country’s name remains conspicuously unspecified corroborates this idea, further stereotyping the Orient and tainting it with sameness and deadening uniformity. In order to decipher the codes of this image, it would be useful to resort to Toni Morrison’s examination of the strategies of stereotyping that pervaded Africanist discourse in Europe and North America as these same strategies are quite effectively deployed in Orientalist ethos.36 Among these strategies is the “economy of stereotype,” which allows the writer to “construct a quick and easy image” of the Other “without the responsibility of specificity” or “accuracy.”37 Julie, and through her selective omniscience, the reader, encounter “a quick and easy image” of Oriental men and women that always already overdetermines the standards by which they are classified as subhuman and animalistic. The reference to the movement of children, the old women squatting, the mouths masticating food, and the “big bellies of men pregnant with age” reduces these human beings to their procreative and scatological functions, thus “deliver[ing] little and count[ing] on the reader’s complicity in the dismissal” of more relevant features of their identity. Producing “foreclosure rather than disclosure” of these features, Gordimer’s rendering of the Oriental identity “prevents human contact and exchange,”38 hence giving the author and her protagonist the upper hand in their stereotyping, or more accurately, ethnotyping of the Oriental character.39 Gordimer’s romancing of the Orient is further evinced through her representation of the desert. Throughout the narrative, the Oriental desert is equated with eternity. Significantly, Julie’s encounter with the desert “where the street ended” is highly romanticised: The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing—not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand … has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.

158

Chapter Nine What could /would thrust this back into time? Water.40

The expressions “out of time,” “no measure of space” and “no demarcation from land to air” apparently endow the desert with a touch of sublimity. The fusion between sand and sky further highlights the desert’s celestial character. Yet this overwhelmingly positive impression is belied by an excessive use of negatives, which ironically obliterates the desert and turns it into a fantasy. With its aesthetic, cultural and geographical markers completely wiped out, the desert becomes a fertile ground for the character’s imagination, and thus subject to her visions and constructions. The scene is further romanticised with the final question and answer that purport to prescribe a solution for this sterile land. In fact, the reference to water, “a lost memory” without which the desert cannot be revived and relocated within the bounds of “time” and “forced to become again” (emphasis original) only reveals the need for an external agency whose redeeming power can disentangle this dead space from its atavistic purity and nullity. This negative impression is confirmed by other references to the desert, which is often curiously associated with death, stagnation and backwardness. The desert is not only “the sudden end of the street;” it also signifies the end of human life and activity and the death of people’s aspirations.41 Significantly, the desert’s disconnection from all forms of life alienates Julie from all forms of civilisation and urbanisation, i.e. “street,” “road,” “district,” and “highway,” turning the setting into a pre-industrial space where life is paralysed and human presence is insignificant.42 Most importantly, the desert resists any chronotopic definition: “There is no last time, for the desert. The desert is always.”43 Nor does it conform to any climatic changes recognized by an outsider: “And the strange surprise: the nights now were cold: the picture postcard place was one of perpetual heat; there had been no Northern Hemisphere season of winter in that desert.”44 It is thus not coincidental that the narrative closes on Julie’s heroic decision to bring water to this barren landscape, thereby quenching her missionary zealotry and bringing the Orient back into time and civilisation.45 The novel’s annihilation of the desert’s spatial poetics is also underlined in a later reference to Julie’s exploratory flâneries in this blank space: It is in the very early morning that she goes out into the desert alone... The books she had ordered … made her giggle or abandon half-read—that woman Hester Stanhope, and the man Lawrence, English charades in the desert, imperialism in fancy dress with the ultimate condescension of bestowing the honour of wanting to be like the people of the desert...46

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

159

In her attempt to negotiate her new surroundings and decipher the codes of Oriental space, Julie comes closer to the figure of the female flâneur. Broadly defined as “the spectator and depicter of modern life… [t]he flâneur moves through space and among the people with a viscosity that both enables and privileges vision.” 47 More importantly, “the flâneur possesses a power … walks at will, freely and seemingly without purpose, but simultaneously with an inquisitive wonder and an infinite capacity to absorb the activities of the collective, – often formulated as ‘the crowd.’”48 Julie’s flâneries on and off the desert certainly enable and privilege her vision, allowing her not only to mediate the Orient through her “errant” perspective but also to construct it and domesticate it. Julie’s flâneries thus contribute to the poiesis of a romantic desert landscape, displacing her estrangement from her native city Johannesburg onto this mythical setting. In her exploratory journeys, Gordimer’s incognito settler also recalls Baudelaire’s flâneur, his self-centredness and his voyeuristic gaze: “To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world” represent only “a few of the slightest pleasures” of Baudelaire’s streetwalker and his fantasies.49 Throughout her journey to a mythical Orient, Gordimer’s desert walker is thus “an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I,’” the Oriental other who “is always unstable and fugitive.”50 Julie’s incognito identity is further masked by Gordimer’s choice of selective omniscience, which settles on Julie’s subjectivity as a centre of consciousness from which the Orient’s spatial poetics/poiesis are re-presented. It is not accidental that at particularly this moment Julie recalls “English charades in the desert” woven by British travellers and saviours of the Orient. This self-reflexive reference seems to comment on her pantomimic adventures in the desert and evinces her narcissistic romancing of this space. The allusion to imperialist narratives and colonials’ “condescension of bestowing the honour of wanting to be like the people of the desert” ironically confirms this self-reflexive tendency as it comments on Julie’s own patronising attitude and the narcissistic pleasures she derives from playing the pretentious roles of heroine and saviour in the lives of “the people of the desert.”51 Significantly, Julie’s public and private flânerie(s)—for she envisions both public and private spaces with the same “viscosity,” “power” and “inquisitive wonder”—allow her not only to “absorb the activities” of a “collective” Oriental identity,52 but also to subsume Orientals under an anachronistic vision tainted by patriarchal despotism, oppression and backwardness. Julie’s “privatisation of flânerie, the withdrawal into the

160

Chapter Nine

interior and into the self”53 finds its expression in her negotiation of her surroundings in Ibrahim’s Oriental home. Represented as a gendered space reserved for the cult of domesticity, this setting is also subject to her romancing fantasies. Gordimer’s portrayal of Arab women only reinforces historically inscribed dichotomies between East and West. In her protagonist’s envisioned topography, women are forced to wear black covers and are restricted in their movements. Women are housewives, housemaids, or ghost-like Bedouin shepherds. Several critics have unquestionably internalised this dystopian vision of Oriental women, focusing on the possibilities of integration Gordimer creates for her female protagonist within the limits of Arab patriarchy. In this context, Meier claims that “the very segregation of men and women in this culture creates a space of female solidarity and agency, that in Gordimer’s Arabian country seems to be less limited than is usually assumed for Islamic cultures in general.”54 On a deeper level, however, Gordimer’s portrayal of Arab society is far from being appreciative. Gordimer sets the tone for a thorough deprecation of Arab women’s status and social roles through criticising Arabs’ attitude towards the institution of marriage: They had a bride for him. Of course. Since he was sixteen or seventeen years old there had been a girl marked out. Even before, perhaps; there was a little one all skinny elbows and knees who swung her plait among the children he played with and later she was recognizable, mournful-eyed to attract attention, in the group of girls past puberty… Girls are married off young in this place that the innocent, this foreign wife thrown against him by the swaying of the bus, called his home: home, you’re home!55

In this extract, the reader is not only exposed to a highly eroticised depiction of Arabs’ mindscape, but s/he also discovers Arab girls’ affected manners and their hapless efforts to attain the “Romantic” ideal of marriage. This stereotyped vision of Arab women is reinforced by the reference to Julie as “the innocent foreign wife” who cherishes the place that Ibrahim only resentfully acknowledges as his “home.” The same stereotypes are re-inscribed through the portrayal of Ibrahim’s aunt in her vulgar “gold jewellery on wrists and ox-bloodfinger-nailed hands” and her daughter’s “Westernised attire,” as well as the repetitive reference to women idly “gazing,” “jostling,”56 or watching bystanders “at windows.”57 This disparaging picture of Arab women who act as foils to Western women is consolidated by Gordimer’s depiction of Ibrahim’s mother and sisters. Ibrahim’s youngest sister Maryam, for

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

161

instance, is scheduled to marry a policeman and be a blanketed wife. It is not incidental that Julie is the heroine who rescues Maryam from ignorance, civilises her and teaches her the English language some weeks before her marriage: Maryam is such a bright girl... She says she wants to study. Doesn’t seem to know quite what—be a doctor, secretary in a company—glamourized careers she sees on television, for sure. But she is so hungry to learn. Why can’t she have the chance? Why should she be a nursemaid or whatever it is. She has a brain. You somehow got to the university.58

However kind and well-meaning, Julie cannot change Maryam’s destiny, as her arguments in defence of her intellectual qualities do not dissuade her family from their choice. In Julie and the reader’s eyes, however, Arab society appears not only backward and patriarchal, since only males have access to education, but also static and immutable. Just as the desert exists outside time and space, the people who inhabit this sterile landscape are static, unable to change or develop through time since successive generations are assigned the same destiny. This prejudice is confirmed through the reference to Ibrahim’s unnamed mother. Like the other female characters in the household, she is deprived of a social status and has to surrender to a life of herded domesticity that has already been arranged for her since her early youth: My mother is a very clever woman. She has a brain, as you say… She fought with everyone for education, that girl, forced her father to let her go to school to learn to write and read the Koran. In those days she was the only girl among the boys there. She could read newspapers and books no other girl could. She could say whole parts of the Koran—by heart, is it? ... She still can. But it was arranged, she was married. And here she has been in this house giving us birth, feeding us…59

In spite of her intellectual assets, Ibrahim’s mother is entrapped in her “arranged” marriage and surrenders to an ideology that prepares her daughter for the same submissive and passive role. Despite critics’ claims that the mother has an all-pervading presence that resides over the symbolic order, i.e. the world of intersubjective relations,60 this character, like her daughter, reproduces “the colonial archetype of the disempowered and victimized Muslim woman.”61 Through these images, Gordimer insinuates, Oriental women are secluded, happy in their seclusion. “Women here—his home—,” Julie realizes, “do what their men tell them to.”62 As Jasmine Zine argues in her discussion of the politics of representation of Muslim women in Western

162

Chapter Nine

texts, the latter “entered the ‘imaginative geography’ of the Orient as both an object of desire and a repressed maiden in need of rescue.”63 Whereas Maryam is the “Muslim maiden in need of rescue,” her sister-in-law, Khadija, for instance, is “the oppressed Muslim woman” who is deserted by her husband.64 In this respect, the repetitive reference to Khadija’s anger, frustration and depressive state throughout the narrative is quite revealing: Maryam insists that Khadija is the one who can impart their language to Julie far better than she can, Khadija comes from the capital, she finished school ‘all the way’… [E]veryone in the family knows, even Ibrahim’s wife has seen, that Khadija is in a state of frustration which swings from being found weeping in a corner … to angry imprecations against her husband, a son of the house. Ibrahim calls her, privately to his wife, that crazy woman... Maryam’s delicate way of wanting to help her sister-in-law is … to distract her by recognizing her superiority and flattering her into the obligation to use it to help someone else: their new sister-in-law, Ibrahim’s wife.65

Quite interestingly, Khadija’s moody temperament is justified by her husband’s absence, which further highlights Oriental women’s dependence on male presence and their limited life choices. This depressing image of the madwoman in the attic is further validated by the other characters’ negative impressions about Khadija. Ibrahim’s assertion that she is “crazy” portrays her as helpless, silent, and utterly overwhelmed by this difficult experience. Maryam’s “delicate way of wanting to help her” by “flattering her” finally evinces Khadija’s vanity and arrogance, thereby justifying the other characters’ apathy towards her. Khadija’s qualities are further dwarfed and her empirical presence is turned into a theoretical and textual absence in other passages of the narrative where her dismal state and rebellious character are emphasised: Poor Khadija. She was—what do you say—awful, oh awful before, when my brother Zayd was here with her, when they got married and he brought her from her parents, she did not like our house, she was the one who said he must go to the oil fields for money to buy a house for her. Now she is—more awful— because she is so unhappy. She looks at you like this, she hates you because she is jealous. You have your husband, your husband will take you to a good country, you have money. Poor Khadija. In this house no person likes her. And my brother …? Does he still want her? We don’t know. If he doesn’t come back?66

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

163

Through this disguised denigration of Khadija’s qualities and the distortion of her image, the narrative subtly and closely associates Khadija with the figure of the termagant, an image constructed for Muslim women in Western medieval texts.67 More particularly, Khadija exemplifies the “overbearing Muslim woman,” an “older model” that precedes that of the veiled, secluded, submissive, oppressed, “helpless,” and “inferior” woman,68 which has held sway over Western representations of Muslim women since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Khadija’s “awful” and unbearable arrogance is ironically justified by her desire for independence, privacy and a decent life; hence the other women’s disdainful and probably jealous sympathy for her rebellious attitude. Khadija’s termagant-like character is further delineated and reasserted through her disruptive presence and her unruly behaviour, features frequently pointed out by Gordimer’s narrator: Khadija used a strong perfume, it was the assertion of her presence in the house, constant pungent reminder that she was deserted by a son of this family-; when Ibrahim’s wife was impulsively bold enough to approach her and say how glad she was that this sister-in-law’s husband was safe and well, the woman gave a proud wry smile—and then, suddenly, she who never touched anyone but her own children, embraced Julie. Perhaps it was because Julie spent much time with one of the children.69

Not only does Khadija’s silence give the other characters license to interpret her gestures negatively, but she is also exoticised through the reference to her strong perfume. In a scene that already exudes exoticism, Khadija becomes the absented “limp shimmering object of a [fe]male gaze.”70 The reference to the sudden embrace between her and Julie, which is considered empty of feelings but those of pride and cynicism, ultimately reveals her emotional frustration and her helpless attempt to transcend her invisibility and seclusion. This female silence is corroborated at the mediational level since Arab women are divested from any narratorial authority that allows their voices to emerge and present an accurate account of their realities. As Varisco points out, there is no indigenous voice “in the entire narrative that presents a positive point of view” in order to “counter the constant flow of stereotypes. Even the women whom Julie comes to admire and accept as friends are mired in their subordinate roles” and thus seem to have no viable future in the novel “without Julie’s outsider help.”71 This Orientalist vision of Arab women conjures up an important concept associated with Oriental culture, namely that of the “harem.” Although this concept does not function at the literal and textual levels in

164

Chapter Nine

Gordimer’s literary cartography of the Orient, its metaphorical and emotional thrust cannot be evaded. In fact, “the longevity of the topos of the harem and its endurance in the face of political and cultural changes”72 are covertly but insistently underscored throughout the narrative. In this context, it is noteworthy that the word harem denotes both the female members of a household and the dedicated spatial enclosure in which they live… With the harem… one and the same word denotes both a space and a category of people.”73 Through the spatialisation of gender, Ibrahim’s harem are veiled from discovering the opportunities available to them in society, mainly education, a thriving social and professional life, and independence from patriarchy. They are instead confined to the figurative, conceptual harem of the household, as they are mainly depicted chatting in their rooms or preparing everyday meals for the men of the household. More importantly, the metaphorical thrust of the topos of the harem is visible in representations of women outside domestic space as Arab women are secluded and denied visibility under their black veils. In addition to the recurrence of the colour black with which the veil is associated, the reader is forced to notice its presence outside the female community’s domestic boundaries, as if to reinforce their invisibility, enclosure and exoticism. That which is hidden certainly arouses the desire and curiosity of strangers, since “the beautiful hands of a baby holding tight on its mother’s shrouding veil” provoke the “bared grin of a man momentarily staring at her.”74 The aura of exoticism “shrouding” the veil is confirmed by the absence of any religious significance attached to it. From a geocritical perspective, the trilogy of harem (home), hijab (veil), and desert, constitutes the spatial trialectics that fixes Arab womanhood to a pre-historic state, divesting the Oriental world of its cultural, religious and socio-historical complexities. The reference to the “the black-veiled women”75 Julie meets upon her arrival to the village as well as the encounter with the Bedouin girl hidden in “her black wraps”76 confirm the socio-spatiality of this topos as well as its mobility. The disquieting image of the Oriental woman outside the harem is constructed throughout the narrative with the frequent reference to the Bedouin girl Julie encounters in the desert: The goats with the Bedouin woman appeared before her in the desert as if conjured up. She would walk what seemed a long way towards her and her goats but the measure of distance in this element and space was unaccustomed; the figures of woman and animals retreated although they had appeared to be only slowly veering, changing direction. There was one morning when they were discovered close; close enough to be advanced to. The woman turned out to be hardly more than a child—perhaps twelve

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

165

years old. For a few moments the desert opened, the two saw each other... She smiled but the other responded only by the eyes acknowledgment of a presence. The encounter without word or gesture became a kind of daily greeting; recognition.77

The identity of the Bedouin, whom Julie only encounters “without word or gesture,” never approaching her as a real person is actually irrelevant since she is represented as a mirage. Foregrounding the goats’ empirical and textual presence only confirms this impression by reducing the girl to nothingness. “The other’s” silent response, while re-inscribing her absence, clearly evinces how “the veiled, secluded Oriental woman [becomes] the perfect image of the non-citizen” in Orientalist texts.78 In Reina Lewis’s discussion of the Orientalist “haremisation” of women, the “emphasis on tribal, or traditional practices presented as unchanged and unchanging denies ‘coevalness’” between East and West and anachronistically “produces the anthropological other in a space outside time, stuck in primitive behaviours that modern Western societies have left behind.”79 Encapsulating the trialectics of veil, harem, and sterile desert, the figure of the Bedouin thus conjures up the ultimate Orientalist trope whereby real people are reduced to the most common stereotype in a setting void of any sign of life or “civilisation.” As such, Bedouins are not only veiled from the sun with their “black wraps,”80 but also veiled from life, identity and recognition, wandering in a desert already cast outside the boundaries of time and space. This negative connotation is inherent in the meaning of the word “veil.” As the fourth entry of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary states, to veil is “to conceal from apprehension, knowledge, or perception” or “to hide the real nature or meaning of something, frequently with implication of bad motives.”81 This connotation is substantiated by the French dictionary Littré, where the noun “veil” (voile) figuratively connotes that which deprives us from knowing.82 Whereas the first definition deploys the word “conceal,” the French dictionary uses “dérobe,” a more pejorative verb that always already presupposes the viewer’s right to extend his/her gaze to a veiled territory. Most importantly, this last connotation legitimises the viewer’s gaze, which aims at unveiling a territory that has been surreptitiously stolen and concealed from vision. Ironically, the negative connotations of the veil equally apply to Gordimer’s Bedouin who, by being veiled from strangers’ illicit gaze, is robbed of visibility, recognition and knowledge. That such generalisations about Arab women, whether they be Bedouin or urban, are endorsed by an indigenous character, is equally significant. As Ibrahim’s sister Maryam nonchalantly explains, satisfying the “casual curiosity from

166

Chapter Nine

a foreigner,” the ghost-like black-veiled girl “must be Bedouin, they have their tents and their goats somewhere out there.”83 Ascribing prejudices to Orientals from an endogenous perspective further fossilises them in Julie’s orientalist mind map, thus validating Maryam’s “nonchalantly” spontaneous non sequitur with regard to the Bedouin’s identity. On a deeper level, the recurrent reference to the Bedouin girl points out the extent to which Julie’s encounter with this figure of otherness and liminality is profoundly disorienting and destabilising. For in her parodic double, the Bedouin, or the nomad, Gordimer’s flâneuse loses control over a formerly domesticated space. Contrarily to the figure of the migrant that Julie comes to symbolise, and who “leaves behind a milieu that has become hostile or amorphous,” the Bedouin girl represents, in Gilles Deleuze’s theory on Nomadism, the nomad who “has a territory” (my emphasis) and therefore “does not depart.”84 Rather defined as “the Deterritorialized par excellence,” the nomad “goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity” since, “in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory.”85 Julie’s constant attempt to reterritorialize in the Oriental desert is thus ironically parodied by the nomad’s deterritorializing habitus. If Julie represents the migrant who wants to settle in a foreign land, the Bedouin girl is, to use Deleuze’s theory, the nomad for whom “every point is a relay and exists only as a relay;”86 hence the unsettling and disquieting impact of this encounter on Julie’s consciousness. Rather granting continuity and coherence to the topos of the harem in the Western imagination, Maryam and Julie’s visit to the rice fields is equally quite revealing with regard to Gordimer’s deployment of the mythology of the veil: Maryam did not like to tell her to cover her head for this expedition, but brought along an enveloping scarf for her as a gentle instruction rather than an indication that she should have decided to wear something adequate of her own. A man accompanied the father in the front seat, and the two young women sat at the back.87

Maryam’s hesitation to ask Julie to cover her head in the presence of men casts the veil as an abhorred practice, which even Orientals find shameful and anti-modern. In her discussion of Western perceptions of veiled women, Fatima Mernissi argues that the veil has always carried the connotation of seclusion in Western thinking. In this context, she maintains that conceiving of the veil as “a scrap of cloth that men have imposed on women to veil them when they go into the street, is to truly impoverish this term” and “drain it of its [religious] meaning.”88 In the

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

167

same vein, Zine points out, “the description of the veiled Muslim woman as anonymous, a non-person, unapproachable … looking neither left nor right… recaptures the equation of silence, erasure, and Islamic dress.”89 Just as she constantly depicts Orientals as fragments cut off from their ontological, historical and cultural roots, Gordimer reduces the veil to a black wrap that condemns the Oriental woman to silence and anonymity, hence Maryam’s reluctance to “impose” it on Julie. For a moment, Julie seems to succumb to this symbolic erasure, accepting to “envelop” herself in a “scarf,” silently sitting “at the back” in conformity with Muslim codes of conduct. Ironically, her symbolic erasure plunges her at the heart of the atemporal Oriental desert, confirming the prejudice that Arab women exist in “an anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity.”90 As such, Julie’s visit to the desert completely subjects her to the dynamics of Orientalist ideology. Ironically, and as if to ward off this impression, Julie emerges from the desert with the revolutionary idea of bringing water to the rice fields,91 thereby once again asserting her superiority and defying the norms of conduct of an “Islamic” lifestyle that would thwart her Western identity and hinder her from fulfilling her role as heroine and saviour. In this benevolent undertaking, water, obviously an emblem of life, rebirth, regeneration and purity, actually works as a metonym for the West’s purity, superiority and life-giving power, thereby further justifying Julie’s ultimate civilizing venture in Ibrahim’s Oriental desert. It is noteworthy that for Julie, “the desert is always; it doesn’t die it doesn’t change, it exists.”92 In the end, it is only through her intervention that the sterile Oriental landscape can be revitalised outside this “endless turn of night and day. Out of time.”93 Most importantly, Julie’s heroic venture lies in her ability to find radical solutions and restore a sense of hope to a place that is irredeemably barren and dead, thereby answering the novel’s initial dilemma: “what can you grow in a desert.”94 As this rhetorical question suggests, there is no viable future for this stagnant society; hence the need for Julie’s external agency. The ending corroborates this idea, as Julie’s refusal to travel with her husband further reveals her commitment to the progress of a world otherwise veiled from knowledge, growth, and prosperity. Julie’s heroism is also discernible in the domestic sphere, namely in her willingness to teach her language to the women of the household and the village children. Julie teaches English to Maryam and the young neighbourhood girls in exchange for lessons in their language.95 From a cursory reading, her benevolence “might allude to linguistic and emotional ties” growing “among the silenced females in this patriarchal society.”96

168

Chapter Nine

On a deeper level, however, Julie’s “noble” mission further casts a heavy shadow on Gordimer’s anti-Orientalist stance, while confirming prejudices of ignorance and backwardness against Arab women. The women’s eagerness to “pick up Julie’s language” and get enriched by her skill makes them operate as foils for the western female intellectual, Julie. Their somewhat archetypal “backwardness” is recoverable only through their “willingness to accommodate [themselves] to modernity and western cultural norms.”97 Gordimer’s intellectual vanguard is generous enough to transmit her “gift” and “skill” in English not only to the female members of the household, but also to the local children, since there is obviously no future in their own language. Throughout these scenes, it becomes obvious that Julie approaches the Oriental landscape through mythologizing it and re-placing it in a time warp in which she is entangled, hence the mythical anachronistic mindscape her perspective yields to the reader. Yet behind this limiting portrayal of Orient and Orientals lies Julie’s craving for communal life, for real human exchange, and for an experience of space unsevered from the web of relationships it encloses. The Orient is at once a heterotopia of illusion and of compensation for Julie.98 It is a heterotopia of illusion, which exposes every real space in her home country as illusory and meaningless. It is also a heterotopia of compensation, which presents society in its perfected form, making up for the confusion and the loss of identity and connections that characterises the South African global city. Gordimer’s naïve romanticisation of the desert village and of familial sisterhood is, in fact, envisioned from Julie’s perspective, which shapes public, private and intimate spaces in this Oriental community. This perspective reveals Julie’s, and probably Gordimer’s utopianism in postapartheid South Africa. However well-meaning Gordimer’s heroine appears, her cognitive mapping of the Orient unfortunately fails to probe the Oriental landscape and the underlying cultural, psychological, historical, and religious specificities of the Arab Muslim mindscape. To a great extent, Gordimer’s romantic poetics/poiesis of the Orient conceives of it as an imagological space, which Bertrand Westphal defines as a space caught in a “heteroimage,” the image of “otherness.”99 In Westphal’s sense, imagological space is “exotic, in the primary sense of the word (meaning “outside”),” and thus “strongly affected by stereotyping.”100 “Put into perspective” and perceived by “a third party,” this space is “hesitant to take into account [its] referent.”101 Rather lending itself to an “egocentered” and stereotyped narrative spatiality constructed by its author and character, Gordimer’s imagological Orient indeed obviates the relationship between written space and its empirical referent.102 Mapped

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

169

onto characterisation, Gordimer’s envisioning of an imagological Orient illustrates how, in Amira Jarmakani’s terms, “heteroimages” of “Arab womanhood” are “constantly associated with timelessness” and “cast into a frozen stance as markers of a pure and irrecoverable origin.”103 Echoing earlier references to the frozen desert, such images represent the “cultural mythologies” through which the protagonist attempts to come to terms with “a profoundly disorienting experience.”104 Articulating her postcolonial guilt in post-apartheid South Africa and her dream of global equality, Gordimer’s ambivalence towards the Orient and the utopian optimism upon which she closes her narrative recall Bill Ashcroft’s notions of utopia and “postcolonial hope.” Postcolonial hope, Ashcroft affirms, “produces utopias that rarely have location but have a particular and very often sacred form, a form describable by Ernst Bloch’s term Heimat.”105 Through her character, Gordimer articulates postcolonial hope in a better heimat, a “glocal” community where, disappointingly, only the white South African protagonist can accomplish the mission of bringing together two worlds in a harmonious relationship. Conversely, through her female saviour, Gordimer turns the Orient into an emotional utopia that rarely has location, save in the guilty Western Orientalist imagination; hence Julie’s thirst for a sense of Heimat and her mapping of the Romantic geography of the Western imagination onto the Oriental landscape in a helpless attempt to assign meaning to her existence. In the end, Gordimer’s damsel errant becomes the real nomad whose liminal wanderings emplace her neither here nor there and guarantee her neither stability nor the kind of life she really craves.

Notes 1

Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society (New York: Harper Row, 1989), 37. 2 Daniel Martin Varisco, “Grease Monkeys and Bedouin Girls: the Rhetorical Fate of Arabs and Muslims in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup,” Tingis, December 11th, 2010, accessed April 1st, 2015, http://www.tingismagazine.com/article/greasemonkeys_and_bedouin_girls.html. 3 Franz Meier, “Picking Up the Other: Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup,” ESSE 2 (2003), accessed April 1, 2015. http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic23/franz/2_2003.html. 4 Ibid. 5 Dana Mount 105. 6 Ibid., 103.

170

Chapter Nine

7 Hilary P. Dannenberg. “Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and the Desert Romance Tradition in Postcolonial/Anglophone Fiction,” in Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 20, no. 1 (2008): 78. 8 Ibid., 85. 9 Ibid., 78. 10 Ibid., 83. 11 Ibid., 85. 12 Ibid., 78. 13 Ibid., 85. 14 Meier, “Picking Up the Other.” 15 Ibid. 16 Emma Hunt “Post-Apartheid Johannesburg and Global Mobility in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 37, no. 4 (2006): 103. 17 Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London: Tauris, 2004), 182. 18 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 17. 19 Robert Tally, “Geocriticism: Mapping the Spaces of Literature,” L’Esprit Créateur: The International Quarterly of French and Francophone Studies 49, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 134. 20 Nadine Gordimer, The Pickup (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 14. 21 In his seminal work, Orientalism (1977), Edward Said maintains that Orientalism is no more than an “archive of information” bound by a “family of ideas” that purport to explain the “behaviour of Orientals,” thus supplying them with “a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere.” This in turn allowed Europeans, or more generally, Occidentals, to see them as a distinct category “possessing regular characteristics.” Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1991), 42. 22 Gordimer, The Pickup, 14. 23 Said, Orientalism, 3. 24 Gordimer, The Pickup, 36. 25 Said, Orientalism, 52 26 Gordimer, The Pickup, 98. 27 Said, Orientalism, 67 28 Ibid., 97. 29 Gordimer, The Pickup, 47. 30 Hunt, “Post-Apartheid Johannesburg,” 105. 31 Ibid., 106. 32 Gordimer, The Pickup, 10. 33 Ibid., 109-110. 34 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 38. 35 Said, Orientalism, 177. 36 In her book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison explores the theory of Africanism through detailing the literary and discursive practices deployed to account for the Africanist presence in American

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup

171

fiction. Among these strategies, she mentions “metonymic displacement,” “fetishisation,” and “dehistoricizing allegory.” Through a critical revisiting of canonical fictional works such as Flannery O’Connor’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, Morrison highlights the extent to which American fiction is affected by an Africanist aesthetics that only reinscribes and reinforces Africans’ silence, namelessness and the serviceability of their presence. For further details on Morrison’s exploration of Africanism see chapter three “Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks.” Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 62-91. 37 Ibid., 67. 38 Ibid., 68. 39 In his book, Geocriticism, Real and Fictional Spaces, Bertrand Westphal defines ethnotyping as “the stereotypical representation of people categorized according to a series of xenotypes, cast in bronze for all time.” Closely associated with ethnocentrism, ethnotyping pertains to “a discursive register that is also the register of the stereotype.” Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism, Real and Fictional Spaces (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 144. 40 Gordimer, The Pickup, 172. 41 Ibid., 167. 42 Ibid., 131. 43 Ibid., 246. 44 Ibid., 253. 45 Ibid., 212-13. 46 Ibid., 198. 47 Chris Jenks, “Watching Your Step: the History and Practice of the Flâneur,” in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), 146. 48 Ibid., 146. 49 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 9. 50 Ibid., 9-10. 51 Gordimer, The Pickup, 198. 52 Jenks, “Watching Your Step,” 146. 53 Priscilla Pankhurst Ferguson, “The Flâneur on and off the Streets of Paris,” in The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 38. 54 Meier, “Picking Up the Other.” 55 Gordimer, The Pickup, 113. 56 Ibid., 109. 57 Ibid., 131 58 Ibid., 136. 59 Ibid., 136-137. 60 Meier, “Picking Up the Other.” 61 In her discussion of the politics of representation of Muslim women, Jasmine Zine lists several archetypes and images that pervaded textual representations of Muslim women and thus contributed to the creation of knowledge about them during the colonial era. Zine insightfully argues that such images are still present

172

Chapter Nine

and are endlessly reproduced even in contemporary feminist writing and popular culture. The motifs of the “Muslim woman in need of rescue,” and the “voiceless” and “silenced” victim, which recur in the narrative, have therefore become fossilised in the Western imagination and canonised even in postmodern fiction. Jasmine Zine, “Muslim Women and the Politics of Representation,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 19 (2002), 3-4. 62 Gordimer, The Pickup, 227. 63 Zine, “Muslim Women,” 10 64 Ibid., 3 65 Gordimer, The Pickup, 151. 66 Ibid., 166. 67 For an insightful discussion of the evolution and transformations of the image of the Muslim woman in Western texts, see Mohja Kahf. Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (University of Texas Press, 2002). In chapter 2 titled “The Muslim Woman in Medieval Texts,” Kahf closely examines the dimensions and manifestations of the termagant motif in Western romance narratives. 68 Ibid., 8. 69 Gordimer, The Pickup, 193-94. 70 Kahf, Western Representations, 8. 71 Varisco, “Grease Monkeys.” 72 Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 17181918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 59. 73 Irvin Cemil Schick, “The Harem as Gendered Space and the Spatial Reproduction of Gender,” in Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces, ed. Marylin Booth (Duke University Press, 2010), 69. 74 Gordimer, The Pickup, 111. 75 Gordimer, The Pickup, 109. 76 Ibid., 172. 77 Ibid., 199-200. 78 Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 97 79 Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 254. 80 Gordimer, The Pickup, 172. 81 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, s.v. “veil.” 82 My translation of “Ce qui nous dérobe la connaissance de quelque chose.” Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, s.v. “voile.” 83 Ibid., 171. 84 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 381. For a more detailed discussion of “nomadism,” see chapter XII titled “Treatise on Nomadology” (351-423). 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 380. 87 Gordimer, The Pickup, 207. 88 Fatima Mernissi, Women in Islam: an Historical and Theological Inquiry, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 93.

On Bedouins, Veils and the Western Imagination: The Pickup 89

173

Zine, “Muslim Women,” 14. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (New York: Routledge, 1995), 40. 91 Gordimer, The Pickup, 212-13. 92 Ibid., 229. 93 Ibid., 172. 94 Ibid., 14. 95 Gordimer, The Pickup, 150. 96 José L. Venegas Caro de la Barrera, “Identity as Liminality in Post-Colonial Fiction: Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power,” Odisea 6 (2005): 207. 97 Zine “Muslim Women,” 15. 98 In Michel Foucault’s seminal article, “Of Other Spaces,” the notion of heterotopia refers to “real places that do exist” and which represent in comparison to utopias, “counter-sites… in which the real sites… that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” Heterotopias are, according to Foucault, of several types, the most relevant of which are heterotopias of illusion, whose role is to expose “every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.” The second type is the heterotopia of compensation, which creates “another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1. (1986): 24, 27. 99 Westphal Geocriticism, 111-12. 100 Ibid., 112. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Amira Jarmakani, Imagining Arab Womanhood: the Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 25. 104 Ibid., 8. 105 Bill Ashcroft, “Introduction: Spaces of Utopia,” Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, 2, no. 1 (2012): 5, accessed April 3rd 2015, http://ler.letras.up.pt. 90

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abdul-Aleem, Mustapha Kamel & Sayed Faraj Rashed. Al Yahud fi Al Alam Al Qadim. Beyrut: Al dar Al Shameya, 1995. Ahmida, Ali Abdullatif. “Introduction.” Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics. Ed. Ali Abdullatif Ahmida. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Allnutt, Luke. “Tunisia: Can We Please Stop Talking About Twitter Revolutions?”, Accessed 02 April 2015, http://www.rferl.org/content/tunisia_can_we_please_stop_talking_abo ut_twitter_revolutions/2277052.html Al Shami, Rashad. Ishkaleyat Al Houeya fi Israil. Kuwait: Alam Al Maêrifa, 1997. Appadurai, Arjun. “Patriotism and Its Futures.” Public Culture 5.3 (1993): 411-29. “Arab Americans better educated than most in U.S.” The Michigan Daily. March 9, 2005. https://www.michigandaily.com/content/arab-americansbetter-educated-most-us. Arab Human Development Report 2002. United Nations Development Program. Regional Bureau for Arab States. 2002. www.arab-hdr.org/publications/other/ahdr/ahdr2002e.pdf Ardc, Nurullah. “Understanding the Arab Spring: Justice, Dignity, Religion and International Politics.” Afro Eurasian Studies 1 (2012): 8–52. Arfaoui, Sihem. “Contemporary Female Imaginaries Toying with National and Ideological Hegemonies in the Middle East.” Paper presented at the International Conference “Identity and Conflict in the Middle East and its Diasporic Cultures.” Lebanon: University of Balamand, March 20-22, 2014. Ashcroft, Bill. “Introduction: Spaces of Utopia.” Spaces of Utopia: an Electronic Journal 2, no. 1 (2012): 1-17, accessed April 3rd 2015. http://ler.letras.up.pt. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in PostColonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998. Atkinson, David et al. “Editors’ Preface: On Cultural and Critical Geographies.” In Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

175

Concepts, Edited by David Atkinson, Peter Jackson, David Sibley, and Neil Washbourne, vii-xviii, London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Auden, W. H. “Musée Des Beaux-Arts.” (1940). Poetry by Heart. http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/musee-des-beaux-arts/. Augé, Mark. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Baker, David. “Past the Centrality of Suffering: A Conversation with Fady Joudah.” In Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012. http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_joudah.php. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 84-258. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Barnes, Jonathan, ed. Aristotle: the Complete Works. V. 2. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. London: Routledge, 1994. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London: Phaidon, 1964. Baumann, Dorothea and Christina Niederstatter. “The Sound of Space as a Symbol of the Sacred.” In Sacred Buildings: a Design Manual. Edited by Rudolf Stegers. Birkhauser: Basel, 2008. Beck, Koa. “Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston, author of I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.” March 1st, 2011. http://www.smithmag.net/ memoirville/2011/03/01/interview-maxine-hong-kingston-author-of-ilove-a-broad-margin-to-my-life/ Feb. 2015. Ben Gharbia, Sami. “Anti-censorship movement in Tunisia: creativity, courage and hope!” Nawaat. May 29, 2010. https://nawaat.org/portail/2010/05/29/anti-censorship-movement-intunisia-creativity-courage-and-hope/ Benjamin, Walter. “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 333-36. In Reflections. NY: Schoken, 1986. Ben Mami, Mohamed Béji. “Great Mosque of Zaytuna.” In Discover Islamic Art, Museum with No Frontiers, 2017. January 3, 2017. http://www.discoverislamicart.org/database_item.php?id=monument;I SL;tn;Mon01;1;en. Ben Soltane, Mohamed. “Stories from Tunisia.” Academia. edu. http://www.academia.edu/954147/Stories_from_Tunisia

176

Bibliography

Berlin, Adele. The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion. Oxford University Press, 2011. Bhabha, Homi. “The Beginnings of Their Own Enunciations: Stuart Hall and the Work of Culture.” Critical Inquiry, 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2015). http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/homi_k._bhabha_on_stuart_hall Bloom, Jonathan M. and Sheila S. Blair, eds. The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture. Oxford University Press, 2009. Bouzouita, Kerim. “Memories from the Underground.” In Taking to the Streets: The Transformation of Arab Activism. Edited by Lina Khatib and Ellen Lust, 34-35. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Bowles, Paul. Their Heads are Green and Their Hands Are Blue. London: Abacus, 1963. —. The Sheltering Sky. London: Flamingo, 1993. —. Without Stopping: An Autobiography by Paul Bowles. London: Peter Owen, 1972. Boyarin, Jonathan. “Space, Time, and the Politics of Memory.” In Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, Edited by Jonathan Boyarin., 1-37, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 2002. Brueggemann, Walter. The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977. Burkhardt, Titus. “Art and Liturgy.” In Voices of Islam: Voices of art, beauty, and Science, vol 4. Edited by Vincent J. Cornell, 49-58. Connecticut, Waesport: Praeger, 2007. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Hetmanstate,” accessed 28 August 2015, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages\H\ E\Hetmanstate.htm Carothers, Thomas. “The end of the Transition Paradigm.” Journal of Democracy, 13 (2002): 5-21. Cavanaugh, Amy. “A Life on the Margins: Maxine Hong Kingston, ‘I Love a Broad Margin to My Life,’ at the Writer’s Center.” February 3, 2011. Charara, Hayan. “Inclined to Speak,” An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008. —. “Author’s Statement.” In “Writer’s Corner.” 2009. National Endowment for the Arts. http://arts.gov/writers-corner/bio/hayan-charara. Chomiak, Laryssa. “Architecture of Resistance in Tunisia.” In Taking to the Streets: The Transformation of Arab Activism, 22-51. Edited by

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

177

Lina Khatib and Ellen Lust. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Choukri, Mohamed. For Bread Alone. Trans. Paul Bowles. London: Saqui, 1993. —. Paul Bowles Wa Uzlat Tanja. Köln: Al-Kamel Verlag, 1997. CichoĔ, Anna Izabela. “Identity Trajectories in V.S. Naipaul‫ތ‬s Work.” In A Fluid Sense of Self: the Politics of Transnational Identity. Edited by Silvia Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu, 45-60. Krotenthallergasse: Lit Verlag, 2010. Ciuraru, Carmela. “‘Woman Warrior’ Looks at Aging, Writerly Self.” Review of Kingston, Maxine Hong. I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. The Boston Globe (Jan. 25, 2011). http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2011/01/25/maxine_hong_ kingston_resumes_her_memoir_with_verse_and_an_interior_focus/ Jan. 2015. Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures.” Cultural Studies, Edited by. Lawrence Grossberg. Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. —. “On Collecting Art and Culture.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, Edited by Simon During, 49-73, London: Routledge, 1993. —. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Cole, Juan. “The First Middle Eastern Revolution since 1979.” Informed Comment. January 14, 2011. http://www.juancole.com/2011/01/thefirst-middle-eastern-revolution-since-1979.html Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. “Constitution of Ukraine,” Legislationline, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.legislationline.org/documents/section/constitutions/country /52. Cornell, Svante. Autonomy and Conflict. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2002. Cresswell, Tim. Place, a Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Curiel, Jonathan. Al’ America: Travels through America’s Arab and Islamic Roots. Reprint edition. New York: The New Press, 2009. —. “Muslim Roots of the Blues / The Music of Famous American Blues Singers Reaches Back through the South to the Culture of West Africa.” SFGate. August 15, 2004. http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Muslim-roots-of-the-blues-Themusic-of-famous-2701489.php.

178

Bibliography

Dannenberg, Hilary P. “Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and the Desert Romance Tradition in Postcolonial/Anglophone Fiction.” In Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 20 (2008) 69-88. Dearden, Lizzie. “Mohamed Abu Khdeir murder: Israeli man convicted of burning Palestinian teenager to death in revenge killing.” Independent, Tuesday 19 April 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mohammedabu-khdeir-murder-israeli-man-convicted-of-burning-palestinianteenager-to-death-in-revenge-a6991251.html De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. —. “The Practices of Space.” In On Signs, Edited by Marshall Blonsky, 122-145, Maryland: Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Deeb Mary J: “Al-Zaytuna.” In the Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern Islamic World vol. 4. Edited by J. L. Esposito. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 De la Barrera, José L. Venegas Caro. “Identity As Liminality In PostColonial Fiction: Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power.” Odisea 6 (2005): 201-214. Delaney, David. Territory: a Short Introduction. MA, Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. DeNora, Tia. “How is Extra-Musical Meaning Possible? Music as a Place and Space for ‘Work’.” Sociological Theory 4, no. 1 (1986): 84-94. Desai, Manan. “Review of Maxine Hong KingstonҲs ‘I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.’” June 8, 2011. http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2011/06/reviewmaxine-hong-kingstons-i-love-broad-margin-my-life. Feb. 2015. Dickinson, Emily. “A Route of Evanescence,” in Letters of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Mabel Loomis Todd, 368. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012. Dreyfuss, Robert. Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. New York: Owl Books, 2005. Eimers, Nancy. “Poetry and the Difficulty of Documentation.” Pilot Light: a Journal of 21st Century Poetics and Criticism, September 2011. http://www.pilotlightjournal.org/1/3/1. El-Badry, Samia. “Arab American Demographics.” 2014. Arab American Demographics. http://www.aaiusa.org/demographics.

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

179

Elghandor, Abdelhak “Bowles’s Views of Atavism and Civilization,” Journal of Maghrebi Studies, 1 (1993): 77-94. El-Said, Maha. “Dropping the Hyphen: Arab American Poetry from Ethnic to Diaspora.” Paper uploaded to Academia.edu presented at the American Studies Conference, University of Beirut. https://www.academia.edu/4941698/Dropping_the_Hyphen. Encyclopaedia Judaica, Second Edition, V 07. New York: MacMillan Reference USA, 2007. Encyclopaedia Judaica, Second Edition, V 19. New York: MacMillan Reference USA, 2007. Europa Publications, ed. Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. London: Taylor & Francis, 2003. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. by Richard Filcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Fantz, Ashley. “Array of world leaders joins 3.7 million in France to defy terrorism.” CNN.com, accessed February 25, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/11/world/charlie-hebdo-paris-march/. Ferguson, Priscilla Pankhurst. “The Flâneur on and off the Streets of Paris.” In The Flâneur. Edited by Keith Tester, 22-42. Oxon: Routledge, 2014. Fleet, Kate, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Everett Rowson. Encyclopedia of Islam. THREE. Brill Academic Online. http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopedie-de-lislam/alpha/m?s.rows=50&s.start=500 Flusty, Steven. “Postmodernism,” in Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts. Edited by David Atkinson, Peter Jackson, David Sibley, and Neil Washbourne, 169-174, London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces,” in Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 2227. —. “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon, 63–77, New York: Pantheon, 1980. —. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. —. The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 1989. Fraser, Nancy. “Politics, Culture, and the Public Sphere: Toward a Postmodern Conception.” In Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity

180

Bibliography

Politics. Edited by Linda Nicholson and Seidman Steven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1949. Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Gafni, Isaiah M. Land, Center and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. Goldmann, Nahum. “Jews in the World of 1947.” The American Mercury (December 1958): 72-73. Gordimer, Nadine. The Pickup. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Graham, Smith. The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union. London: Longman, 1990. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonia Gramsci. Edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. NY: International Publishers, 1971. Hakim, Negar. “Mosque Architecture Past and Present.” In Sacred Buildings: a Design Manual. Edited by Rudolf Stegers, 46-53. Birkhauser, Basel, 2008. Hale, Henri E. “Regime Cycles: Democracy, Autocracy and Revolution in Post-Soviet Eurasia.” World Politics 58 (October) 2005. Hall, Rodney B. National Collective Identities: Social Constructs and Internal Systems. New York: Columbia UP, 1960. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. Edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222-37. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. —. “New Cultures for Old.” In A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, Edited by Doreen. Massey and Pat. Jess, 175-213. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. —. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In Modernity and Its Futures, 274-316. Edited by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew. London: Polity Press, Open University, 1992. Harvey, David. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. New York, Cornell University Press, 2005. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Barbarism a User Guide.” New Left Review, 206 (JulyAugust 1994): 44-54. —. The Age of Extremes. London: Abacus, 1995.

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

181

Hoffman Michael and Amaney Jamal. “Religion in the Arab Spring: Between Two Competing Narratives.” 2013. Accessed August 31, 2015. http://aalims.org/uploads/Hoffman_and_Jamal_AALIMS.pdf. Homes, Leslie. Post-Communism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. Hunt, Emma. “Post-Apartheid Johannesburg and Global Mobility in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 37, no. 4 (2006):103-121. Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, Edited by P. O‫ ތ‬Donnell and Robert Con Davis, 3-32. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Ives, Nancy R. “Review of Kingston, Maxine Hong. I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.” Jan. 2011. Library Journal (Sep. 15, 2010): 72-73. Janz, Bruce B. “The Territory Is Not the Map: Place, Deleuze and Guattari and African Philosophy.” Philosophy Today 45 no. 4 (Winter 2001): 392-404. Jarmakani, Amira. Imagining Arab Womanhood: the Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Jenks, Chris. “Watching Your Step: the History and Practice of the Flâneur.” In Visual Culture. Edited by Chris Jenks, 142-160. Joudah, Fady. “‘A Poet from Gaza Will Rise … And Win the Nobel Prize’ The Gaza Poetry Roundtable: Part III.” Los Angeles Review of Books. December 2, 2012. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-gaza-poetryroundtable-part-iii/ Kahf, Mohja. Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. University of Texas Press, 2002. Katz, Jonathan M. “In Chapel Hill, Suspect’s Rage Went beyond a Parking Dispute.” The New York Times. Accessed April 5, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/chapel-hill-muslim-studentshootings-north-carolina.html?_r=0. Kerrou Mohamed. La Grande Mosquée de Kairouan, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 2009. http://remmm.revues.org/6237. Khan, Zafarul Islam. Ancient History of Palestine 1220 B.C.-1359 C.E: from the Jewish Invasion to the Last Crusade. Lebanon: Dar Al Nafaes, 1973. Kingston, Maxine Hong. I love a Broad Margin to my Life. New York: Random House Inc., 2011. Koven, Suzanne, and Fady Joudah. “The Big Idea #7: Fady Joudah.” November 18, 2013. The Rumpus.net.

182

Bibliography

http://therumpus.net/2013/11/the-big-idea-7-fady-joudah/. Kuzio, Taras. Ukraine State and Nation Building, London, Routledge, 1998. Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. First pub. 1959 London: Penguin Books, 1990. Laroui, Abdallah. Al Idyulugia Al Arabia Al Muaasara. Casablanca: Al Markaz Athakafi al Arabi, 1999. Layachi, Arbi. A Life Full of Holes. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. —. State, Space, World. Edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Translated by Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Lewis, Reina. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. London: Tauris, 2004. Lionnet, Francoise and Shu-mei Shih, eds. Minor Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Littré, Emile and L. Marcel Devic. Dictionnaire de la Langue Française. 2 vols. Paris: L. Hachette et Cie, 1869. Lorusso, Marilisa. “Russia, lo Stato Profondo.”Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, 24 February 2015. —. “La formazione degli Stati de facto dello spazio post-sovietico.” November 2014. www.sicurezzanazionale.gov.it/sisr.nsf/letture/laformazione-degli-stati-de-facto-dello-spazio-post-sovietico.html. —. “La Russia avvinghiata all’Ucraina.”Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, 21 November 2014, www.balcanicaucaso.org/aree/Russia/La-Russiaavvinghiata-all-Ucraina-157260. Losh, Richard. The Uttermost Part of the Earth: A Guide to Places in the Bible. Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005. Luke, Harry Charles. The Handbook of Palestine. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1922. Majaj, Lisa Suhair. “Arab-American Literature: Origins and Developments.” American Studies Journal 52 (2008). http://www.asjournal.org/52-2008/arab-american-literature-originsand-developments/. —. “Claims” In Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists. Edited by Joanna Kadi, 84-86. Cambridge MA: South End Press, 1994. —. “The Hyphenated Author: Emerging Genre of ‘Arab-American Literature’ Poses Questions of Definition, Ethnicity and Art.” Al-Jadid 5, no. 26 (1999). http://www.aljadid.com/content/hyphenated-author-

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

183

emerging-genre-arab-american-literature-poses-questions-definitionethnici. Makdisi, George. The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West. Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Malka, Haim “Tunisia: Confronting Extremism.” in Religious Radicalism after the Arab Uprisings. Edited by Jon B. Alterman, 92-121. MD, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Mattawa, Khaled. “After 42 Years.” Los Angeles Times. October 25, 2011. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/25/opinion/la-oe-mattawa-poemkadafi-20111025. —. Amorisco. Keene, NY: Ausable Press, 2008. —. “Identity, Power, and a Prayer to Our Lady of Repatriation: On Translating and Writing Poetry.” Kenyon Review Online. Fall 2014. http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2014fall/selections/khaled-mattawa-essay-1-656342/. —. Ismailia Eclipse. Rhinebeck, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1995. —. “The Making of a Miracle-Maker.” In Miracle Maker: Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi. Trans. Khaled Mattawa. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2003. —. Tocqueville. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues in Prose & Poetry, 2010. —. “Traffic.” In “Poet of the Month: Khaled Mattawa.” April 2007. Poetrynet. Accessed April 1, 2015. http://www.poetrynet.org/month/archive/mattawa/intro.html. McAlpin, Heller. “Making Room for a ‘Broad Margin’ to Life, in Verse.” http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/133303006/making-room-for-a-broadmargin-to-life-in-verse. July 2011. 1-14. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge, 1995. Meier, Franz. “Picking Up the Other: Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup,” ESSE 2 (2003), accessed April 1, 2015. http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic23/franz/2_2003.html. Melman, Billie. Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. Mernisssi, Fatimah. Women in Islam: an Historical and Theological Inquiry. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Miller, Melinda. “Kingston’s Life Journey, Told in Chapter and Verse.” Review of Maxine Hong Kingston. I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. Buffalo News, N.Y (30 Jan 2011). https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-27823865.html. Jan. 2015

184

Bibliography

Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Moghissi, Haideh. Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis. London: Zed Books, 1999. —. “September 11 and Middle Eastern Women: Shrinking Space for Critical Thinking and Oppositional Politics.” Signs 29, no 2 (2004): 594-597. —. “What We Have Learned from 9/11.” American SSHRC Forum http://essays.ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/what-we-have-learned-from-9/11. —. “Women, War and Fundamentalism in the Middle East.” Social Sciences Research Council on-line collection of essays: Sept. 11 Essays on Fundamentalism, http://www.SSRC/org. Moghissi, Haideh, Saeed Rahnema and Mark Goodman. Diaspora by Design: Muslims in Canada and Beyond. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. NY: Public Affairs, 2011. —. “The Tunisian Twitter Revolution That Wasn’t.” Mother Jones. January 27, 2011. http://www.motherjones.com/media/2011/01/evgeny-morozov-twittertunisia Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Mount, Dana. “Playing at Home: An Ecocritical Reading of Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 45, no. 3 (2014): 101-122. Mourad, Ghada. “‘The Best Poems Are Not Political,’ But—.” October 28, 2012. Arabic Literature (in English). http://arablit.org/2012/10/28/the-best-poems-are-not-political-poemsbut/. Mrabet, Mohamed. Love with A Few Hairs. Translated by. Paul Bowles. London: Peter Owen, 1967. —. The Lemon. Translated by Paul Bowles, London: Peter Owen, 1967. Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Ontario: Palgrave, 2002. Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient.” In The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society. New York: Harper Row, 1989. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7-24.

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

185

—. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Nu’aima, Mikha’eel. “Tuma’neenah” [Quietude]. El Fann. Accessed 02 July 2015. http://www.elfann.com/news/show/1116565/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8 %B7%D9%85%D8%A3%D9%86%D9%8A%D9%86%D8%A9. Olsen, Steven E. “Alien Terrain: Paul Bowles’s Filial Landscapes.” Twentieth Century Literature 32, No. 3/4, (1986): 334-349. Oremus, Will. “Elena Kagan Admits Supreme Court Justices Haven’t Quite Figured Out Email Yet.” Slate. August 20, 2013. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/20/elena_kagan_supr eme_court_justices_haven_t_gotten_to_email_use_paper_memos.html Orr, David. “Maxine Hong KingstonҲs I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.” http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/95186.html. Feb. 2015. Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “masjid,” accessed January 22, 2015, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/masjid. Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “place,” accessed January 22, 2017, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/place. Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “space,” accessed January 22, 2017, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/space. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edition. 20 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pálsson, Gísli “Introduction: Beyond Boundaries,” Beyond Boundaries: Understanding, Translation and Anthropological Discourse. Edited by Gísli Pálsson. Providence: Berg, 1993. Petersen, Andrew, ed. Dictionary of Islamic Architecture. Routledge, London, 2002. Petrusich, Amanda. “The Sheltering Sound.” The New Yorker, February 24, 2016, accessed December 30, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-sheltering-soundpaul-bowless-attempt-to-save-moroccan-music. Plokhy, Serhii. The Cossack myth, History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pounds, Wayne. Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography. New York: Lang, 1985. —. “Paul Bowles and The Delicate Prey: the Psychology of Predation,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 59, no.3 (1981): 620-633. Procter, James. Stuart Hall. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2004. Radical Mosques Invite Young Tunisians to Jihad in Syria.” in AlArabiyya News. AFP. Tunis. 2012. http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/05/18/214947.html.

186

Bibliography

Review of Maxine Hong Kingston. I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. East Baton Rouge Parish Library. http://link.ebrpl.com/portal/I-love-a-broad-margin-to-my-life-MaxineHong/rwxSogGRPx4/. Jan. 2015. Revilo, Oliver. The Jewish Strategy. Virginia: Kevin and Alfred Publishers and Booksellers, 2005. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Robinson, Edward. Biblical Researches in Palestine and in the Adjacent Regions: A Journal of Travels in the Year 1838. Vols I & II. Edited by E. Robinson and E. Smith. Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1856. Rohling, Auguste. Le Juif selon le Talmud. Paris: Albert Savine, 1889. Ropero, Lourdes López. “Diaspora: Concept, Context, and its Application in the Study of New Literatures.” Revista Estudios Ingleses 16 (2003): 6-30. Rountree, Mary Martin. “Paul Bowles: Translations from the Moghrebi.” Twentieth Century Literature 32. 3-4 (1986): 389-99. Sack, Robert D. “The Power of Place and Space.” Geographical Review, 83, no. 3 (1993): 326-329. Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Routledge, 1978. —. “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 205-225. Sargent, Lyman Tower. Contemporary Political Ideologies. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2009. Saskia Sassen, “Deciphering the Global,” in Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects. Edited by Saskia Sassen, 1-19. New York: Routledge, 2007. Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Weidenfeld, 1989. Schick, Irvin Cemil. “The Harem as Gendered Space and the Spatial Reproduction of Gender.” In Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces. Edited by Marilyn Booth, 69-84. London: Duke University Press, 2010. Schultermandl, Silvia and Sebnem Toplu. “A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity in Anglophone Literatures.” In A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity, edited by Schultermandl and Toplu, 11-24. Krotenthallergasse: Lit Verlag, 2010. Shabaz, Stan. “Disrepair and Neglect Mar Kahlil Gibran Memorial.” Al Jadid 12, nos. 56/57, 2006. Shalabi, Ahmad. Al Yahudeya. Cairo: The Renaissance Bookshop, 1978.

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

187

Simal, BegoĖa. “‘Moving Selves’: Immigration and Transnationalism in Gish Jen and Chitra Divakaruni.” In Transnational, National, and Personal Voices: New Perspectives on Asian American and Asian Diasporic Women Writers, Edited by Begona Simal and Elisabetha Marino, 151-74. Munster: Lit Verlag, 2004. Skordoulis, Constantine D and Eugenia Arvanitis. “Space Conceptualization in the Context of Postmodernity: Theorizing Spatial Representation.” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 3 no. 6 (2008): 105-13. Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989. —. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. Suny, Ronald Grigor and Martin Terry. A State of Nation: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Tajine, Synda. “Tunisia Suffers Bloodiest Day in 50 Years as Terror Strikes Border,” Al Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East. July 21, 2014, http://www.almonitor.com/pulse/security/2014/07/tunisia-antiterrorist-law-attack.html#ixzz4UbJPKSdq. Tally, Robert. “Geocriticism: Mapping the Spaces of Literature.” L’Esprit Créateur: The International Quarterly of French and Francophone Studies 49, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 134. Tan, Kathy-Ann. “‘All the difficult Names of Who We Are’: Transnational Identity Politics in Chang-Rae Lee’s and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Fiction.” In A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity, Edited by Schultermandl and Toplu, 113-36. Krotenthallergasse: Lit Verlag, 2010. Terray, Emmanuel. “Headscarf Hysteria.” New Left Review, 26 (MarchApril 204): 118-127, https://newleftreview.org/II/26/emmanuel-terray-headscarf-hysteria. The Torah: The Five Books of Moses. Illinois: Varda Books, 2001. Tlili, Mustapha. “Tunisia’s Hour of Need,” New York Times, March 27, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/opinion/tunisias-hour-of-need.html Toplu, Sebnem. “Gendered Transnational Spaces: Arab ‘Safari‫ ތ‬Situated in Hanen Al-Shaykh’s Only in London.” In A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity,edited by Schultermandl and Toplu, 159-74. Krotenthallergasse: Lit Verlag, 2010.

188

Bibliography

Torelli Stefano M., Fabio Merone and Francesco Cavatorta, “Salafism in Tunisia: Challenges and Opportunities for Democratization.” Middle East Policy XIX, no. 4, (Winter 2012): 140-154. “Toronto 18 ringleader, Fahim Ahmad, denied parole,” The Star, accessed September 24, 2014, https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2014/09/24/toronto_18_ringleade r_fahim_ahmad_seeks_parole.html. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Tuathail, Gearóid Ó. and Gerard Toal. “Geopolitics.” In Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Concepts. Edited by David Atkinson, Peter Jackson, David Sibley, and Neil Washbourne, vii-xviii. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. “Tunisia: Background paper on Internet regulation.” https://www.article19.org/data/files/medialibrary/37135/TunisiaReport-on-Internet-.pdf Accessed 02 April 2015. “Tunisia Battles over Pulpits, and Revolt’s Legacy.” in The New York Times, Nov.12, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012. “Tunisia: Blogger Slim Amamou arrested today.” Nawaat. January 06, 2011. http://nawaat.org/portail/2011/01/06/tunisia-blogger-slim-amamouarrested-today/ Accessed 02 April 2015. “Tunisia: International Religious Freedom Report 2009, Section II. Status of Government Respect for Religious Freedom: Legal/Policy Framework,” October 26, 2009, https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2009/127359.htm, accessed January 3, 2017. “Tunisia: Internet Regulation.” Article 19. April 04, 2012. https://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/3014/en/Tunisia:%2 0Internet%20regulation Ulin, David L. “The Writer’s Life; a Reflection on Aging.” Review of Maxine Hong Kingston, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. Jan. 2011. Los Angeles Times, Calif. (06 Feb 2011): 2ps. http://articles.latimes.com /2011/feb/06/entertainment/la-ca-maxine-hong-kingston-20110206. Feb. 2015. —. “David L. Ulin Talks to Maxine Hong Kingston.” February 6, 2011. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/02/david-l-ulin-talksto-maxine-hong-kingston.html. Feb. 2015. Varisco, Daniel Martin. “Grease-Monkeys and Bedouin Girls: the Rhetorical Fate of Arabs and Muslims in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup.” Tingis Redux, December 11th, 2010.

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

189

http://www.tingisredux.com/article/greasemonkeys_and_bedouin_girls .html. Walonen, Michael K. “Sense of Place in the North African Writings of Paul Bowles.” In On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Weiss, Timothy. Translating Orients: between Ideology and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Wellhausen Julius Ed., Muhammed in Medina: A translation of Muhammad ibn‘Umar Al-Waqidi. Berlin: G Reimer, (1882) in Encyclopédie de l’Islam. Band 6 (VI): 1991. “Al-masjid.” Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. “Why the Stereotypes?” In “Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes.” 2011. Arab American National Museum. http://www.arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes. Williams, David. “This Hyphen Called My Spinal Cord: Arab-American Literature at the Beginning of the 21st Century.” World Literature Today 81, no. 1 (2007): 55-63. Wu, Jason. “Maxine Hong Kingston on the ‘Broad Margin’ of Her Life. Asian American Icon Reflects on Her Life and Legacy.” April 21, 2011. http://asiasociety.org/arts/literature/maxine-hong-kingston-broadmargin-her-life. Feb. 2015. Young, Robert. J.C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990. Zia, Helen. “Free at Last.” Ms 21, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 57-58. http://www.powells.com/review/2011_02_27.html. Feb. 2015 Zine, Jasmine. “Muslim Women and the Politics of Representation.” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 19.4 (2002): 1-22.

CONTRIBUTORS

Yosra Amraoui is an Assistant Professor at the Higher Institute of Languages in Tunis, University of Carthage, Tunisia. Her main research and teaching areas are media studies, historiography, Anglophone studies, and Jewish history. She wrote a number of articles on the formation of the Israeli identity, which appeared in international and Tunisian journals such as IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, TAYR Quarterly, Cross Cultural Issues and International Conference Proceedings on Science, Art and Gender in the Global Rise of the Indigenous Languages. Sihem Arfaoui is an Assistant Professor in English Literature. She is currently Head of the English Department at Northern Borders University, K.S.A. She received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of Sousse, Tunisia. She has taught several courses in literature and cultural studies at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences, University of Jendouba, Tunisia. Her major area of interest is ethnic female writings. She is the co-editor of International Conference Proceedings on Creating Myths as Narratives of Empowerment and Disempowerment (2016) and the International Conference Proceedings on Indigenous Languages (2014). Karim Hamdi is an independent scholar and consulting engineer, with interests in social movements, sustainable development, gender, and crosscultural communication. He taught French and Arabic at Oregon State University (OSU), and was the founding director of OSU study abroad programs in Tunisia (2004-2011). His published works include refereed papers, book chapters, and book-length translations from Arabic and French into English. Currently, he serves as a technical advisor in a US federally-funded entrepreneurship project in Tunisia, and as a consultant with private companies in Tunisia and France, as well as with a government agency in Tunisia. Asma Hichri is a Lecturer in English literature at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis at the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia, and teaches in the areas of South African and American literatures and postcolonial and postmodernist criticism. She has published in several

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

191

international journals, such as ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature (2013) and The Journal of African Literature and Culture (2011). Her research interests include South African history and literature, English literature, African American history, and postmodernist and postcolonial studies. Marilisa Lorusso is a Lecturer at the American University of Armenia (Yerevan and Yeghegnadzor), extension program of economics. She has obtained a PhD on Democracy and Human Rights, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Genoa. She is a permanent co-operator of Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, an Italian think tank, and writes for different centres of studies. She has published articles and various contributions for Italian and foreign publications. She is the author of the book Georgia, Vent'anni dopo l'URSS (2011). Samira Mechri is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia. She has an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warwick, England, and a PhD from the University of La Manouba, Tunisia, on a joint programme with the University of Warwick. She teaches cultural studies, regional studies and media studies. Her areas of interest are post-colonial studies, travel literature, translation studies and international relations. She has published articles on colonial literature, travel writing, translation, and academic encounters. She is currently the Head of the English Department and Director of the MA in English and International Relations at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences, University of Tunis El Manar. Haideh Moghissi is Professor Emerita at York University in Toronto. She was a founder of the Iranian National Union of Women and member of its first executive and editorial boards, before leaving Iran in 1984. Her publications in English include 7 monographs and edited volumes and many articles in books and journals. Her Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2000 and Zed Press, 1999), winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award, has been translated to Farsi, Korean and Indonesian. Haideh Moghissi was the principal investigator of several international research projects. She was awarded a Pierre Elliot Trudeau research prize Fellowship in 2011 and the Status of Women Award of Distinction from Ontario Confederation of Faculty Associations (OCUFA) in 2015.

192

Contributors

Fatima Radhouani teaches English literature and translation at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis, University of Tunis El Manar. She has obtained an MA in English literature from La Manouba University, Tunisia, and an MA in specialized translation from Tunis El-Manar University. She has taught several courses in English literature, specialized translation, writing strategies, gender studies, and Arab-American literature. Radhouani is published in the Cambridge Scholars Press. She has served as a Translator and education consultant for the UNO and contributed to the translation of the Tunisian Constitution. She is currently a collaborator to a project on religious status in Tunisia within Mominoun without Borders Institute for Studies and Research and a research associate within the Arab-American Centre, University of Michigan. Laura Rice is Professor Emerita of comparative literature at Oregon State University. Her research interests include North African literature, gender, literacy, as well as women’s role in development. Recent publications on North Africa are “Tunisia,” co-written with Karim Hamdy, in Women’s Lives around the World: a Global Encyclopedia (2017), Revolutions in Tunisian Poetry (2015), co-edited and co-translated with Karim Hamdy, Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa (2007), as well as articles on women and literacy (2008) and folk poetry and resistance (2015). As Principal Investigator, she designed and conducted federally-funded R&D projects on the MENA region, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, US Department of Education, and from the US Department of State. Current activities include consulting for the Maghreb Economic Forum and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

INDEX

Abdul-Aleem, Mustapha Kamal, 43 Adorno, Theodor, 82 Africanism. Africanist presence, fetishisation, serviceability, dehistoricizing allegory, American fiction, 170-171n36. See also Morrison, Toni Amorisco (Mattawa), 137, 139 Ambivalence (Bhabha), 106 Anachorism (Cresswell), 12 Ancient History of Palestine (Khan), 44 Anderson, Benedict, imagined communities, the Ummah, 9 Aqabat Jabr refugee camp (Jericho), 142 Arab American Museum, 146-47 Arab American writers, 15-16, 130, 134. See Mattawa, Khaled. American literature, dialogic, liminal space, multicultural, "other" geographies, poetry, thirdspace, translator, 16 Arab women, 17, 164, 167-68 deprecation of, disparaging picture of, portrayal of stereotyped vision of, 160 generalisations about, 165 Orientalist vision of, 163 Arab Spring, The, 9, 56 Aristotle, 40 De Memoria et Reminiscienta, 50n13 Armush, A. A, 44 Ashcroft, Bill, utopia, postcolonial hope, 169

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari), 124, 126 Augé, Mark, 3 identity, place, .non-place, places of memory, supermodernity, 4 Aurelius, Marcus, 140 Meditations, Roman ruins, Sabratha, Stoic philosophy, 139 Azzawi, Fadhil alMiracle Maker, 141 Barbarism (Adorno), Abu Ghraib, Arab revolutions, civil wars, Cold War, eighteenth-century Enlightenment, empires, fascism, ISIS, 9/11, moral behaviour, socialism, systems of rules, the Twentieth Century as the age of extremes (Hobsbawm), 82 Bardo Museum terrorist attacks, 2015, 61 Baron d’Erlanger, Le, 100 Bedouin, 160 absence, mirage, non-citizen, Other, ouside time and space, secluded, silent, stereotype, harem, sterile desert, veil, 165 black wraps, conjured up, desert, disquieting image, encounter with, girl, goats, 164 deterritorializing habitus, disorienting, nomad, territory, unsettling encounter, 166. dystopian vision, envisioned harem, Oriental women, 153 See also Nomadism

194 Ben Ali, Zin El Abidine, 60, 64n3, 71-72, 75 revolution, surveillance, 56-57 totalitarian regime, January 2011, Tunisia, 12 Ben Jalloun, Tahar, 109 Benjamin, Walter Mimetic Faculty, The, 59 Bevin, Ernest, 43 Bhabha, Homi, 63, 106 Bill C-51. disruption, Canadian Parliament, terrorist activities, 89. See also CSIS. Black Skin, White Masks, 132 Bloch, Ernest, 169 Bourgeoisification, 108 Bourguiba, Habib, 62 administration, postindependence Tunisia, religious policy, 79n23 Bowles, Paul, 14, 94-95, 99-101, 103, 105-11, 111n8 Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, 96-97 Sheltering Sky, The, 96, 108, 110 Without Stopping: An Autobiography by Paul Bowles, 96, 98, 102, 104, 110 Boyarin, Jonathan, 5, 8 Brah, Avtar, 125 Brecht, Bertolt “To Posterity,” 141, 144 Brueggemann, Walter, 5, 11 place, land, territory, affective, continuity, covenantal, established identity, history, meaning, memory, time, 3 space, ahistorical, detachment, "undefined freedom," 3 Burroughs, William, 96, 109 Bush, George W., 13, 120, 133

Index Certeau, Michel de, 5, 96 inward turning hisotries, places, praticed place, 4 Chaambi Mountains, The, 74 assassination, beheaded soldiers, Mohamed Brahmi, Ramadan, Republic Day, terrorists, 2013, 80n29 Charara, Hayan, 137, 141, 143 Choukri, Mohamed, 96, 99, 104, 108-09, 113n64 Chronotope, The, 2 Clifford, James, 94, 98, 133 Collecting, 99-100, 109 anthropological culture collectors, anthropology, artefacts, customs, display, exotic objects, 101 “On Collecting Art and Culture,” 112n22 The Predicament of Culture, 101, 112n23 Code du Statut Personnel (Code of Personal Status), 55 Cresswell, Tim, 6, 12 Crimea, 24, 28, 30, 33 annexation of, border of Ukraine, referendum, 23 Crimean peninsula, 1954, political autonomy, Tatars, Ukraine, 31 CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service ), 89 Cultural encounters, 15, 97, 102, 126 anthropological, chance, global, historical, local, space, spatial dynamics, transforming, travel, 104 Cultural studies, 5, 8, 14, 96, 116 Cliffordian approach, 94 origins of (Hall. S), 132 Cyber dissidence, 58

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 124, 126 deterritorialization, 8, 15, 19n35, 24 nomadism, 124, 166 space heterogeneous, homogeneous, smooth, striated, 19n35 Derrida, Jacques, 107 decolonising Western thought, deconstruction, postmodern, 113n61 Desacralization, 66-67 sacralization, resacralization 70 Desert. 154, 164-69. blank space, fantasy, imagination, spatial poetics, 158 charades in the, 158-59 encounter with the, eternity, heterotopia, representation of, 157 Oriental, 17, 152-53, 166-67 journey through the, landscape, Orientalist mystification, premodern, romance, stasis, 156 outside time and space, sterile landscape, 161 ultimate sublime, 153. See also Orient Deterritorialization, 9, 15, 19n35, 24 and reterritorialization, border, contact zones, mapping, routes, spatiality, 8 Diaspora, 13, 56, 83, 125, 133, 139 and galut, homeland, 39 Jewish, 38, 43, 47, 49 Jews, 40 Digital media, 54, 59-63 digital home, digital space, 55 online activism, political activism, protest, role of, uncontrollable spaces of transgression, 12

195

Dickinson, Emily, 139 Drumont, Edouard, 38 Ethnocentrism, 20n59, 171n39 Ethnography, 4, 102 Ethnomusicology, 95, 99-100 Ethnotyping (Westphal), 14, 157 ethnocentrism, stereotyping, xenotypes, 20n59, 171n39 Ez-Zitouna Mosque, 71, 75 Ez-Zitouni model of learning, Islamic University, 1988 Mosques’ law, Sheik Hssine Laabidi, 76 Fanon, Frantz 107 Black Skin, White Masks, 132 Fifth Book of Peace (Kingston), 118, 122 Flânerie, 158-60 Baudelaire, English charades, flâneur, romantic desert, 159 Foucault, Michel, 5-8, 19n35, “episteme,” 107, 113n61 “Of Other Spaces,” 173n98 Freud, Sigmund, 39-40 Genet, Jean, 109 Genius loci, 5 Geocriticism, 9, 146 imaginative topography, spatial practices, spatial semantics, 9 literary cartography, 162 Geocriticism, Real and Fictional Spaces (Westphal), 171n39 Geography, 1, 4, 11, 42, 165 critical human, 5 historical, 2 imaginative, 155, 162 imperial, of difference, 8 of space, 8, 125 postmodern cultural, 7 Romantic, 169 “sensuous” (Westphal), 99 social and psychic, 125

196 spatial politics, “writing the earth,” 11 Geopolitics geopolitical colonial interests, 86 geopolitical landscape, 12 Jewish, 11 Gibran, Gibran Khalil, 133 The Prophet, 131 Ginsberg, Allen, 109 Goldmann, Nahum 43-44, 50n23 Gordimer, Nadine, 17, 154, 159, 161, 163-67 ambivalence, exoticisation of the Orient, Orient as cultural Other, 151 reading of the Orient, 153 literary cartography of the Orient, 164 romanticised vision, 156 romancing the Orient, 157 romantic poetics, 168 utopian optimism, 169 The Pickup, 16, 150-153 Gramsci, Antonio, The Prison Notebooks, 60 Grand narratives, 8 Hall, Rodney sovereign state actors, sub-group state actors, 45 National Collective Identities, 51 Hall, Stuart, 56, 60, 63, 130, 133 “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” “Origins of Cultural Identity,” 132 diaspora, homeland, identity, imagined “homes,”125 Hannibal, 140 Harem, 150, 163-166, Arab women, domestic space, gaze, gendered space, haremisation, topos of the, visibility, 17 conceptual space, envisoned, haremised female community, mythical, 153

Index Bedouin, representations of women, trialectics of veil, harem, and sterile desert, 165 Harvey, David territory, time and space, 3 “relative space,” 6 Heimat Bloch, glocal community, hope, utopianism, utopias, 169 Herz Imber, Naphtali, 40 Heterotopia (Foucault), 153, 173n98 counter-sites, of compensation, of illusion, Foucault, 168 heterogeneous space, 7, 19n35 Hetmanate Cossack, Hetmans, Little Russia, 1764, 29-30 Historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon), 119 Hobsbawm, Eric, 82 Holodomor collectivization, genocide, grainquotas, nationalism, peasants, Soviet Union, terror-famine, Ukraine (1932-1933), 3637n13 Homo viator, 18 Hull, Edith Maude desert, romance, The Sheik, 152 Hutcheon, Linda 119 “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History,” 132 Identity, 4, 6, 89, 125, 135, 156, 165-66, 168 and narrative, autobiographical writing, flux, mobility, rootedness, 15 and solidarity, communal, 152 Arab American, 131 collective memory and, 3 cultural, 15-16, 130, 132-33, 151-52 group, 32, 38, 42 Islamic, Muslim, 12, 90

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics

197

Israeli, Jewish, 11, 42, 44-45, 49 national, 1, 24, 28, 35, 151 Oriental, 17, 157, 159 politics, 15, 116 religious, 88 Western, 167 Ideological State Apparatus, 6 Idrissi, Khatib Al-, 80 I Love a Broad Margin to my Life (Kingston), 15, 116-20, 122-24, 126-27 Imperialism, 10, 159 cultural, 104 ecological, 151 International Museum of Muslim Cultures, 133 ISIS, 82, 88 Alshabab, Buko Haram, Lashkar e-Islam, 13, 84 Islamist groups, Islamic State, Khilafah, 9 Islam, 14, 56, 72, 84-85, Medieval Islam, 69 Middle East, Muslim societies, racist imagery about, stereotypes about, stereotypical images of, 90-91 Muslim women, 161, 163 Salafi Sunni, 107 Islamism, 13, 86 Islamophobia Abu Ghraib, Charlie Hebdo, embedded, terrorism, 87 of western media and politicians, racist imagery about Islam, 91 Ismailia Eclipse (Mattawa), 137

biblical past, collective memories, Jews, testimonies, 40 Jewish wandering, narratives, Promised Land, return, 11 Zionist, 39, 42, 47, 49 Jihad clerics, Friday sermons, Libya, mosque, support of, Syria, 73 jihadi discourse, 75 fighters, Syria, 78 propaganda, 88 Salafists, 71, 80n31 Joudah, Fady, 135, 141-43 “Sleeping Trees,” 136 Judea and Samaria, 46

Ja’maa Uqba Ibn Nafaa (The Kairouan Grand Mosque), 72, 79n22 Jasmine Revolution, 54, 64n3 Jeffries, Joseph, Palestine, The Reality, 46 Jericho (West Bank), 142 Jewish Historiography, 38, 45-48

Laroui, Abdallah, 107, 109 Le Bon, Gustave, 39, 46 Lefebvre, Henri, 6-7, 13 The Production of Space, 2 ideology, logico-epistemological space, politics, production, social practice, 5 Lieux de mémoire (Nora)

Kahf, Mohja Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque, 172n63 Kerouak, Jack, 109 Khan, Zafarul Islam, 46 Ancient History of Palestine, 44 King Solomon, 48, 51n45 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 125 Fifth Book of Peace, The, 118, 122 Broad Margin, 15, 116-20, 12224, 126-27 Tripmaster Monkey, 116-18, 122-23 Woman Warrior, The, 116-17, 120-22

198 community, heritage, sites of memory, symbolic, time and memory, 4 Losh, Richard The Uttermost Part of the Earth 41-42 Luke, Harry Charles The Handbook of Palestine, 46 Maghreb, 75, 87, 94-96 Maghrebi culture, 97, 104, 107 educated class, thinkers, 106 folklore, 108-09 governments, nationalism, 105 Majaj, Lisa Suhair, 131 “Claims,” 150 Makdisi, George Islamic learning, jurisprudence, Khan (Law College), madrassas, Quran, 69 Mapping, 7, 115, 146, 169 border, itineraries, routes, spatial and mental movements, 8, 15 cognitive, 1, 9, 168 historical, 3 mnemonic, 11 postmodern, 8 spatial, 5 Marxism, 5 Marxism-Leninism, 34 Masjid, 13, 15, 66-67, 70-72, 77 Al Masjid Al–Haram, 69 daawa, devotional function of the, minbar, 68 holy space, Islamic identity, religious-cum-political authority, religious instruction, Salafists, ideological struggle, Tunisian geopolitical landscape, turmoil, worship, 12 Mattawa, Khaled, 15, 130, 134-143 “After 42 Years,” Qaddafi, Libyan uprising, 144

Index Amorisco, Ismailia Eclipse, Tocqueville, “Traffic,” Zodiac of Echoes, 137 Arab American writers, cultural translators, “Identity, Power, and a Prayer to our Lady of Repatriation,” political positioning, 135 Memory, 12, 38, 45, 98, 138, 158 and identity, 3 collective, 3, 10 historical, 28-29 Jewish, 40-44, 47 The Holocaust, recollection, traumatic experiences, 11, 41 mnemonic schemes, realms of, sites of, spaces, time and, tradition of, 4-5 (see also Lieux de mémoire) MENA, 13, 84, 86, 192 Mernissi, Fatima, 166 Metafictionality blurring of genres, echoing, intertexts of fiction, journeys, metafictional strategies, 119 Minbar, 66-68, 71-72, 75, 79n23. See also Masjid Mishna, The, 48 Morocco, 9, 94, 102-05, 107, 112 Moroccan folklore, 14, 95-99, 101, 108-10 Moroccan space, 98-99 rendering of, 14, 98, 109 allogeneous, endogenous, exogenous, 109 Morozov, Evgeny, 60 The Net Delusion: the Dark Side of Internet Freedom, 59 Morrison, Toni, 171n36 Africanist discourse, Other, economy of stereotype, quick and easy image, stereotyping, 157 Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 170n36

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics Mrabet, Mohamed, 99, 108-109 Multiculturalism, 115, 133 Multicultural, 16, 85-86, 115-16, and literary maps, 146 identity, 136 society, 133 “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (Auden), 140 Nation, 1, 15, 27, 39, 104, 115 building, 25, 28-29 characteristics of the (Smith), boundaries, codes and institutions, myths and memories, public culture, a socio-economy, 44 nation-state, 3, 9-10, 26, 31, 35, 126 National Collective Identities (Hall. R), 45 Nationalism, 17, 31, 33, 36, 44, 106, 115 collectivization and, 37n13 (see holodomor) crisis of, 10 ideology of, national consciousness, Ukrainian, 2526 identity and, Maghrebi, secular, state, 105 long distance, 14, 85-86 xenophobic, 82 NATO, 29, 62 Net Delusion: the Dark Side of Internet Freedom, The (Morozov), 59 Nochlin, Linda, 151 Nomadism, 110-11, 124 Bedouin, desert, deterritorialized, deterritorializing, nomad, reterritorialize, territory, trajectory, 166 Nu’aima, Mikha’eel, “Tuma’neenah,” 56

199

Orient, 131, 151, 153-59 Arab community, exoticisation of, exoticised East, The Sheik (Hull), 152 Arab Muslim mindscape, cognitive mapping of, envisioning of, exotic, frozen desert, imagological space, Oriental landscape, romantic poetics/poiesis of the, 168-69 cultural space, imaginative geography, in Western eyes, Oriental self, primitive place, Orientalist ideology, 155-56 heterotopia of compensation, of illusion, 168, 173n98 Oriental identity ethnotyping, romancing, 157 Oriental women Arabian country, Arab patriarchy, Arab society, dystopian vision, social roles, 153, 160 romancing of the, 17, 157 Said, sameness, stereotyping, topos, uniformity, Western superiority, 157 Orientalism, 8, 170n21 Arab women, myths, prejudices, 170 archaic traditional Orient, Islamic Orientalists, 105 harem, imagined female community, landscape, myths, Oriental women, representation, stereotypes, 17 mysterious East, mythology, 155 “us vs. them,” Weltanschauung, xenophobic, 8, 154 Orientalist discourse, 105 mystification, 17, 151, 153, 15556 Orientalism (Said), 105

200 Palestine, 39, 41-47 homeland, interest in, Jewish state in, military center, Promised Land, return to, Zionists, 43-44 Israel's war in, siege of Gaza, 86 occupied Palestine, 86, 90 Paul Bowles Wa ‘Uzlat Tanja (Choukri), 96 Philistia, 46 Philistines, 45 Pickup, The (Gordimer), 16, 150-53 Place and identity, 96 and memory, places of memory, Ricoeur, 42 (see also Lieux de mémoire) and movement, 116, 118, and non-place, mapping of, “practiced,” 4 as a center of meaning, marker of stability, 6 continuity, identity, memory, 3 dialectics of identity, space, and, 49 felicitous places, 60 identification with, 25 literary cartography, spirit of, 146 non-static, 124 of expression, 61, 63 of worship, 67 polysensoriality (Westphal), relationship with, senses, spatial referent, 99 pursuit of, yearning for a, 11 renderings of space and, 95 sense of, 6 space and expression, 54 spatial displacement, wrong place, 8 times and boundaries, 119. See also space. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Morrison), 170n36

Index “Polysensoriality” (Westphal), sensuous plenitude, senses, 99 Post-Apartheit South Africa, 151 Postcolonialism, 5, 8 postcolonial, 105, 151-52, 169 context, 10, 104 crisis of ethnographic authority, 102 Maghrebi thinkers, 107 Postmodernism, 5, 8 postmodern, 2, 10, 115, 151 critical human geography, 5 cultural geography, 7 literary space, 15 mapping, 8 postmodernist, 6, 116, 123 reading, 15, 96, 110 Postpostmodernism, 5 Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, The (Clifford), 101, 112n23 Prison Notebooks, The (Gramsci), 60 Prophet, The (Gibran), 131 Prophet Moses, 38, 43, 46 Prophet Muhammad, 12, 67, 69 Qaddafi, Muammar, 138 coup, dictator, violations of, 144 42 years, nightmare, 145 Al Qaeda, MENA, Muslim youth, 13, 84 Radicalism, 12 Rashed, Sayed Faraj, 43 Renan, Ernest, History of the People of Israel till the Time of King David, 42 Resacralization, desacralization, sacralization, Tunisian masjid, 70 Revilo, Oliver, The Jewish Strategy, 43 Ricoeur, Paul, 41

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics memory and history, testimony, 40 memory and place, 42 Robinson, Edward, 45-48 Biblical Researches in Palestine, 46 Sack, Robert. D., in/out of place, power relations, social relations, territorial rules, “The Power of Place and Space,” 102 Salafism, 75 Tunisian, transition, 76 Salafist phenomenon, 71 terrorists, 62 Salafists, 12, 73 jihadi, 71, 80n31 radical, 75 Said, Edward 96, 157, 170n21, Orientalism, 105 Sawyer-Lauçanno, Cristopher, 100, 110, 113n64 September 11 attacks, 9, 13 aftermath of, post 9/11 world, 83, 86, 89, 130-31, 134 Shaheen, Jack, Reel Bad Arabs, 133 Shalabi, Ahmad, 48 Shami, Rashad Abdullah al-, 39, 41 Sheik, The (Hull), 152 Sheltering Sky, The (Bowles), 96, 108, 110 Smith, Anthony D., 44 Soja, Edward 5, 7, 16 Space, 67-69, 86, 88, 91, 102, 111, 130, 137 absolute, 7 and identity construction, 38 and place, 1-4, 7, 9, 49, 95, 116, 118, 125-26 and power, carceral, heterogeneous, heterotopias, 7 and territory, global, rescaling of, 9

201

blank, dead, pre-industrial, 158 chronotope, the (Bakhtin), 2 domestic, 17, 124, 164 (see also harem) discursive, 13, 15, 83 exotic, imagological (Westphal), 168 gender and, 153 gendered, 10, 160 Hegelian notions of, 8 hyphenated space-time, 6 imaginary, 5, 120 liminal, 16, 116 (see also thirdspace) logico-epistemological, 5 Moroccan, 14, 98, 109-10 geocritical approach to, passionate encounter with, 99 (see also Morocco) narratological and geographic, 15 of independent Ukraine, 31 Oriental, 14, 159 (see also Orient) physical, 54 political, 89 post-Soviet, Russian, 35 public, 56, 66 relational conceptions of, 3 relative space-time, 6 religious, 12-13, 71, 76-77 smooth, striated, 19n35 spatial turn, 10 spatialisation of time and memory, 5 “subaltern counter public,” 13, 82 territorial, 11, 38 time and, 3, 6-8, 17, 41-42, 97, 119, 156, 161, 165. See also place. Stein, Gertrude, 96, 11 Strauss, Levi, 97, 105 Syria, 14, 46, 48, 83 bombing, innocent people, Iraq, Yemen, 90

202 brutal wars, Libya, Muslims in Iraq, 87 jihad, Libya, Salafi factions, 73 Jihadi fighters from, 78 Syrians, 132 Tally, Robert, 2, 146 Talmud, The, 38, 43, 49n9 Temple of Jerusalem, 48 Temple of Shiloh, 45, 46 Termagant, the Muslim women, Western medieval texts, Western representations, 163, 172n67. See also Kahf, Mohja Territorialisation, 30 Territory, 1, 3, 9, 23, 25, 44, 166 elusive territory, 117 of Ukraine, 26, 28-29, 31-32, 35 place, space and, 5 quest for territory, 45 Soviet, 10 symbolism of land and, 3 territorial boundaries, hegemony, 10 continuity, 10, 34 rules (Sack), 102 space, 11, 38 veiled, 165 (see also veil) Thatcher, Margaret, 56, 63 Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (Bowles), 95-97 Thirdspace, 16 spatial imagination, spatiality, spatial thinking, trialectics, 7 Tocqueville (Mattawa), 137-38, 141-142 Torelli, Stephano, 76-77 “Salafism in Tunisia,” 75 Transnationalism, 115 exchange, fluidity of boundaries, hybridization, migrants, multiculturalism, transnational spaces, 116 Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston), 116-18, 122-23

Index Ummah, 09 USSR, 31 decolonization, post-Soviet space, 34-35 The Uttermost Part of the Earth, (Losh), 41-42 Veil Bedouins, Black wraps, harem, illicit gaze, identity, secluded Oriental woman, veiled territory, vision, 165 cultural/religious symbolism, enclosure, exoticism, invisibility, 17 mythology of, abhorred practice, anonymous, erasure, Islamic dress, Muslim woman, non-person, seclusion, silence, 166-67 War on Iraq, 9, 88 War on Terror, 9, 13, 83, 89 Weltanschauung (“us vs. them,”), 8, 154 Westphal, Bertrand, 99, 109 heteroimage, 168-69 White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Young), 113n61 Without Stopping, An Autobiography by Paul Bowles (Bowles), 96, 98, 102, 104, 110 Woman Warrior, The (Kingston), 116-117, 120-122 World War II, 25, 41, 44, 98 Wyatt, Thomas, “They Flee from Me,” 141-42

Yanukovych, Viktor, 23, 36n2 Euromaidan, 22, 26 Young, Robert White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, 113n61

Transnational Landscapes and Postmodern Poetics Zine, Jasmine, 161, 167, 171n61 “Muslim Women and the Politics of Representation,” 172n61 Zionism, 44, 47 birth of, return to Zion, 42

203

Zionist, 88 (religious) discourse, 42-3, 45 historiography, 39, 42, 47, 49 lobby, Mount Zion, 44 Zodiac of Echoes (Mattawa), 137